Category Archives: Nihilism

THE ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE LAST CHAPTER OFATTACK ON TITAN.

Attack on Titan just ended its 11-year manga run, and that story will be adapted for the finale of the anime series this Winter. In the climax, the heroes had to prevent the big bad from triggering an apocalypse that didn't just destroy the world but would rewrite Reality itself. This is actually a very common trope in a lot of manga and anime.

This trend began in the 1970s and has continued from time to time. It might have begun with Go Nagai's series Devilman, which evolved from a supernatural superhero story into a full-blown apocalypse with the hero fighting an ultimate battle with Satan himself, who's the big bad of the series. He lost, humanity is exterminated, and Satan, who actually loves him, is left alone with his bisected corpse on a devastated Earth. This was possibly the darkest and most nihilistic ending in the history of Comics. A new, faithful anime adaptation, called Devilman: Crybaby, is now on Netflix. Hajime Isayama draws on that series for his climax to Attack on Titan.

The trope became big again in the late 1990s in manga and anime when Hideaki Anno ended Neon Genesis Evangelion on an ambiguous note where the emotionally devastated and dysfunctional hero Shinji Ikari is the one with the choice to completely rewrite the universe and all of Time and Space. Since then, a huge number of epic manga and anime series have used that trope. So have Marvel and DC Comics, who practically do that every year in their crossover events. The difference is, when a villain in Western comics wants to take over the world or all of reality, it's usually because they're megalomaniacs and want power. They hardly ever talk about what they would use that power for. The power is usually just a McGuffin for the heroes to keep them from using. There's a deeper, more existential reason for the baddie wanting the power to change the world and reality itself in Japan. A Japanese big bad is usually a disillusioned idealist fallen into nihilism. He thinks the world sucks so much he wants to rewrite it into his idea of utopia. Eren Jaeger in Attack on Titan uses the power of the Founding Titan to threaten the world and sets himself up so that his love Mikasa can save the world by killing him, leaving only the new reality that there are no more Titans. It even referencesDevilmanin having a hero carry the decapitated head of their dead love.

The fantasy of changing reality seems to spring from a deep sense of helplessness in the state of the world. It's a fantasy about playing God. These manga villains don't want to talk over the world. They want to change it and mold it to their idea of a better world. It's villainous because it's the epitome of hubris, and the bad guy is willing to murder literally billions of people to succeed. It's also often remarkably convoluted and melodramatic. Manga editors are certainly encouraging creators to plot for this long arc in order to give a series a point to work towards and an ending to plan for. You can't have a more epic climax to a series than all of reality under threat. Attack on Titan is the latest example of this trend, and it certainly won't be the last.

And next winter, anime fans will get to watch the animated version of this climax.

More here:

Attack on Titan's Apocalyptic Climax is Part of a Common Trend - Bleeding Cool News

Blu-rayByTom Stockman|April 16, 2021

The Original DJANGO (1966) will be available on 4K Ultra HD with TEXAS ADIOS included on Blu-ray May 25th From Arrow Video

In this definitive spaghetti western, Franco Nero (Keoma,The Fifth Cord) gives a career-defining performance as Django, a mysterious loner who arrives at a mud-drenched ghost town on the Mexico-US border, ominously dragging a coffin behind him. After saving imperilled prostitute Maria (Loredana Nusciak), Django becomes embroiled in a brutal feud between a racist gang and a band of Mexican revolutionaries

WithDjango, director Sergio Corbucci (The Great Silence) upped the ante for sadism and sensationalism in westerns, depicting machine-gun massacres, mud-fighting prostitutes and savage mutilations. A huge hit with international audiences,Djangos brand of bleak nihilism would be repeatedly emulated in a raft of unofficial sequels.

The film is presented here in its 4K UHD Blu-ray debut, with a wealth of extras. Also included is the bonus featureTexas, Adioson Blu-ray, which also stars Franco Nero, and was released as a sequel toDjangoin some countries.

2-DISC 4K UHD BLU-RAY LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS

DISC 1 DJANGO [4K UHD BLU-RAY]

DISC 2 TEXAS ADIOS [BLU-RAY]

See the rest here:

The Original DJANGO and TEXAS ADIOS Available on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray May 25th From Arrow Video - We Are Movie Geeks

Im from Knoxville, Tenn.

You probably havent thought much about the mid-sized Southern city I call home for the same reasons you dont often find yourself imaginatively drifting off in the middle of a busy work day with thoughts of your 5-year-old Honda lawnmower that always starts even if you forget to change the oil from year to year.

Our nations paper of record, the esteemed New York Times, once described my ancestral home as the couch, or a place too unassuming to shout about but too comfortable to leave.

For much of my life I mostly believed in Knoxvilles couch-like quality. That it was and is an easy place to live, raise children and own a home. However, when I returned to it some 10 years ago as an adult, the seams on the old couch Id called home for much of my life began to show.

This growing uneasiness with Knoxville only worsened upon my becoming a psychotherapist at my old high school, where I found that many students and families as well as several of my former classmates and coworkers had very different experiences with my town. With patience, kindness and a nearly inexhaustible grace, they let me in on a world where 26.5% of our residents live in poverty and where, when we account for age, this number jumps to 39% of our elementary-aged children and 34.8% of our adolescent population.

These figures only get worse if you are a Knoxvillian of color.

In 2017, our local paper, The Knoxville News Sentinel, reported that while Blacks and African Americans comprise only 17% of Knoxvilles population, 42% of them live in poverty, which far outpaces the Black poverty rates of Memphis, Chattanooga or Atlanta. Much of this 17% lives in a stretch of our community colloquially known as East Knoxville, which may have appeared in your Apple News Feed recently due to a spate of gun violence that has, since the beginning of 2021, tragically claimed the lives of five adolescents of color from just one high school in our city, Austin-East.

With patience, kindness and a nearly inexhaustible grace, they let me in on a world where 26.5% of our residents live in poverty.

Four friends from across the United States reached out to me in the wake of this weeks news cycle to ask if I was OK. Because I once worked at an inner city school, and because I live 3.6 miles from A-E, but Im not really nearby. My relative geographic proximity is due, in some ways, to Knoxvilles size (or lack thereof), and in others to the deep-seated and long-standing community segregation that has effectively cordoned off the inner city and its dangers from the rest of us.

Im saying I might as well live 36 miles away from whats been happening just over the ridge. In the gap between the 3.6 miles separating Austin-East from my home exists an insurmountable trench of income inequality, payday lenders, institutional abandonment, systemic, individual and carceral racism not to mention an almost ethereal fog that settles over most Knoxvillians like me anytime gun violence besieges urban neighborhoods.

When I say, like me, I most certainly mean well-meaning middle and upper-middle-class white people.

Cornel West once called this fog that thickens around us we paralyzed, white suburban onlookers a sort-of deadening nihilism that is characterized by psychic depression, personal worthlessness and social despair, where hope is eliminated by a market morality that undermines a sense of meaning and larger purpose.

