#3 people doing actual literary analysis
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what's your stance on ao3 comments? do you read them often?? aka what is the best avenue to give u compliments because my love language is words of affirmation
i love them!! i'm bad at replying consistently bc i usually feel bad answering before whatever i'm currently writing is uploaded (weird mental gymnastics ik) but they bring me such joy. i have a whole doc in my writing folder that's just my favorite comments on stuff.
#qui parle#qui repond#anon#comments#so many good varieties of comments.#i think top 3 are like#1 people doing long ass in depth comments on each chapter of a multi chapter fic (bc it's rewarding to be going thru the storyline together#2 people telling fun anecdotes about x fic relating to them or their life in some way or how theyve brought it up irl etc#3 people doing actual literary analysis#but i appreciate them all
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You know what? I have become a gaylor sympathiser
This is going to be a long post, sorry! Please read the full post before even thinking about commenting.
Over the past few days I’ve seen a few posts on my dash about taylor swift and her fans that have left a bad taste in my mouth.
I know that a lot of people think that some fans of her are “trying to make her gay” and I just wanted to put the record straight and defend some people after actually looking at what’s going on. And I know I’m probably opening myself up for tumblr’s poor reading comprehension but before I start I’m going to say this:
I do not think taylor swift is a lesbian
Ok? Now let’s have a conversation.
First of all from what I’ve seen most of the fans who talk about Taylor swift and queerness do it from a point of literary analysis and learning queer history. This is a huge part of the community and lots of people have said that they never would have learnt so much about queer history without reading taylor swift’s works through a queer lens.
Adding on to that point, it seems a little hypocritical for the gay site which loves queer readings of books, tv shows, songs, musicals, films etc to be bullying a pretty small group of people who are mainly doing queer readings of lyrics. Especially when those people get near constant death threats. Instead of bullying these people (who don’t think or do what you think they think and do) why don’t you go outside and think “does this affect me? No. Do I agree with them? No. Am I going to cyber bully them because of this? No.”
Secondly, for the people who believe that any speculation on a real persons sexuality is 100% wrong. I used to think this too but I have changed my mind a bit about this recently after stopping and thinking about it properly. I’m not trying to change your mind at all I just want you to stop and think for a minute.
If you only get mad when speculation is queer in nature, then maybe think about that for a minute. Why is it totally wrong to think a person might be queer. We probably do it in our daily lives with people we know and they likely do it with us, back in the day that’s how queer people found each other-by speculating on sexuality. Would you be upset if you found out someone that you know thought you might be queer? I wouldn’t, maybe you would but if you would, why? Why is it terrible to think someone might be queer (this is NOT about hounding a person to admit to being queer like shawn mendes, this is just thinking in your head and on your small blog that the person will likely never see). Also this is literally the website where we talk about historical (real people) being gay even when they would have never said something to the equivalent.
An addition to this point before people start saying in the comments is that this is NOT the same situation as with kit connor. The issue there was people assuming that he was straight and taking that role away from a queer person. Speculating that he was queer was the opposite of what happened in that situation. So this is not an example of what happens when you speculate queerness.
Final things to say:
1) don’t believe every post you see with someone looking insane about taylor swift being gay, a lot of them are fake.
2) before anyone says “they should listen to real queer artists instead” most of them very much do. There’s a lot of fans of Hayley kiyoko, girl in red, Janelle monae, tegan and sara, zolita, kehlani etc.
3) there are some queer flags that are there. Sorry but there are. Hairpin drops, lavender, the ladder, flag colours, songs about women, friend of dorothy reference. Whether they are intentional is a different matter.
4) shipping real people is not what is happening for the majority of the people in the community. Also this comes back to queer vs straight again. Plenty of swifties ship taylor with men she’s been seen with and no one goes into their inboxes and sends death threats even when they are the ones making taylor swift all about the men she may or may not have dated.
5) taylor swift has never stated her sexuality. I know this may be hard to belive based off of how some people act, but it’s true. She has made vague statements which could have many meanings but she has never clearly stated anything. When gaylors get upset with taylor it is not because she said she is straight, it’s because they are getting death threats and doxxed and she seems to either be unaware of it (which is unlikely given how she seems to be a little terminally online) or she doesn’t care enough to tell her fans to stop.
6) if she does explicitly say she’s straight then there will probably be disappointment in her use of queer history and flags and her potential queer erasure (as we saw with lavender haze, with straight women describing their relationships as lavender) and centring herself in queer spaces (like the you need to calm down music video) but no one will be angry that she’s not gay. And a lot will probably be grateful that she actually explicitly stated for the record to absolve any confusion. The main issue would likely be other fans ramping up the death threats and bullying.
In conclusion: these people who do queer analysis of Taylor’s work are not trying to out her or make her gay etc. if you don’t understand it that’s fine it’s clearly not for you and you can go quite easily without seeing any of it. It’s not illegal to read works through a queer lens and if it means more people know about queer history then I think that’s a very good thing.
I changed my mind after looking at what a lot of people are actually saying rather than what people perceive them to be saying and maybe you will too?
Just be kinder to people online please and if you don’t like what people are saying block them and do not engage!
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One day I'll probably do a 40-minute video essay on this topic, but the internet's misinterpretation of "Death of the Author" is just a real shame.
I frequently see the concept brought up in relation to a certain terf author. People attempt to 'separate the work and the author', but that is frankly not how it is intended to be used.
"Death of the Author" is supposed to be a tool for literary analysis. That's all it is. It is not a theory by itself, nor a political stance or a way to judge morality.
It is a tool to encourage readers to interpret the content of a text authentically, but you should use it critically, and be aware of why, how and when it is relevant. It is not an excuse to ignore context or paratext, as both of those should also be considered in a proper analysis.
The tool was developed during a time when the discourse was more favourable towards an author's intention rather than a reader's interpretation. People used intention to dismiss other readers' analysis of texts, using diary entries or letters by dead authors to counter less mainstream takes of canon texts. It was a period where the 'goal' of literary analysis was to uncover a text's true meaning. The original essay was a short controversial counterargument but the conversations it sparked over the following decades have led to the scale tipping more in favour of interpretation. It has also led to a 180 of the original problem.
Killing the author has the potential of empowering readers and encouraging deeper. Maybe even uncovering biases the author wasn't even aware of! However, (mostly outside of academic circles but not always) people are misusing the concept and use it to dismiss context and racist dog-whistles as well as discourage readings that rely more on subtext.
In simple terms we have gone from a mentality saying "AHA, I have evidence and it said you are wrong" to "AHA, it doesn't matter and therefore you are wrong". Neither is constructive in a conversation about art.
If you use the death of the author effectively while acknowledging intention and context you actually add a lot of nuance to your analysis, and doing so can demonstrate your analytical abilities. You will be able to distinguish what the text is saying plainly, what is said between the lines, and if the narrative effectively handles what it originally claimed. It is an effective 1-2 punch. Let me give you an ultra-short example:
On the surface level, '50 Shades of Grey' tells you that it is a sexy BDSM story. Throughout interviews and promotional material, E. L. James frames her story as a female-empowering book. But by critically examining how the books handle themes of consent, privacy, agency etc. we can argue that the narrative doesn't live up to proper BDSM conduct and that the protagonist is not empowered, and is instead displaying an unhealthy relationship. If we take the analysis further we could make an argument about what this says about society at large. Does it normalise boundary-breaking behaviour? Could it make someone romanticise stalking? The thesis statement is all up to you. (disclaimer I have not actually read these books, don't come for me, this is an example)
Here is what we just did: I presented a surface reading of a text. I presented the most likely intention of the author. I then argued for my interpretation by looking at literary themes and context. I used the conflict between Jame's intention, and my interpretation to illustrate a conflict. 1-2 punch. I am not killing James, I consider her opinion and intention to strengthen my argument, but I don't let her word of god determine or dismiss my reading. In just 3 simple sentences I use a variety of resources from my toolbox.
When people weaponise the author's intention it can look like this:
"Well, E. L. James said it is a female power fantasy, you're just reading too much into it" <- dismissing context and subtext by using 'word of god'. Weighing intention above interpretation.
"Does it really matter that E. L. James didn't research BDSM before publishing, can't it just be a sexy book?" <- dismissing context, subtext as well as author intention and accountability. Weighing their own interpretation and subtly killing the author
Simply exclaiming "I believe in death of the author" (which I have heard in Lit classes) means nothing. It's nothing. Except that you want to ignore context and only indulge in the parts of the text that you find enjoyable.
In the plainest way I can put it, the death of the author is supposed to make you say: "the author probably meant A, but the text and the context is saying B, therefore I conclude C". Don't just repeat what the author says. Don't just ignore context. And allow the feelings the text invokes in you to be there and let them be something you reflect on. The details you pick up on will be completely unique to you, the meaning you get will be just your own. You can do all of these things at once, I promise it doesn't have to be one or the other.
There has to be a balance. Intention matters. Interpretation matter. Watch out and pay attention. Are you only claiming the author is dead or alive when it serves your own narrative?
When you want to ignore an author ask why
When you don't want to read a book because you don't condone the actions of the author ask why
Examine how you dismiss arguments and how you further conversations.
#literature#lit#uni#death of the author#i don't write long tumblr posts what the fuck is this#i take constructive criticism but be nice about it#English is not my first language there are probably a ton of mistakes and weird things in this#analysis#i'll probably delete this thing#but i'll post it for now i guess because I have been writing on it for too long
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I’ll never get over this - what an insanely cryptic statement to make . It’s also interesting that GRRM will give long rambling answers about other ships (as he tends to do in interviews and asks) but this is his response here. Short and sweet but ambiguous and entirely up to one’s interpretation - essentially think about what you’ve read.
And then it had me thinking…
To imply that George isn’t a careful writer and doesn’t put immensely intricate thought into every sentence he writes is entirely reductive to him as a writer. Especially if you claim to be a fan of said writing (you’d have to be apart of this fandom). This is the man who has taken 13 years to write TWOW, who consistently writes, scraps, and rewrites chapters if he dislikes them or they don’t fit what he’s envisioned.
And with a fandom that has discussed, debated and analysed every possible theory - providing some well-thought out essays onto the internet, consistently stating that nothing is ever a coincidence with George before delving into a lengthy analysis - it has me wondering why said theorists and ‘very intelligent’ contingents of fans will be grasping, bursting blood vessels, losing their mind and their sanity in the process just to disprove a possible match between J/S.
Now as an example that I’ve come across just yesterday on the infamous r/asoiaf - When S*nsan is brought into the conversation, it’s absolutely accepted as a plausible theory due to *checks notes* people devoting time to and picking apart evidence and to the wider fandom either not dismissing it or remaining neutral about it. (I mean, the redditor I was made privy to yesterday just disproved the Ashford tourney theory and it’s connection to Jon on the basis that it was made by a s*nsan shipper - wow !! Thanks :)) I never knew , finally my rose tinted glasses have been removed and I can bow down to you, oh wise redditor … these J words are CRAZY delusionals indeed!!
This is just one example among the many of the possible future romances that are debated endlessly on the various social media platforms , and all said ships - whether they’ve met or interacted or are very close or whatever require analysis . Deep deep analysis. Picking apart sentences, imagery, chapter ordering, literary references you name it . We all become literature students, and every ship is privy to it and hey ! More power to them - we’re all just having fun here theorising about all the possibilities for a book/s that has not yet been released.
So it begs the question , and bear with me here - I know I’ve been talking quite a lot about people opposed to and entirely dismissive of my ship - but yesterdays’ conundrum had me thinking about generalised fandom receptiveness.
See, normal fans (normal people) when presented with a theory that they genuinely believe to be so absurd/dislike/are entirely opposed to , would simply block the user, filter the content, and move on with their lives. A far happier solution, it means you’re not worked into a frenzy over something you’re aware you don’t like. Yay! Everyone’s happy! But…..
People must be debby-downers and ruin the fun , turning into genuine clouds of negativity, invading tags in which they don’t belong, creating anti blogs, writing lengthy essays disproving it all - yep, we’ve seen it, and we just ignore it as best we can.
But it gets to a point where it’s just frustrating. Because this is all so painfully hypocritical. If said intelligent fandom can provide 3 hour video essays, 50,000 word essays and reddit debates of threads with 100+ replies based on the notion of tyrion being a targaryen, or j*nrya is actually canon or the blue rose is metaphor for a future romance whatever theory that’s been put into the world - why - gods why does the entire fandom jump on the bandwagon of hating/dismissing Jonsa as soon as it’s brought up as a theory??
When we are just doing what everyone else has been doing vigorously for the last 13 years - theorising, analysing, debating like we’re literature students (and I’m a lit major, so it does feel this way). And whilst we quietly engage with and make our content, we’re ridiculed, picked apart, and vilified elsewhere for being awfully stupid people - because ….why?? Oh yes, that’s right - it is not a valid plausible theory at all, we just ship it because we self insert as sansa and jon is a heroic figure or the even sillier assumption - because Kit and Sophie are attractive people (which indeed they are, but most theories stem from the books, lmao.)
Sooo, essentially jonsas aren’t allowed into the club because …. (Well I’m actually still wondering why), because every other popular ship theory is either incestuous or involves a child being shipped with a grown person.) so Jonsa is obviously the latter, but that’s not the reason that the general fandom (J*nerys and to an extent, J*nrya) dislike them because those too - are incestuous.
If you’re an individual who is uncomfortable with all incest ships period . Then I respect that since I understand it. What I don’t understand, as seen through reddit and what I was made privy to yesterday, - were the multitude of disprovers fine with J*nerys and J*nrya and S*nsan but god forbid someone brings up Jonsa because then it’s a crackship - except all those other ships I mentioned are valid because people have analysed and theorised and written metas etc etc etc and Jonsa’s are just plain silly crackshippers.
I really have to wonder about fandom mentality, because it’s making less and less sense to me ….
Anyway George you ARE a sly one and I’ll always giggle when I come across that image.
#jonsa#jon x sansa#anti sansa antis#fandom mentality#anti asoiaf reddit#anti asoiaf fandom#anti jonrya#anti jonerys#anti sansan
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the Aubrey problem (or how Omori's writing failed her)
Also available to read on Archive of our Own.
I really like video games. If the fanfiction, theory posts, and occasional essays weren’t enough, here’s me saying it—I really like video games! They’re a conversation between writing, art, music, and human interaction, between the player, the game, and the characters in them. Of course, not all games have all of that, some being only text-based, some being lifeless wastelands, but whatever they end up choosing to work with, they often do something amazing.
Sunny is one of my favorite protagonists in any realm of media—video game, movie, book—and he genuinely changed the way I view the world. Not just him, but the entire world built around him, Headspace and its charming inhabitants and the wondrous sights and music, the creative bosses that leave so much insight, the beautiful overworld that is Faraway and a nostalgic look into what we leave behind, and what we return to.
