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[MrRoboto75]

XRA was too adult swim for adult swim

[ArchimedesWojak]

All this talk of XRA is making me curious.

Do you not know that issuing so many warnings, makes it more intriguing?

Xavier: Renegade Angel is an American computer-animated adult surrealist dark comedy television series created by Vernon Chatman and John Lee, who are also the creators of Wonder Showzen. The show was produced by PFFR, with animation by Cinematico. It premiered on November 4, 2007 on Adult Swim and November 1, 2007 on the Adult Swim website.

Xavier features a style characterized by an elaborate and nonlinear plot following the humorous musings of an itinerant humanoid pseudo-shaman and spiritual seeker named Xavier. The show is known for its ubiquitous use of ideologically critical black comedy, surrealist and absurdist humor presented through a psychedelic and satirically New Age lens.

Characters

Xavier – A self-absorbed and oblivious faun-like shaman wanderer with delusions of grandeur. Xavier is the eponymous main character of the program, often shown to be a deeply insecure, near-sociopathic and childlike individual who can quickly turn against others if interactions with them lead to negative feelings about himself. Xavier often brings total destruction to his environment and those around him in his attempts to right what he sees as wrong or help others with their problems, in many instances going as far as breaking reality itself. His physical appearance is equally absurd. He wears the shell of an isopod-like creature as an armband on his right arm. His left hand is a snake from the elbow downwards. It usually acts like an ordinary hand, but in the episodes "The 6th Teat of Good Intentions" and "El Tornadador", it appears to possess its own consciousness and speaks to Xavier directly. His knees bend at the joints backwards, he is covered in brown fur and has ocular heterochromia, having one brown eye and one blue. Instead of a nose, Xavier has a raptor-like beak, though he also has a mouth. He has six nipples and a giant eye in place of his genitalia. He typically wears tennis shoes and a loin cloth embroidered with varying symbols. Xavier's purpose seems to change slightly with each episode, with the initial plot setting him as a wandering philosopher, aspiring "wise man" or sage of sorts whose intent on hermitism seems to give references to Native American vision quests. Of initial importance seems to be Xavier's drawn-out search for an answer to the abstract question, "What doth life?" Later on in the series, however, the original plot seems to alter slightly into a more personal and less transcendent search: Xavier announces his reasons for roaming the world as the means to which he can help others, his purpose being to improve the quality of human existence and, generally speaking, do good. Much of the first season focuses on his search for the person who killed his father while the second season puts focus on his search for his mother, whom he believes to be alive after digging up her grave. In the series finale, he finds her in a lunatic asylum and has sex with her, which causes Xavier to see himself as the human he apparently always was. When he says "I'm cured," his psychiatrist says "Cured? Who says there was anything wrong with you?"; it is then revealed that the psychiatrist looks and sounds like whatever creature Xavier saw himself as.

Creation & content

The computer-generated animation-style of Xavier: Renegade Angel resembles that of PC games such as Second Life and The Sims. The show features ribald wordplay, nonchalant violence and transgressive sexuality, in deeply nested, often recursive plots. These plots are often very nonlinear in their chronology; however, each episode seems to contain similar themes and motifs, as well as a single opening scene that has recurred in every episode of Xavier: a depiction of the titular character wandering through a desert (possibly a reference to the 1970s television program Kung Fu) as he narrates a semi-spontaneous, often nonsensical philosophical thought that many times connects with the episode at hand, whilst the title card of the show itself flies overhead, usually varying in action or position. An opening theme presumed to be played by Xavier on his "shakashuri" is present during these.

Co-creator Vernon Chatman called the show "a warning to children and adults about the dangers of spirituality".[1] The show has been known to show insensitivity and caricatures of Catholicism, Islam, Middle America, redneck stereotypes, and anarcho-punk subcultures.

Xavier often incorporates underlying themes and concepts based outside of, though interconnected with, the plot of each episode. Philosophical or political concepts are often juxtaposed with the surrealistic and aleatory nature of the show. Society and cultural psychology and phenomena, the meaning of life, the existence of sentience and the nature of reality have been examined in one form or another throughout the program's 2 seasons.

Jokes and humor tend to be oriented towards Xavier's own philosophical inquiry and the "deep," "zen-like" diction of wisdom quotes from various spiritual systems (particularly Native American and Hindu or Eastern spirituality) that Xavier seemingly attempts to mimic. These are many times lightly mocked with Xavier's misuse of the phrases, reflecting on contemporary humor and taking the often circular logic of such statements far out of context.