The easy narratives of race, income and social class are but the outward manifestations of a rotted self-identity.

In a fuller treatment on the matter, West argues that the easy narratives of race, income and social class that so thoroughly separate us from one another are but the outward manifestations of a rotted self-identity rooted in a devotion to market-mandated self-interest and scarcity as nationwide moral imperatives. To be clear, West is saying that capitalism is the thing pitting us against one another even if we use questionable racial and sociological assumptions to support our ongoing segregation.

Ibram Kendi makes a similar claim in his masterwork on the history of American chattel slavery, Stamped, as he argues for an understanding of racism as less an ideology driving violence and oppression in America, and more a sociological explanation for what is, frankly, a naked, capitalistic self-interest that predates Eugenics and Jim Crow Southern nativism.

According to both West and Kendi, no matter how thoroughly we seek to sequester the effects of our crippling addiction to self-interest within oppressed and impoverished communities bereft of resources and support, nor the lengths to which we go to blame the oppressed for their plight, nihilistic self-interest eventually takes all of us in the end. But it seems as if its coming for our kids first.

Nihilistic self-interest eventually takes all of us in the end. But it seems as if its coming for our kids first.

This may explain why despite the ways in which the paths of affluent, Caucasian teenagers and those of impoverished teenagers of color in my city seem to exponentially diverge after birth there exists a convergence of these two groups in adolescence around the loss of meaning, purpose and eventually, life itself. In some of the most affluent schools and communities in my city, ones not recently featured on your Apple News feed, there continues to be an exponential rise in teenage suicide. Nationwide, according to the CDC, suicide is the second leading cause of death in all American children aged 10 to 24, and the number of American children taking their own lives has tripled since 2007.

Whether seeing more affluent teenagers in private practice as I do now, or less affluent ones at my old high school as I once did, I am reminded of something I learned early on in my work with kids across the sociological spectrum. Namely, that even amidst sometimes inappropriate, confusing or even violent behaviors, teenagers are the symptoms incarnate of a much larger institutional sickness. Instead of being the problem, they reveal it, in technicolor. Or, as one of my first supervisors put it to me during a particularly trying encounter with one of these symptoms, teenagers are our societys pain made flesh.

And if my (and your) news feed is any indication, the sickness of our self-interest is spreading no matter the amount of effort, energy and money we put into our parenting, our ZIP Codes, the professionalization of childhood, the tactical training of our teachers, or our kids ACT scores.

An answer wont likely emerge from the manic efforts of privileged people like myself.

So in the face of yet more inexplicable violence in my city, I want to argue that an answer wont likely emerge from the manic efforts of privileged people like myself. As we immediately cycle through knee-jerk attempts at grappling with the pain of oppressed communities. And as we immediately bypass this pain whenever it becomes complicated and demanding of us, our time, our money and our self-preservation.

In my personal experience, defensiveness and burned-out cynicism arent typically a recipe for transformation.

Instead, the students and faculty members I spent time with for two years in North Knoxville taught me that transformation resurrection really only comes for us whenever we reject the false capitalist binary of my life and your death, my success and your failure, my more and your nothing. Only when I choose to quietly bear witness and make unbroken eye contact with a pain that I have frequently ignored or even consumed as fuel for the alleviation of my own inherent white guilt, neediness and shame, can I finally encounter something that should have buried me, but doesnt.

Owning my complicity for what happens in East Knoxville, in Minneapolis, in Cleveland, in Charleston, and in the White House as a privileged white person from the couch, isnt some sort of political saber-rattle or virtue signal, its what my inherited evangelical tradition called an act of rededication. Its a confession, an admittance of a sinfulness that both predates and inhabits me whenever I say things like urban, impoverished, or, you know that part of town.

For, as James Baldwin argues, it is only when white Americans are brought face to face with the fictions underwriting our history, our worth, our value, our neighborhoods, and our heritage that we might finally begin questioning the crippling capitalism that has so thoroughly blinded us to the realities of the world and has left us the slightly mad victims of (our) own brainwashing.

Only the death of our crippling addiction to self-interest can save us, can free us, can resurrect us all.

When we at long last own our brainwashing, rather than losing everything weve been desperately clinging to, we white Americans are finally given opportunity to return to the truth of ourselves and the world we have wrought. A truth reminding us that individual freedom and self-interest wont ever save our schools, our communities, our families, our country or our souls. Only the death of our crippling addiction to self-interest can save us, can free us, can resurrect us all.

And if, during the struggle for the soul of our kids, our communities and our world, you come across a god, a political party, a faith, a politician, a social media platform, a corporation, an educational institution or a philosophy going by the name Christian while maintaining an unwillingness to die for the salvation of something other than itself, may you recognize it, may you face it, and may you kindly return it to its roots as a religion founded in the name of a God who dies for the world without expecting the world to return the favor.

Because as the Easter season attests, we can die alone, or we can rise, together.

Eric Mintonis a writer, pastor and therapist living with his family in Knoxville, Tenn. He holds a bachelors degree in psychology from the University of Tennessee, a master of divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary and a master of science degree in clinical mental health counseling from Carson-Newman University.

Continued here:

Learning to see my hometown from a different perspective with a little help from my friends - Baptist News Global

Abby Innes writes that while UK governments have refrained from intervening in the private sector, they enable ever greater business access to public authority and revenue. She argues that successive policies have led to corporate state capture.

British Ministers and MPs operate with uniquely close ties to business. These ties are an essential feature of the neoliberal transformation of the state. Their vulnerability to conflicts of interest and corruption are a feature, not a bug. Under the New Public Management agenda of the last forty years, agenda-setting and policy design have increasingly been outsourced to professional consultancies, third-sector agencies, law and accountancy firms and corporate sponsored think tanks. The administrative, policymaking and agenda-revising throughputs of the state have seen greater business involvement via senior civil service recruitment and special advisors. Departmental non-executive directors have significant powers but are routinely recruited through an opaque process from businesses with a direct interest in the terrain under a departments control. Finally, the states core outputs in terms of welfare and regulation have been ever more outsourced to the private sector. The machinery of state is now porous to private business interests to a degree that is exceptional among the established democracies. A third of todays central government spending goes on outsourcing.

Britains neoliberal state has become a semi-permeable membrane in which governments refrain from intervening in the private sector but enable ever greater business access to public authority and revenue. Corporate state capture refers to the high point of corruption whereby private interests subvert legitimate channels of political influence and shape the rules of the legislative and institutional game through private payments to public officials. In Britain that influence has largely been gifted as a matter of public policy.