So that’s why I’m so disappointed I don’t like Aubrey.
This game blew my mind away when I first saw it—my first experience with the game wasn’t even my own playthrough, but sitting through a 20-hour longplay!—and I lost so many hours of sleep twisting and turning and trying to make peace with the grief it left me feeling. And after finishing, I realized that its flaws were plenty, but not enough to drag me out of my enjoyment. But Aubrey? Aubrey didn’t make me feel the way I knew she was supposed to.
That frustrated me, especially as I became a bigger and bigger fan of the game. I had no qualms about liking her archetype, the feminine bully with a tragic backstory, and yet I do with her.
As someone who craves literary analysis and in-depth looks into every media I consume, I just needed to know: what made me dislike Aubrey?
And after over two years of being a fan of the game, I’ve finally figured it out: it’s a good mixture of 1) lack of explanation, 2) rushed self-awareness, and 3) lackluster narrative choices. And I’ve found the words I needed to explain these concepts, so please join me on my messy journey to understanding what went wrong with Aubrey.
preface
If you’re an Aubrey apologist, this essay is not for you. I’ve heard plenty of arguments about why Aubrey was actually in the right, not limited to “Basil deserved it,” and, “Aubrey was hurting too,” so I’d like to begin by stating that Aubrey was a bully very clearly.
Rejecting the notion that she actively harmed others is rejecting a core component of understanding her character. Before we dive into her character and how the writing failed her character arc, I would like us all to be on the same page: she physically, verbally, and socially bullied Basil. It was not Basil’s fault, and it will never be a victim’s fault to get bullied. She is not the victim of her own crime, just like how Sunny is not the victim of Mari’s death, and Basil is not the victim of Mari’s hanging. We, as the player, are to recognize their responsibilities in their actions. The same must be extended to Aubrey.
Some people feel the need to deny this aspect of her character to justify her actions and/or justify liking her. Firstly, the purpose of this essay isn’t to villainize anyone for liking Aubrey. I’m simply analyzing what was attempted with her character and why it didn’t strike a chord with me and so many others. Secondly, as Kel wisely said, “Just because you did something bad, doesn't make you a bad person.” I’m not here to say that Aubrey is a bad person—no, nobody in Omori is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and labeling characters as such is taking away the nuance they possess. And I’m certainly not saying liking a character who did something bad makes you bad, either!
Liking Aubrey is in no way a problem (which makes me a tad bit sad that I need to clarify), and I’ll even go as far as to say kudos to you, but if you bend and twist to stop her from holding any responsibility for her actions, that’s when problems arise. Basil is a fictional character and won’t care if you think it was his fault he was bullied, but for the people around you who may have been in similar positions to him?
And lastly, I want to say that if you cite sexism as the reason people don’t like Aubrey… actually, this is the perfect transition into the analysis.
gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss
Femme bullies are not a new phenomenon. Perhaps it’s the break from the stereotypical sweet feminine girl that makes them so fascinating, using their femininity to not sing to animals or wish for a man, but pull down others and advance their status.
I, for one, adore the femme bully trope. Especially if they’re one who used to be extremely kind and underwent some sort of ‘fall from grace’ that led to a bastardization. But, as for all bullies, if they are left without a proper backstory and motivation, I’m turned off from them. Most humans are not mean just because they can be but rather are products of how they were raised. When these causes are ignored, the trope falls flat, and instead of being a good reconstruction, it’s a flat stereotype.
The best way to analyze this is by comparing Aubrey’s character to good examples of femme bullies in the past. Specifically, I’m picking my favorites: Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Nanami from Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Sophie from The School for Good and Evil. I’m going to do a quick (and a bit sarcastic) overview of their characters in their respective media, but a quick warning for suicide in Asuka’s overview, and animal cruelty in Nanami’s.
Asuka is a pilot for one of the mechas, the Evangelion, and she always thought of herself as better than everyone. Well, of course, she would: she studied hard, worked harder than everyone around her, and she’s just naturally talented. And yet, she’s still always threatened by others and how they can ruin her status. Specifically, for the course of the show, she targets Shinji—he’s this nobody from nowhere who could suddenly pilot an Eva, while she had to fight her whole life to get here! How is that fair? And what has that asshole been through anyway? Did he have to see his mother’s corpse after she committed suicide as a small child? Did he fight for his mother’s love his entire life just for her to kill herself? Does he have to fight for male attention just so he isn’t thrown aside? No, of course not! So how is any of it fair?
Nanami is the sister to the wonderful student body president Touga, and she wants nothing more than his attention. And with her being the youngest of the cast, one cannot be mad at her for not understanding the severity of violence and finality of death, so her anger as a small child with a kitten whom Touga adored is also understandable. One simply cannot be mad at her for drowning it. So, of course, you cannot blame her for wanting to punish the ever-elusive Anthy and Utena, who Touga has become fixated on. What does Anthy or Utena have that Nanami doesn’t? They’re stupid girls, not Touga’s sister. No matter what, Nanami is going to win her brother’s affection (and in her pursuit, ignore how horribly he’s been manipulating her the entire time).
And Sophie is the Witch of Woods Beyond, capable of powerful spells beyond the imagination, from a place that few know of. And she wants nothing more than for her own fairy-tale ending—why do all the princesses around her get princes and castles and beautiful dresses, and she’s doomed to being hideous and alone for the rest of her life? Who decided that for her? She’s beautiful, after all, so she should be a princess! It doesn’t matter who stands in the way of her happily ever after; especially not if it’s Agatha, her lifelong best friend. No matter what, Sophie will not end up like her mother who died all alone, with her husband forgetting her and moving on. Sophie will be loved, no matter who she has to hurt.
What do they all have in common? Firstly, they’re all girls. As stated, femme bullies are different from masc bullies, especially as they reveal aspects of femininity and womanhood in general that many people—see, a male audience—will neglect to face, and overall uncover sexism that's still present in both media and society. Secondly, they’re all bullies, and they targeted someone in particular who they saw as detrimental to their happiness. And thirdly, they all had specific upbringings that conditioned them to have their ‘falls from grace’. What is this third, unidentified thing?
Mommy issues!
(Sorry, I know Nanami technically has a brother complex, but I just wanted to say mommy issues.)
A pattern has been developed with all of these girls. They all start fairly, what one can call, ‘feminine’ or at least, per standard stereotypes. They’re gentle and sweet and shine when needed. And they all have a ‘fall from grace’—a moment, or sequence of moments, that leads them to reject traditional femininity and embrace a more vengeful version of it. And a final moment, where they are faced with their opposite, who represents all that they do not have.
Asuka was sweet and kind and bubbly until her mother killed herself. After that, she dedicated herself to her studies and getting adult male attention through means of the over-sexualization of herself. And then, she began to bully Shinji.
Sophie was sweet and kind and bright until her mother died. After that, she idolized her mother’s false display of femininity and became obsessed with becoming a princess. And then, at the School for Evil, she began to bully Agatha.
Nanami was assumedly sweet—she deviates from this pattern slightly, being built off assumptions of a good past rather than showcases—until she was brought into this family and became obsessed with her brother and was manipulated by him. After that, she became desperate for his attention, fighting any other who could take it. And then, she began to bully Utena (and Anthy.)
While Nanami does deviate from this pattern, they all have clear origins. They were not bullies from the start. As aforementioned, in the face of an adversary, the majority of people do not turn to hurting one another. Something in their pasts, their ‘falls from grace’, was the foundation of their actions, what led them to believe what they were doing was okay. It’s not justification—it's a much-needed explanation. After all, if you do not understand, how can you empathize?
Still, you may fail to see my point. The game has lots of hints of Aubrey’s troubled upbringing. And that’s exactly what the problem is. These girls have clear origins while Aubrey’s is muddled.
Of course, I don’t expect Omori to have spoon-fed me details of her past. You can put the pieces together by walking through her home and seeing bottles laid on the ground. But, even in a game dependent on nuance and having the player put certain things together, it’s better to leave things out directly rather than to work a way around.
To build up a good femme bully, we need a good origin story. What happened to her that made her turn to violence? Why should we care? We know Aubrey probably had a troubled childhood. But the game doesn’t supply enough. It leaves too much to fill in the blanks. I know that Asuka saw her mother’s corpse, I know that Sophie was forced into a misogynistic viewpoint upon her mother’s death, and I know that Nanami was manipulated to hell and back. I know what these girls have been through so I know why they ended up walking their paths.
But the game simply doesn’t reveal enough about Aubrey. Fan speculation is not enough. Canon interpretation should not be confused with fan interpretation—according to the fans, Aubrey’s father is a deadbeat, and her mother is an abusive, neglectful alcoholic. According to the game? Aubrey’s dad is “strict”, and her house is an absolute disaster. The house is one of the biggest clues as to Aubrey’s childhood, and while some may praise this as ‘showing and not telling’, the game never tries to make workarounds for the other characters (which I will dig deeper into later). I can assume what happened in her house but it’s not my job to find ways to empathize with the character; that is the story’s job.
This is the first of Omori’s three sins and we haven’t even scratched the surface.
actions speak more than words, or something like that
I recently saw a post that I thought would make a good intro for this section. It’s an apologist post for Aubrey, discussing how the game did treat her with just enough harshness—that because she’s been beating herself up, because she’s suffered a public breakdown, because it took kindness to help her heal, it’s proof of her regret. There’s some good Basil blaming in there too, with a strange turn saying that she refused to leave Basil’s house because of her willingness to turn over a new leaf. And it ends with a weird claim that she was a “good person all along,” (implying an argument otherwise), but I’m not here to rat on that post.
Despite how frustrated the post made me, I am inclined to agree. It’s black-and-white to state that Aubrey didn’t change at all. If you compare her first Faraway appearance to her final scenes, she’s a completely different person. Which would've been nice if the change didn’t take two scenes.
Much like how I compared Aubrey’s backstory to that of other femme bullies, I’m going to compare Aubrey’s redemption to that of my favorite redemption story in all of media: Riku from Kingdom Hearts (the fact that I’m so in touch with his story may also explain some of my disappointment with Aubrey’s).
Riku starts off his journey on Destiny Islands. He’s always wondered what lies beyond his small home and dreamed of taking a sailboat with his best friends, Sora and Kairi. However, jealousy is an awful thing—Sora and Kairi are close. And it seems that Riku has been hearing about how they’re thinking of leaving him behind. So, he does what any teenager dealing with larger-than-life feelings does: he gives in to the magical Darkness and effectively kills everyone on the islands, separating him, Sora, and Kairi (don’t worry—everyone comes back.)
By the end of the game, he’s come to his senses, but it takes a lot of time. He fights with Sora a lot because he just knows, deep down, that he’s right and Sora is wrong, and if Sora would just listen…but no. Sora keeps abandoning him. So he has to work through that and all the feelings that accompany those abandonment issues, he has to work through the question of “What is even making me want to kill my best friend, anyway?”, and he has to work through “Wait…can I kill my best friend?” So, it takes a lot of time for him to get to his senses.
And then, he goes through hell. Literally and metaphorically. He dedicates himself wholly to making up for what he did. How? Well, he first identifies what he did wrong—he separated from his friends, he gave in to his jealousy, and he submerged his home in Darkness. He apologizes for it directly—although he doesn’t have a chance to speak with Sora right away, he's constantly apologizing for the fact that he gave in to the Darkness, so much that it became a running gag to some fans. He put up distance—he didn’t feel like he was owed forgiveness right away (or at all, but that’s a different matter) and didn’t stick at Sora’s side to wait for his best friend to forgive him. He worked hard to show that he’s changed—it would be a much longer essay if I attempted to explain the lengths he went through, but it’s not limited to allowing himself to be possessed, going to literal Hell, forcing himself into isolation, and enduring multiple handicapping injuries.
Long story short? He really, really tries to make it up to Sora. And when he and Sora finally talk (it took three years in real life, took perhaps a year in the game), Sora doesn’t even hesitate to forgive his friend…though it may be in part to Sora just being Sora. Nevertheless, Riku had earned that forgiveness.
And then, after that, Riku continues to give himself hell! He never stops to sweep what he did under the rug. It’s a part of him, after all, an ugly past but his past nonetheless. It does not define him but it cannot be forgotten, otherwise, he hasn't learned anything at all.
Deep breath. We talked a lot about Kingdom Hearts in an Omori essay. But it’s important to understand the sheer depth put into his redemption: identification, distance, and work.
What’s most frustrating about Aubrey’s arc is that fragments of this good writing exist, but that’s what they are: fragments. I would like it to be stated for the record that everything I explained for Riku’s arc wasn’t me creating speculation based on what the games said. It’s what the games literally came out and said. Aubrey however…
Identification—she apologizes to Sunny, Kel, and Hero by saying “I’m sorry, guys… I’ve been acting like such a jerk.” While I may give her grief for the usage of the word ‘jerk’ when perhaps a stronger, more evocative term would’ve done a better job, it’s certainly better than what she said in front of Basil’s door: "I just wanted to say that… I’m sorry for the way I’ve been treating you.” Completely separating herself from the issue at hand.
Distance—none. She's immediately reintroduced to her old friend group, at a rate that ended up giving me whiplash the first time around. The question, “What about the Hooligans?” is never brought up, and things are back to how they always were, with no problems at all.
Work—Aubrey stayed the night at Basil’s house, wanting to make sure he was safe. To which, if you end up getting the neutral ending, you get the most insightful message of Aubrey’s arc (which is technically non-canon): “I'm so sorry, Basil. Please forgive me…” If getting the good or bad ending, her staying the night meant literally nothing, as Sunny’s fight took the reins.
These are fragments of a character arc. These are fragments of good characterization. While I praise Omori for how often it appears realistic, this kind of exponential growth simply isn’t. In what world, does someone who’s been bullying someone for four years, take less than two days to realize she’s been a bully and decide to change the entire course of her life?
While I could rat on Aubrey, this isn’t her problem. This is the game misreading what makes a good redemption. Redemption means work. It means effort. It is not a character simply changing their ways. Those characters feel cheap and empty—there’s a reason, after all, why the majority of fans always characterize Aubrey as the mean girl she’s shown to be when she first appeared in fan works. It’s because the ‘new’ Aubrey, the Aubrey buried under layers of hurt, hasn’t earned the right to exist.
The Riku I love in Kingdom Hearts III has earned the right to be angsty and gay and happy and his new self because he’s put in 17 years' worth of effort to become that person. It’s beautiful, it’s inspiring, it’s hopeful—you can make a mistake and go past it. It doesn’t define you. You can be forgiven. You can have hurt and have been hurt and still be worthy of love and loving.
