Culture

The best part of coming up with a plan is when you decide to completely ignore it. I've decided to drop one of the games from the Month of Games, because I'm fairly confident I can start and finish something from scratch in less time than it will take me to get the AI code working the way I want it to.

This week's post is not about game dev though (I had one written and have pushed it to next week, so come back next week where I'll probably push it again).

I had written a post about how Obi-Wan Kenobi succummed to the same curse as the first season of The Mandalorian where I vastly enjoyed another Disney+ show released at the same time. Some of that is still here, but I've pivoted to something that's not complaining about all the things that didn't work.

With The Mandalorian season 1, I ended up being way more into High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. I liked the relationship that space dad developed with Baby Yoda, but I cared so little about the rest of the show that I legitimately cannot name any of the other characters. There's the alien guy that helps out (this doesn't narrow it down much), anti-vax wrestler woman, 80s movie guy who was in Arrested Development, and May from Agents of SHIELD. And even then I'm doubting if May was even in season 1 and whether she was actually first introduced in season 2 when The Book of Bobby's Feet turned up.

I watched season 2 all in one-go after it all came out, so there wasn't another show I could be more excited about each week. But with the back half of Obi-Wan Kenobi, I enjoyed watching Ms. Marvel way more and I was trying to figure out why.

Beyond some of the creative editing choices in the first couple of episodes with how they show characters messaging each other, which is so well done (and episode 3 dropped the ball on that), it's the culture in Ms. Marvel that keeps me interested.

The Star Wars universe is filled with (mostly sandy) alien planets, and yet what is shown in Ms. Marvel is far more alien and fascinating to me.

I grew up in a place that is incredibly white, and even though I didn't go to a Catholic primary school, Christianity was still forced onto us with the entire school gathering and having to sing hymns what felt like everyday, or at least moving your lips to mouth the words and not actually producing any sounds.

Given my almost non-existent experience with any culture beyond what I grew up with, seeing a show put a non-white Muslim family so front and center and being proud to spend so much time on the culture is so fascinating to watch.

Someone I lived with once told me how they were preparing to go and spend a month away for their brother's wedding because in her culture weddings weren't just one day - they were an event. I feel like some of that month were preparations before and a bit of downtime after, and that the event didn't go on for an entire month, but it's a part of the world I know nothing about and from having seen the wedding in Ms. Marvel, weddings in other cultures do seem to be way more warm and colourful than whatever bland stuff white people decided to do.

Seeing this different culture also allowed a memory to resurface, although my younger self's effort to preserve it meant compressing it down to the point where it's now a dot-to-dot puzzle that I have to solve to understand any of it.

A new kid started at our school in Year 3. Sadiq and his family were from South Africa and one time I got to go over to his place. Whereas the kids' houses I'd been to were within a 5 minute drive from the school, Sadiq lived 2 towns away and he lived in a massive house. Because that massive house was actually a block of flats.

Based on what little information I retained, I think his dad was a doctor. Or I assumed that he was based on how close to the hospital my brain is telling me they were. But when I try and think of the entrance to their flat, my brain conjurs up one of the buildings from secondary school so there's a possibility all of this is wrong.

Even the concept of living in a flat was completely new to me. At that point, I'd only ever seen houses so living somewhere where you didn't have to go upstairs to get to a bedroom was wild (unless you had been out, in which case there were lots of stairs). Despite having only recently moved there, the decorations were vibrant and there were things I hadn't seen any other kid have in their house.

The only other things I remember is one of Sadiq's younger sisters was watching Disney movies on a TV-VHS combi, and his mum seemed to spend the entire time cooking in the kitchen. So when Kamala's mum gave Bruno a bag full of food containers is Ms. Marvel in episode 1, my brain kicked into gear and retrieved this memory.

And then he was gone. I can't remember if he stuck around until the end of Year 3, or was gone before then, but in Year 4 the classroom was all-white again. Maybe he got a place in a school much closer to where he lived. Maybe his dad got a job somewhere else. Maybe they went back to South Africa. Maybe they were from another dimension and found somebody with a bracelet who could take them home.

While I can hardly remember any of it, that short period of time was a window into a world that I was unfamiliar with even though it existed on the same world as me. And now Ms. Marvel is doing the same.

I'm kind of surprised I was able to write something positive for once. Next week's post is about shadows, until I decide last minute that I want to write about something else.