#academic context here? or a different one at least. where only a few die so they keep doing it but also for the Average lemming following | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

eiirisworkshop · 3 years

Text

The Fanfic Author's Guide to Metatext

(As Used on Ao3) by Eiiri

Also available as a PDF here. This thing is 13,000 words. The PDF is recommended.

Intro: What is Metatext?

Metatext is everything we fanfic authors post along with our story that is not the story itself: title, tags, summary, author's notes, even the rating.

It is how we communicate to potential readers what they're signing themselves up for if they choose to read our story, how we let them make informed decisions regarding which fics they want to read, how we get their interest and, frequently, how they find our story in the first place. A lot of metatext acts as a consent mechanism for readers, it's the informed part of informed consent.

Since most of us who write fanfic also read it, we understand how important this is! But, for the most part, no one ever teaches us how to use metatext; we have to pick it up by osmosis. That makes it hard to learn how to use it well, we all suck at it when we first start out, and some of us may go years without learning particular conventions that seem obvious to others in our community. This creates frustration for everybody.

Enter this guide!

This is meant to be a sort of handbook for fic writers, particularly those of us who post on Archive of Our Own, laying out and explaining the established metatext conventions already in use in our community so we (and our readers!) are all on the same page. It will also provide some best-practices tips.

The point is to give all of us the tools to communicate with our audience as clearly and effectively as possible, so the people who want to read a story like ours can find it and recognize it as what they're looking for, those who don't want to read a story like ours can easily tell it's not their cup of tea and avoid it, nobody gets hurt, and everybody has fun—including us!

Now that we know what we're talking about, let's get on with the guide! The following content sections appear in the order one is expected to provide each kind of metatext when posting a fic on Ao3, but first….

Warning!

This is a guide for all authors on Ao3. As such, it mentions subject matter and kinds of fic that you personally might hate or find disgusting, but which are allowed under the Archive's terms of use. There are no graphic descriptions or harsh language in the guide itself, but it does acknowledge the existence of fic you may find distasteful and explains how to approach metatext for such fics.

Some sexual terminology is used in an academic context.

A note from the author:

This guide reflects the conventions of the English-language fanfiction community circa 2021. Conventions may differ in other language communities, and although many of our conventions have been in place for decades (praise be to our Star Trek loving foremothers) fanfiction now exists primarily in the realm of internet fandom where things tend to change rather quickly, so some conventions in this guide may die out while other new conventions, not covered in this guide, arise.

This is not official or in any way produced by the Archive of Our Own (Ao3), and though some actual site rules are mentioned, it is not a rulebook. Primarily, it is a descriptivist take on how the userbase uses metatext to communicate amongst ourselves, provided in the interest of making that communication easier and more transparent for everyone, especially newer users.

Contents

How To Use This Guide Ratings Archive Warnings Fandom Tags Category Relationship Tags Character Tags Additional Tags Titles Summaries Author's Notes Series and Chapters Parting Thoughts

How To Use This Guide

Well, read it. Or have it read to you.

This isn't a glossary, it's a handbook, and it's structured more like an academic paper or report, but there's lots and lots of examples in it!

Many of these examples are titles of real media and the names of characters from published media, or tags quoted directly from Ao3 complete with punctuation and formatting.

Some examples are more generic and use the names Alex, Max, Sam, Chris, Jamie, and Tori for demonstration purposes. In other generic examples, part of an example tag or phrase may be sectioned off with square brackets to show where in that tag or phrase you would put the appropriate information to complete it. This will look something like “Top [Character A]” where you would fill in a character's name.

This guide presumes that you know the basics of how to use Ao3, at least from the perspective of reading fic. If you don't, much of this guide may be difficult to understand and will be much less helpful to you, though not entirely useless.

Ratings

Most fanfic hosting sites provide ratings systems that work a lot like the ratings on movies and videogames.

Ao3's system has four ratings:

General

Teen

Mature

Explicit

These seem like they should be pretty self-explanatory, and the site's own official info pop-up (accessible by clicking the question mark next to the section prompt) gives brief, straightforward descriptions for each of them.

Even so, many writers have found ourselves staring at that dropdown list, thinking about what we've written, and wondering what's the right freaking rating for this? How do I know if it's appropriate for “general audiences” or if it needs to be teen and up? What's the difference between Mature and Explicit?

The best way to figure it out is often to think about your fic in comparison to mainstream media.

General is your average Disney or Dreamworks movie, Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon shows, video games like Mario, Kirby, and Pokemon.

There may be romance, but no sexual content or discussion. Scary things might happen and people might get hurt, but violence is non-graphic and usually mild. Adults may be shown drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco, and some degree of intoxication may be shown (usually played for laughs and not focused on), but hard drug use is generally not shown or discussed. There is little to no foul language written out and what language there may be is mild, though harsher swears may be implied by narration. There are no explicit F-bombs or slurs.

Teen is more like a Marvel movie, most network television shows (things like The Office, Supernatural, or Grey's Anatomy), video games like Final Fantasy, Five Nights at Freddie's, and The Sims.

There might be some sex and sexual discussion, but nothing explicit is shown—things usually fade to black or are leftimplied. More intense danger, more severe injuries described in greater detail, and a higher level of violence may be present. Substance use may be discussed and intoxication shown, but main characters are unlikely to be shown doing hard drugs. Some swearing and other harsh language may be present, possibly including an F-bomb or two. In longer works, that might mean an F-bomb every few chapters.

Mature is, in American terms, an R-rated movie* like Deadpool, Fifty Shades of Grey, The Exorcist, and Schindler's List; certain shows from premium cable networks or streaming services like Game of Thrones, Shameless, Breaking Bad, and Black Sails; videogames like Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, Grand Theft Auto, and The Witcher.

Sex may be shown and it might be fairly explicit, but it's not as detailed or graphic or as much the focus of the work as it would be if it were porn. Violence, danger, and bodily harm may be significant and fairly graphic. Most drug use is fair game. Swearing and harsh language may be extensive.

Explicit is, well, extremely explicit. This is full on porn, the hardcore horror movies, and snuff films.

Sex is highly detailed and graphic. Violence and injury is highly detailed and graphic. Drug use and its effects may be highly detailed and graphic. Swearing and harsh language may be extreme, including extensive use of violent slurs.

Please note that both Mature and Explicit fics are intended for adult audiences only, but that does not mean a teenaged writer isn't going to produce fics that should be rated M or E. Ratings should reflect the content of the fic, not the age of the author.

Strictly speaking, you don't have to choose any of these ratings; Ao3 has a “Not Rated” option, but for purposes of search results and some other functions, Not Rated fics are treated by the site as Explicit, just in case, which means they end up hidden from a significant portion of potential readers. It really is in your best interest as a writer who presumably wants people to see their stories, to select a rating. It helps readers judge if yours is the kind of story they want right now, too.

Rating a fic is a subjective decision, there is some grey area in between each level. If you're not quite sure where your fic falls, best practice is to go with the more restrictive rating.

*(Equivalent to an Australian M15+ or R18+, Canadian 14A, 18A or 18+, UK 15 or 18, German FSK 16 or FSK 18.)

Warnings

Ao3 uses a set of standard site-wide Archive Warnings to indicate that a work contains subject matter that falls into one or more of a few categories that some readers are likely to want to avoid. Even when posting elsewhere, it's courteous to include warnings of this sort.

These warnings are:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Major Character Death

Rape/Non-Con

Underage

Just like with the ratings, the site provides an info-pop up that explains what each warning is for. They're really exactly what it says on the tin: detailed descriptions of violence, injury, and gore; the death of a character central to canon or tothe story being told; non-consensual sex i.e. rape; and depictions of underage sex, which the site defines as under the age of 18 for humans—Ao3 doesn't care if your local age of consent or majority is lower than that.

In addition to the four standard warnings above, the warnings section has two other choices:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings

These do not mean the same thing and cannot be used interchangeably. “No Archive Warnings Apply” means that absolutely nothing in your fic falls into any of the four standard warning categories. “Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings” means that you the author are opting out of the warning system; your fic could potentially contain things that fall into any and all of the four standard warning categories.