The Aubrey at the end of Omori has not earned the right to be there, simply put. She’s the product of lazy, or ignorant writing, and it feels harsh to type out, but there’s no other way to describe it. Her self-awareness happened too quickly. She passes by Sunny’s house every day, sees Kel playing basketball every day, and could freely visit Mari’s grave whenever she wants—there were four years for her to change who she was. If Kel wasn’t able to give up his toxic positivity until the bitter end of the neutral ending, it’s quite hard to believe that a few hours of just talking made her change her ways. Especially considering that the Hooligans were characterized as her new, accepting friends, who love her and hear her out.
And again, the best fragment of an arc that could’ve been appears in the neutral ending! While it was not directly Aubrey’s actions that led Basil to take his life, it’s very impactful to see her begin to blame herself. It’s not right for her to blame herself—but that’s perhaps the only scene in the entire game where I really sympathized with her. It’s the only scene in the entire game where I truly saw that she wanted to change.
A quick note I wanted to pull out before finishing: the inclusion of the Hooligans. They were, again, fragments of an amazing arc. While they could’ve been a good way to show how kind Aubrey still is, they are thrown aside and mainly included in scenes where Aubrey is still being a bully. It’s in content outside of the game (see: Aubrey birthday comic) that they contrast Aubrey’s harsh exterior and show her sweet insides. But no, they’re underdeveloped and unutilized to make Aubrey’s arc feel doable.
There seems to be a very clear culprit to both this and the femme bully problem, and a solution that should’ve been considered more deeply.
rome wasn’t built in a day
There’s a loud rumor in the Omori fandom that Omori was originally supposed to take place over ten days rather than three days. While I’m not sure how much merit this rumor has, the fact that it exists leads me to my ultimate point:
Omori should’ve been longer.
Specifically, Omori should’ve taken place over a longer period.
EDIT: Before we continue, I just had an excellent conversation with a friend ( /ᐠ ._. ᐟ\ﾉ ). This solution only applies to if one is unwilling to change Aubrey's core character; essentially, the extent of her bullying. By making her someone who goes out of her way to torment Basil, significant screen time is going to be needed to properly unpack all that's been given. Making the base game ten days is only my opinion of the best choice, but there are other ways to solve this. However, the best course of action would be to change the extent of Aubrey's bullying on Basil—in other words, changing how Aubrey's anger presents itself.
For example, she would simply hold a grudge over what she believed was Basil destroying the photos, being extremely passive aggressive towards him. It would make a reconciliation between her and Basil, much, much more doable as well, perhaps him seeking her out in the first place in a peaceful manner to look for the photos. The lake scene could be an emotional explosion for her, perhaps finding out Basil just gave the photo album to Sunny, who is literally about to leave, and then pushes him into the lake. Then, the reflection she has next would fit what has tonally been established, seeming doable. She had, after all, been on good terms with Basil, even if for a little while.
By ‘lackluster narrative choices’, I am referring literally to the belief that Omori should not have been a game that took place in three days. I’m not here to argue about the game's mechanics—should Headspace have been that long? What is the point of a world created to serve as escapism, which should be fleeting moments of happiness, when it ends up being longer than the real world?—as much as I’m here to argue that this is a flaw of the game’s writing as opposed to a game design standpoint.
I’m not going to pretend I know how to make a video game. I’m enthusiastic about them, I follow their development and creation, and I strive to learn as much as I can about the ones that are dear to me, but I’m not going to pretend I know the first thing about making a video game. Omori’s development is one of the most infamous parts of its legacy, and the notion of extending the game would’ve only been another strain on the extended period between its announcement and its final release.
But, I know how to tell a story. Or, at the very least, I know what makes a good story. Now, the three days format of the game serves its other protagonists amazingly.
Sunny, whose arc mainly develops through the interfering ideas established in the real world and the ones previously established in Headspace, doesn’t need an extended time in the real world. His story takes place in his dreams, and the foundations of Headspace are already extremely insecure, based on the idea of covering up the truth. But when faced with a separate truth in reality, despite only a brief exposure, the lies created to protect Headspace fall apart. So Sunny’s arc does not depend on how long he spent in the real world.
Kel and Hero, on the other hand, have a very small arc. They are not flat and are very much dynamic when you compare how they started and how they ended up. However, the majority of their arc had taken place off-screen. The majority of their characterization does not occur through direct interaction with Sunny—we don’t learn about Hero’s depression because of him having a breakdown, but rather Kel discussing it. And in that same scene, we learn about Kel’s toxic positivity and the strain it’s taking on him, rather than through the game. This recontextualization is perfect for Kel and Hero. The change that occurred after Mari’s death is not easily seen by Sunny, and through it being slowly revealed instead, we learn the nature of their changes. Nonetheless, their changes occurred after Mari’s death and another change will occur most likely after the revelation of the truth—either way, their character arcs do not depend on the length of the three days. No amount of time would’ve changed them without Sunny revealing the truth (and as aforementioned, Sunny’s time was well spent in Headspace).
And finally, Basil. He's in the same boat as Kel and Hero, having an arc that occurs entirely off-screen. The difference is, however, the amount of emphasis the game puts on what happened to him as opposed to a few cutscenes with the brothers (though it is understandable, given his role as the game’s deuteragonist). His arc is a downward spiral, from an already unstable boy to an insecure mess who becomes obsessed with the sole idea of keeping his best friend safe. While it’s a progression of who he used to be, it’s development nonetheless, and it also happens off-screen. Given Basil’s fragile mindset, furthermore, the appearance of Sunny suddenly was enough to throw him off, given he was already planning on taking his own life. His rapid spiral into an even worse mess which leads to the fight between him and Sunny, therefore, is understandable. And, similarly to Kel and Hero, his real change will only occur after Sunny reveals the truth. Basil’s character development does not at all depend on how long the game would be.
The simple fact is that the other characters do not go through a drastic change on the days that Sunny comes out, and Sunny’s change was fueled by the existence of Headspace, not by the real world. The game taking place in three days does not affect the others. That is good storytelling. Using the game’s time frame to properly convey their arcs having occurred off-screen.
Aubrey, however, is not subject to that same praise. Her arc occurs on screen—while she descended to becoming a bully after Mari’s death, the arc we the viewer are supposed to acknowledge is her redemption. And three days just isn’t enough time.
The last two problems I covered, a lack of detailed backstory and a general lack of redeeming actions, lie in the same problem: the game went past those scenes far too quickly, as though Aubrey’s redemption is not essential to understanding her. It’s as though the game is trying to place importance on relationships and the joys of rekindling, rather than having to actually rekindle a relationship, having to put in the work. If the game had been slightly longer, Aubrey’s story could’ve been dealt with in a far more effective manner.
I am not Omocat, nor am I a part of the development team. I do not have the ideal solution for what could’ve been. I do, however, have a few ideas that I’d like you, my audience, to consider. How much do you think the game would’ve changed if it was ten days instead of three?
As already explained, Sunny, Kel, Hero, and Basil would not have had any significant difference if the game took place longer. Perhaps, there would’ve been a more natural awkwardness present that accompanies talking to someone for the first time in four years, but aside from that, the events of the game would’ve just taken longer.
Aubrey, however, would’ve had some actual thinking time. Her fight in the church would be her turning point, and her then isolation would feel like she had time to think things over. For a few days, Aubrey would have to be absent, and given the impression she left on the players, this absence would be heavily felt. It would be her return so much more effective, especially if she returns as someone who is unsteady due to their actions.
For the next few days, leading up to Aubrey deciding to stay the night at Basil’s house, we have the chance to know and forgive her better—perhaps, similar to Kel talking to Sunny about Hero’s depression, Aubrey can explain what it was like growing up in her household. Not as a defense, but as an explanation. She would do things with the rest of the group, and she would at a more natural rate, be integrated once again. And not just anything! She would actively help them with whatever the ten days would have to offer, and it would show that she is hurting over her actions.
And, finally, when she would decide to stay at Basil’s house, it wouldn’t feel like the game was just trying to have the cast together for one last moment, but it would feel like she’s trying to bridge the gap of all the hurt she created. When she would go to Basil’s door, it wouldn’t feel like the game was just trying to convince us to forget about her actions, but it would feel like she’s reflected and attempted a new leaf. And hopefully, the game would offer a more heartfelt apology, given more context and material to work with.
Four years of bullying can’t go away in ten days. But that’s not what the game was trying to argue in the first place—it wasn’t fully erasing Aubrey’s action, but trying to create the stepping stone for a way back. But the three days poorly argued her case, with a rushed and lacking version of redemption, and it made her ‘final character’ feel poor.
At the very least, ten days would have allowed the audience to empathize and begin to understand her. And, more importantly, it would’ve made sense that she understood the weight of her actions. And the Aubrey she became, whoever that girl would be?
She would’ve been so, so loved.
a little love in our lives
This has been on my mind for an awful lot of time. Sunny, as aforementioned, is one of my favorite characters of all time (if not my favorite), but the entire cast has a spot in my heart and is very dear to me. That includes Aubrey, but she benefits from association, which hurts me—I hate when girls in media are defined by their relationships with other guys. I wanted to get to the heart of why I couldn’t get her to stand on her own.
To summarize: Aubrey’s character was criminally mismanaged. Instead of it being a hopeful story of redemption, someone finally breaking the cycle of abuse and breaking free of her toxic household, seeking forgiveness by taking an active part in Basil’s healing, she is let off too quickly and makes all her further scenes feel twice as empty. The ideal solution would have been to have the game take place over a larger period, rather than a rushed three days, to allow the audience to empathize and relate to her.
Aubrey apologists truly astound me. I find so many flaws in her writing, and yet other people manage to see those flaws as perfections. I see people making very absurd, ableist arguments, and it makes me question the humanity of many fans, but I’ve always been intrigued by how many different perspectives there are surrounding her. I’ve seen some who relate to her because they were bullies or because they’ve been abandoned by others; so some valid reasons, and others very concerning. But it’s telling how our own experiences make us relate to different characters and help us understand why someone stands in the places they do.
…do you see what I did there? I started talking about relating backgrounds and how that benefits our understanding and— yeah, I suppose you understand, if you got this far (almost 6k words, you should be proud of yourself). If you’re still unfazed and believe that Aubrey’s writing was splendid, all the power to your fannish behaviors. But if I’ve opened your eyes a bit as to the flaws in her writing or if I’ve been able to explain your dislike of her, then I’m glad. It’s important to discuss things that didn’t stick the way they were meant to so that we can do better and we can learn.
Omori’s writing failed Aubrey. Some fans took that as a challenge. I’ve said before that canon interpretation should be separate from fanon interpretation, but I’d have to be heartless (Kingdom Hearts pun intended) to say that many fan’s interpretations didn’t get me to feel with her. I think Aubrey could’ve been brilliant, and while Omori didn’t fully capture that, a lot of fans did. So to everyone who makes art, whether it’s a drawing, a written work, a video, a song, an edit, or whatever, thank you for sharing it. Thank you for telling your stories.
I feel like writing these analysis pieces without connecting them to our own life experiences is pointless. So, to everyone else, please tell your stories. Tell your stories of redemption and love and forgiveness, because that’s what Aubrey’s story was meant to be about, and that’s what we all need in this world. Tell your stories, no matter what they are, because that is what ties us all together. We are made of stories and we return to them. We learn from them and we become better people. We become kinder—and we could all use a little more kindness in the world.
Thanks for reading!
#omori#omori meta#omori analysis#aubrey omori#media analysis#meta essay#literary analysis is my special interest#andrew's essays
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Women in Jujutsu Kaisen
Let’s get this out of the way first: if you’re reading this because you enjoy reading posts by people who hate Jujutsu Kaisen, you’re going to be disappointed. I actually like Jujutsu Kaisen a lot, I have a lot of positive things to say about it, and I’m going to be explaining my reasoning here. You should probably move on if you want trash talk. But if you have a negative view point that you’re nevertheless willing to reevaluate or recontextualize by looking at things from a new perspective, please read on.
A lot has been said about how women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen. A lot of good, and a lot of bad. I think a lot of the bad comes from how Jujutsu Kaisen was praised so early on for how it’s women were written, only for people to either not see it or have their expectations not be met due to events in Shibuya and the Culling Games. However, while I try to respect diversity of opinion, I feel like a lot of people aren’t really grasping why the way GeGe Akutami writes women was lauded. I think a people have lots of different ideas of what makes for a well-written female character, and don’t find what they’re looking for in Jujutsu Kaisen, thus they get angry and they post online about how GeGe Akutamisogyny isn’t going to beat “the allegations.”
I’ve never liked the justifications put forth for that argument. There’s a lot of subtext to how the female cast of Jujutsu Kaisen are written that can’t fit neatly into the simple world of page and panel counts or win-loss ratios. And, fortunately, there are tools for feminist literary analysis that I am going to employ in what will hopefully be a short trilogy of posts, starting here.
When I see people criticizing how women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen, I usually only see them using one point of interest: the outcome of a fight. If a female character doesn’t win a fight, then some people in the audience take that to mean that GeGe Akutami hates that character, hates women, and doesn’t want them to succeed — or some variation of that, perhaps less extreme.
This is a product of Jujutsu Kaisen being a Shonen, and thus being on the radar of Shonen fans who — let’s be honest — are not known widely for consuming anime or manga outside of the Shonen demographic. Shonen is heavily focused on conflict and competition as storytelling, it’s why the term “battle shonen” is used so prevalently. And Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t try to deny its own Shonen heritage: it uses fights for storytelling all the time, sometimes even more than other Shonen seem to do.
I think this might also be a cultural thing. Anime and manga are written very differently from Western movies or comic books, with very different cultural background and different artistic sensibilities. However, that’s a topic that I’ll unpack another time, maybe not even in Part 2 or 3 of this post.
Point is, we need to step back and get some perspective. People who use the losses or deaths among the female cast as evidence that GeGe hates women, or sees women as inferior, or has some sort of passive, culturally-inherited sexism in their worldview are suffering from tunnel vision. You need to look at the story as a whole sometimes, not just the one subject in question.
Go back to the Goodwill Event, and the fight between Nobara and Momo. Their whole conversation is a huge part of why Jujutsu Kaisen was praised early on for how Akutami writes women, and I think the subtext of it really went over some people’s heads. It did mine, the first time around: to me, it just felt like a competent, if tired “girl power” moment for Nobara. But as I invested more time and thought into reading the series, and as I learned more since first viewing that scene, I started to realize what I wasn’t seeing in that scene.