Britains corporate state capture by design has happened because neoliberalism is a materialist utopia. It is, in fact, the exact counterpart to its Soviet communist opponent albeit even less tethered to social reality in its theoretical foundations. Where Leninism was based on a deterministic reading of Marxs analysis of capitalist change, British neoliberal policy has been rooted in the most market-fundamentalist wing of neoclassical economics that depends on deductive-theoretic mathematical reasoning and tends to disregard market failures. The result is an agenda of beguiling simplicity. In this scheme, it is axiomatic that when you remove state intervention you improve competitiveness and allow the economy to move closer towards a general equilibrium in which demand and supply are matched with a perfect, frictionless efficiency. This is the mirror of the Soviet belief in perfectly efficient central planning.

For Britains neoliberal governments, it has followed as a matter of logic that the more the state can be got out of the way or made more business-like where it remains, the better. As a society we have moved from ethical debates about the effective government of people in a complex and uncertain world to an era in which parties have competed over the management of a pseudo-science about the allocation of things in a closed-system world of apparently little meaningful complexity at all. The seeds of state capture are sown in materialist utopias because as an article of faith they privilege the interests of one social group as the virtuous, transformative vanguard that will lead us to the Promised Land of seamless allocative efficiency. In neoliberalism it is business rather than the industrial proletariat taken to exemplify the idealised rational economic agent and business is duly endowed with the leading role in society.

In Britain, this idealisation has led successive governments to a deep lack of curiosity about the diversity and complexity of actual businesses. It has also created a profound political complacency about what drives innovation and improves productivity. The history of economic development, as distinct from the neoclassical thought experiment, tells us it is not just competition. Despite the fact that the investment culture of Britains traded companies has been hollowed out by norms of short term profit-maximisation, governments have proved resiliently indifferent to the pathologies of corporate financialisation: the extraction of profit even unto the cannibalisation of the firm itself. John McDonnell ended this complacency in Labour, but it persists across the aisle. In the meantime, Britains public sector industry firms are among the most financialised of all. Carillion and Interserve went bust because of it. Serco and the rest continue to leverage their accounts, minimise their investment and training and to sweat their public contracts and employment conditions to maximise profits. The result is a new systemic risk in which the states structural dependency upon these archetypes of rent-seeking makes them too big to fail.

The neoliberal argument for state failure that helped bring it to power in the late 1970s was built on an argument by theoretical analogy: that the state is a monopoly firm and hence the presumptively rational economic actors who run it will tend to exploit their position until the state expands into a totalitarian, socialist Leviathan. There is no concept of public service here. The neoliberal solution proceeds to build in corporate state capture via an analytical ratchet effect in which even chronic failures of neoliberal policy are assumed a priori to be the fault of public servants and their lingering attachments to the privileges of monopoly. It follows as a matter of logic that the answer is to bring in further corporate expertise to bear.

In the meantime, privileged corporate access skews ministerial interactions with other interest groups and unbalances the playing field between them. The extension of public services markets to encompass as many state functions as possible encourages escalating corporate donations to parties in search of favouritism within that dynamic. Contrary to the neoliberal and indeed Leninist fantasy in which the state will wither away to its nightwatchman minimum, the centralising neoliberal state has become a giant of procurement. Government departments are tied into a complex web of relationships with large enterprises scarcely less than in Soviet central planning, only now in super-fragmented form. Those relationships shift whole bodies of public spending from statutory to contract law and under the cloak of commercial confidentiality.

The combination of state failures and corporate state capture is tailor made to undermine public trust because it breaks the democratic fiscal contract in which tax is paid on a fair basis and revenues never confiscated. This corporate penetration of the state has occurred even as the dogmatic principle of self-regulation has been applied by politicians and there remains a near total lack of legal regulation around some of the most serious risks.

Regulatory drift occurs when formal rules are deliberately held constant in the face of major shifts in context, so that outcomes change. The UKs cross-party Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, and the Public Accounts Select Committee have repeatedly called on governments to tighten the rules around conflicts of interest, second jobs, party finance, consultancy, lobbying and revolving doors. All of them have been rebuffed. To regulate political-corporate ties would have violated many of the core assumptions of the neoliberal project: that business actors are only ever honourable wealth-builders, that self-regulation is always superior to state action, that rational self-interest confers no unacceptable social losses.

The public reaction has been one of rising public distrust in political elites, the oxygen in which populism thrives. The most recent (2013) Transparency International Global Government Barometer showed the following attitudes for the UK:

These numbers might seem conspiratorial but what other terms should we use? We might have called it idealistic zeal in the early years of Thatcherite enterprise and New Labour modernisation, the utopianism of the project notwithstanding. At what point does it stop being good faith, however, when governments persist in the marketization of the state even in the face of systemic failures of neoliberal policy, strategy, and increasing costs? How high has the capacity for governmental self-delusion become when corporate actors are parachuted into the senior civil service and allowed to direct hard-earned public monies into even the most dubious of private hands? What else is it but corruption in its classic form when as consultants or on retirement ministers and even prime ministers charge rates of remuneration beyond the wildest dreams of the average voter in return for their knowledge and influence, from the very businesses they were supposed to govern in the public interest? Since even small side-payments are toxic to public trust, the current dispensation is surely mortal. Already by 2015 there were some 4,000 people working professionally in the UKs 2 billion lobbying industry, which made it the third largest lobby in the world. Everything, including the climate transition, is at stake unless we reverse the dynamics at hand before they reach their full, kleptocratic, Trumpian potential.

The political culture of public service inherited from the post-war era has been weakening with each new intake of Conservative MPs, though many persist with it against the odds. However, a fifth of the Conservatives 2019 new MPs had a background in lobbying or public relations. By 2020, the economic values of the partys MPs were far to the right of even their own councillors and party members, let alone the wider electorate. Johnsons second Cabinet is comprised of the parliamentary partys most committed economic libertarians and since coming to power they have sought to shatter this culture from the top. The Prime Minister himself has shown an overt nihilism around standards in public life, as indicated by the resignation of his Advisor on those standards and the failure to replace him. Even as tens of thousands of people died needlessly of Covid-19 because of late intervention, a VIP lane for procurement was organised so that suppliers with government contacts were ten times more likely to be awarded a procurement contract than those who applied to the Department of Health and Social Care.

What comparative history teaches us is that once the dynamics of corporate state capture take hold the risk is that political parties themselves become targets for those who choose politics for primarily private gain. If they rise to the top, the risk is that elections cease to be about representation and become the point of market entry and exit. Political parties become corporate brokers who oversee the continuous distribution of public revenue and rents into private hands. A populist, authoritarian politics becomes the effective way to corner this market.

Even in the context of a public health crisis, the Johnson Government exhibited an ideological allergy to engaging with public sector expertise and capacity until absolutely forced to by events. For economic libertarians, it is really not clear that there is any intrinsic moral injunction against their own private enterprise en route. Just as Leninism and Stalinism had stripped out the radical democratic republicanism of Karl Marx, so too neoliberalism in its purest form picks liberalism clean of its nineteenth and early-twentieth century ethical debates about the nature of republican virtues.