There's nothing wrong with selecting Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings! It may mean that some readers will avoid your fic because they're not sure it's safe for them, and you might need to use more courtesy tags than you otherwise would (we'll talk about courtesy tags later), but that's okay! Opting out of the warning system can be a way to avoid spoilers,* and is also good for when you're just not sure if what you've written deserves one of the Archive warnings. In that case, the best practice is to select either the warning it might deserve or Choose Not To Use Archive Warnings, then provide additional information in other tags, the summary, or an initial author's note.

Unless you're opting out of using the warning system, select all the warnings that apply to your fic, if any of them do. So if a sixteen year old main character has consensual sex then gets killed in an accident that you've written out in excruciating detail, that fic gets three out of the four standard warnings: Underage, Major Character Death, and Graphic Depictions Of Violence.

*(Fandom etiquette generally favors thorough tagging and warning over avoiding spoilers. It doesn't ruin the experience of a story to have a general sense of what's going to happen. If it did, we wouldn't all keep reading so many “there was only one bed” fics.)

Fandom Tags

What fandom or fandoms is your fic for? You definitely know what you wrote it for, but that doesn't mean it's obvious what to tag it as.

Sometimes, it is obvious! You watched a movie that isn't based on anything, isn't part of a series, and doesn't have any spinoffs, tie-ins or anything else based on it. You wrote a fic set entirely within the world of this movie. You put this movie as the fandom for your fic. Or maybe you read a book and wrote a fic for it, and there is a movie based on the book, but the movie is really different and you definitely didn't use anything that's only in the movie. You put the book as the fandom for your fic.

All too often, though, it's not that clear.

What if you wrote a fic for something where there's a movie based on a book, but the movie's really different, and you've used both things that are only in the movie and things that are only in the book? In that case you either tag your fic as both the movie and the book, or see if the fandom has an “all media types” tag and use that instead of the separate tags. If the fandom doesn't have an “all media types” tag yet, you can make one! Just type it in.

“All media types” fandom tags are also useful for cases where there are lots of inter-related series, like Star Wars; there are several tellings of the story in different media but they're interchangeable or overlap significantly, like The Witcher; or the fandom has about a zillion different versions so it's very hard, even impossible, to say which ones your fic does and doesn't fit, like Batman. Use your best judgement as to whether you need to include a more specific fandom tag such as “Batman (Movies 1989-1997)” alongside the “all media types” fandom tag, but try to avoid including very many. The point of the “all media types” tag is to let you leave off the specific tags for every version.

In a situation where one piece of media has a spinoff, maybe several spinoffs, and you wrote a fic that includes things from more than one of them, you might want use the central work's “& related fandoms” tag. For example, the “Doctor Who & Related Fandoms” tag gets used for fics that include things from a combination of any era of Doctor Who, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

And don't worry, from the reader-side of the site the broadest fandom tags are prioritized. The results page for an “all media types” or “& related fandoms” search includes works tagged with the more specific sub-tags for that fandom, the browse-by-fandom pages show the broadest tag for each fandom included, and putting a fandom into the search bar presumes the broadest tag for that fandom. A search for “Star Wars - All Media Types” will pull up work that only has a subtag for that fandom, like “The Mandalorian (TV).” You don't have to put every specific fandom subtag for people to find your fic.

If you wrote a fic for something that's an adaptation of an older work—especially an older work that's been adapted a lot, like Sherlock Holmes or The Three Musketeers—it can be hard to know how you should tag it. The best choice is to put the adaptation as the fandom, for instance “Sherlock (TV),” then, if you're also using aspects of the older source work that aren't in the adaptation, also put a broad fandom tag such as “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms.” Do not tag it as being fic for the source work—in our Sherlock example that would be tagging it “Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle”—unless you are crossing over the source work and the adaptation. Otherwise, the specific fandom subtag for the source work ends up clogged with fic for the adaptation, which really is a different thing.

By the same token, fic for the source work shouldn't be tagged as being for the adaptation, or the adaptation's subtag will get clogged.

The same principle applies to fandoms that have been rebooted. Don't tag fic for the reboot as being for the original, or fic for the original as being for the reboot. Don't tag a fic as being for both unless the reboot and original are actually interacting. Use an “& related fandoms” tag for the original if your fic for the reboot includes some aspects of the original that weren't carried over but you haven't quite written a crossover between the two. Good examples of these situations can be seen with “Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)” vs. “Star Trek: The Original Series,” and “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)” vs. “She-Ra: Princess Of Power (1985).”

Usually, this kind of mistagging as a related fandom happens when someone writes a fic for something that is or has a reboot, spinoff, or adaptation, but they're only familiar with one of the related pieces of media, and they mistakenly presume the fandoms are the same or interchangeable because they just don't know the difference. It's an honest mistake and it doesn't make you a bad or fake fan to not know, but it can be frustrating for readers who want fic for one thing and find the fandom tag full of fic for something else.

In order to avoid those kinds of issues, best practice is to assume fandoms are not interchangeable no matter how closely related they are, and to default to using a tag pair of the most-specific-possible sub-fandom tag + the broadest possible fandom tag when posting a fic you're not entirely sure about, for instance “Star Trek” and “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

The Marvel megafandom has its own particular tagging hell going on. Really digging into and trying to make sense of that entire situation would require its own guide, but we can go through some general tips.

There is a general “Marvel” fandom tag and tags for both “The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom” and “The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types.” Most of us who write Marvel fic are working with a cherry picked combination of canons from the MCU, various comics runs, both timelines of X-Men movies, and possibly several decades worth of cartoons. That's what these tags are for.

If your cherry picked Marvel fic is more X-Men than Avengers, go for the “X-Men - All Media Types” tag.

If you are primarily working with MCU canon, use the MCU specific tags rather than “all media types” and add specific tags for individual comics runs—like Earth 616 or the Fraction Hawkeye comics—if you know you're lifting particular details from the comics. If you're just filling in gaps in MCU canon with things that are nebulously “from the comics” don't worry about tagging for that, it's accepted standard practice in the fandom at this point, use a broader tag along with your MCU-specific tag if you want to.

Same general idea for primarily movie-verse X-Men fics. Use the movie-specific tags.

If your fic mostly draws from the comics, use the comics tags. If you're focusing on an individual run, show, or movie series rather than an ensemble or large swath of the megafranchise, tag for that and leave off the broader fandom tags.

Try your best to minimize the number of fandom tags on your Marvel work. Ideally, you can get it down to two or three. Even paring it down as much as you can you might still end up with about five. If you're in the double digits, take another look to see if all the fandom tags you've included are really necessary, or if some of them are redundant or only there to represent characters who are in the fic but that the fic doesn't focus on. Many readers tend to search Marvel fics by character or pairing tags, it's more important that you're thorough there. For the fandom tags it's more important that you're clear.

If you write real person fiction, you need to tag it as an RPF fandom. Fic about actors who are in a show together does not belong on the fandom tag for that show. There are separate RPF fandom tags for most shows and film franchises. Much like the adaptation/source and reboot/original situations discussed earlier, a fic should really only be tagged with both a franchise's RPF tag and its main tag if something happens like the actors—or director or writer!—falling into the fictional world or meeting their characters.

Of course, not all RPF is about actors. Most sports have RPF tags, there are RPF tags for politics from around the world and for various historical settings, the fandom tags for bands are generally presumed to be RPF tags, and there is a general Real Person Fiction tag.

In order to simplify things for readers, it's best practice to use the general Real Person Fiction tag in addition to your fandom-specific tag. You may even want to put “RPF” as a courtesy tag in the Additional Tags section, too. This is because Ao3 isn't currently set up to recognize RPF as the special flavor of fic that it is in the same way that the site recognizes crossovers as special, so it can be very difficult to either seek out or avoid RPF since it's scattered across hundreds of different fandom tags.