Momo shares something in common with all of the Kyoto Students, Todo and Miwa being the exception. In addition to seemingly coming from a more-or-less established sorcerer pedigree, Momo shares the general pessimism that hangs over the Kyoto Students like a dark cloud. There’s this very morosely Japanese sense of “woe is me, but there’s nothing to be done” about Momo, Mai, Noritoshi, and Mechamaru, in one sense or another. These four are people who will complain about a problem, then just sit while it washes over them and batters them like a wave. They just accept the unfair hand they’re dealt in life, and while they don’t like it, they treat it as something no one can overcome. Furthermore, on some level, I think these four don’t necessarily want to overcome the misfortunes and injustices they face.
See, Momo pours her heart out at length about how hard it is being a woman and being a sorcerer. And the way she talks about it is a very different critique of society than you’d see in a lot of Shonen. She talks about how women are expected to be perfect: beautiful, graceful, exquisite, the model of femininity, while also keeping up with the macho “might makes right” sensibilities that dominate sorcery. In her words, “men have to be strong, women have to be perfect.”
This isn’t something that’s just being plucked out of thin air, this is a criticism of the girlboss culture that arose through the 2000s and 2010s up to now. Women are expected to battle sexism alone, in their own lives, by being exceptional: rather than reforming cultural structures that put women at a disadvantage to men, girlboss culture says women just need to always wear perfect makeup, always be fashionable, always work 2.5 times harder than men, and find time to raise children and have a side-hustle at the same time. Instead of fixing the problem, it’s telling women, “Just work harder. Just be better.” As if women haven’t been having to work harder for nothing in return for the past 50 years, holding down jobs that they have to go above and beyond to prove themselves in as compared to male coworkers for whom the job might as well be a guarantee by comparison, having a ceiling put on their promotion while men who didn’t put in as much work get to move up the company ladder, and frequently having to juggle having a child and taking care of housework in addition to the expectations of jobs that often don’t afford maternity leave. And then, on top of all of that, the expectation is then foisted on to have the time and energy to perfectly craft your hair, makeup, and outfit for the day, and if you miss a single step of the whole stupid dance, you’re seen as an underachiever. That’s girlboss culture, and that’s what Momo is indirectly criticizing when she laments the contradictory and unfair expectations women in the sorcery world have to uphold. They need to fight just as hard as the men, while wearing skirts and not getting a single scar on that pretty face.
(Just as an aside, I love the way this conversation comes about. Momo and Mai are pretty close to each other, to the point that it sometimes feels like nobody else in the Kyoto school likes or respects Mai like Momo does. And Momo targets Nobara with this whole speech because of the friction between Mai and Nobara, and because she wants to stand up for Mai. I like that element of both solidarity and conflict between women, about being a woman, and I’ve always gotten sapphic vibes from Momo and Mai, so I’m glad that she’s the one giving this whole speech and why she’s doing it. But I digress.)
And the thing is, she’s not wrong. Neither Nobara nor the story as an overall entity refutes anything she says. However, Nobara points out something else about Momo that she shares in common with the other Kyoto Students who were raised to be sorcerers: the way she treats her whole life like a job. Momo has internalized the culture she despises, and instead of trying to rebel, she just accepts all of it as “the way the world works.” She soldiers on, just as Noritoshi soldiers on with his family’s expectations, Mai soldiers on with her pain and feeling of being abanoned, and Mechamaru soldiers on with the isolation, unfairness, and general misery that comes with his Heavenly Pact. Soldiering on, as if soldiering on has inherent value when it leads nowhere and accomplishes nothing. Never addressing the problem, or trying to find a way around it; simply rolling that boulder up the hill, grumbling all the way. She and the other Kyoto Students have this sense of treating their own misfortune as a badge of honor. To them, they’re justified and validated because they have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. They’re always eager to flaunt the crosses they have to bear.
Momo treats being a woman as a curse. Funny how that ties into the rest of the narrative, huh?
For Nobara, being a woman is not some great burden she has to live with. Being a woman in general and being Nobara Kugisaki in particular is something she revels in, and it’s just the fault of everyone else if they think otherwise.
Let’s talk about Nobara, and let’s not reduce her to her death scene. When we meet Nobara, she’s immersing herself in the Tokyo way of life after moving from the countryside to the big city. She encounters a sleazy talent agency recruiter who’s pestering women on the street with his hand-rubbing, obviously nefarious ways… only for Nobara to stop him, turn him around, and say, “What about me?” He gets intimidated, tries to run, and she drags him back. From her perspective, he should be happy to have her, and the fact he isn’t means he’s ignorant of her beauty and wit and needs to be corrected. If he won’t convert to Kugisakism, then her charms are wasted on him, and he’s doomed to the dim world that is Nobaralessness. When she meets Yuji and Megumi, she introduces herself with a line that’s translated into English as, “I’m the only woman in your group.” But from what I’ve been able to gather, her line in Japanese is, “I’m the red mark.” The phrase “red mark” can mean “the one who’s different from the others” — like the one girl in a group of boys — or it can mean “the one who stands out.” So you can also read it as her saying, “I’m the stand-out of the group.” Nobara Kugisaki, everybody.
If you want to talk about how literary circles analyze how women are writing, let’s leave the topics of fight outcomes and feats to one side. One thing you immediately look for is motivation. What’s motivating a character? This is important for how female characters are written, and especially in Shonen, which revolves so much around characters with some goal or belief that the story pursues through fights and other forms of adversity.
Now poorly-written women will tend to be motivated by men. They’ll be attracted to a man, or trying to support or protect a man, or trying to find a man. This by itself isn’t a death sentence for a woman’s characterization, but it is a red flag. It’s also not as if women have to never interact with or think about men to be well-written. It’s not an on-off switch, a bad writing-good writing switch. It’s a meter, like Mahoraga steadily adapting to a technique. Just a little bit is fine, and can be even turned into good writing in capable hands. But if it becomes too prevalent and is never examined, then you get a situation where a story’s women are not permitted lives outside of being in a male character’s orbit.
How do we gauge this? Well, there are lots of ways, but one of the more well-known and simple techniques is the Bechdel test. The name is derived from Alison Bechdel, feminist author who penned such classics as Dykes to Watch Out For. Bechdel proposed a simple litmus test for how to tell an author’s seriousness about writing women, and it goes like this:
1.) Look for scenes where women talk to each other.
2.) In those scenes, check for how often they’re talking about things besides male characters.
This isn’t the only way to tell if women are written well or not, and some will say it isn’t even the best way, but it’s a good foot in the door to get us thinking about what divides well-written female characters from poorly-written female characters. I’m not going to go back and scan through the whole manga just yet, but let’s look at some examples.
— The aforementioned conversation between Nobara and Momo, where the two pit their different view of what it means to be a woman and a sorcerer against one another.
— Maki and Nobara talking to each other after the encounter with Mai and Todo. Curious by meeting Maki’s sister, Nobara talks to Maki a bit about their upbringing. Having gained more insights into Maki’s past and personality, Nobara leans on her and tells her how much she respects her.
— Miwa and Mai discussing the upcoming Goodwill Event in a flashback. Mai tells Miwa that Maki is weak, which leaves Miwa unprepared for their fight.
— Maki and Mai arguing and coming to terms with what drove them apart. Mai just wanted a peaceful life with Maki, but Maki couldn’t be happy and authentic with herself if she just left things the way they were. She was forced to choose between herself and Mai, and Maki chose herself, knowing that Mai would suffer and that she’d shoulder some of the guilt for that.
This indicates that GeGe found it important to divorce the identities of the female characters from male characters. And this holds true in what drives and motivates the female cast.
Nobara is motivated by her own goals. She hates the countryside, and she loves the city; becoming a sorcerer is a way she can make a lot of money, live in the city, and pursue the kind of lifestyle she values. She wants to be a true blue Tokyoite, wearing trendy clothes and eating crepes and taking selfies by the statue of Hachiko outside Shibuya Station. She’s not doing this to avenge her dead brother, she’s not doing this to find her father, she’s not searching for a strong man to sire strong children — yuck. Nobara has aesthetic values and strongly held beliefs, and becoming a sorcerer lets her pursue those values and beliefs.
And if you really want to analyze the action side of Jujutsu Kaisen as an indicator for how GeGe feels about female characters, consider how Nobara takes to sorcery like a fish to water. Both Megumi and Yuji have their own internal dilemmas with being a sorcerer, but not Nobara. In a series where mindset is so important, Nobara has the mindset. Uro describes the model sorcerer as having “no concern for others and an overwhelming sense of self.” There is no one with a more overwhelming sense of self than Nobara. She’s loud, opinionated, loves to argue, flaunts herself, and demands other people give her more than what they think she’s due. She’s narcissistic, but that faith in herself makes her mentally strong.
She lacks experience, but even then, she learns and grows rapidly through the series. Due to running out of nails to fend off cursed spirits during the first stretch of Fearsome Womb chapters, she invents Hairpin as a way to reuse nails she’s already launched and embedded in a surface. She manages to land a Black Flash during the tag team fight with Yuji, and it’s her oppressive use of Resonance on Eso and Kechizu that turns the tides — a tactic which required her to hammer nails into her own arm. She takes it on the chin and gets her brain rattled around in her skull during the fight with Haruta, but even while borderline unconscious and suffering from a concussion, she forces herself to keep him talking in hopes Nitta can escape and manages to get to her feet and keep fighting despite the total disorientation and inability to summon her strength. While she didn’t win the fight, she showed more fighting spirit than half of the male cast tends to, and I find it kind of gross that people will ignore all of that and mock someone who kept fighting against the odds. That’s like laughing at Mumen Rider when he’s hopelessly trying to fight Sea King even as his body is breaking. I don’t exactly see what about either case is so funny or worthy of ridicule.
Even in the showdown with Mahito, people always fixate on how she dies, but never consider what led to it. She crosses paths with Mahito, and even knowing from Yuji what he’s capable of, she goes in — partially because he hurt Yuji, her friend, and she wants to make him suffer for it. And her technique turns out to be a worst case scenario for Mahito. She’s hammering his clone with Resonance and sending the blowback to the original while he’s fighting Yuji, dividing his attention and weakening him. Her only mistake was chasing him down, and even then, this isn’t the story punishing her. It’s the story being consistent with who Nobara is. She’s got a dangerous enemy on the ropes, her pride is bruised after the fight with Haruta, and she has a chance to get vengeance on someone who’s hurt her friend while helping said friend in the process. If she hadn’t followed Mahito into the subway, then she wouldn’t be Nobara Kugisaki.
And in her final moments, Nobara achieves something that’s considered to be out of reach of most sorcerers. She dies content, with a smile on her face. Nobara may not have realized her potential to be a great sorcerer, but she got what she, personally, wanted. Sorcery was a means to an end, and she got to live the Tokyo life and meet interesting people that she considers her friends. She got to fill out that finite number of seats in her life, and even meet a few people who pulled up a chair when she didn’t expect it. In her words, “It wasn’t so bad.” Nobody else but Toji and Gojo have gotten to die this satisfied — Toji because Megumi had grown up free of the Zen’in curse, Gojo because he was authentic to himself right to the end and left it all on the field. Nobara was authentic to herself right to the end, and that’s worthy of high praise. If she is definitely dead and not coming back, then she managed to accomplish what it was she wanted before dying. Not many get that luxury in Jujutsu Kaisen. It hurts because I liked her and admired her and appreciate the way she was written, and her dying doesn’t make the value of her character disappear from the story entirely. It’s the character’s death, it’s everything that led to that death and what that death means to them and to those who are left behind. And if it’s manga that explore death, nobody does it better than GeGe Akutami.
Lots of people will point to an interview where GeGe said that Nobara was not originally considered part of the cast, and they’ll use that as evidence that secretly, GeGe’s a big stupid misogynist who hates women and likes killing them in stories and blah blah blah blah blah. You know, first of all, I doubt that the editor held a gun to GeGe’s head and said “Put in a female main character or die.” Secondly, if GeGe really didn’t care, Nobara would just be a two-dimensional copy of Sakura who dies in the first arc or two. GeGe would not have put in the effort to set her apart from other female leads, or given her so many stand-out moments, or given her such an interesting motivation and world view. In short, if GeGe didn’t want to write a female character, they’d do what Kishimoto did: write Sakura. But that comparison is a can of worms I’ll need to pry open another time.
To sum up for the time being, no, GeGe Akutami does not hate women. Losing a fight does not make a female character worthless, and does not indicate a disdain for them on the part of the author. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read Shonen just to see who punches harder. I want to see characters be challenged, sometimes fail, learn, grow, and overcome adversity — and it wouldn’t be adversity if all the characters I like win and survive easily. I love Kashimo and will continue to love Kashimo, and Kashimo being super ultra dead doesn’t change that.
Look out for Part 2, in which I’m going to unpack some really contentious stuff when it comes to challenges and female characters in Jujutsu Kaisen. We’re gonna talk about the concept of screen time, we’re gonna talk about subtext, we’re gonna talk about great expectations and the great unexpected in Jujutsu Kaisen, and we’re gonna talk more in-depth about the narrative outside the narrative of Jujutsu Kaisen in a vacuum. If your sense for danger is giving you a bad feeling about this, then it should be: we’re talking about that. Switch on your Anti-Gravity System, it’s going to get messy.
#jujutsu kaisen#literary analysis#analysis#jjk analysis#feminism#feminist literature#feminist literary analysis#nobara kugisaki#maki zenin#akutami gege
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Tuesday, April 16, 2024
I can tell that it is the nearing the end of the study year for me because there is so much work to be done! I nearly feel like I am not going to get to it all, but somehow I manage. I may have to do certain things while on the way or back from dance, and I eat lunch while studying too. No wonder I am so tired of the evening and feel as if I need more breaks than usual. It is partially my own fault as some of these things are supplement, so I have added them on myself, but at the same time, I enjoy doing them, like watching the historical docuseries genre that I have been into for the WWII unit. Tomorrow, I will start one on the Cold War as I will be starting the Cold War unit very soon in World History. I get so much more detail this way, and they are primary sources since there are interviews from veterans and actual footage that was released.
In other news, I don't think I like combinatorics, and I am certain these permutation and combination problems with probability are easy compared to what higher level combinatorics looks like. The formulas are fine as I can calculate them without issue, but figuring out how to take apart the word problem to input it into the formula is where I keep getting discombobulated.