For economic libertarians, in principle the marketplace is designated as the sphere of true freedom: the only republic. The history of late stage materialist utopias in practice, however, is that in the absence of a viable social contract, the nexus between the governing regime and its society becomes that of a protection racket. Insofar as Rishi Sunak has proved keen on public spending, it is directed far more obviously at political self-perpetuation than the public interest: in the new 1billion Towns Fund justified as a way to level up deprived communities, 40 of the 45 chosen areas had a Conservative MP. An additional 4.6 billion fund was likewise found to include wealthy Conservative constituencies, even as some of the poorest cities in the country, such as Salford, which voted Labour, were relegated to a lower funding tier. As the sociologist Ken Jowitt concluded of the USSR: Brezhnevs novelty seems to have been to take the Partys organizational corruption and elevate it to the status of an organizational principle. The serious question for Conservative backbench MPs is whether, on reflection, they are willing to participate in their partys final ruin as a democratic entity, and to see the concepts of liberty and love of country deployed as their alibi.

______________________

About the Author

Abby Innes is an Assistant Professor at the European Institute of the LSE. She has written extensively on the political economy of corruption in Central Europe and is part of a UN/NYU transnational working group on corporate state capture. She is completing a manuscript on the systematic affinities between Neoliberal and Soviet economics. Its working title isLate Soviet Britain: The Political Economy of State Failure in Materialist Utopias.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

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Corporate state capture: the degree to which the British state is porous to business interests is exceptional among established democracies - British...

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Self-isolating and bored? Reading helps. Across the pandemic-tinged globe one book is flying off shelves: The Plague (1947), a novel by Albert Camus about a deadly epidemic in the Algerian town of Oran. If, as the saying goes, crisis reveals character, why not pick up a book whose central question is What should I do?

In a plague there is no avoiding the issue. Pretend there is no problem: thats taking a stand. Remain neutral: thats a choice. Profit from the crisis: thats charting a path. Camuss hero is Doctor Rieux. His answer: make an effort, help the healing.

Easier said than done. Avoiding responsibility is a major human sport, matched by the ability to concoct rationalizations. As a mid-20th century figure, Camus inherited the responsibility question as part of a wider framework: religion or nihilism, choose one. His take: theyre both bad. Each makes it easy to avoid responsibility.

The dilemma seems odd today. Religion should encourage responsibility. Nihilism, well, the very label has faded. It used to signal that life is objectively meaningless, and that all meaning is subjective. Although the word has faded, the perspective lives on in phrases like its up to the individual, whatever floats your boat, dont make value judgments.

Camus wrote The Plague in a way that it would challenge the last pronouncement. Readers are led to make value judgments, to praise Rieux and the volunteers who combat the plague.

Here is where its up to the individual comes into play. Its an expression with two separate meanings. The phrase, rightly, (a) emphasizes the personal dimension in choice. In a challenging situation, its up to the individual to select among options. So far so good. However, the fan of full-blown nihilism adds a second dimension. Its up to the individual becomes (b) whatever choice the individual makes is the right one. To grasp the contrast, think of nutrition. Its up to the individual (a) to decide which foodstuffs to ingest. Its not up to the individual (b) whether those choices are healthy or not.

Camus challenged nihilism because of b. When a and b are run together, evaluations like Dr Rieuxs actions are honorable dont mean much. Its up to the individual translates into Thats just your opinion.

Why not, then, go with religion? For Camus, as for Nietzsche before him, religion just offers a disguised version of nihilism. The world is fallen, meaningless in itself. All values derive from divine commands.

Such an emphasis on Gods will bothered Camus. The Plague has a priest called Father Paneloux who delivers two sermons with standard themes: (1) its a punishment for sins; (2) God works in mysterious ways. As far as the doctor is concerned, such sermons carry dangerous messages: find scapegoats, welcome ignorance, accept Gods will, dont roll up your sleeves and help.

Rieux realizes that despite bad theory, most religious individuals, in practice, go to a physician when ill. In this regard, Rieux has gotten surprising support. A real priest, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, agreed. Merton thought Camus was right to judge Father Panelouxs sermons as revolting. It was appalling that the cleric would encourage his flock to submit to a will we do not understand and even to adore and love what appears horrible. Camuss mistake, according to Merton, was believing that such an attitude is essential to Christianity. Idol worship is everywhere and even priests can worship false gods.

Merton provides a sort of mirror image of the a and b distinction as regards nihilism. Whats right is (a) acceptance of a divinity. Whats wrong is (b) the typical way that divinity is understood.

Camus had little patience for irresolvable ideological subtleties. His focus was on What should I do? His answer: become true healers. Become like doctors. Where there is illness, bring healing. Where there is suffering, bring relief. Churchgoers praying are not bringing relief. Nihilists, denying any deep meaning to the words better, and worse, are not sufficiently motivated. What should I do? Join the healers, do your part.

Prof. Raymond D. Boisvert 2021

Raymond Boisvert is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Siena College, Loudonville, NY.

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Camus, The Plague and Us | Issue 143 - Philosophy Now

In 1954, Ishiro Honda created a monsterquite literallywith his film Godzilla, where the titular monster levels the city of Tokyo. While Hondas original tale of Godzilla is about the horrors of nuclear war, it created a franchise of films that became primarily focused on the spectacle of giant monsters rather than the consequences of human actions. The nihilism Honda imbued within the 1954 film slowly dissipates and is replaced with campy and entertaining battles between Godzilla and giant moths, three-headed space dragons, sentient pollution and more. But, in 2016, directors Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Shinji Higuchi harkened back to the 1954 films hopelessness and absolute terror with their 2016 film, Shin Godzilla. This is no longer about the entertaining spectacle of monsters; this is about an unstoppable, rapidly-evolving malevolent god with no regard for humanity.

Shin Godzilla is Anno and Higuchis interpretation of Hondas original film, but with a modern twist that includes a scathing look at the continued incompetence of an unnecessarily complex bureaucracy, the first-person perspectives of those on the ground and a horrifying reimagining of Godzilla himself. Just like 1954s Godzilla, the giant lizard levels Tokyo while government officials helplessly watch from afar. Anno and Higuchi imbue the film with the prevailing sense of nihilism seen in the original. There is no hope, only temporary solutions.

The terror inflicted by Godzilla in this film triples as he undergoes three evolutions, each more destructive than the last. He is able to quickly adapt to his surroundings, going from a bumbling creature with only back legs to a gargantuan monster with atomic breath and the ability to asexually reproduce. The first form, the larval form, crashes on land as his two hind legs propel him forward while the rest of his body scrapes along the ground, carving a path through the city like a snake slithering through grass. Frilled, shark-like lungs spew out a red liquid that drowns the city in a bloody substance. Then, before everyones eyes, he stands up.