On the subject of crossovers—they can make fandom tagging even more daunting. Even for a crossover with lots of fandoms involved, though, you just have to follow the same guidelines as to tag a single-fandom work for each fandom in the crossover. The tricky part is figuring out if what you wrote is really a crossover, or just an AU informed by another fandom—we'll talk about that later.

There are some cases where it's really hard to figure out what fandom something belongs to, like if you wrote a fanfic of someone else's fanfic, theirs is an AU and yours is about their OC, not any of the characters from canon. What do you do?! Well, you do not tag it as being a fanfic for the same thing theirs was. Put the title of their fic (or name of their series) as the fandom for your fic, attributed to their Ao3 handle just like any other fandom is attributed to its author. Explain the situation in either the summary or the initial author's note. Also, ask the author's permission before posting something like this.

What if you wrote a story about your totally original D&D character? The fandom is still D&D, you want the “Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)” tag.

What if there's not a fandom tag on the Archive yet for what you wrote? Not a problem! You can type in a new one if you're the first person to post something for a particular fandom. Do make sure, though, that the fandom isn't just listed by a different name than you expect. Many works that aren't originally in English—including anime—are listed by their original language title or a direct translation first, and sometimes a franchise or series's official name might not be what you personally call it, for instance many people think of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series as The Golden Compass series, so it's best to double check.

What if you wrote an entirely new original story that's not based on anything? Excellent job, that takes a lot of work, but that probably doesn't belong on Ao3! The Archive is primarily meant as a repository for fannish content, but in a few particular circumstances things we'd consider Original Work may be appropriate content for the Archive as well. Double check the Archive's Terms of Service FAQ and gauge if what you wrote falls under the scope of what is allowed. If what you wrote really doesn't fit here, post it somewhere else or try to get it published if you feel like giving it a shot.

Category

What Ao3 means by category is “does this fic focus on sex or romance, and if so what combination of genders are involved in that sex or romance?”

The category options are:

F/F

F/M

Gen

M/M

Multi

Other

The F/F, F/M, and M/M categories are for stories focused on pairings of two women, a woman and a man, and two men, respectively. These refer to sexual and/or romantic pairings.

The Other category is for stories focused on (sexual and/or romantic) pairings where one or both partners are not strictly male or female, such as nonbinary individuals, people from cultures with gender systems that don't match to the Western man-woman system, and nonhuman characters for whom biological sex works differently or is nonexistent, including aliens, robots, and inanimate objects or abstract concepts. There are some problems with treating nonbinary humans, eldritch tentacle monsters, sexless androids, and wayward container ships as all the same category, but it's the system we currently have to work with. Use Additional Tags to clarify the situation.

Multi is for stories in which several (sexual and/or romantic) relationships are focused on or which focus on relationships with multiple partners, including cases of polyamory, serial monogamy, strings of hookups with different people, and orgies. A fic will also show as “Multi” if you, the author, have selected more than one category for the fic, even if none of those are the Multi category. Realistically, the Archive needs separate “Multiple Categories” and “Poly” options, but for now we have to work with this system in which the two are combined. Use Additional Tags to clarify the situation.

Gen is for stories that do not contain or are not focused on sex or romance. Romance may be present in a gen fic but it's going to be in the background. While rare, there is such a thing as a sexually explicit gen fic—solo masturbation which does not feature fantasizing about another character is explicit gen fic; a doctor character seeing a series of patients with sex-related medical needs following an orgy may qualify if the orgy is not shown and the doctor is being strictly professional—but such fic needs to be rated, otherwise tagged, and explained carefully in the summary and/or author's note.

Much like the warnings section, category is a “select all that apply” situation. Use your best judgement. For a fic about a polyamorous relationship among a group of women, it's entirely appropriate to tag it as both F/F and Multi. A poly fic with a combination of men and women in the relationship could be shown as both M/M and F/M, Multi, or all three. A fic that focuses equally on one brother and his husband and the other brother and his wife should be tagged both M/M and F/M, and could be tagged as Multi but you might decided not to just to be clear that there's no polyamory going on. If you wrote a fic about two characters who are both men in canon, but you wrote one of them as nonbinary, you could tag it M/M, Other, or both depending on what you feel is representative and respectful.

When dealing with trans characters, whether they're trans in canon or you're writing them as such, the category selection should match the character's gender. If there's a character who is a cis woman in canon, but who you're writing as a trans man, you categorize the fic based on his being a man. If there's a character who is a cis man in canon, but whom you're writing as a trans man, he is still a man and the fic should be categorized accordingly. When dealing with nonbinary characters the fic should really be classed as Other though, by convention, fics about characters who are not nonbinary in canon may be classed based on the character's canon gender as well or instead. When dealing with gender swapped characters—i.e. a canonically cis male superhero who you're writing as a cis woman—class the fic using the gender you wrote her with, not the gender he is in canon.

Most of the time, gen fics should not be categorized jointly with anything else because a fic should only be categorized based on the ships it focuses on, and a gen fic should not be focusing on a ship in the first place.*

*(One of the few circumstances in which it might make sense to class a fic as both gen and something else is when writing about Queerplatonic Relationships, but that is a judgement call and depends on the fic.)

Relationship Tags

The thing about relationship tagging that people most frequently misunderstand or just don't know is the difference between “Character A/Character B” and “Character A & Character B.”

Use a “/” for romantic or sexual relationships, such as spouses, people who are dating, hookups, and friends with benefits. Use “&” for platonic or familial relationships, such as friends, siblings, parents with their kids, coworkers, and deeply connected mortal enemies who are not tragically in love.

This is where we get the phrase “slash fic.” Originally, that meant any fic focused on a romantic paring, but since so much of the romantic fic being produced was about pairs of men, “slash fic” came to mean same-sex pairings, especially male same-sex pairings. Back in earlier days of fandom, pre-Ao3 and even pre-internet, there was a convention that when writing out a different-sex pairing, you did so in man/woman order, while same-sex pairings were done top/bottom. Some authors, especially those who have been in the fic community a long time, may still do this, but the convention has not been in consistent, active use for many years, so you don't have to worry about putting the names in the “correct” order. Part of why that died out is we, as a community, have gotten less strict and more nuanced in our understandings of sex and relationships, we're writing non-penetrative sex more than we used to, and we're writing multi-partner relationships and sex more than we used to, so strictly delineating “tops” and “bottoms” has gotten less important and less useful.

The convention currently in use on Ao3 is that the names go in alphabetical order for both “/” and “&” relationships. In most cases, the Archive uses the character's full name instead of a nickname or just a given name, like James "Bucky" Barnes instead of just Bucky or James. We'll talk more about conventions for how to input character names in the Characters section. The Archive will give you suggestions as you type—if one of them fits what you mean but is slightly different from how you were typing it, for instance it's in a different order, please use the tag suggested! Consistency in tags across users helps the site work more smoothly for everybody.

This is really not the place for ship nicknames like Puckleberry, Wolfstar, or Ineffable Wives. Use the characters' names.

Now that you know how to format the relationship tag to say what you mean, you have to figure out what relationships in your fic to tag for.

The answer is you tag the relationships that are important to the story you're telling, the ones you spend time and attention following, building up, and maybe even breaking down. Tagging for a ship is not a promise of a happy ending for that pair; you don't have to limit yourself to tagging only the end-game ships if you're telling a story that's more complicated than “they get together and live happily ever after.” That said, you should generally list the main ship—the one you focus on the most—first on the list, and that will usually be the end-game ship. You should also use Additional Tags, the summary, and author's notes to make it clear to readers if your fic does not end happily for a ship you've tagged. Otherwise readers will assume that a fic tagged as being about a ship will end well for that ship, because that's what usually happens, and they'll end up disappointed and hurt, possibly feeling tricked or lied to, when your fic doesn't end well for that ship

You don't have to, and honestly shouldn't, tag for every single relationship that shows up in your fic at all. A character's brief side fling mentioned in passing, or a relationship between two background characters should not be listed under the Relationship tag section. You can list them in the format “minor Character A/Character C” or “Character C/Character D – mentions of” in the Additional Tags section if you want to, or just tag “Minor or Background Relationship(s)” under either the Relationship tag section or in the Additional Tags section.