Tasks Completed:
Geometry - Learned about probability with permutations and combinations + practice + honors work
Lit and Comp II - Reviewed Unit 24 vocabulary + read Act 3 Scenes 2-3 of Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare + read modern translation of same scenes + wrote a diary entry for one of the characters (I went with one of the Watchmen) + worked on my literary analysis for Emma (due Friday)
Spanish 2 - Reviewed vocabulary + watched lecture video on demonstrative adjectives + practice activity
Bible I - Read 1 Samuel 18-19
World History - Read about the Marshall Plan and MacArthur's Plan for Japan + watched "The United Nations: History and Functions" + answered more WWII review questions
Biology with Lab - Read about vaccine basis + read about how to make different types of vaccines with examples
Foundations - Read more on thriftiness + completed next quiz on Read Theory + watched video on writing introductions for a speech + watched a video on introductions for persuasive speeches + watched a video on writing the conclusion to a persuasive speech
Piano - 60-minute piano lesson + practiced for one hour
Khan Academy - None today
CLEP - Completed Module 12 reading “Europe: 1945 to Present" 14.1-14.2
Streaming - Watched Greatest Events of World War II in Color episode 10
Duolingo - Studied for 15 minutes (Spanish, French, Chinese) + completed daily quests
Reading - Read pages 223-259 of Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross
Chores - Laundry
Activities of the Day:
Personal Bible Study (2 Timothy 1)
Ballet
Pointe
Journal/Mindfulness
What I’m Grateful for Today:
I am grateful for candy! I certainly do not have it all the time because of all of the sugar (and my parents would not let me do that even if I wanted to), I do let myself enjoy a serving when I want something very sweet!
Quote of the Day:
When you give joy to other people, you get more joy in return. You should give a good thought to the happiness that you can give out.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
🎧Kreisleriana, Op. 16 - 2. Sehr innig und nicht zu rasch - Robert Schumann
#study blog#study inspiration#study motivation#studyblr#studyblr community#study community#study-with-aura
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A very long analysis on Heathcliff, his relationships, and his origins: or, how Wuthering Heights drove me insane :)
Links to my previous WH analysis (which aren't required to read this post!): 1) my post analyzing heathcliff & his relationships with cathy2.0/isabella/hareton / 2) smaller post analyzing heathcliff & the earnshaws in relation to theories about his parentage / 3) misc. heathcliff/cathy analysis
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On Heathcliff's origins, his mysteriousness, and his arrival to Wuthering Heights:
As I mention in that 2nd link, I think the theory of Heathcliff being Mr. Earnshaw's son is an interesting theory of conjecture because even if not true (and it probably isn't) it allows us to more deeply explore the generally accepted basis of the canon, which is that Heathcliff is not related to them, but nevertheless is still caught between the labels of "family" and "outsider," just like he would have been if he had indeed been a bastard, a step-child, or even more formally adopted. Under Mr. Earnshaw's wishes Heathcliff shares a room with the children, he is given equal gifts and clothes as them, and he is preferred over Hindley. And while he may not be in line to inherit legally, he ends up inheriting anyway, an idea which lends itself to the novels Joseph-approved theme of predeterminism/fate.
So I'm not dead-set on any singular interpretation or theory as to Heathcliff's role in the story or the details of his background. Much of his character is inherently mysterious: his race and age are unknown, his family history and origins are unknown, what he was doing for 3 years of Cathy's marriage and how he acquired his wealth are unknown, some of his feelings and motives are highly debatable (as I discussed in my post about his odd dynamics with Cathy 2.0, Isabella, & Hareton: https://www.tumblr.com/burningvelvet/738901817580290048/my-analysis-on-heathcliff-and-his-relationships), & whether English was his first language is also questioned (many people including myself have wondered at the line where we're told he "repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand," though it could have just been panicked child's speech).
Many academics have noted how Wuthering Heights follows various testaments of the Gothic literary tradition, not only by the involvement of death, violence, ghosts, etc., but also in the use of incestuous themes (whether literal or metaphorical) and the use of the Other in Heathcliff, aided by the mysteries of his origins and his racial ambiguity.
As for Heathcliff not revealing much about his childhood, I believe this part of it could be due to trauma as well as regular childhood amnesia. He may not remember anything. A lot of people don't have many memories from before the age of ~6 anyway — and I just looked it up— his real age is never given but he is believed to be around the same age than Cathy who was described as "hardly six years old." I had thought they were a little older for some reason. He's also said to have been "speaking gibberish" which I once considered may have been indicative of a foreign language and/or accent but now, because of his age and probable low background, it may have been due to his just being very young and maybe unsocialized and shy. It actually makes my heart ache when Nelly describes him :(
Here's an excerpt from chapter 3 describing Heathcliff's childhood:
"He threw himself into a chair, laughing and groaning, and bid them all stand off, for he was nearly killed—he would not have such another walk for the three kingdoms.
'And at the end of it to be flighted to death!' he said, opening his great-coat, which he held bundled up in his arms. 'See here, wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life: but you must 'en take it as a gift of God; though it's as dark almost as if it came from the devil.'"
We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy's head I had d peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine's; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there: because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it. Well, the conclusion was, that my mistress grumbled herself calm; and Mr. Earnshaw told me to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.
Hindley and Cathy contented themselves with looking and listening till peace was restored: then, both began searching their father's pockets for the presents he had promised them. The former was a boy of fourteen, but when he drew out what had been a fiddle, erushed to morsels in the great-coat, he blubbered aloud; and Cathy, when she learned the master had lost her whip in attending on the stranger, showed her humour by grinning and spitting at the stupid little thing; earning for her pains a sound blow from her father, to teach her cleaner manners. They entirely refused to have it in bed with them, or even in their room; and I had no more sense, so I put it on the landing of the stairs, hoping it might be gone on the morrow. By chance, or else attracted by hearing his voice, it crept to Mr. Earnshaw's door, and there he found it on quitting his chamber. Inquiries were made as to how it got there; I was obliged to confess, and in recompense for my cowardice and inhumanity was sent out of the house.
This was Heathcliff's first introduction to the family. On coming back a few days afterwards (for I did not consider my banishment perpetual), I found they had christened him 'Heathcliff': it was the name of a son who died in child-hood, and it has served him ever since, both for Christian and surname. Miss Cathy and he were now very thick; but Hindley hated him: and to say the truth I did the same; and we plagued and went on with him shamefully: for I wasn't reasonable enough to feel my injustice, and the mistress never put in a word on his behalf when she saw him wronged.
He seemed a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment: he would stand Hindley's blows without winking or shedding a tear, and my pinches moved him only to draw in a breath and open his eyes, as if he had hurt himself by accident, and nobody was to blame. This endurance made old Earnshaw furious, when he discovered his son persecuting the poor fatherless child, as he called him. He took to Heathcliff strangely, believing all he said (for that matter, he said precious little, and generally the truth), and petting him up far above Cathy, who was too mischievous and wayward for a favourite.
So, from the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house; and at Mrs. Earnshaw's death, which happened in less than two years after, the young master had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as a usurper of his paren's affections and his privileges; and he grew bitter with brooding over these injuries. I sympathised a while; but when the children fell ill of the measles, and I had to tend them, and take on me the cares of a woman at once, I changed my idea. Heathcliff was dangerously sick; and while he lay at the worst he would have me constantly by his pillow: I suppose he felt I did a good deal for him, and he hadn't wit to guess that I was compelled to do it. However, I will say this, he was the quietest child that ever nurse watched over. The difference between him and the others forced me to be less partial. Cathy and her brother harassed me terribly: he was as uncomplaining as a lamb; though hardness, not gentleness, made him give little trouble."
From this excerpt we see that Earnshaw 1) despite being racist toward Heathcliff, is also wildly protective of him - so much so that he kicks Nelly out of the house FOR DAYS for initially not allowing Heathcliff to sleep in his childrens room 2) Earnshaw doesn't like Cathy that much, and prefers Heathcliff over her; later when he dies he has a nice moment with her, but still asks her why she can't be a better child (lol) 3) Earnshaw did not name Heathcliff on his own accord but Heathcliff is named after Earnshaw's own son that died!!! And that says a lot; we're also never really told how Mrs. Earnshaw felt about him being named after her dead kid, or if she had a part in it or not, or if she grew to like Heathcliff too — she just dies soon after - however, I think we can all assume she always favored Hindley over Heathcliff, since we're told Hindley's jealousy grew after her death 4) Heathcliff is described by Earnshaw as a "gift from God" which I find kind of suspicious because Earnshaw struggled so much just to get him home... um, God had no part in that, Mr. - unless he's referring to the kids existence imo. At any rate, if Heathcliff isn't biologically related to Earnshaw, we're still led to have the sense that Heathcliff is sort of predestined to be there 5) Heathcliff was indeed a bit scraggly/unkempt when he arrived, but imo that doesn't mean he was necessarily a homeless orphan; if he did have a mother/family, they probably would have been living in harsh conditions anyway just by being impoverished, and if not, maybe he was just a bit dirty from wandering outside like normal kids do, and like he's so fond of doing anyway on the Moors later on - he could have just been playing outside when this white guy comes along and takes him under his coat! 6) Earnshaw says he asked around for the kids parents and felt obligated to take him on, though the kid was struggling... so yeah, regardless of if he's omitting other info or if he's his father or not, we can infer that he essentially kidnapped Heathcliff.
After re-reading this excerpt, I don't think it's as likely that Earnshaw had seen/known Heathcliff personally prior to his taking him home, but I still don't think any of this totally disproves the theory that Earnshaw could have been lying to Mrs. Earnshaw/omitting certain information.
Why was Mr. Earnshaw in Liverpool to begin with? I and many others often assume it was some sort of a business trip, and it probably was, but after re-reading the part where he leaves, I can't actually find anything to definitively confirm what he was actually there for. He could have been in Liverpool specifically to take Heathcliff with him. Another thing that doesn't make any sense is the fact that he walked all the way there alone: "I’m going to Liverpool today, what shall I bring you? You may choose what you like: only let it be little, for I shall walk there and back: sixty miles each way, that is a long spell!’"
He's then gone for 3 whole days. Meaning according to him, he walked 120 miles in 3 days, half of that while carrying/dragging a struggling small child, who he says he took because it would be his easiest option: "his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there."
He's contradicting himself, because if he was so concerned about finances then he never would have taken on another child, as Mrs. Earnshaw immediately supplies (meaning if he was on a mission to retrieve Heathcliff, he didn't tell her): "Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad?" Ummmm you're telling me there isn't something a little suspicious or weird about any of this?!
And why would he be walking in the first place when he has horses — was he really so tight on money as to not want to support/feed them on a journey, or did he just not want to be recognized or attract attention, or did he not want to deal with a child riding on a horse for the first time? I assume carriages/wagons were out of the question for costs, and I know people walked a lot back then, especially in rural farmlands, but that is a very long journey as he himself says. What was so important? Did he even go to Liverpool at all? And why did he bundle Heathcliff up as if to hide him? To avoid suspicions about having a bastard child, etc.? And we're told Mrs. Earnshaw was expecting him home earlier, and we get no indication if she knew Mr. Earnshaw's plans or whereabouts.
And why does Mr. Earnshaw act so upbeat and nonchalant about all of this, when we're told he's usually really stern? Ie he supposedly treats Nelly well eg, telling her he'll bring her back fruits on his journey, but then he LOCKS HER OUT OF THE HOUSE FOR MULTIPLE DAYS for not following his orders about putting Heathcliff in the children's room on his first night there.
Where tf did she even go lol? Am I forgetting some part about her family having a nearby house? How far did she have to walk to get there, alone and unaccompanied as a young woman? Probably less than 120 miles in 3 days, but still! He's known Nelly her whole life, and he's supposedly known Heathcliff for a day (in which time Heathcliff has already led him into physical exhaustion), and yet he already prefers Heathcliff over her as well as his own children.
Even excusing Nelly being a narrator of debatable reliability, and being sometimes contradictory & biased against Heathcliff, Mr. Earnshaw's behavior still seems a bit outlandish and it makes sense that Mrs. Earnshaw would ask him if he had gone mad. I course, I may be looking too far into this, but how can I not?
Heathcliff's trauma, his relationship with Mr. Earnshaw, Earnshaw as kidnapper, and race:
I think Heathcliff is certainly severely traumatized. I'm not a psychologist but Nelly's line "hardness, not gentleness, made him give little trouble" is textbook childhood CPTSD, and it is partly due to Earnshaw indeed being a kidnapper with a white saviour/"white man's burden" complex.
I think the following quote by Nelly supports this kidnap view, in that she actually refers to him being kidnapped; Emily may also be encouraging us to speculate on even the most outlandish theories of his origins like Nelly does:
"‘A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad,’ I continued, ‘if you were a regular black; and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly. And now that we've done washing, and combing, and sulking—tell me whether you don’t think yourself rather handsome? I'll tell you, I do. You're fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth; and the thoughts of what I was should give me courage and dignity to support the oppressions of a little farmer!'"
Like in Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily also borrows taboo Romantic and Orientalist imagery and racializes the gothic Other figure, because this idea of the foreign/non-white body was a source of anxiety to a lot of white British Victorian readers. This is a popular concept in Gothic literary studies & a lot has been written on it, so I won't go into it too much.
Like Charlotte's Bertha Mason, Linton Heathcliff's identity as being mixed race is essential to his character — in the narrative, him being white-passing is supposed to relate to his identity being more Isabella/Linton (as also evidenced by his name) and less Heathcliff's, who is disappointed not to see his own resemblance in his son.
Since we seriously don't know Heathcliff's true origins, we can't ascertain his ethnicity (given his descriptions/epithets/Nelly's speculations, he is likely fully or part Roma, South-Asian, or African), and we can't tell if he or his family/mother were highborn, enslaved, or simply free, but we do know that slavery was still very active in England in the late 1700s when Heathcliff is a child, and his hometown Liverpool was the center of the slave trade, so connections to slavery either ancestrally or during his hiatus (a popular theory, explored in the book Heathcliff: the Lost Years by David Drum) are possible.
More evidence for the theory of Heathcliff having a previous history of child abuse and unknown early trauma, possibly relating to the slave trade (which doesn't necessarily discount the Earnshaw parentage theory either imo, and if anything may make it more likely if his reasoning for taking Heathcliff was that he wouldn't want his biological son enslaved) — is the portion where Nelly describes Heathcliff and how he initially took Hindley's abuse stoically:
". . . a sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment: he would stand Hindley's blows without winking or shedding a tear, and my pinches moved him only to draw in a breath and open his eyes, as if he had hurt himself by accident, and nobody was to blame. This endurance made old Earnshaw furious, when he discovered his son persecuting the poor fatherless child, as he called him. He took to Heathcliff strangely . . ."
When Nelly adds that Earnshaw called Heathcliff "poor fatherless child," I see this as ironic whether Earnshaw is his biological father or not, since he is still the closest thing he has to any sort of "father figure" nominally, and symbolically in line with the view of Earnshaw as flawed micro-colonizer. In the act of standing up for Heathcliff over his own teenage son and future master of the house, he is basically acting as a pseudo-father preferring one son over another; for Hindley, the blow is deepened by Heathcliff not being Earnshaw's son in name.
