way too much consideration of pacific rim bonus material on newt's taste in music.

[cimorene]

Disclaimer: This bit of throwaway movie-extra trivia I'm about to discuss almost certainly didn't deserve this level of consideration, but 1. it's funny and 2. sometimes you just can't stop remembering something and going "YEAH, but - !" After inflicting these rants on my wife 3 times and once on someone who hasn't even seen the movie, I decided I'd just write it down.

According to the extras from the Pacific Rim bluray, Newton Geiszler’s “heroes” are 1. Mulder (fictional), 2. Bear Grylls (science and zoology stuff), and 3. three icons of the early punk rock movement, Iggy Pop, Sid Vicious, and Johnny Rotten.



Item: It's pretty weird for someone born in 1990 (that image set says 1980, but call it a misprint, because the other sources seem to agree on 90 according to the wiki) to pick these three icons of the early punk rock movement as their heroes. (The list isn't even exhaustive of early punk rock, so it's clearly, like, selected... yet the inclusion of Iggy Pop seems to make it impossible that he just is obsessed with the Sex Pistols... and sure, you could be intensely interested in exactly 2 musical acts from 14 years before your birth, but no others... but...)

He could have simply inherited it. If we grant that his parents carried on an extramarital affair from 1980-1990 with each other as the fandom wiki claims, then it's likely that his dad or uncle is the right age to have been into punk rock during the time when these were relevant stars, the late 1970s. It might be a bit odd to have just three musician heroes and to have been introduced to all of them by one’s parents, but not impossible. After all, not everybody has to rebel against their parents’ taste... though that would be a pretty ironic trait in someone who builds their image on punk.

Item: A person born in 1990, on the other hand, was 15 in 2005, when the pop-punk revolution was at its height. It wouldn’t be at all weird for someone that age to be into punk, of the pop and emo variety. (And I know someone else has said this or something very similar, and it’s been driving me crazy all day trying to remember where I read it, so please point me in the right direction if you know!) Newt's movie outfit would also allow him to slip into the My Chemical Romance lineup on Warped tour 2005 with the addition of some red eyeliner.

Conclusion: Newt was either raised on the Sex Pistols from a young age or else he did a deep dive into the history of punk after getting interested in punk rock and ended up more into the old school. I mean, or both I guess.

Other conclusion: That trivia card was made up by someone born before 1970 who forgot about the age and time issues involved, probably; but I’m stuck on Watsonian analysis here because, well... we obviously can’t actually entirely discard the influence of punk on Newt as non-canon, given his aesthetic. And the other trivia cards there are, obviously, the source of the extra canon that he and Hermann fell in love in a penpal romance before they met in person and turned into the Odd Couple, which inclines me to look favorably on the data as a whole.