There are two main reasons to not tag all those minor relationships. The first is to streamline your tags, which makes them clearer and more readable, and therefore more useful. The second reason is because certain ships are far more common as minor or background relationships than as the focus of a work, so tagging all your non-focus focus ships leads to the tags for these less popular ships getting clogged with stories they appear in, but that are not about them. That is, of course, very frustrating for readers who really want to read stories that focus on these ships.

If your fic contains a major relationship between a canon character and an OC, reader-insert, or self-insert, tag it as such. The archive already has /Original Character, /Reader, /You, and /Me tags for most characters in most fandoms. If such a relationship tag isn't already in use, type it in yourself. There are OC/OC tags, too, some of which specify gender, some of which do not. All the relationship tags that include OCs stack the gender-specific versions of the tags under the nongendered ones. Use these tags as appropriate.

For group relationships, both polycules and multi-person friendships, you “/” or “&” all the names involved in alphabetical order, so Alex/Max/Sam are dating while Chris & Jamie & Tori are best friends. For a poly situation where not everyone is dating each other you should tag it something like “Alex/Max, Alex/Sam” because Alex is dating both Max and Sam, but Max and Sam are not romantically or sexually involved with each other. Use your judgement as to whether you still want to include the Alex/Max/Sam trio tag, and whether you should also use a “Sam & Max” friendship tag.

Generally, romantic “/” type relationships are emphasized over “&” type relationships in fic. It is more important that you tag your “/”s thoroughly and accurately than that you tag your “&”s at all. This is because readers are far more likely to either be looking for or be squicked by particular “/” relationships than they are “&” relationships. You can tag the same pair of characters as both / and & if both their romance and their friendship is important to the story, but a lot of people see this as redundant. If you're writing incest fic, use the / tag for the pair not the & tag and put a courtesy tag for “incest” in the Additional Tags section; this is how readers who do not want to see incestuous relationships avoid that material.

Queerplatonic Relationships, Ambiguous Relationships, Pre-Slash, and “Slash If You Squint” are all frequently listed with both the “/” and “&” forms of the pairing; use your best judgement as to whether one or the other or both is most appropriate for what you've written and clarify the nature of the relationship in your Additional Tags.

Overall, list your “/” tags first, then your “&” tags.

Character Tags

Tagging your characters is a lot like tagging your relationships. Who is your fic about? That's who you put in your character tags.

You don't have to and really should not tag every single background character who shows up for just a moment in the story, for pretty much the same reasons you shouldn't tag background relationships. We don't want to clog less commonly focused on characters' tags with stories they don't feature prominently in.

You do need to tag the characters included in your Relationship tags.

A character study type of fic might only have one character you need to tag for. Romantic one shots frequently only have two. Longfics and fics with big ensemble casts can easily end up with a dozen characters or more who really do deserve to be tagged for.

Put them in order of importance. This doesn't have to be strict hierarchal ranking, you can just arrange them into groups of “main characters,” “major supporting characters,” and “minor supporting characters.” Nobody less than a minor supporting character should be tagged. Even minor supporting characters show up for more than one line.

If everyone in the fic is genuinely at the same level of importance (which does happen, especially with small cast fics), then order doesn't really matter. You can arrange them by order of appearance or alphabetically by name if you want to be particularly neat about it.

Do tag your OCs! Some people love reading about OCs and want to be able to find them; some people can't stand OCs and want to avoid them at all costs; most people are fine with OCs sometimes, but might have to be in the mood for an OC-centric story or only be comfortable with OCs in certain contexts. Regardless, though, Character tags are here to tell readers who the story is about, and that includes new faces. Original Characters are characters and if they're important to the story, they deserve to be tagged for just like canon characters do.

There are tags for “Original Character(s),” “Original Male Character(s),” and “Original Female Character(s).” Use these tags! If you have OCs you're going to be using frequently in different stories, type up a character tag in the form “[OC's Name] – Original Character” and use that in addition to the generic OC tags.

Also tag “Reader,” “You,” or “Me” as a character if you've written a reader- or self-insert.

You can use the “Minor Characters” tag to wrap up everybody, both OC and canon, who doesn't warrant their own character tag. Remember, though, that this tag is also used to refer to minor canon characters who may not have their own official names.

Just like when tagging for relationships, the convention when tagging for characters is to use their full name. The suggestions the Archive gives you as you type will help you use the established way of referring to a given character.

Characters who go by more than one name usually have their two most used names listed together as one tag with the two names separated by a vertical bar like “Andy | Andromache of Scythia.” This also gets used sometimes for characters who have different names in an adaptation than in the source text, or a different name in the English-language localization of a work than in the original language. For character names from both real-world and fictional languages and cultures that put family or surname before the given name—like the real Japanese name Takeuchi Naoko or the made up Bajoran name Kira Nerys—that order is used when tagging, even if you wrote your fic putting the given name first.

Some characters' tags include the fandom they're from in parentheses after their name like “Connor (Detroit: Become Human).” This is mostly characters with ordinary given names like Connor and no canon surname, characters who have the same full name as a character in another fandom, such as Billy Flynn the lawyer from the musical Chicago and Billy Flynn the serial killer played by Tim Curry in Criminal Minds, and characters based on mythological, religious, or historical figures or named for common concepts such as Lucifer, Loki, Amethyst, Death, and Zero that make appearances in multiple fandoms.

Additional Tags

Additional Tags is one of the most complicated, and often the longest, section of metatext we find ourselves providing when we post fic. It's also the one that gives our readers the greatest volume of information.

That, of course, is what makes it so hard for us to do well.

It can help to break down Additional Tags into three main functions of tag: courtesy tags, descriptive tags, and personal tags.

Courtesy tags serve as extensions of the rating and warning systems. They can help clarify the rating, provide more information about the Archive Warnings you've used or chosen not to use, and give additional warnings to tell readers there are things in this fic that may be distasteful, upsetting, or triggering but that the Archive doesn't have a standard warning for.

Descriptive tags give the reader information about who's in this fic, what kind of things happen, what tropes are in play, and what the vibe is, as well as practical information about things like format and tense.

Personal tags tell the readers things about us, the author, our process, our relationship to our fic, and our thoughts at the time of posting.

It doesn't really matter what order you put these tags in, but it is best practice to try to clump them: courtesy tags all together so it's harder for a reader to miss an important one, ship-related info tags together, character-related info tags together, etc.

There are tons and tons of established tags on Ao3, and while it's totally fine, fun, and often necessary to make up your own tags, it's also important to use established tags that fit your fic. For one thing, using established tags makes life easier for the tag wranglers behind the scenes. Using a new tag you just made up that means the same thing as an established tag makes more work for the tag wranglers. We like the tag wranglers, they're all volunteers, and they're largely responsible for the search and sorting features being functional. Be kind to the tag wranglers.

For basically the same reasons, using established tags makes it easier for readers to find your fic. If a reader either searches by a tag or uses filters on another search to “Include” that tag, and you didn't use that tag, your fic will not show up for them even if what you wrote is exactly what they're looking for. Established tags can be searched by exactly the same way as you search by fandom or pairing, your off the cuff tags cannot.

Let's talk about some well-known established tags and common tag types, divvied up by main function.

Courtesy

A lot of courtesy tags are specific warnings like “Dubious Consent,” “Incest,” “Drug Use,” “Extremely Underage,” “Toxic Relationship,” and “Abuse.” Many of these have even more specific versions such as “Recreational Drug Use” and “Nonconsensual Drug Use,” or “Mildly Dubious Consent” and “Extremely Dubious Consent.”