For clarity's sake, whenever I refer to Mr. Earnshaw as Heathcliff's unofficially adoptive father or father figre, I do so sort of hesitatingly. Mr. Earnshaw/Heathcliff do not have a regular father/son dynamic; we're told that Heathcliff did not embrace but rather fought Mr. Earnshaw the entire 60 miles back to the Heights.
Surely the above may be hyperbole, but we must keep in mind that Mr. Earnshaw's gifts for Cathy/Hindley/Nelly were lost or destroyed in the process: most symbolically, Mr. Earnshaw's struggle to obtain Heathcliff led to Hindley's fiddle being broken, Cathy's whip being lost, and we're never told what happened to Nelly's gift of fruit, but we can assume it was lost or never got to be obtained as a result of his preoccupation.
Heathcliff's relationship with Mr. Earnshaw is complicated because of the racial power imbalance & as I said, Earnshaw having a white saviour complex & basically kidnapping Heathcliff despite (or so we're told) not fully knowing if Heathcliff had a family or not. Most important are Heathcliff's own feelings about the situation; Earnshaw's wild affection is clear.
We're told by Nelly's observations that Heathcliff clearly did not have a great love for Earnshaw: "I wondered often what my master saw to admire so much in the sullen boy; who never, to my recollection, repaid his indulgence by any sign of gratitude. He was not insolent to his benefactor, he was simply insensible; though knowing perfectly the hold he had on his heart, and conscious he had only to speak and all the house would be obliged to bend to his wishes."
When Mr. Earnshaw was dying, Heathcliff was sitting with Cathy who was singing to Earnshaw. When they realize Earnshaw has finally passed, Heathcliff seems to genuinely grieve as equally as Cathy (Hindley is at college at this time):
"The poor thing discovered her loss directly — she screamed out — 'Oh, he's dead, Heathcliff! he's dead!' And they both set up a heart-breaking cry." Later when Nelly returns from getting help: "I ran to the children's room: their door was ajar, I saw they had never lain down, though it was past midnight; but they were calmer, and did not need me to console them. The little souls were comforting each other with better thoughts than I could have hit on: no parson in the world ever pictured heaven so beautifully as they did, in their innocent talk . . ."
Yet we also know by Heathcliff's odd dynamics with Nelly and Hareton, and even by some of his behavior around Catherine I (who is the only person that most of us can agree he really loves), we can see that, probably due to trauma, Heathcliff does not know how to show affection "normally."
By his earlier disconnected reactions to Hindley's abuse, we can see that early on he had trouble reacting to negative emotions as well, which probably led him to his later emotional dysregulation & bursts of rage/frustration, which make complete sense in his situation and are why we can still often sympathize with him in his path of vengeance, even despite his abusiveness.
So we do not know the full extent of Heathcliff's feelings toward Mr. Earnshaw, and whether he truly had deep affection for him or somewhat resented him, but whatever his feelings were, they were clearly complex. As we all know, Heathcliff is capable of feeling very strongly, and when he does, he is usually vocal about it (see: literally most of his dialogue). He can't go 30 seconds without roasting someone lol. But he is oddly ambivalent and quiet about Earnshaw.
You could also (& countless academics have) argue that Earnshaw/the Earnshaw family is essentially a microcosm of colonization, Heathcliff is symbolically captured/enslaved by Mr. Earnshaw (which highlights how white saviourism is oxymoronic), and then actually becomes almost literally enslaved by Hindley later on.
On Heathcliff and Hindley:
Both are extremely flawed. Both are wildly in love with women who die from labor, both become abusive single fathers, both are defined by their grief and feelings of revenge, both want to kill each other all throughout the story, both actually try to do so to varying extents. Heathcliff saves Hareton from Hindley's negligence by catching him, Hindley saves Isabella from Heathcliff's abuse by tackling the latter (in what I think is one of the novels best sequences, Isabella's narration of the period of Heathcliff and Hindley's fighting and her escape). Heathcliff's bond with Hareton, like Hindley's bond with Isabella, is both manipulative and touching in turns. Ditto for their bonds to Nelly.
Many people believe Heathcliff had a role to play, directly or indirectly, in Hindley's death. Evidence for this: 1) teen Heathcliff wishes Hindley could drink himself to death but acknowledges doctor Kenneth says he won't: "‘It’s a pity he cannot kill himself with drink,’ observed Heathcliff, muttering an echo of curses back when the door was shut. ‘He’s doing his very utmost; but his constitution defies him. Mr. Kenneth says he would wager his mare that he’ll outlive any man on this side Gimmerton, and go to the grave a hoary sinner; unless some happy chance out of the common course befall him.’" 2) later, Kenneth remarks to Nelly that "He's barely twenty-seven, it seems; that's your own age: who would have thought you were born in one year?'" 3) Joseph once accused Heathcliff of attempting to murder Hindley during their fight ("And so ye've been murthering on him?") - in which Isabella said Heathcliff had to barely restrain himself from not killing Hindley. Joseph later adds suspicion to Hindley's death when, after Heathcliff explains to Nelly how Hindley had been suffering from the effects of alcoholism but died suddenly in the morning, Joseph "confirmed this statement, but muttered: "I'd rayther he'd goan hisseln for t' doctor! I sud ha' taen tent o' t' maister better nor him—and he warn't deead when I left, naught o' t' soart!'" (trans. from WH Reader's Guide site: "'I'd rather he'd gone himself for the doctor! I would have taken care of the master better than him—and he wasn't dead when I left, nothing of the sort!'"). So Heathcliff told Joseph to fetch Kenneth which left Heathcliff alone with Hindley, who was then dead when Joseph/Kenneth arrived.
My own theory is that Hindley probably choked on his own vomit (a common form of death by addiction) because of Heathcliff's description of he and Joseph finding Hindley "snorting like a horse; and there he was, laid over the settle: flaying and scalping would not have wakened him." It is after this that Heathcliff is alone with Hindley and he dies. Heathcliff can be seen as guilty through inaction imo, though he would justify it by saying he was letting nature take its course.
Heathcliff and Hindley take turns enslaving each other throughout the story. Hindley's seniority, legitimacy, and race give him advantages, while Heathcliff's early favoritism by Mr. Earnshaw and his later accrual of wealth, wit, and strength give him some advantages. We're told by Nelly (and she's biased, but she's the main source we have) that Hindley bullied Heathcliff immediately, to which Heathcliff weaponized Mr. Earnshaw in his favor, as evidenced by the horse scene.
If, when Hindley returned to become master of Wuthering Heights after Mr. Earnshaw's death, his wife Frances had taken a liking to Heathcliff, or if Hindley had simply matured in his time away — in other words, if Hindley had decided to grow up and let bygones be bygones — I wonder if Heathcliff would have done the same, and decided to be peaceful & not to continue their childhood rivalry.
The bulk of Heathcliff's lust for revenge really stems from Hindley's treatment of him after Mr. Earnshaw's death, when Hindley, as the new Mr. Earnshaw, really does follow through on that childhood promise during the horse scene to use his wealth/power/independence to render Heathcliff miserable, and to turn him out or keep him enslaved. Possibly at the beckoning of Frances (which I mention later,) Hindley succeeds in fulfilling this childish power fantasy, and this is partly what inspires Heathcliff to obtain the means of flipping the script and later rendering Hindley a weakened dependent.
Although Hindley is racist/absorbed his parents racism, note that Catherine was not/did not, and so Hindley's true hatred of Heathcliff imo is more motivated by jealousy/envy for his father's affection than it is anything else, & his own feelings of inadequacy & self-hatred which likely would have existed anyway & were just fuelled by being "usurped" in his father's affection.
I really blame Mr. (& Mrs., though we sadly have so little insight into her character) Earnshaw for Hindley/Heathcliff's rivalry, because I feel like we can assume Mrs. Earnshaw must have favored Hindley more when Mr. Earnshaw started favoring Heathcliff, considering Hindley's hatred increased after the grief from his mother's death, — and this favoritism & parental split is bound to deepen the split between their favorites.
Hindley's hatred of Heathcliff really increased after his father & then his wife's deaths (meaning he had prolonged complex grief), which I'm assuming compounded & brought back his feelings of his original grief for his mother, resulting in further hatred of Heathcliff who had nothing to do with any of it but whose arrival Hindley just subconsciously associated with his mother's illness/death & his father's emotional abandonment (which we could consider a mental death which took place before his physical death; imo Hindley's whole character is defined by grief).
To enhance their pseudo-brotherly rivalry, which some may say is reminiscent of Abel/Cain (especially if you believe the theory/opinion that Heathcliff murdered Hindley or was otherwise in any part to blame for his death), we again have the fact that Heathcliff was named after Hindley's dead brother.
Heathcliff is actually Heathcliff 2.0, and maybe it was Mr. Earnshaw's grief that led him to use Heathcliff 2.0 as a replacement child the way Hindley uses Mrs. Earnshaw 2.0 as a replacement mother.
All throughout the story we have people being named after each other and taking on each other's roles, ie the whole 1st/2nd generation parallels (we could extend it to be 1st/2nd/3rd since I've highlighted the narrative importance of Mr./Mrs. Earnshaw), Linton Heathcliff, Cathy 1.0/2.0. — but we know nothing about Heathcliff 1.0 other than that he died in childhood.
Was he Catherine's age, younger, or older? Did Catherine see Heathcliff as a replacement brother? Did Heathcliff 1.0 die before Catherine was born? Was he Hindley's age? Did Hindley already have grief/trauma from Heathcliff 1.0's death and resent Heathcliff 2.0 for usurping not only him, but his dead brother's place?
We're told that "the family" gave Heathcliff 2.0 his name, but I assume Mrs. Earnshaw and Hindley may not have been involved due to us never seeing that they care for him — and Joseph may have had a role in it, but he's also rarely thoughtful, and Nelly was gone — so could Cathy have suggested the name Heathcliff? (which brings to my mind Edward Rochester telling Jane Eyre to "give him his name" when he proposes to her, asking her to call him "Edward" — this would be poetic of Catherine/Heathcliff's relationship).
The meaning of the names Heathcliff/Hindley are very similar; they also share the same initials, syllable count, and the "ee" sound. Heathcliff is a combination of "heath" (a synonym for "moor"; what he and Cathy love to roave on) and "cliff." In meaning, apparently (according to some sources on Ancestry.com) Hindley is a habitational name from hind 'hind, female deer' and lēah 'woodland clearing' — which is basically another way of saying heath/moor. So there is a lot of similarity in their names, and this tainted brotherly theme, both of which must have been intentional.
Regardless of whether Heathcliff & Hindley are foster brothers or half-brothers, this naming choice is still a sign that Heathcliff was predestined to be part of the family, and lends itself to the other themes of predeterminism in that Heathcliff ends up becoming the master of the Heights after Hindley the way he would have if he were his biological brother.
Mr. Earnshaw telling Hindley he'd bring him back any gift he chose, and then returning with that gift having been broken by Heathcliff, are ample reasons to explain the hatred that moody 14-year-old Hindley immediately feels for him, who was about half his age and therefore an impractical playmate. He is more like a new sibling, and like an older sibling, Hindley is horrified at being overshadowed by the family's new addition. Since we don't know whether Hindley knew or was close to Heathcliff 1.0, we can hesitantly assume he may have been upset by the naming.
On Heathcliff, Hindley, and Frances:
I would like to briefly touch more on Hindley's wife's death (so closely followed by his fathers death) bringing up feelings of his mothers death. Hindley's wife Frances Earnshaw is the second Mrs. Earnshaw and she only comes to the house right after Mr. Earnshaw dies. I believe Hindley parallels his father, Frances parallels his mother (so like many men, he metaphorically "married his mother"), and that Frances also has some similarities to Heathcliff.
Frances has an unknown origin story and Hindley keeps her background from his father on purpose, and this could have been intended to parallel the first Mr. Earnshaw from possibly keeping Heathcliff's origins vague: "What she was, and where she was born, he never informed us: probably, she had neither money nor name to recommend her, or he would scarcely have kept the union from his father."
Frances also immediately dislikes Heathcliff... just like Hindley's mother, the first Mrs. Earnshaw, did: "Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad?"
We don't know why Frances dislikes Heathcliff, but it wouldn't be a stretch to assume it has to do with his race & status, because it is only after her disapproval that Hindley banishes Heathcliff to the role of a servant/slave, we can assume. We can also assume Frances disliked Heathcliff from the beginning, since we're never told that she took a liking to him like she initially does with Catherine; we are only ever told she dislikes him:
"She expressed pleasure, too, at finding a sister among her new acquaintance; and she prattled to Catherine, and kissed her, and ran about with her, and gave her quantities of presents, at the beginning. Her affection tired very soon, however, and when she grew peevish, Hindley became tyrannical. A few words from her, evincing a dislike to Heathcliff, were enough to rouse in him all his old hatred of the boy. He drove him from their company to the servants, deprived him of the instructions of the curate, and insisted that he should labour out of doors instead; compelling him to do so as hard as any other lad on the farm."
It is after the last quote that we learn Cathy and Heathcliff become increasingly "feral" outdoors, as Heathcliff is forced to toil in outdoor labor, and Cathy insists on keeping him company while he's at it. At this point they are both essentially orphaned, and then neglected and abandoned by Hindley and Frances, the new Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw, who take on the roles of the former Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw, who were similarly neglectful and emotionally abandoning to their children.
On Cathy and Heathcliff:
In the beginning, Lockwood reads this diary entry from Catherine I which proves the prior analysis in that she compares Mr. Earnshaw 1.0 to Mr. Earnshaw 2.0 (Hindley):
""An awful Sunday,' commenced the paragraph beneath. 'I wish my father were back again. Hindley is a detestable substitute — his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious – H. and I are going to rebel — we took our initiatory step this evening."
Notice how in the death of Mr. Earnshaw and then under the tyranny of Hindley (Mr. Earnshaw 2.0), Cathy and Heathcliff are often sharing each other's emotions, and their bond is very twin-like. They both cry & grieve in their room in unison after Earnshaw dies, and although Heathcliff is the one primarily sentenced to torment by Hindley, Cathy doesn't abandon him to it and instead often keeps him company in his punishment, recalling when she was younger and her father would try to keep Heathcliff away from her to punish her.
Even when Cathy does sort of abandon Heathcliff to marry Edgar, in her speech after Heathcliff leaves, she says that her plan was to use her control over Edgar to benefit Heathcliff, so she really never intended to abandon him at all. Abandonment, attachment issues, separation, loss, grief, being torn away from someone/somewhere/something, are all major themes in this story, often expressed by familial and more often filial experiences.