The second form most closely emulates the traditional Godzilla design. He is wreaking typical havoc as he topples buildings, but is still gaining strength; he is not done growing, a harrowing realization that there is even more hell to be wrought. His third and final form is his most destructive, as he evolves to have Anno and Haguchis version of atomic breath. Godzillas jaw unhinges and unleashes not a fiery blast, but a concentrated laser beam that can slice through buildings, drones and fighter jets. But thats not it. Godzilla is virtually indestructible and cannot be killed like the 1954 version. While he is frozen with liquid coagulant, this is only a temporary solution. Even worse, humanoid creatures are frozen mid-spawn from his tail; Godzilla is able to create his own beings, further illustrating his godlike abilities. This is his planet now.

But this horror isnt just created by the lizard deity. Perhaps even more horrifying than Godzilla is the bureaucracy that bogs down any hope of rapid response from the government. Officials with vague titles gather around giant wooden tables for back-to-back meetings where solutions are discussed but never executed. The prime minister is rendered essentially useless as he tries to make a reassuring speech about how the creature cannot come on land and in the midst of that speech, Godzilla makes landfall. Instead of honesty, the Japanese government is more focused on its image; their continuous denial of the gravity of the situation only increases the number of casualties. This mirrors 2011s three-pronged real world catastrophethe Tohoku earthquakes subsequent tsunami and Fukushima nuclear meltdownin both scope of damage and mismanagement of the disasters by the Japanese government. While 1954s Godzilla is about a force of nature, Shin Godzilla is about bureaucratic reactions to that force of nature. Anno and Higuchi build upon the original films discussion of the effects of manmade disasters (ie the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to create a biting commentary of the current Japanese governments lack of accountability.

Shin Godzilla innovates not only in its reinterpretation of Godzilla, but it also adopts elements of found footage to truly illustrate the terror unfolding for those evacuating the city. These sections emulate the most horrifying parts of Hondas Godzilla, where Tokyos citizens are shown screaming in the streets, not just through wide shots, but through short vignette-like scenes that give the film a more personaltherefore devastatingtone. In Hondas film, a woman clutches her three sobbing children as a building collapses on them saying, Dont cry, well be with daddy soon, a heart-wrenching moment that focuses not on Godzilla himself but on the people he is killing. Anno and Higuchi take that ethos and place it within a 21st century contextand what better way to provide that context than through the prevalence of social media in society?

Live streams, Instagram posts and tweets are the only ways for the government to have any idea of whats really happening in Godzillas wake, not unlike how government officials in the 1954 film only understand the scope of destruction through television coverage. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa) is shown glued to his phone, watching footage as its posted, such as people escaping a collapsed tunnel and the sound of Godzillas footsteps shaking the ground. This footage is what leads Yaguchi to propose that there is a creature approaching the city; there is no denying its truth as the same images flood news feeds and timelines. This on the ground footage creates a sense of realism; there are seemingly no well-crafted shots or scripted dialogue here. It is raw and shaky, making its contents all the more believable and all the more terrifying.

While wide shots are used in many kaiju films to capture the spectacle of the monster, a first-person POV shifts the focus to the actual effects on people that are sprinting away from Godzillas feet. Similar to the 2007 film Cloverfield, found footage elements are used here to emulate the scale of the monster and the abject terror Tokyos citizens are facing as they try to evacuate the city.

In the 67 years since the release of Godzilla, dozens of films have been made as part of the franchise, bringing about decades of creative and entertaining cinema with a political message. While both 2014s Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters are more recent adaptations of the monster, they still do not capture that same fear, as neither take risks with their creature: He is not made to be a destructive, hateful god but one that wants to be a protector. In that context, despite being a gigantic kaiju imbued with nuclear energy, he does not want to wipe out humanityunlike both his 1954 and 2016 counterparts, who were purely focused on destruction and reclaiming the Earth as their own. It took 62 years for a film to truly capture the fear of the first Godzilla, but with Shin Godzilla, Anno and Higuchi translate the fear and hopelessness of postwar Japan into a modern nihilist context illustrating that perhaps humanity hasnt come as far as wed like to think.

Mary Beth McAndrews is a freelance film journalist with a love of all things horror. Shes written across the Internet about found footage, extreme horror cinema, and more. You can follow her on Twitter to read more of her work, as well as her hot takes about her favorite cryptid, Mothman.

Read more here:

Shin Godzilla Captured the Terror of the Original, Six Decades Later - Paste Magazine

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From his perch high above Midtown Manhattan, just across from Carnegie Hall, Bill Hwang was quietly building one of the worlds greatest fortunes.

Even on Wall Street, few ever noticed him -- until suddenly, everyone did.

Hwang and his private investment firm, Archegos Capital Management, are now at the center of one of the biggest margin calls of all time -- a multibillion-dollar fiasco involving secretive market bets that were dangerously leveraged and unwound in a blink.

Hwangs most recent ascent can be pieced together from stocks dumped by banks in recent days -- ViacomCBS Inc., Discovery Inc., GSX Techedu Inc., Baidu Inc. -- all of which had soared this year, sometimes confounding traders who couldnt fathom why.

One part of Hwangs portfolio, which has been traded in blocks since Friday by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo & Co., was worth almost $40 billion last week. Bankers reckon that Archegoss net capital -- essentially Hwangs wealth -- had reached north of $10 billion. And as disposals keep emerging, estimates of his firms total positions keep climbing: tens of billions, $50 billion, even more than $100 billion.

It evaporated in mere days.

Ive never seen anything like this -- how quiet it was, how concentrated, and how fast it disappeared, said Mike Novogratz, a career macro investor and former partner at Goldman Sachs whos been trading since 1994. This has to be one of the single greatest losses of personal wealth in history.

Late Monday in New York, Archegos broke days of silence on the episode.

This is a challenging time for the family office of Archegos Capital Management, our partners and employees, Karen Kessler, a spokesperson for the firm, said in an emailed statement. All plans are being discussed as Mr. Hwang and the team determine the best path forward.

The cascade of trading losses has reverberated from New York to Zurich to Tokyo and beyond, and leaves myriad unanswered questions, including the big one: How could someone take such big risks, facilitated by so many banks, under the noses of regulators the world over?

One part of the answer is that Hwang set it up as a family office with limited oversight and then employed financial derivatives to amass big stakes in companies without ever having to disclose them. Another part is that global banks embraced him as a lucrative customer, despite a record of insider trading and attempted market manipulation that drove him out of the hedge fund business a decade ago.

The value of the portfolio of positions block traded dropped 46% in the last week, erasing 2021 gains.

Source: Bloomberg

A disciple of hedge-fund legend Julian Robertson, Sung Kook Bill Hwang shuttered Tiger Asia Management and Tiger Asia Partners after settling an SEC civil lawsuit in 2012 accusing them of insider trading and manipulating Chinese banks stocks. Hwang and the firms paid $44 million, and he agreed to be barred from the investment advisory industry.

He soon opened Archegos -- Greek for one who leads the way -- and structured it as a family office.