Giving details about what, if any, drugs are used or mentioned, specifying what kinds of violence or bodily harm are discussed or depicted, details about age differences or power-imbalanced relationships between characters who date or have sex, discussion or depictions of suicide, severe or terminal illness, or mental health struggles is useful. It helps give readers a clear sense of what they'll encounter in your fic and decide if they're up for it.

One the most useful courtesy warning tags is “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” which basically means “there are things in this fic which are really screwed up and may be disturbing, read at your own risk, steer clear if you're not sure.” This tag—like all courtesy warnings, really—is a show of good faith, by using it you are being a responsible, and thoughtful member of the fanfic community by giving readers the power and necessary information to make their own informed decisions about what they are and are not comfortable reading.

Saying to “Heed the tags” is quite self-explanatory and, if used, should be the last or second to last tag so it's easy to spot. Remember, though, that “Heed the tags” isn't useful if your tags aren't thorough and clear.

“Additional Warnings In Author's Note” is one of only things that should ever go after “Heed the tags.” If you use this, your additional warnings need to go in the author's note at the very beginning of the fic, not the one at the end of the first chapter. If your additional warnings write up is going to be very long because it's highly detailed, then it can go at the bottom of the chapter with a note at the beginning indicating that the warnings are at the bottom. Some authors give an abbreviated or vague set of warnings in the initial note, then longer, highly detailed, spoilery warnings in the end note. It's best to make it as simple and straightforward as possible for readers to access warnings.

Tagging with “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat,” “Heed the tags,” or “Additional Warnings In Author's Note” is not a substitute for thorough and appropriate courtesy tagging. These are extra reminders to readers to look closely at the other warnings you've given.

While most courtesy tags are warnings, some are assurances like “No Lesbians Die” or “It's Not As Bad As It Sounds.” A fic tagged for rape or dub-con may get a tag assuring that the consent issues are not between the characters in the main ship; or a fic with a premise that sounds likely to involve lack of consent but actually doesn't may get a tag that it's “NOT rape/non-con.” A tag like “Animal Death” may be immediately followed by a freeform tag assuring that the animal that dies is not the protagonist's beloved horse.

Descriptive

There are a few general kinds of descriptive tags including character-related, ship-related, temporal, relation-to-canon, trope-related, smut details, and technical specifications.

Many character- and ship-related tags simply expand on the Character and Relationship tags we've already talked about. This is usually the place to specify details about OCs and inserts, such as how a reader-insert is gendered.

When it comes to character-related tags, one of the most common types in use on Ao3 and in fandom at large is the bang-path. This is things like werewolf!Alex, trans!Max, top!Sam, kid!Jamie, and captain!Tori. Basically, a bang-path is a way of specifying a version of a character. We've been using this format for decades; it comes from the very first email systems used by universities in the earliest days of internet before the World Wide Web existed. It's especially useful for quickly and concisely explaining the roles of characters in an AU. Nowadays this is also one of the primary conventions for indicating who's top and who's bottom in a ship if that's information you feel the need to establish. The other current convention for indicating top/bottom is as non-bang-path character-related tags in the form “Top [Character A], Bottom [Character B].”

Other common sorts of character tags are things like “[Character A] Needs a Hug,” “Emotionally Constipated [Character B],” and “[Character C] is a Good Dad.”

Some character-related tags don't refer to a particular character by name, but tell readers something about what kinds of characters are in the fic. Usually, this indicates the minority status of characters and may indicate whether or not that minority status is canon, as in “Nonbinary Character,” “Canon Muslim Character,” “Deaf Character,” and “Canon Disabled Character.”

Down here in the tags is the place to put ship nicknames! This is also where to say things like “They're idiots your honor” or indicate that they're “Idiots in Love,” maybe both since “Idiots in Love” is an established searchable tag but “They're idiots your honor” isn't yet. If your fandom has catchphrases related to your ship, put that here if you want to.

If relevant, specify some things about the nature of relationships in your fic such as “Ambiguous Relationship,” “Queerplatonic Relationships,” “Polyamory,” “Friends With Benefits,” “Teacher-Student Relationship,” and so on. Not all fics need tags like these. Use your best judgement whether your current fic does.

Temporal tags indicate when your fic takes place. That can be things like “Pre-Canon” and “Post-Canon,” “Pre-War,” “Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “1996-1997 NHL season,” “Future Fic,” and so on. These tags may be in reference to temporal landmarks in canon, in the real world, or both depending on what's appropriate.

Some temporal tags do double duty by also being tags about the fic's relationship to canon. The Pre- and Post-Canon tags are like that.

Other relation-to-canon type tags are “Canon Compliant” for fics that fit completely inside the framework of canon without changing or contradicting anything, “Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence” for fics that are compliant up to a certain point in canon, then veer off (maybe because you started writing the fic when the show was on season two but now it's at season four and you're not incorporating everything from the newer seasons, maybe a character died and you refuse to acknowledge that, maybe you just want to explore what might have happened if a particular scene had gone differently), and the various other Alternate Universe tags for everything from coffee shop AUs and updates to modern settings, to realities where everyone is a dragon or no one has their canon superpowers.

The established format for these tags is “Alternate Universe – [type],” but a few have irregular names as well, such as “Wingfic” for AUs in which characters who don't ordinarily have wings are written as having wings.

If you have written an AU, please tag clearly what it is! Make things easy on both the readers who are in the mood to read twenty royalty AUs in a row, the readers who are in the middle of finals week and the thought of their favorite characters suffering through exams in a college AU would destroy the last shred of their sanity but would enjoy watching those characters teach high school, and the readers who really just want to stick to the world of canon right now.

Admittedly, it can get a little confusing what AU tag or tags you need to describe what you've written since most of us have never had a fandom elder sit us down and explain what the AU tags mean. One common mix up is tagging things “Alternate Universe - Modern Setting” when what's meant is “Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence.” The misunderstanding here is usually reading “Alternate Universe - Modern Setting” and thinking it means an alternate version of the canon universe that is set at the same time as the canon universe, but is different in some way. That's not how the tag is meant to be used, though.

The Modern Setting AU tag is specifically for fic set now (at approximately the same time period it was written), for media that's canonically set somewhere that is very much not the present of the real world. This can mean things set in the past (like Jane Austen), the future (like Star Trek), or a fantasy world entirely different from our own (like Lord of the Rings or Avatar: the Last Airbender). Fic for a canon that's set more or less “now” doesn't need the Modern Setting AU tag, even if the world of canon is different from our own. If you're removing those differences by putting fantasy or superhero characters in a world without magic or supersoldier serum, you might want the “Alternate Universe - No Powers” tag instead.

Some of the most fun descriptive tags are trope tags. This includes things like “Mutual Pining,” “Bed Sharing” for when your OTP gets to their hotel room to find There Was Only One Bed, “Fake Dating,” “Angst,” Fluff,” “Hurt/Comfort” and all its variants. Readers love tropes at least as much as we love writing them and want to be able to find their favorites. Everyone also has tropes they don't like and would rather avoid. Tagging them allows your fic to be filtered in and out by what major tropes you've used.

Explicit fics, and sometimes fics with less restrictive ratings, that contain sex usually have tags indicating details about the nature of the sexual encounter(s) portrayed and what sex acts are depicted. These are descriptive tags, but they also do double duty as courtesy tags. This is very much a situation in which tags are a consent mechanism; by thoroughly and clearly tagging your smut you are giving readers the chance to knowingly opt in or out of the experience you've written.

Most of the time, it's pretty easy to do basic tagging for sex acts—you know whether what you wrote shows Vaginal Sex, Anal Sex, or Non-penetrative Sex. You probably know the names for different kinds of Oral Sex you may have included. You might not know what to call Frottage or Intercrural Sex, though, even if you understand the concept and included the act in your fic. Sometimes there are tags with rectangle-square type relationships (all Blow Jobs are Oral Sex, but not all Oral Sex is a Blow Job) and you're not sure if you should tag for both—you probably should. Sometimes there are tags for overlapping, closely related, or very similar acts or kinks and you're not sure which to tag—that one's more of judgement call; do your best to use the tags that most closely describe what you wrote.