Cathy and Heathcliff's relationship basically embodies all these themes the most poignantly, in that Heathcliff abandons her because he thinks she's abandoning him and he can't bear it and would rather leave than be left; then as soon as he returns, Cathy ends up actually physically abandoning him by dying! And later on, her ghost taunts him (I believe most of us can take the ghost plot as canon & not hallucinatory considering how many characters attest to it), and he once again returns to her like he did before.
Their whole relationship is about overcoming obstacles to separation, and being determined to retain their attachment as an act of defiance (even if it means defying life, death, physics, etc.) — this is why they're considered the most romantic couple in literature even despite their awful behavior most of the time, because in writing/literary pedagogy as a general rule it is almost always the goal of romantic leads to overcome obstacles which separate them from their lover, – and Heathcliff and Cathy take this goal to a new level by overcoming not only their childhood punishments of separation from one another, but overcoming the impossible obstacles of LIFE AND DEATH to reunite in the spirit realm where no one can separate them again — not even God.
Both Catherine and Heathcliff say that they know they won't go to heaven; God literally doesn't want them, and he has abandoned them, and this is the ultimate abandonment/seperation. Thus, all they have in the universe is each other — and if their relationship didn't work in life, they're determined to make it work in death!
Some final thoughts on Mr. Earnshaw and the making of Heathcliff:
Due to all of my previous explanations, I consider Mr. Earnshaw a possibly well-intentioned man but who ultimately failed all of his children (along with Mrs. Earnshaw) by 1) emotionally neglecting/abandoning Catherine because she was a "bad child" & acted more boyish than Hindley, 2) emotionally neglecting/abandoning Hindley in favor of Heathcliff (and maybe it was partly because Hindley was becoming a moody teenager and Heathcliff was comparatively younger/easier to handle bc of his trauma-induced subdued nature, but whatever his reasoning, it had disastrous consequences), 3) emotionally neglecting Heathcliff too by not being involved enough in his integration with the family & not checking in on him and Hindley, 4) straight up just not being that involved to begin with and not seeming to teach his children anything, hence why they're all bratty and grow up to be deeply maladjusted.
Notice how Nelly's motivational speeches to Heathcliff, and her taking care of him when he was sick, have an extraordinary affect on him, meaning Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw probably didn't show him even half as much attention or real affection. Like most English fathers at the time, Earnshaw thought his job as father/master was to merely provide provisions, leave the children with the women to be actually raised, and be done with it. The most unique thing he does in his life, and indeed his whole role in the story, is bringing home Heathcliff.
Maybe most importantly, I also just realized that Earnshaw kidnapping Heathcliff parallels Heathcliff kidnapping his own son after Isabella dies (and also him kidnapping his daughter-in-law Cathy II), and while this narrative parallel works if Earnshaw is merely Heathcliff's adoptive father, it also could be working to suggest that Earnshaw was his biological father, knew Heathcliff's mother had died, and so went back for him and took him by force. If Heathcliff's mother had recently died (or been separated from him), this would have compounded his trauma of being taken by Earnshaw, and this would have furthered his childhood memory loss, which could be another reason why I don't think Heathcliff remembers very much about his origins.
Heathcliff has much in common with Frankenstein's creaure. Yet, he is essentially a self-made man, his own creator and creature. We are even led to think of him as inhuman, as Isabella suggests with her referring to him as such and even calling him vampiric. And he does bear a lot of similarity to John Polidori's Lord Ruthven, from the first vampire novel The Vampyre (a Byronic tale, based on Byron's short story Augustus Darvell). Heathcliff's canonically mysterious origins and mysterious hiatus are necessary to his character; like Isabella and Nelly, we're supposed to question him and form our own opinions on the matter.
#wuthering heights#emily brontë#literature#english literature#victorian#gothic literature#media analysis#literary analysis#analysis#criticism#theories#fandom#heathcliff#heathcliff wuthering heights#character analysis#catherine earnshaw#hindley earnshaw#the brontës#novels#books#book thoughts#book analysis#book opinions#me#my writing#my analysis#dark academia#writing#my essays#classic literature
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Actually, want to return to this post real quick because people are now reblogging to agree with the inane addition, but I want folks to know that when you’re making an argument of literary analysis, “what I want to happen” is not valid evidence. “Well nobody in Mu Qing’s life died except for his dad, so him being passionate about committing war crimes must be because his dad got punished for saving people!” Literally nowhere in the book is Mu Qing’s father’s execution relevant except to say why people discriminated against Mu Qing. Mu Qing’s father is never brought up outside of that, not by Mu Qing or the narration, and it is mentioned once in a throwaway line. “Mu Qing’s father, the fallen hero” is a headcanon, not evidence for character analysis.
What we actually see in the story is Mu Qing, in his care for Xie Lian, saying that Xie Lian’s (and the people of the capital’s) lives are more valuable than the people of Yong’an who they are fighting. We see this reiteration before the flashback reveal when Mu Qing says that soldiers of one country should not worry about the safety of the civilians in another that get caught in the crossfire of their war. We see it again in the flashback with the one cup of water scenario. You do not need to headcanon some convoluted explanation for why Mu Qing would possibly think genocide is ok when the story makes it pretty clear that he and other characters place intrinsic value upon people they decide are “of status” that they do not apply to others. This is literally just in-group/out-group mentality.
On another note, 1) people get executed for more than just treason, past and present (and in fiction, since this is a fictional story not set in a real place or time), 2) using Xie Lian’s Central Plains General story to say that Mu Qing’s dad must have gotten executed “for treason” because “he was helping people” makes absolutely no sense when you consider the fact that Xie Lian, himself, didn’t get executed for helping people, either, 3) if his dad’s execution is what made Mu Qing forsake caring about people and promote genocide, then guess what? He’s still a shit person promoting genocide! You just made it worse because now, he’s promoting genocide to spit on the legacy of his own father! So now we’ve circled back around to: Mu Qing is not a working-class hero because he does not value people below him.
Mxtx said that we shouldn’t take the words of the general population and especially not the rich and powerful at face value when they unite to spread certain narratives, that we should find the truth by looking at the actual facts and the characters of the people involved to discern the truth. What she did not say is that if we don’t like the picture the evidence presents because it makes our favs look bad, then we should make up evidence of our own in disregard of the truth.
#tgcf#caught a glimpse of some bullshit#and now I’m glad I didn’t actually read that whole thing#mu qing’s dad don’t even got a name; that’s how irrelevant he is in the story#but now you dragging daddy mu’s name through the mud in defense of MU QING???#if y’all don’t let that man rest in peace
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idont think anybody understands sheffbrien the way I do (insane) I'm sorry they're literally so bad for each other (affectionate) I could go on and on forever. I will actually. sheffbrien post be upon ye. thanks to ashe for talking about this w me on discord. this is a kinda obrien centric post bc of that loll but I'm obvi getting into sheffields whole deal too
having reread tc22 again and done some literary analysis a few days ago on a plane at 2 in the morning (I'm out of the country rn helloo ^_^) I picked up on a lot of thematics for them I find very interesting. long post ahead!
1 - the dynamics in their relationship are so wildly interesting. I think their characterization in tc22 does wonders for them. firstly, there are a lot of false differences id say? they seem so different, but when you boil it down they have a lot in common. sheffield is affluent and intelligent but has a spiteful and hotheaded side, obrien is seen as angry or rude but is taken for granted with his intelligence quite often by others. he got into an ivy league school at 17. there's also how sheffield seems so charismatic while obrien is abrasive and lonely, but they both really have no other friends when you get down to it? and last example for now, sheffield sees himself as divine while obrien seems to have renounced religion, but he really hasn't done the work of removing his mindset from a catholic(?) framework. expanding on that,
2 - obrien has religious trauma and this is heavily established. he doesn't actually ever move past religion as a concept though, he just moves on from God. he replaces his concept of God with his concept of his sister. more on this later. sheffield also has a relationship with religion, but more in the sense that he inherently sees himself as something unlike humanity, something greater and to be revered. he refers to himself as an angel in a way that doesn't strike me as being ingenuine the way he does in other places. I need to draw art about this it makes me abnormal
3 - for obrien specifically, there are some insanely interesting threads left about his trauma creating a savior complex within him. obviously shown at the start of the story with professor harris, but there are also the times he mentions going into genetics due to his guilt and wanting to entirely eliminate the disease that disabled his sister and when he says he feels an involuntary sympathy for stella when he found out she didn't mean to kill harris. it also makes me wonder if that plays into his protectiveness of sera later on.
4 - obrien has some severe internalized ableism going on that I wish more people actually picked apart. I know tc22 is a small scale story and a lot of people haven't read it, but it's fascinating stuff. he obviously grew up with the mindset that his sister was somehow contagious and describes how he felt he would somehow fall ill because of this, and that sort of mindset does a lot to dehumanize somebody in a person's mind. after eventually passing on an illness to her that results in her death, he is driven entirely by guilt as a character. he becomes certain that if God were fair and true, he would have died instead of her. but, like I mentioned before, he never really renounces religion in any specific way aside from this. he even mentions how he now prays to his sister instead of God, which I think is so fascinating. he never saw his sister as a person, and by elevating her to this status of somebody he needs to grovel to or even just uses as a holy figure in his life, he continues to see her as inhuman. he recognizes his past ableism, but he never does anything to deconstruct and rebuild from it. much like with his relationship with religion!
5 - obrien is treated by dds2 as the morally virtuous character, but he's really not (if you get the context from tc22). my boyfriend put it as him being just on the right side of history, which I absolutely agree with. I know tc22 was probably written after dds2 and doesn't necessarily inform the writing decisions for the games, but it definitely adds juicy layers to me. obrien is seemingly not motivated by any true desire to help sera or the nameless sufferers of CATCH22, he is motivated by the guilt from his sisters death hanging over him like a shadow. not to say he doesn't care at all, but it seems more like a quest to make up for his sins in the eyes of his sister than a desire to do good, which seems awfully catholic to me. this is absolutely the most interesting part of his character presented by the narrative. God I wish they did this better in the games.
6 - moving on to sheffield, sheffield is actually one of the most interesting and real depictions of a character with NPD traits I've ever seen, hands down. I know I talk about this frequently, but it's especially strongly done in tc22 and one of my favorite parts of his character. to start, he's mostly presented with extremely minor and often-masked aspects of the disorder a lot of people don't really pick up on. vouching personally. he quickly becomes passive aggressive and seemingly personally offended when challenged, like by inspector Harvey for instance. he is a practiced and seemingly compulsive liar, able to make things up on the spot that nobody but obrien questions due to his confidence. he seems to get along swimmingly with people he doesn't know well, charismatic and understanding. he pays exceptionally close attention to other people's emotions, expressions, and demeanors to adjust and match theirs. he also is debatably depicted with real delusions of grandeur. he only seems to be able to let his guard down around obrien, actually. and my absolute favorite moment of his, really relatable for me, is that when he stops masking he does not become dangerous. he does not go into a rage, he just goes blank. entirely and visibly unable to express emotion "normally", and obrien is initially scared, but realizes he just doesn't understand sheffield as well as he thinks he does. this is incredibly accurate to real life for me. it's actually insanely well depicted. and what I really appreciate is that sheffield is never presented as truly malicious [IN THIS STORY]. with dds2 context, he can be seen that way for sure, but he isn't actually shown being morally reprehensible. he's dubious and seems to have trouble understanding where he crosses a line, but that's also very true to real life for me. he isn't necessarily trying to be evil, he's just nosy and invasive of boundaries on occasion. they also never actually label him as or call him a narcissist, which is so good?? props to tadashi for once?? I think he is one because I have the disorder and can more accurately assess this sort of thing, but labeling every character who's like Abusive as a narcissist is so tacky and distasteful to me. it diminishes the harm they inflict on other people as being something born of mental illness, which isn't necessarily true. he is definitely abusive to sera, but that is not related to his narcissism.
7 - sheffield is just such a good character in this. I raved already about his npd stuff but I want to get into other things a little too. firstly, he does seem to genuinely view himself as inhuman, which is something I also believe contrasts obrien a little. obrien has this deep internalized self hatred, while sheffield has this genuine belief he is on a different level from other people. despite this, he sees obrien as being his Equal in some way. as being worthy of his presence, his assistance, his friendship. the pizza scene really really drives this home for me. (that's another subtle npd ass trait but I've said enough). in addition, sheffield tries so desperately to present himself as worthy of something more, maybe backed by doubt, or maybe even just true belief. he tries to appear intimidating, has knowledge of how to get into people's heads, etc. maybe this is because he's young and people see him differently for being so ahead of his grade, but I also see it as a display of insecurity in an implicit way. his delusions of grandeur also play into this characterization, because delusions of grandeur are often born from extreme and severe self doubt (at least in those with mental health disorders, which I've already mentioned I believe he strongly aligns with). him coming from a wealthy background in Portland of all places would not help any of that kind of thing.
8 - i don't even know what else I could say about them. they make me so abnormal. not even a toxic romantic relationship between them (which I do like think about but obviously post tc22 I don't like their age gap) but simply their dynamic as two characters. sera is a figurehead for their conflict, really. all the things we learn about both of these characters really makes me question how much BOTH of them care for sera, not just sheffield's two-faced lies. she is representative of their ideological dispute. she is a small child who has the potential to save the world, but obrien is too scared of letting another child die as a result of his inaction and sheffield is too focused on his end goal of getting what he believes he deserves, divinity and becoming a revered savior of the world, no matter who falls along the way. they are built to contrast each other. you even see this through heat and serph to a degree, with how sera mixed them up. heat declares he is on the same level as God during the jp text of the vritra fight, while serph inevitably sacrifices his own life for the sake of sera.
9 - what happened between tc22 and the dds2 flashbacks? I actually need to know what caused their relationship to split so heavily. I'm fucking obsessed with them. post over please join my sheffbrien Island there's like 2 other people here
#digital devil saga#shin megami tensei#digital devil saga 2#ddsat#sheffbrien#analysis#thats catch 22#ok sorry i actually really worked hard on this post i hope you guys like and or read it. thx#i think about them so much
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Okay I know you've had like a million people just screaming in your inbox about Symphony and I'm sure you're sick of it. But unfortunately for you, I'm joining them <3
Because oh my god oh my god It's been like a solid three or four days since I've finished chapter 24 and I'm still thinking about it like,, holy fuck.
I honestly wish I knew more about writing and stuff so I could write a whole literary analysis on it because I can't put my thoughts into words. Like I've read MANY fanfics over the years, and I may not know much about writing, but I DO know that Symphony is so well thought out and planned and like holy fuck I can't wait to reread it. I feel like I'm gonna find so many subtle hints and foreshadowing I missed and just RAHHH I WISH I KNEW HOW TO ACTUALLY COMPLEMENT WRITING PROPERLY INSTEAD OF JUST SCREAMING THAT I LIKE IT
I think I've only ever cried over a fanfic like TWO other times out of like,, the eight years I've been reading them. Granted, I tend to stay away from angst so I was probably way in over my head for Symphony. Anyways, cried a lot. And then cried a lot again. I love it. Every time I finished a harsh chapter I'd just go for like a half hour walk just to think about it.