Family offices that exclusively manage one fortune are generally exempt from registering as investment advisers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. So they dont have to disclose their owners, executives or how much they manage -- rules designed to protect outsiders who invest in a fund. That approach makes sense for small family offices, but if they swell to the size of a hedge fund whale they can still pose risks, this time to outsiders in the broader market.

This does raise questions about the regulation of family offices once again, said Tyler Gellasch, a former SEC aide who now runs the Healthy Markets trade group. The question is if its just friends and family why do we care? The answer is that they can have significant market impacts, and the SECs regulatory regime even after Dodd-Frank doesnt clearly reflect that.

Archegos established trading partnerships with firms including Nomura Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank AG and Credit Suisse Group AG. For a time after the SEC case, Goldman refused to do business with him on compliance grounds, but relented as rivals profited by meeting his needs.

The full picture of his holdings is still emerging, and its not clear what positions derailed, or what hedges he had set up.

One reason is that Hwang never filed a 13F report of his holdings, which every investment manager holding more than $100 million in U.S. equities must fill out at the end of each quarter. Thats because he appears to have structured his trades using total return swaps, essentially putting the positions on the banks balance sheets. Swaps also enable investors to add a lot of leverage to a portfolio.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, for instance, are listed as the largest holders of GSX Techedu, a Chinese online tutoring company thats been repeatedly targeted by short sellers. Banks may own shares for a variety of reasons that include hedging swap exposures from trades with their customers.

Goldman increased its position 54% in January, according to regulatory filings. Overall, banks reported holding at least 68% of GSXs outstanding shares, according to a Bloomberg analysis of filings. Banks held at least 40% of IQIYI Inc, a Chinese video entertainment company, and 29% of ViacomCBS -- all of which Archegos had bet on big.

Im sure there are a number of really unhappy investors who have bought those names over the last couple of weeks and now regret it, Doug Cifu, chief executive officer of electronic-trading firm Virtu Financial Inc., said Monday in an interview on Bloomberg TV. He predicted regulators will examine whether there should be more transparency and disclosure by a family office.

Without the need to market his fund to external investors, Hwangs strategies and performance remained secret from the outside world. Even as his fortune swelled, the 50-something kept a low profile. Despite once working for Robertsons Tiger Management, he wasnt well-known on Wall Street or in New York social circles.

Hwang is a trustee of the Fuller Theology Seminary, and co-founder of the Grace and Mercy Foundation, whose mission is to serve the poor and oppressed. The foundation had assets approaching $500 million at the end of 2018, according to its latest filing.

Its not all about the money, you know, he said in a rare interview with a Fuller Institute executive in 2018, in which he spoke about his calling as an investor and his Christian faith. Its about the long term, and God certainly has a long-term view.

His extraordinary run of fortune turned early last week as ViacomCBS announced a secondary offering of its shares. Its stock price plunged 9% the next day.

Banks reported huge stakes in some of the companies in the Archegos portfolio.

Source: SEC filings, Bloomberg

The value of other securities believed to be in Archegoss portfolio based on the positions that were block traded followed.

By Thursdays close, the value of the portfolio fell 27% -- more than enough to wipe out the equity of an investor who market participants estimate was six to eight times levered.

Its also hurt some of the banks that served Hwang. Nomura and Credit Suisse warned of significant losses in the wake of the selloff and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. has flagged a potential $300 million loss.

You have to wonder who else is out there with one of these invisible fortunes, said Novogratz. The psychology of all that leverage with no risk management, its almost nihilism.

With assistance by Benjamin Bain, Benjamin Stupples, Erik Schatzker, Gillian Tan, David Gillen, Donal Griffin, and Emily Cadman

(Updates with latest bank to detail exposure in penultimate paragraph.)

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

The rest is here:

One of World's Greatest Hidden Fortunes Is Wiped Out in Days - Bloomberg

From his perch high above Midtown Manhattan, just across from Carnegie Hall, Bill Hwang was quietly building one of the worlds greatest fortunes.

Even on Wall Street, few ever noticed him -- until suddenly, everyone did.

Hwang and his private investment firm, Archegos Capital Management, are now at the center of one of the biggest margin calls of all time--a multibillion-dollar fiasco involving secretive market bets that were dangerously leveraged and unwound in a blink.

Hwangs most recent ascent can be pieced together from stocks dumped by banks in recent days--ViacomCBS Inc., Discovery Inc. GSX Techedu Inc., Baidu Inc.--all of which had soared this year, sometimes confounding traders who couldnt fathom why.

One part of Hwangs portfolio, which has been traded in blocks since Friday by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo & Co., was worth almost $40 billion last week. Bankers reckon that Archegoss net capital--essentially Hwangs wealth--had reached north of $10 billion. And as disposals keep emerging, estimates of his firms total positions keep climbing: tens of billions, $50 billion, even more than $100 billion.

It evaporated in mere days.

Ive never seen anything like this -- how quiet it was, how concentrated, and how fast it disappeared, said Mike Novogratz, a career macro investor and former partner at Goldman Sachs whos been trading since 1994. This has to be one of the single greatest losses of personal wealth in history.

Late Monday in New York, Archegos broke days of silence on the episode.

This is a challenging time for the family office of Archegos Capital Management, our partners and employees, Karen Kessler, a spokesperson for the firm, said in an emailed statement. All plans are being discussed as Mr. Hwang and the team determine the best path forward.

The cascade of trading losses has reverberated from New York to Zurich to Tokyo and beyond, and leaves myriad unanswered questions, including the big one: How could someone take such big risks, facilitated by so many banks, under the noses of regulators the world over?

One part of the answer is that Hwang set up as a family office with limited oversight and then employed financial derivatives to amass big stakes in companies without ever having to disclose them. Another part is that global banks embraced him as a lucrative customer, despite a record of insider trading and attempted market manipulation that drove him out of the hedge fund business a decade ago.

He soon opened Archegos--Greek for one who leads the way --and structured it as a family office.

Family offices that exclusively manage one fortune are generally exempt from registering as investment advisers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. So they dont have to disclose their owners, executives or how much they manage -- rules designed to protect outsiders who invest in a fund. That approach makes sense for small family offices, but if they swell to the size of a hedge fund whale they can still pose risks, this time to outsiders in the broader market.

This does raise questions about the regulation of family offices once again, said Tyler Gellasch, a former SEC aide who now runs the Healthy Markets trade group. The question is if its just friends and family why do we care? The answer is that they can have significant market impacts, and the SECs regulatory regime even after Dodd-Frank doesnt clearly reflect that.

Valuable customer

Archegos established trading partnerships with firms including Nomura Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank AG and Credit Suisse Group AG. For a time after the SEC case, Goldman refused to do business with him on compliance grounds, but relented as rivals profited by meeting his needs.

The full picture of his holdings is still emerging, and its not clear what positions derailed, or what hedges he had set up.