Tag for the kinks at play, if any, so readers can find what they're into and avoid what they're not. Tag for what genitalia characters have if it's nonobvious, including if there's Non-Human Genitalia involved. Tag your A/B/O, your Pon Farr, and your Tentacles, including whether it's Consentacles or Tentacle Rape.

Technical specification tags give information about aspects of the fic other than its narrative content. Most things on Ao3 are prose fiction so that's assumed to be the default, so anything else needs to be specified in tags. That includes Poetry, Podfics, things in Script Format, and Art. If it is a podfic, you should tag with the approximate length in minutes (or hours). If a fic is Illustrated (it has both words and visual art) tag for that.

Tag if your fic is a crossover or fusion. The difference, if you're not sure, is that in a crossover, two (or more) entire worlds from different media meet, whereas in a fusion, some aspects of one world, like the cast of characters, are combined with aspects of another, like the setting or magic system.

If the team of paranormal investigators from one show get in contact with the cast of aliens from another show, that's a crossover and you need to have all the media you're drawing from up in the Fandom tags. If you've given the cast of Hamlet physical manifestations of their souls in the form of animal companions like the daemons from His Dark Materials but nothing else from His Dark Materials shows up, that's a fusion, the Fandom tag should be “Hamlet - Shakespeare,” and you need the “Alternate Universe - Daemons” tag. If you've given the members of a boy band elemental magic powers like in Avatar: the Last Airbender, that can be more of a judgement call depending how much from Avatar you've incorporated into your story. If absolutely no characters or specific settings from Avatar show up, it's probably a fusion. Either way, if the boyband exists in real life, it needs to be tagged as RPF.

Tag if your fic is a Reader-Insert or Self-Insert.

You might want to tag for whether your fic is written with POV First, Second, or Third Person, and if it's Past Tense or Present Tense (or Future Tense, though that's extremely uncommon). For POV First Person fics that are not self-inserts, or POV Third Person fics that are written in third person limited, you may want to tag which character's POV is being shown. Almost all POV Second Person fics are reader-insert, so if you've written one that isn't, you should tag for who the “you” is.

A fic is “POV Outsider” if the character through whom the story is being conveyed is outside the situation or not familiar with the characters and context a reader would generally know from canon. The waitress who doesn't know the guy who just sat down in her diner is a monster hunter, and the guy stuck in spaceport because some hotshot captain accidentally locked down the entire space station, are both potential narrators for POV Outsider stories.

Other technical specifications can be tags for things like OCtober and Kinktober or fic bingo games. Tagging something as a Ficlet, One Shot, or Drabble is a technical specification (we're not going to argue right now over what counts as a drabble). Tagging for genre, like Horror or Fantasy, is too.

It's also good to tag accessibility considerations like “Sreenreader Friendly,” but make sure your fic definitely meets the needs of a given kind of accessibility before tagging it.

Personal

Even among personal tags there are established tags! Things like “I'm Sorry,” “The Author Regrets Nothing,” “The Author Regrets Everything,” and “I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping” are common ones. Tags about us and our relationship to the fic, such as “My First Work In This Fandom,” “Author is Not Religious,” and “Trans Porn By A Trans Author,” can help readers gauge what to expect from our fic. Of course, you are not at all obligated to disclose any personal information for any reason when posting your fic.

The “I'm Bad At Tagging” tag is common, but probably overused. Tagging is hard; very few of us have a natural feel for it even with lots of practice. It's not a completely useless tag because it can indicate to readers that you've probably missed some things you should have tagged for, so they should be extra careful; but it can also turn into a crutch, an excuse to not try, and therefore a sign to readers they can't trust your tagging job. Just do your best, and leave off the self depreciation. If you're really concerned about the quality of your tagging, consider putting in an author's note asking readers to let you know if there are any tags you should add.

You might want to let readers know your fic is “Not Beta Read” or, if you're feeling a little cheekier than that, say “No Beta We Die Like Men” or its many fandom-specific variants like the “No Beta We Die Like Robins” frequently found among Batman fics and “No beta we die like Sunset Curve” among Julie and The Phantoms fic. Don't worry, the Archive recognizes all of these as meaning “Not Beta Read.”

The Archive can be inconsistent about whether it stacks specific variants of Additional Tags under the broadest version of the tag like it does with Fandom tags, so best practice is usually to use both. You can double check by trying to search by a variant tag (or clicking on someone else's use of the variant); if the results page says the broader or more common form of the tag, those stack.

There's no such thing as the right number of tags. Some people prefer more tags and more detail, while other people prefer fewer more streamlined tags, and different fics have different things that need to be tagged for. There is, however, such a thing as too many tags. A tagblock that takes up the entire screen, or more, can be unreadable, at which point they are no longer useful. Focus on the main points and don't try to tag for absolutely everything. Use the “Additional Warnings In Author's Note” strategy if your courtesy tags are what's getting out of hand.

Tag for as much as you feel is necessary for readers to find your fic and understand what they're getting into if they decide to open it up.

A little bit of redundancy in tags is not a sin. In fact, slight redundancy is usually preferable to vagueness. Clear communication in tags is a cardinal virtue. Remember that tags serve a purpose, they're primarily a tool for sorting and filtering, and (unlike on some other sites like tumblr) they work, so it's best to keep them informative and try to limit rambling in the tags. Ramble at length in your author's notes instead!

Titles

Picking a title can be one of the most daunting and frustrating parts of posting a fic. Sometimes we just know what to call our fics and it's a beautiful moment. Other times we stare at that little input box for what feels like an eternity.

The good news is there's really no wrong way to select a title. Titles can be long or short, poetic or straight to the point. Song lyrics, idioms, quotes from literature or from the fic itself can be good ways to go.

Single words or phrases with meanings that are representative of the fic can be great. A lot of times these are well known terms or are easy enough to figure out like Midnight or Morning Glow, but if you find yourself using something that not a lot of people know what it means, like Chiaroscuro (an art style that uses heavy shadow and strong contrast between light and dark), Kintsukuroi (the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold), or Clusivity (the grammatical term for differences in who is or isn't included in a group pronoun), you should define the term in either a subtitle, i.e. “Chiaroscuro: A Study In Contrast,” or at the beginning of the summary.

As a courtesy to other writers, especially in small fandoms, you may want to check to make sure there's not already another fic with the same title in the same fandom, but this is not required. In large fandoms, there's no point in even trying. After all, there are only so many puns to be made about the full moon and only so many verses to Hallelujah.

It may be common practice on other platforms to include information such as fandom or ship in the title of a fic, but on Ao3 nothing that is specified by tags belongs in the title unless your title happens to be the same as a tag because, for instance, you've straightforwardly titled your character study of Dean Winchester “Dean Winchester Character Study” and also responsibly tagged it as such.

Summaries

Yes, you really do need to put something down for the summary. It might only need to be a single sentence, but give the readers something to go off of.

The summary is there to serve two purposes: one, to catch the interest of potential readers, give them a taste of what's inside, and make them want to know more; and two, to give you a space to provide information or make comments that don't really fit in the tags but that you want readers to see before they open the fic.

We've already talked some about that second function. When you put an explanation of the title or clarification about tags in the summary, that's the purpose it's serving. You can also put notes to “Heed the tags” or instruct readers that there are additional warnings in the author's note here in the summary, rather than doing so in the tags.

The first function, the actual summarizing, can be very hard for some of us. It's basically the movie trailer for your fic, butwhat are you even supposed to say?

There are two main strategies as to how to approach this: the blurb, and the excerpt. Blurbs are like the synopses you at least used to see on the backs of published books, or the “Storyline” section on an IMDb page. Writing one is a matter of telling your readers who does what, under what circumstances.

Depending on the fic, one sentence can capture the whole thing: “Sam and Alex have sex on a train.” “Tori tries to rob a bank.” “If anybody had mentioned Max's new house was haunted, Jamie wouldn't have agreed to help with the move.”