So I'm very normal about Symphony it's definitely not consuming my brain or anything. Hopefully you're not tired of receiving these kinds of asks because there WILL be more <33
oh i will Never get tired of people coming to talk about my fics!! that’s the whole reason i’m posting them, you know! community 🌸
i’ve spent the last ten years writing stuff just for me and keeping it on my icloud. it’s satisfying, and i’ve learned to write what i want to write which keeps me excited and motivated even if no one ever reads it. but it’s very thrilling to share art, and to know how it affects people! hearing your theories, your favorite parts, seeing the art people draw, reading the fanfic of my fanfic—it’s so cool!!!
anyway, i LOVE that youre having a good time! i work hard on my writing so it’s very satisfying when people enjoy it as much as i do. but yeah! :D my inbox is open for a reason! scream away ✨
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SCP 1128 (SCP)
"SCP-1128 is a massive aquatic creature that hunts down any subject given a full description of the being's appearance through either spoken or written descriptions or visual. While we don't know exactly what it is, we do know that it is large enough to eat whales. Persons infected by 1128 will, without being administered amnestics, grow steadily more terrified of water as time goes on. Should a subject ever be fully immersed in water, they will disappear completely under the surface, regardless of the water's actual depth. Apparently, there was an incident where it dragged a D-class personnel member into a glass of water. In most cases, they will reappear moments later in a panicked state, frantically trying to leave the water. Other cases will have the water will become polluted with blood and debris confirmed to be the remains of the subject. Subjects that have reappeared intact claim that they were transported to a vast ocean where they were pursued by 1128. Interviews with these individuals carries risk of further contamination, as descriptions of the being's appearance trigger further infections."
Moby Dick (Moby Dick)
"Okay, look--let's get this out of the way. I know that the whale is big. That is not an insignificant thing about whales in general and this whale in particular. It's not even an insignificant factor in nominating him today. Except, it's not the size that matters--it's what Herman Melville does with it*.
*(Sorry, the dick joke was obligatory. It should be the only one unless my love of bad puns runs away from me.)
There's a post floating out there on tumblr calling Moby Dick the OG eldritch terror. Unfortunately, we all know how the hellsite's search "function" is (exasperated but affectionate), so I'm not going to be able to link it. What I can do is pull out a few rusty tools of literary analysis to show that at his Vast heart, Moby Dick represents the terrifying insignificance of humanity in the face of the grandness and terror of the sea.
First, it's crucial to point out that the book opens with quotes about whales, including several Bible verses, some Pliny, something purported to be copied down by a ninth-century king, Shakespeare, and so on. Right out of the gate, the book connects the Whale with the idea of the mythological Leviathan. By quoting Genesis in particular, Melville creates the idea of the Whale as a beast that has existed alongside humanity since its inception. Just as the fears are ancient and have tormented humanity since prehistory, the Whale/Leviathan has represented a "dragon of the sea" that mankind cannot conquer.
Sailors who make their living killing the whales are aware that " all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s (whale’s) mouth, are immediately lost and swallowed up" and that "[t]he great Leviathan […] maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan." They can't escape, though, because as the extracts also make clear, the booming economy of the nineteenth century depends on whale oil for everything from healing bruises to heating rooms in the dead of winter. The sailors are therefore helpless in the face of the dangers that the Whale's sheer size escapes, but also the vast and impersonal economic machinery that reduces them to commodities to be sacrificed to the Whale's wrath, Ahab's vengeance, and the Industrial Revolution's greed. Simon Fairchild probably had a field day with this one.
I realize I'm nearly 400 words in, so in the interest of sparing people's eyes, I'll wrap up by pointing out: --There is a whole chapter devoted to the crew standing knee-deep in whale fat while they dissect a smaller whale. --There is another chapter where Ishmael rhapsodizes about the size of a whale's skeleton. --Then he goes on for another chapter about whale fossils. --And then chapter 3 in this trilogy (which began in chapter 103, btw), asks outright in the title. "Does the whale's magnitude diminish?" --Ishmael sees the sea, and by extension, the Whale, as an irresistible, almost compelling force that terrifies and awes him. This is similar to noted Vast victim Robert Kelly, who also feels a draw to the Vast. --The book closes with Ishmael as the only survivor of the Pequod, having barely escaped the whale's vortex that pulled the ship and all her crew into the depths of the ocean, floating alone on his subtextual lover's coffin for a day and night before finally being picked up by another ship."
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i felt like i read a lot of books last year and its true that i read more than most years but i think i literally only read 3 1/2 books. reading is something ive always really struggled with and i think it has to do with needing to be like super hyperfocussed. idk i feel like if im not retaining and acknowledging the absolute most detail that i absolutely can then im wasting time. so I go pretty slowly and take plenty of notes to reference when i don't quite understand something mentioned in passing that happened chapters ago . and if i dont take a day or two between reading to absorb everything i feel overwhelmed. the notes help with my memory issues or putting everything together in my head. anyway ive always been super insecure about it and it probably sounds like no fun and too much work to everyone else and well it is a lot of work. which is what draws me to it and also discourages me. anyway pointless post im just saying it requires so much effort to me and i think its mostly due to myself and not the learning disabilities LOL. i heard once that dyslexic people tend to memorize facts because they learn information differently ironically i memorized this fact and perhaps thats why i feel like i need to get every single detail. also its just fun i really enjoy comprehensive breakdowns and literary analysis. i hope to read more this year perhaps its also a mix of not knowing what genres i prefer. vonnegut i can pick up immediately without trying as hard as other texts. i also force myself to read classics which are a bit more difficult bc i feel like i have to decode what theyre saying. ok im done now bye p[lease dont change your opinion on me im actually really self couscous (<- silly way to say self conscious ) about it
#one of my favorite things to do whebn taking notes is ask rhetorical questions and then half the book later come back and be like see maggie#you got this and here's what i (future maggie) think#all books i read for the first time i read catcher in tha rye urm jaws.. slaughterhouse. does watchmen count#i did reread the pearl steinbeck thats a short story though so. also half of bury my heart @ wounded knee and most of beastie boy book
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Hi you've mention before you had to study fanfiction in college and had to write two essays on Howl's Moving Castle, if it's not to personal, can you tell us what did you study in college?
Hey!! No problem at all, I loved my studies in university so it's always a pleasure to talk about it 👐
I have a Double Degree in French Modern Literature & English literature (+ culture/some history, but mostly focused on the UK and US), as well as a Master Degree in Fiction (studied most of its forms + how it is produced in an industrial world like ours, through creative and more theoretical classes, though my focus was more on literature/tv shows/movies/video games) (*´▽`*)❀
About the fan fiction thing, well, I've had three thesis to write during my last 3 years of college?
1) A 25 pages only thesis where I attempted to understand how Fan Fiction might be a renewal of the XIXth's Roman Feuilleton (serial literature that appeared thanks to the industrialization and that was published weekly/monthly in popular journals, think of Dickens, Victor Hugo, etc)
2) A 50 pages only thesis about Fan Fiction as an obscure genre in the literary world, where I question not why or who creates fan fictions (something that has already been studied for 30 years) but HOW. Whichs means questions how people write? How do they select what to write about? How do so many communities can identify a fic's content in one glance through its tags, even when they are quite obscure? What about the story structures of fan fictions? Why the repetitiveness? For what purpose? So... Yeah. 50 pages of picking literary analysis techniques we already have to study fan fiction as a genre, the same way we do we literally any other genre, with one less theorical part by analysis an actual fan fiction
3) A 50 pages only thesis about a creative project + 50 pages of presemtation of the project itself. I am... A huge horror fan, ok? SO as a creator who also loves fantastic and fantasy I wondered about something. Would it be possible to create AND make last a possible world based/centered around the horror genre? You know how in fantasy you explore a world where EVERYTHING is a consequence of the magic/fantasy elements? Ehat if we did that with horror? Where EVERYTHING, at its core, is a product of the horror genre? Where everything, everyone, every element of the universe is out to get you ― how do you survive? CAN you do more than just survive in such a world? Can it expand and keep growing through fan headcanons and ideas and grow more and more, like fantasy's possible worlds do??
Okay that was already a lot, congrats if you read so far 🫡🫡
About Howl's Moving Castle!
During my 3rd year in university, I had a class about Gender Studies and we had to pick a Ghibli movie to study and analyze. I picked Howl's Moving Castle, and tried to explain how the movie reverses gender expectations through the use of stereotypical fairy tales tropes.
Then during my 5th year in university, I had a class on Road Movies. Don't ask me why but my high-off-of-allergy-meds ass had a weird af epiphany and picked this movie.
The first essay is in french but i recently summed its main points for @newbieineverything so I can share it if you want! And the second essay was in english so I do have the whole thing, or just the bullet points if you'd rather have a summed up version 🤔🤔
If you want more info on those, don't hesitate to say it in comments/reblogs/dm and I will share it on the post! ٩(๑˃́ꇴ˂̀๑)و🪇
#Aslinn answers#aslinn rambles#howl's moving castle#Fan fiction#Lots of words i'm sorry 🤣🤣🤣#I loved research and honestly had i actually been good at it i'd have loved to go for a PhD
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I'm reading flowers of evil because of you BTW. It's really good! I was never one for poetry because I thought I was just too stupid to understand it, but I feel I have been missing out.
How have you been? Any development or life issues that we can help with? I think your game is really something special. Take care. 💚
I'm so glad to hear that!! I'm a firm believer that art and writing is for everybody and it always makes me happy to hear people are expanding their genres and experiences :) there are lots of resources that provide annotated versions of classical poetry so flowers of evil is actually a great text to look at if you're wanting to break into the romantics a little bit more! Different translators also change the tone of the work significantly, I have 3 separate copies of Flowers of Evil in the printed English format by dofferent translators, some with and some without original french text and annotations, but my favorite of all time is Ruth White's 1969 early electronica album based on the text! your personal experience with the writing is more important than an "objective" truth some people may try to convince you is true of the thing- historical context and literary analysis only go so far. Your enjoyment of a text doesn't have to have anything to do with what is academically accepted. I like flowers of evil the poetry collection mostly because of the visceral descriptions! Other people might enjoy it more because of its peculiar place in its time period, its relevance in the modern goth scene or the classic gothic literary scene, its gorgeous bound editions in book collecting circles, its raunchiness, its holiness, whatever! all that is to say, I don't believe in stupid people, and I belive even less in a stupid way to approach poetry, writing, and art- art is for everyone, and there are lots of ways to feel and interpret an artists work!
I wish I had good news on the development front- I had a week off of work I was hoping to dedicate to working on the game but I mostly either slept or cleaned. Being disabled and working has. Significantly altered my trajectory on the game. I wasn't expecting to have to use my body to work and it's been affecting me pretty brutally. Unfortunately because it's been so long since I started it up I'm wondering if I should gut and reproduce it entirely into something newer and cleaner instead of continuing to roll with a framework I've come to find pretty flawed and hard to work with. I haven't dropped the project by any means but I'm struggling to find the motivation to finish it. In any case! I'm really hoping to have at least a major update by March. fingers crossed, and happy reading to you!
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All due respect, but you’re pretty wrong about a few things.
1. That’s not what death of the author means. It’s a common misconception, but death of the author is a literary analysis technique in opposition to “word of god”. An example of death of the author would be “word of god from JRR Tolkien says lord of the rings wasn’t inspired by his time at war, but analysis of events and his life shows a lot of similarities and influences on it, and interpreting the series as about his time in the war is a valid approach despite what he says”. It’s not ignoring things about the author or deciding the author has no involvement or influence.
2. JK Rowling does actually continue to make royalties off of Harry Potter stuff.
3. Buying the game is funding her, and she uses the money to fund transphobic politics that has done real harm to transgender people in at least the UK, and funding efforts to keep Scotland and Ireland colonized.
4. Reclaiming queer and fag and dyke isn’t the same as continuing to fund JK Rowling. You can’t “reclaim” a franchise. Queer, fag, dyke, etc don’t make anyone money. They’re words being weaponized emotionally, and their impact is as strong as we let it be. Harry Potter is a brand and a franchise with PR and accountants and corporations at the helm. It’s not something that can be “reclaimed” and to say so indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what reclaiming is at all. Harry Potter itself has some cruel caricatures in it, yes, but the real problem is the actual funding of JK Rowling and those she works with that agree with her, or just care about money more than the people she’s hurting.
I understand your intentions here, and why people get defensive about enjoying HP. But I hope you’ll genuinely listen to me and think about what I’ve said, because you really have said a lot of incorrect things here. JK Rowling has and will continue to do genuine, tangible harm to our community.
And this isn’t in the body of your post, but it’s something I’d like to add. This game isn’t the Harry Potter you grew up with. While Harry Potter itself had aspects of antisemitic caricatures, it wasn’t the main focus. This game is made of and about blood libel. I adored the books when I was a kid. This game is nothing like them. If you remove it from the discourse about JKR, you can still recognize that it’s a game using the setting and name of Harry Potter to sell a story about oppressing Jewish-coded slaves, but it’s okay, because they’re EVIL slaves. It has the superficial trappings of Harry Potter, but it will not have what you loved about the books.
Have a good day.
So I do very much appreciate you trying to be civil about this, and I will certainly give some consideration to your points, But could you provide me with some sources for the information here?
I don't mean this to come off as dismissive, but I'm not keen to take the word of an anonymous person on the internet over my own education in literature, finance and economics. Or to reverse my views on cancel culture and the spread of undeserved hate towards people who are just trying to enjoy a nostalgic part of their childhood, just because a very opinionated person online has ignored my examples of how other creators have had their IP’s reclaimed by fans.
Especially when your argument to the contrary would suggest that the queen community has not battled lawmakers, lawyers, PR and accountants for years in reclaiming much of the language we use today, let alone all of the other times we have fought against systematic abuse and won. I don’t feel like “its hard” makes for a very valid argument for why we should not only avoid trying, but demonize any of our own who do.
And again... I actually have no love for the books? I grew out of them, and looking back, very much recognize that they are hot trash, and not something I care about. I'm also not defending this game, and have no intention of buying or supporting it. I just... really don't like seeing communities start wars within themselves when there are real, actively malicious enemies waiting at the doorstep.
Witchhunts and the persecution of heretics are something the 15th century catholic church was known for. I’d rather not see the trend continue
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