One reason is that Hwang never filed a 13F report of his holdings, which every investment manager holding more than $100 million in U.S. equities must fill out at the end of each quarter. Thats because he appears to have structured his trades using total return swaps, essentially putting the positions on the banks balance sheets. Swaps also enable investors to add a lot of leverage to a portfolio.

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, for instance, are listed as the largest holders of GSX Techedu, a Chinese online tutoring company thats been repeatedly targeted by short sellers. Banks may own shares for a variety of reasons that include hedging swap exposures from trades with their customers.

Unhappy investors

Goldman increased its position 54% in January, according to regulatory filings. Overall, banks reported holding at least 68% of GSXs outstanding shares, according to a Bloomberg analysis of filings. Banks held at least 40% of IQIYI Inc, a Chinese video entertainment company, and 29% of ViacomCBS -- all of which Archegos had bet on big.

Im sure there are a number of really unhappy investors who have bought those names over the last couple of weeks, and now regret it, Doug Cifu, chief executive officer of electronic-trading firm Virtu Financial Inc., said Monday in an interview on Bloomberg TV. He predicted regulators will examine whether there should be more transparency and disclosure by a family office.

Without the need to market his fund to external investors, Hwangs strategies and performance remained secret from the outside world. Even as his fortune swelled, the 50-something kept a low profile. Despite once working for Robertsons Tiger Management, he wasnt well-known on Wall Street or in New York social circles.

Hwang is a trustee of the Fuller Theology Seminary, and co-founder of the Grace and Mercy Foundation, whose mission is to serve the poor and oppressed. The foundation had assets approaching $500 million at the end of 2018, according to its latest filing.

Its not all about the money, you know, he said in a rare interview with a Fuller Institute executive in 2018, in which he spoke about his calling as an investor and his Christian faith. Its about the long term, and God certainly has a long-term view.

His extraordinary run of fortune turned early last week as ViacomCBS Inc. announced a secondary offering of its shares. Its stock price plunged 9% the next day.

The value of other securities believed to be in Archegos portfolio based on the positions that were block traded followed.

By Thursdays close, the value of the portfolio fell 27% -- more than enough to wipe out the equity of an investor who market participants estimate was six to eight times levered.

You have to wonder who else is out there with one of these invisible fortunes, said Novogratz. The psychology of all that leverage with no risk management, its almost nihilism.

(With assistance from Ben Bain, Ben Stupples, Erik Schatzker, Gillian Tan, David Gillen, Donal Griffin and Emily Cadman.)

Read more:

How one of worlds greatest hidden fortunes was wiped out in days - Business Standard

What first comes to mind when you hear the term SoundCloud rap? Perhaps you envision an immature group of teens with colorfully-dyed hair and face tattoos, rapping about prescription drugs. Maybe the term connotes a sense of rebelliousness that brings to mind exciting, unfiltered discoveries found on the internet. It could remind you of your own blunders and self-produced lo-fi beats you wish will never see the light of day. Regardless of your relationship to the genre, it seems that this simple two-word phrase elicits strong reactions from every Gen Z, tech-savvy music listener.

However, though mentions of the genre are a staple in music discourse, defining the short-lived moment of SoundCloud rap (often derogatorily referred to as mumble rap) is a task ranging from arduous to impossible.

During the last decade, the audience for the music streaming service SoundCloud exploded into the hundreds of millions. With a utopian vision of accessible music creation for the people, SoundCloud became a champion for any up-and-coming artist. New musicians, without ever having to leave their bedroom, gained stratospheric stardom, circumventing the conventional methods of going to professional studios and working with record labels. SoundClouds design is more aligned with social media websites than streaming services, which lowers the barrier between artist and audience. This gave a massive advantage to musicians who interacted with their fans online. Behind the scenes, SoundClouds unprecedented success shook the music industry to its core.

What we think of as SoundCloud rap is emblematic of the platform it spawned from. With harsh, raw instrumentals, SoundCloud rap embodies the DIY nature of its platform. Songs like XXXTentacions Look at Me (which currently has over 189 million plays on SoundCloud) contain blown-out vocals and very minimal mixing. Lil Pumps Gucci Gang (which peaked at number three on Billboards Hot 100) trades songwriting for the repetition of the phrase Gucci gang 53 times. For outsiders of the genre, this style of production may make SoundCloud rappers seem lazy and their music seem inaccessible, but for fans, this amateur aesthetic only heightens the listening experience.

These rappers, boasting ostentatious personalities, mind-numbing music and underground origins may elicit strong parallels to the punk movement of the late 70s and early 80s. Rather ironically, most SoundCloud rappers have ditched the platform of their namesake and got snatched up by large record labels, leaving SoundCloud rap to embody the spirit of the early punk scene. Where punk was a stripped-down, aggressive and often nihilistic response to the maximalism of mainstream rock, SoundCloud rap responded similarly to the excess of mainstream hip-hop with hostile, anti-authoritarian attitudes. SoundCloud rappers are much more likely to write songs about taking drugs than dealing them, and the content of their songs is centered around depression and self-destruction, unlike mainstream raps obsession with ego inflation.

Similar to punk, SoundCloud rappers are overwhelmingly young. Many SoundCloud rappers, such as Tekashi69, Lil Peep and Ski Mask the Slump God, all gained tremendous fame before their 18th birthdays. The popularity of these teenagers solidified SoundCloud rap as the sound of Gen Z. The genre represented the anxieties of a highly online generation disillusioned with the world they inherited. The unhealthy forms of escapism discussed in these songs from drugs and sex to self-harm are prevalent coping mechanisms within a generation characterized by existential fear. The intensity of the genre, from the lyrics to the garish face tattoos, represents a palpable nihilism both on and off-stage. In a sense, SoundCloud rappers and their cartoonish personas create an incredibly authentic reflection of the broken society they were brought into.

Gaining millions of fans before you are legally able to vote, however, comes with a dark side. The lives of these artists have been of immense fascination from the public since the beginning of the genre, which may have to do with the stars accessibility through their heavily online presence. On these platforms, SoundCloud rappers have gained a cult following interested in everything from their next collaboration to their latest run-ins with the law. Many of these SoundCloud rappers became just as famous for their music as they did for their hectic personal lives. For rappers such as XXXTentacion and Tekashi69, the bombastic content of their music was backed up by charges for horrific crimes [should we link something about this claim?]. The relationship fans have with these musicians has always been partly defined by morbid curiosity, and the distinction between enjoying music from these creators and condoning their actions is hazy.

These chaotic lifestyles may explain why the genre and the phrase SoundCloud rap has begun to fall out of fashion. Unfortunately, many of the artists who headlined the genre are either dead or sitting in jail. The notorious 27 club, which consists of numerous high-profile deaths of 27-year-old musicians, is now starting to look like a 21 club. The deaths of Lil Peep and Juice Wrld at 21 from drug overdoses, XXXTentacions assassination at 20 and Jimmy Wopos murder at 21 illustrate a painful pattern for the genre.