Sometimes a blurb can be a question! “What happens when you lock a nuclear engineer in a closet with a sewing kit, a tennis ball, and half a bottle of Sprite?”

Of course, plenty of blurbs are more than one sentence. Their length can vary pretty significantly depending on the type and length of fic you're working with and how much detail you're trying to convey, but it shouldn't get to be more than a few short paragraphs. You're not retelling the entire fic here.

An excerpt is a portion of the fic copied out to serve as the summary. This, too, can vary in length from a line or two to several paragraphs, but shouldn't get too long. It should not be an entire scene unless that scene happens to be uncommonly short. It's important to select a portion of the fic that both indicates the who, what, and under what circumstances of the fic and is representative of the overall tone. Excerpts that are nothing but dialogue with no indication of who's talking are almost never a good choice. Portions that are sexually explicit or extremely violent are never ever a good choice—if it deserves content warnings, it belongs inside the fic, not on the results page.

Counterintuitively, some of the best excerpts won't even look like an excerpt to the reader if they don't contain dialogue. They seem like particularly literary blurbs until the reader reaches that part in the fic and realizes they recognize a section of narration.

Some of us have very strong preferences as to whether we write blurbs or use excerpts for our summaries. Some readers have very strong preferences as to which they find useful. Ultimately, there's no accounting for taste, but there are things we can do to limit the frustration for readers who prefer summaries of the opposite kind than we prefer to write, without increasing our own frustration or work load very much. Part of that is understanding what readers dislike about each type so we know what to mitigate.

Blurbs can seem dry, academic, and overly simplified. They don't automatically give the reader a sense of your writing style the way an excerpt does. They can also seem redundant, like they're just rehashing information already given in the tags, so the reader feels like they're being denied any more information without opening the fic.

Excerpts can seem lazy, like you, the author, don't care enough to bother writing a blurb, or pushy like you're telling the reader “just read the fic; I'm not going to give you the information you need to decide if you want to read or not, I'm shoving it in front of you and you just have to read it.” That effect gets worse if your tags aren't very informative or clear about what the plot is, if the excerpt is obviously just the first few lines or paragraphs of the fic, if the except is particularly long, or, worst of all, if all three are true at once.

A lot of the potential problems with blurbs can be minimized by having fun writing them! Make it punchy, give it some character, treat it like part of the story, not just a book report. A fic for a serialized show or podcast, for instance, could have a blurb written in the style of the show's “previously on” or the podcast's intro. Make sure the blurb gives the reader something they can't just get from the tags—like the personality of your writing, important context or characterization, or a sense of the shape of the story—but don't try to skimp on the tags to do it!

Really, the only way to minimize the potential problems with excerpts is to be very mindful in selecting them. Make sure the portion you've chosen conveys the who, what, and under what circumstances and isn't too long. You know the story; what seems clear and obvious from the excerpt to you might not be apparent to someone who doesn't already know what happens, so you might need to ask a friend to double check you.

The absolute best way to provide a summary that works for everybody is to combine both methods. It really isn't that hard to stick a brief excerpt before your blurb, or tack a couple lines of blurb after your excerpt, but it can make a world of difference for how useful and inviting your summary is to a particular reader. The convention for summaries that use both is excerpt first, then blurb.

If you're struggling to figure out a summary, or have been in the habit of not providing one, try not to stress over it. Anything is better than nothing. As long as you've written something for a summary, you've given the reader a little more to help them make their decision. What really isn't helpful, though, is saying “I'm bad at summaries” in your summary. It's a lot like the “I'm Bad At Tagging” tag in that it's unnecessarily self depreciating, frequently comes across as an excuse not to try, and sometimes really is just an excuse. Unlike the “I'm Bad At Tagging” tag, which has the tiny saving grace of warning readers you've probably missed something, saying you're bad at summaries has no utility at all, and may drive away a reader who thought your summary was quite good, but is uncomfortable with the negative attitude reflected by that statement. Summaries are hard. It's okay if you don't like your summary, but it's important for it to be there, and it's important to be kind to yourself about it. You're trying, that's what matters.

Author's Notes

Author's notes are the one place where we, the writers, directly address and initiate contact with our readers. We may also talk to them in the comments section, but that's different because they initiate that interaction while we reply, and comments are mostly one-on-one while in author's notes we're addressing everyone who ever reads our fic.

The very first note on a fic should contain any information, such as warnings or explanations, that a reader needs to see before they get to the body of the story, as well as anything like thanks to your beta, birthday wishes to a character, or general hellos and announcements you want readers to see before they get to the body of the story. On multi-chapter fics, notes at the beginning of chapters serve the same function for that chapter as the initial note on the fic does for the whole story, so you can do things like warn for Self-Harm on the two chapters out of thirty where it comes up, let everyone know your update schedule will be changing, or wish your readers a merry Christmas, if they celebrate it, on the chapter you posted on December 23rd but is set in mid-March.

Notes at the end of a fic or chapter are for things that don't need to be said or are not useful to a reader until after they've read the preceding content, such as translations for that handful of dialogue that's in Vulcan or Portuguese, or any parting greetings or announcements you want to give, like a thanks for reading or a reminder school is starting back so you won't be able to write as much. End notes are the best place to plug your social media to readers if you're inclined to do so, but remember that cannot include payment platforms like Patreon or Ko-fi.

As previously mentioned, warnings can go in end notes but that really should only be done when the warnings are particularly long, such that the length might cause a problem for readers who are already confident in their comfort level and would just want to scroll past the warning description. In that case, the additional warnings need to go in the note at the end of the first chapter, rather than at the end of the fic, if it's a multi-chapter fic; and you need to include an initial note telling readers that warnings/explanations of tags are at the bottom so they know to follow where the Archive tells them to see the end of the chapter/work for “more notes.”

When posting a new work, where the Preface section gives you the option to add notes “at the beginning” or “at the end” or both, if you check both boxes, it means notes at the beginning and end of the entire fic, not the beginning and end of the first chapter. For single-chapter fics this difference doesn't really matter, but for multi-chapter fics it matters a lot. In order to add notes to the beginning or end of the first chapter of a multi-chapter fic you have to first go through the entire process to post the new fic, then go in to Edit, Edit Chapter, and add the notes there.

Series and Chapters

Dealing with Series and Chapters is actually two different issues, but they're closely related and cause some of us mixups, especially when we're new to the site and its systems, so we're going to cover them together.

Series on Ao3 are for collecting up different stories that you've written that are associated with each other in some way. Chapters are for dividing up one story into parts, usually for pacing and to give yourself and your readers a chance to take breaks and breathe, rather than trying to get through the entire thing in a single marathon sitting (not that we won't still do that voluntarily, but it's nice to have rest points built in if we need them).

If your story would be one book if it was officially published, then it should be posted as a single fic—with multiple chapters if it's long or has more than one distinct part, like separate vignettes that all go together. If you later write a sequel to that fic, post it as a new fic and put them together in a series. It's exactly like chapters in a book and books in a series. Another way to think of this structure is like a TV show: different fics in the series are like different seasons of the show, with individual chapters being like episodes.

If you have several fics that all take place in the same AU but really aren't the same story those should go together as a series. If you wrote a story about a superhero team re-cast as school teachers, then wrote another story about different characters in the same school, that's this situation.

Series are also the best way to handle things like prompt games, bingos, or Kinktober, or collect up one shots and drabbles especially if your various fills, entries, and drabbles are for more than one fandom. If you put everything for a prompt game or bingo, or all your drabbles, together as one fic with a different chapter for each story, what ends up happening is that fic gets recognized by the Archive as a crossover when it isn't, so it gets excluded from the results pages for everyone who told the filters to Exclude Crossovers even though one of the stories you wrote is exactly what they're looking for; and that fic ends up with tons and tons of wildly varying and self-contradictory tags because it's actually carrying the tags for several entirely different, possibly unrelated stories, which also means it ends up getting excluded from results pages because, for instance, one out of your thirty-one Kinktober entries is about someone's NoTP.