Taboo topics — such as necrophilia, bestiality, homophobia, abortion, irreligion, pedophilia, incest, self-injury, and racism — are used as sources for humor. In this respect, the program can be seen as containing a substantial amount of black comedy.

[nenjin]

It's all that and the animation style, at least for me, left me feeling ill the longer I watched it.

[pisskop]

A friend from highschool contacted me and tried to recruit me to get financial advice through him and some "ProfiFP"(which he pronoucned as "Profi FB") from OVB. I found it mighty suspicious and refused.

Some interesting things were that he would get paid for contracts made rather than for helping me with finances (that is, he would be paid by whoever I made a contract with) and that he wanted me to recommend other people who might benefit from such service.

It sounded like some kind of chain-mail thing combined with getting convinced to sign unnescessary contracts.

If he is getting paid by the contract or referral then he could just be a regular hustler.  There are people who pass out fliers for a company with a little number etched on it, and when somebody brings in the flier to get service they receive a small discount and the hustler gets a commission.


P:

XRA is trash, but its something I feel compelled to watch at least an episode of.  It's like watching a carfire.  Just pull over, mind the smell, and enjoy.

[Iduno]

So, Panda Express has a weird culture, even by the standards of corporate America. They also have a Panda Express-specific training seminar (that isn't directly provided by the company avoid the liability for when this inevitably comes back to bite them) that you can apparently only take if you're part of their corporate structure. Link for people who want a lot of BS people allegedly get put through if they want to make it in that company instead of getting fired.

https://archive.li/nolhA

A friend from highschool contacted me and tried to recruit me to get financial advice through him and some "ProfiFP"(which he pronoucned as "Profi FB") from OVB. I found it mighty suspicious and refused.

Some interesting things were that he would get paid for contracts made rather than for helping me with finances (that is, he would be paid by whoever I made a contract with) and that he wanted me to recommend other people who might benefit from such service.

It sounded like some kind of chain-mail thing combined with getting convinced to sign unnescessary contracts.

Yeah, that sounds like he's sucked into a MLM/pyramid scheme.

[dragdeler]

-

[methylatedspirit]

Xavier Renegade Angel is just.....deeply unpleasant.

I'd agree, yes, but there's just so many things going on in that show that I can't even tell what the fuck's going on. The subject matter is just... horrific, but I can't get disgusted while I'm in such deep confusion. It's like a trainwreck. I can't look away. Most shows have a "sync" duration, where it takes some amount of time to sync up and get familiar with the world and characters of said show. XRA is one of the few shows where the sync duration is infinite. I can't tell you what the plot even is. I could've sworn I just watched white noise.

Whoever wrote the Wikipedia page on XRA, you have my condolences. I don't know how you study such an incomprehensible show, while not ending up being incomprehensible yourself.

[Flying Dice]

I am just so beyond done with being stuck as only-reasonable-man-in-the-middle in a bunch of socially retarded work drama.

We were all following the news about the Chauvin trial yesterday, of course. Guilty verdict comes in.

As I pieced together later, pretty much the first goddamn thing out of the mouth of socially retarded but well-meaning coworker (white)'s mouth is "He had a bad lawyer!" [they probably deliberately gave him a bad lawyer as ammunition for an attempt to get a retrial after attention leaves the case]. Co-worker (black) takes it, entirely understandably, as "He had a bad lawyer!" [because he should have been acquitted]. Latter can barely hold themselves together and has to leave. A few minutes later, boss (mentally unstable) calls in on speakerphone and screams at everyone in the room because they "don't want to single anyone out", without explaining why.

I find out today what was said. Doesn't mesh at all with my impression of the former's attitudes given that we'd had pretty extensive private conversations. Still think that it's a pretty fucking stupid thing to say given how the "wrong way" to take it is the way a hell of a lot of people in this country would genuinely mean it. Talk with latter to give them a chance to vent about it to someone who isn't just going to turn it into a rant about themselves. They insist they're never going to be able to look at the former the same again. I know it's good odds the whole damn thing is a misunderstanding, but I'm not going to be a "your emotions are invalid blah blah" insensitive dick over someone else's inability to keep their foot out of their mouth. End up in an argument with the former who sticks to their socially oblivious guns about how it's not their fault that the latter was listening to them have a conversation with a third party (while maybe 5-6 feet away) and """misheard""" it. Is monumentally pissed at me for not just blindly taking their side (and looking like I'm backing up what appears to be a closeted racist outing themselves), refuses to accept any possibility that some of the fault is theirs.