Although the public legal battles and violent crimes committed by the rappers may be of great fascination to the genres die-hard fans, it has mostly tarnished the publics perception of the genre. It seems the characteristics which draw people toward these artists their ridiculous public lives, their young, immature personalities and their intense lyrics are the very aspects which eventually drove people away from the genre. Just as quickly as the genre exploded, it started to fade.

Pure SoundCloud rap may be all but dead, but its influence will have a lasting effect on the music industry. Record labels and distribution companies will forever have to wrestle with an industry that is rapidly becoming decentralized. In the internet age, it has now become mainstream for artists to use modest equipment to put out studio-quality beats from their bedrooms. While many of the artists who headlined this miniature musical revolution have either passed away or faded out of public life, others have found successful careers adapting and experimenting with the genre in new and exciting ways. Albums such as Denzel Currys TA13OO and Lil Uzi Verts Eternal Atake play on the spirit of SoundCloud rap in exciting ways while also gaining widespread critical acclaim.

It may be wrong to think of SoundCloud rap as a genre. Instead, it is probably best to think of SoundCloud rap as an artistic movement, one which guided a diverse coalition of artists, entertainers and producers. The movement became ubiquitous then extinct seemingly overnight, leaving wildly experimental, tech-savvy teenagers in its wake.

In the end, its up to us to decide what they think of SoundCloud rap. While divisive, its certain that the movements influence is here to stay. Whether die-hard fans, haters or somewhere in between, it is up to us to navigate this post-SoundCloud rap world. Hopefully, we can create some beautiful music out of it.

Daily Arts Writer Kai Bartol can be reached at kbartol@umich.edu.

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Read the original post:

'Look at me': The rise and fall of SoundCloud rap - The Michigan Daily

Nier Replicant is a remaster thats been a long time coming, with many fans feeling like the original 2010 game, while good, had so much more potential just waiting to be tapped into. At the time, Nier didnt fare too well critically, with reviewers often citing the clunky combat as a reason to avoid it. Despite this, the action adventure maintained a devoted cult fanbase, but quickly faded into obscurity for everyone else.

However, the surprise announcement of a sequel, Nier Automata, generated a whole new wave of interest for the series, thanks in no small part to its...eye-catching protagonist, YoRHa No.2 Type B (or just 2B for short), an android with a stoic disposition and a peculiar fashion sense.

Thanks to Nier Automatas surprising success (the game has sold over 5 million copies to date), a true revival of the series suddenly became a very real possibility - and Nier Replicant is the first step in making that a reality. And what a step it is. Due to release four years to the month after Nier Automata first landed on PS4, Nier Replicant is easily one of the best remasters Ive ever played and sets a whole new standard for the importance of video game preservation.

To be frank, Nier Replicant puts most other remasters to shame. Often it can feel like remasters offer nothing more than slightly upscaled textures, then being thrown onto a current-gen storefront before calling it a day. But Nier Replicant doesnt settle for that. Instead, its entirely raised the bar for how good remasters can be.

The end result of Nier Replicant, then, is a remaster/remake hybrid of sorts. Environments are utterly gorgeous now, with vastly improved textures and lighting across the board. While some of the indoor locales do still look a little bland, the upgrades seen in the overworld and the small towns that dot the map more than make up for this.

"The rollercoaster of a story is more impactful than ever, with completely re-recorded voice work for both main characters and NPCs."

Going into Nier Replicant for the first time, my excitement was quelled by an intruding thought, and thats no fault of the game itself. Rather, its a thought I typically get whenever a remaster of a classic game is on the way: what if the game isnt as great as we once remembered?

Maybe the jump to newer hardware will present entirely new technical problems that werent in the original release (I still shudder thinking about the Silent Hill HD Collection). Maybe the remaster will fail to paint over the cracks that show the originals age.

In the case of Nier Replicant, though, my fears couldnt have been more misplaced, as the remaster sidesteps these issues entirely by not just being a faithful remaster, but also a careful restoration of an aged piece of art.

Locations are simply more vibrant than before, with a smartly heightened level of contrast that doesnt go overboard. The Nier Replicant remaster presents a world thats still bleak and barren, but feels more lived in and as a result, creates the impression that the beauty of the world here is absolutely worth fighting for.

Toylogic also took strides to modernize the games combat somewhat. Once again, combat remains faithful to the original game, but feels so much more responsive than it did prior. Its not mind blowing, and certainly not as flashy as Platinum Games work on Nier Automata, but what we do get is an easy-to-understand and snappy combat system that really benefits from 60fps and the general fast pace of traversal.

The key areas where the original Nier didnt need improvements are fully intact in Nier Replicant, too, but somehow even they have been improved upon. The rollercoaster of a story is more impactful than ever, with completely re-recorded voice work for both main characters and NPCs.

"Niers strength is that its able to tell a mature story without straying into aimless nihilism, and the refurbished visuals and voice acting hammer this home effortlessly."

Nier Replicant tells a mature, fairytale-esque story with characters who are genuinely good people trying to do right in a hopelessly cruel world. Said characters often struggle with their identities, existentialism and choosing to make morally grey choices. But Niers strength is that its able to tell a mature story without straying into aimless nihilism, and the refurbished visuals and voice acting hammer this home effortlessly.

Composer Keiichi Okabe and vocalist Emi Evans also revisit their legendary soundtrack, offering cleaned-up rearrangements for what was already one of the most stunning collections of songs ever put into a game.

Now that Nier is a much more revered franchise than it used to be, the Nier Replicant remaster has no small reputation to live up to. Personally, Im thankful Square Enix didnt opt for a simple port job. Instead, it clearly saw an opportunity in further developing Nier as a core franchise, and developer Toylogic took that mentality and ran with it.

The most important thing the Nier Replicant remaster gets right is that it knows exactly what it is. Its not a grand reimagining of the original narrative, nor is it a from the ground up kind of remake. On the flipside, its not a warts and all recreation of the original Nier, either. What Toylogic has crucially recognized is that theres already a great game in Nier - its just one that had a ton of untapped potential.

The Nier Replicant remaster is impressive on two fronts. One, its a quality remaster that completely revitalizes a cult classic smartly and respectfully. And two, its something of a remake that doesnt eschew what made the original release so special, and introduces it to a new audience of fans that jumped into the series starting with Nier Automata.

Nier as a whole, then, shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Nier Automata became something of a phenomenon, with its characters making guest appearances in other games (most notably 2B as a DLC character in Soul Calibur 6), as well as a full-blown crossover with Final Fantasy 14. Its my prediction that the Nier Replicant remaster will cement the series yet-young legacy for even more years to come.

Square Enix and Toylogic not only delivered a great experience with Nier Replicant, but they also showed the entire gaming industry that with enough time and an adequate budget that remasters can be just as good - if not better - than full-fledged new releases.

Want to get into Nier? Try out Nier: Automata today!

Read more:

Nier Replicant perfects the art of the remaster - TechRadar