And with this, I guess we can rate the re-integration of the two separate halves of Mopey’s personality a complete success. She clearly is back to her old, established personality, and everyone of the team will be kinda happy about that – even Snuka, as soon as he gets over the most acute feelings of embarrassment.
Even Mopey’s clothing has been re-integrated, despite being about to completely disintegrate just mere seconds before. A clear proof for the power of agency.
To be fair, it’s not all due to the superior capabilities of Theda Barer’s agents – they are better than Lee’s, of course, but in this case they were significantly aided by the fact that humiliation has a fundamental attraction toward Snuka, resp. Lee. He’s the ultimate decoy in that class – if you’re standing next to him, you’re perfectly safe from any sort of humiliation, since the humiliation will always prefer to strike him.
Which is not to say that Snuka is never getting a lucky break. In this case, for example, his modesty was perfectly preserved because his hands were so conveniently placed already before his clothes disappeared. And he has Mopey to thank for that. But he won’t …because thanking her for kicking him in the balls could be easily misinterpreted. And it’s not like she’d need the encouragement, anyway. And, yeah, the censorship bar wasn’t really necessary here, but I’ve grown so fond of it…
As for panel three, I’m not sure why Snuka’s so tense, and starring so intensely. There’s really no reason to expect Portugal or a cat with an X-shaped black spot on its back to be suddenly appearing there…
More on Monday.
As a ninja (when plot convenient anyways) Snuka must always expect the unexpected. So the fact that he was unlikely to expect Portugal or a cat with an X-shaped black spot on its back IS THE REASON for him to expect either of those things.
One could argue that needless censorship is a way to create titillation without increasing your age restriction rating. You can add a bleeped out word that is totally innocuous but the audience will ASSUME a swear word was said and the censorship board can’t rightfully flag you for language because nothing bad was actually said.
Yeah, but that would be exactly the kind of ‘unexpected’ that THEY would expect him to expect. So to maintain the element of surprise, it’s not enough to only expect what he wouldn’t expect – he has to expect what THEY wouldn’t expect him not to expect. O_O; No wonder paranoia is such common ailment among the ninja community…
And, yeah, the fun thing about this sort of blatant censorship is that it could be potentially more titillating than whatever it is that is censored, because it leaves things to the imagination of the audience, which might well be more wild and vivid than reality. After all, how many people are really out there who have never seen a set of male genitalia somewhere? Chances are, Snuka’s would look quite similar, save for the rather battered state it’s currently in. The censorship bar here just turns something quite trivial into something not-trivial…