The Queens Gambit on Netflix

Good post that Duchess

@Duchess64

So 1600 in Africa is good?
Maybe I should move there 🤔
What a scam that whole story was 😄
The queen of BS is more like it.

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This book, and the Netflix series which it was based on was never intended to be taken as anything other than fiction. The reason I like it so much, has nothing to do with race, sexism, drugs, or the finer points of tournament chess. This is an imaginative, fictional story about an introverted young person's introduction to the game (very much like myself at that age) it's my favorite literary topic and one of the very few of it's kind ever produced.

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So she is not worthy of a chess movie...

Thanks for clearing that up 😉

The amount of pandering in today's society is almost pathetic 😀

@Duchess64

You are definitely right about Americans being ignorant about chess.
I met some guys who thought Bobby Fischer was black and they refused to believe me when I corrected them.
It all started when I beat all of them and they said I was the "White Bobby Fischer"

I have something to say!

"The Queen's Gambit" series is not really about chess and to criticize it from that perspective is wrong. Yes, it is nonsense that a pill-popping, alcoholic girl can learn 99% of accumulated chess theory by staring at the ceiling while drug-addled. It's a supernatural story in the style of the super-popular American author Stephen King in which we see many of the elements of a typical Steven King novel:

An abused child who possesses supernatural powers that she barely recognizes. As she grows, the powers and her understanding of her powers grow with her. We see the same ideas of child abuse and child development, famously, in King's "Carrie" which ends with revenge and buckets of blood rather than triumphant victory and contentedness. But the same idea.

Innocents trapped in scary institutions! Big element in King stories. Sometimes a prison, sometimes a school, sometimes a hospital or an insane asylum. We see this here with the orphanage and, later, the high school.

Abusive adults but also a few, kindly adults hidden in basements who treat the prodigy with dignity.

Parents projecting their frustrations and failures onto their child. In this story, Harmon has two remarkable parents, her mother and step-mother, whose talents and desires were thwarted by mental illness (her mother) and a loveless, abusive marriage (the adoptive mother). Both mothers are super talented women, one a mathematician the other a pianist. Their dooms foreshadow Harmon's fate. We see this in King's novels as well. The kids inherit the failures of the parents and struggle to escape.

Mid-Century American look and culture. King loves his 1950s and 1960s, the years and place where he grew up. He sets many of his stories in this placid time. Everything seems normal and happy but, in a King novel, there is evil and great power below the calm surface. Out of this superficial world of propriety and happy music comes this amazing girl or boy (and a vampire, or a demon or a monster or an alien invasion or something supernatural and scary).

I read that King, himself, is a big fan of "The Queen's Gambit".

I liked how they portrayed the shabbiness of top-flight American chess. We Americans have had some great, great players. But the institution of American chess is lacking. I like how they set the US Open at some humdrum university and the European tournaments in grand, luxe hotels and arenas. That seemed correct to me.

I liked the series. Had I watched it through a narrow "chess" lens, I would have found it bad.

@congruent said
I was a bit disappointed in how it turned out and I won't be watching to completion. I cannot recommend the series to friends/family, perhaps a good reminder of why I don't like Netflix creating a generation of binge-watchers.

Chess is not about taking green pills and skipping school. 🙁

That's life, should life be censored on TV just because you don't like it or aren't comfortable with it? I think not.

@trev33 said
That's life, should life be censored on TV just because you don't like it or aren't comfortable with it? I think not.

Actually TV is censored now.
Have you heard of "cancel culture"?
If people get offended by a TV show they scream and yell until it gets cancelled.
We have lost a lot of good shows because of sensitive liberals.
We have lost some good sports broadcasters too.
If it doesn't fit into the liberal agenda then it is being censored.
I disagree with any censorship but it is happening now.