Finally convince the former to stop crying about being misunderstood and actually fucking talk to the latter to explain what they were saying and maybe, possibly, apologize for not thinking about how they said it. Peak you're-way-too-old-for-this-teenager-shit attitude but they do. Five minutes later the two come back laughing and talking. Don't know if any bridges were actually mended, and honestly I don't give a flying fuck.

Just about ready to pound my face into a wall over people being so fucking stubborn unwilling to try to talk to each other about interpersonal problems, acting like I'm a goddamn emotional hostage negotiator.

[Kagus]

That is indeed the pitfall of becoming more in touch with your emotions and learning to process things in a healthy and rational way.

It becomes intensely obvious how many people fuckin' don't.

[methylatedspirit]

Is there a reason why adults tend to be somehow terrible at handling and processing emotions? I want to say it's a gender role thing, but I'm fairly certain it's a trait that happens regardless of gender, just that the stereotypes of how it manifests are different. I know emotions are hard, but why is it that people who are "normal", who innately "get it", still struggle with that?

[Egan_BW]

As with most systems, there are more things which can go wrong than things which can go right. It's not quite healthy to ignore your emotions or be entirely controlled by them, and the nuanced middle path is a nuanced middle path and thus not exactly simple to follow.

[Kagus]

That, and many never actually get the proper education on how to process these things. And yeah, definitely happens regardless of gender, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone's terrible in the same ways. As such, certain gender roles get more focus for their emotional dysfunction because of their particular brand of being bad at it.

[martinuzz]

As with most systems, there are more things which can go wrong than things which can go right. It's not quite healthy to ignore your emotions or be entirely controlled by them, and the nuanced middle path is a nuanced middle path and thus not exactly simple to follow.

Spoken like a true stoic. Temperantia!

[Loud Whispers]

I don't get what's the deal with XRA, I loved the show and it seemed perfectly in line with any other subject matter you might expect from any proper show. Just one massive mastercrafted shitpost, like a newsground animation got access to apex tier writing

[wierd]

I take a strange (but scientifically informed) view:

Emotions are by their innate nature, irrational things-- where people (or rather, what sets people apart from most other animals) are adapted for rationality*.

Emotions are also very strongly tied to the potentiation and weighting of memory and experience.  Negative emotions especially have very strong potentiation for the retention of memories. 

This means that the natural state of the human psyche is to accumulate and more heavily weight negative experiences and emotions in future decision making efforts leading to the potential situation where those negative experiences and memories dominate the mental landscape. Eventually, there are serious and real consequences for this. 

Since this is a kind of neural-system "tug of war", where the prefrontal cortex tries to downregulate the amygdalar response, and the amygdalar response is backfed constantly into the prefrontal cortex (via memory potential biases), an individual needs to constantly exercise their rational decision making, or they quickly become overwhelmed.

At least for me, being aware of these mechanisms gives me motivation and impetus to mentally disarm negativity, and consciously choose to override the imperatives it tries to imprint on me.  This is not the same thing as ignoring emotions-- It is acknowledging the emotions, but also rationalizing that their intensity is the result of evolutionarily vestigial biasing, present in memory storage.  The solution is to consciously reinforce positive emotionally tagged memories, while rationalizing the negative ones into submission.  Since memories are constantly being re-burned every time you recall and process them, following such a regimen slowly normalizes the bias of the negative emotional tagging, and you experience a more healthy emotional experience when recalling those memories.

The ISSUE, is that most people are neither aware of, nor willing to learn about, nor willing to enact such modulating mental discipline when they find themselves deep in the thrall of a powerfully negative emotional state.  This leads to the downward spiral of increasingly negative weighted memory retention, and increased cogitative negativity.


*The prefrontal cortex, which is a decidedly human feature of neural hardware, is believed to be the seat of conscious/voluntary action, and also plays a very strong role in regulating the amgydalae and their interaction with the thalamus-- That latter interaction is believed to be the physical hardware involved in the emotional tagging and encoding of memories cited above. Humans are pretty unique in having this structure, and this indicates that humans have experienced evolutionary pressure to become more and more rational, in competition with the intrinsic role of emotion and emotional processing in memory potentiation and encoding.