Dividing these kinds of things up into multiple fic in a series makes it so much easier for readers to find what of your work they actually want to read.

If you've previously posted such things as a single fic, don't worry, it's a really common misunderstanding and there is absolutely nothing stopping you from reposting them separately. You may see traffic on them go up if you do!

Parting Thoughts

Metatext is ultimately all about communication, and in this context effective communication is a matter of responsibility and balance.

Ao3 is our archive. It's designed for us, the writers, to have the freedom to write and share whatever stories we want without having to worry that we'll wake up one day and find our writing has been deleted overnight without warning. That has happened too many times to so many in our community as other fanfic sites have died, been shut down, or caved to threats of legal action. Ao3 is dedicated to defending our legal right to create and share our stories. Part of the deal is that, in exchange for that freedom and protection, we take up the responsibility to communicate to readers what we're writing and who it's appropriate for.

We are each other's readers, and readers who don't write are still part of our community. We have a responsibility as members of this community to be respectful of others in our shared spaces. Ao3 is a shared space. The best way we have to show each other respect is to give one another the information needed to decide if a given fic is something we want to engage with or not, and then, in turn, to not engage with fic that isn't our cup of tea. As long as our fellow writer has been clear about what their fic is, they've done their part of the job. If we decided to look at the fic despite the information given and didn't like what we found, then that's on us.

Because metatext is how we put that vital information about our fics out in the community, it's important that our metatext is clear and easy to parse. The key to that is balance. Striking the balance between putting enough tags to give a complete picture and not putting too many tags that become an unreadable wall; the balance between the urge to be thorough and tag every character and the need to be restrained so those looking for fics actually about a certain character can find them; the balance between using established tags for clarity and ease and making up our own tags for specificity and fun.

Do your best, act in good faith, remember you're communicating with other people behind those usernames and kudos, and, most importantly, have fun with your writing!

#THE GUIDE #metatext #fandom meta #fandom etiquette #Eiiri made this

4K notes · View notes

asparklerwhowrites · 3 years

Text

Writing Indian characters, from an Indian person

India is a huge country! while most characters in mainstream media are from the 'big cities' i.e Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, etc, there are many, many more places and areas to look at! since India is such a vast country, there is incredible diversity. 19,500 languages and dialects are present, with people of different skin, eye, and hair colors and types! there are, of course, a lot of inherent prejudices present, which I'll address a little later.

#1. Know their roots

There is no 'one' Indian experience. People from different places celebrate different festivals, worship different gods, and speak different languages!

A checklist of things you should know about your Indian character's background, in essence:

Which state and city/town/village are they from?

How many and which languages do they speak, and with what frequency? (Mostly, people can speak at least two languages!)

Are they religious? (more on religion later)

What are some of their favourite memories/moments linked to their culture? (festivals, family gatherings, etc)

#2. Naming your character

Some common names for boys: Aarav, Advik, Shlok, Farhan, Ritvik, Aarush, Krish, Ojas, Zain.

Some common names for girls: Arushi, Ishita, Trisha, Rhea, Riya, Zoya, Vedika, Khushi, Charvi.

Common last names: Shah, Singh, Agarwal, Banerjee, Dala, Bhat, Joshi, Iyer, Jain, Dhawan, Dixit.

Be careful while picking a last name: last names are very much indicators of the ethnicity/community you're from! most older folks can guess the ethnicity of people just by their last name - it's pretty cool.

Naming systems usually follow the name-surname format, and children usually take the last name of their father - but I believe some regions have a bit of a different system, so look that up!

#3. Stereotypes to avoid

This goes without saying, but I'm gonna say it anyway. Being 'Indian' shouldn't be your character's entire personality. Give them traits, feelings, and a purpose other than being a token diverse character. Some stereotypes that are really a no-no when it comes to Indian characters:

Making them good at math and academics in general (my Cs in math beg to differ that all Indians are good at math. often, the reason Indians are stereotyped to be so smart stems from an incredibly toxic and harmful environment at home which forces children to get good grades. unless you've experienced that, its not your story to write)

Making your Indian character 'hate' being Indian (not everyone?? hates their culture?? like there are many, MANY faults with India as a country, and it's important to recognize and take action against that - which often makes us iffy about how we feel about our country, it's genuinely not your place to write about that UNLESS you are Indian. don't bring in 'hatred' of a place you've never visited, and don't know much about.)

Make them scaredy-cats, 'cowards', who are good at nothing but being the 'brain' (I will literally behead you if you do this/lh)

#4. Why India shouldn't be portrayed as 'perfect' either

It's likely that most of you won't be going in SO deep with your Indian character, but India isn't the perfect 'uNiTy iN diVerSitY' as it's depicted in media. There are incredible tensions between religions (especially Hindus and Muslims), and even remnants of the 'untouchable' way of thinking remain between castes. There's a lot of violence against women, and misogyny is definitely something Indians are not foreign to. People with paler skin are considered to be 'better' than those with darker skin (in the older generations especially)

#5. Some common customs

Removing your shoes before entering the house, since your house is considered to be 'godly' and shoes shouldn't be brought inside

Eating dal (lentils), chawal (rice), sabji (a mixture of vegetables/meat that's cooked in different ways) roti (Indian flatbread) is considered to be a full, well-balanced meal and at least aspects of it are eaten for lunch and dinner (if not all four elements)

The suffixes -bhai (for men) and -ben (for women) are added to first names and are commonly used by adults to refer to someone of importance or who they hold to esteem.

However, 'bhai' (which literally means 'brother) is often used as slang when referring to friends or family. Other slang includes 'arrey' which is used to show irritation or 'yaar' which has the same context.

It's custom to call adults who you refer to in a friendly way 'aunty' or 'uncle', like the parents of your friends.

Talking back to your elders is forbidden, especially your grandparents who you have to refer to with utmost respect.

#6. Religions

India is a very religiously diverse country. The most common religion is Hinduism, then Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, and Buddhism. All religions have their own complexities, and since I'm a Hindu, I can tell you a little bit about that!

It's common to have a mandir which is a small altar dedicated to the deities your family worships. (Fun fact - they're usually placed in the East direction because that's where the sun rises)

Most kids can say a few shloks by-heart, which are a few lines of prayer! (lmao I've forgotten most but I used to be able to rattle off at least ten when I was younger)

Most people know at least the general plot of the Ramayan and Mahabharat - two famous epic stories. (I'm not sure if they're inherently 'Hindu' or not)

Many people wear necklaces with a small pendant of the deity they worship!

Common Hindu deities: Saraswati, Ganesha, Shiva, Krishna, Vishnu.

It's important to note that religious violence is a thing. Muslims especially, are oppressed and discriminated against. It's a very, very complex issue, and one that's been going on for thousands of years.

#7. Myth & Facts

India is a very poor country

Yep! Lakhs of people live in villages with no electricity, clean water, or amenities nearby. There's no point sugar-coating it. There are HUGE gaps between the poor and the rich (have you heard of Ambani and Adani :D) and while our millionaires rejoice in their thirty-story mansions, people die of famine, disease, and hunger every day. I am personally lucky enough to be EXTREMELY privileged and attend an international school and live in one of the most developed cities. Most people aren't as lucky as me, and it's a really true, horrifying reality.

Everyone in India is vegetarian

No lmao - while many people ARE, there's a greater and equal amount of non-vegetarian people.

We burn our dead in parking lots

This circulated back when the second wave was going on in India, and the media blew it out of proportion. First of all, what the actual f!ck. Cremation is a Hindu ritual, and by saying that aLL Indians burn their dead you are erasing the other religions here. Secondly, cremation is a sacred ritual only attended by close family of the deceased member. It does not happed in PARKING LOTS. It's a time of grief and loss, not a way to humiliate a religion for the way they treat their dead.

Drop any other questions about India in the comments/DM me!

468 notes · View notes

sailorbadger · 3 years

Text

Robin Hood episode ranking part 5 (10-1)

Finally, the top 10 of my Robin Hood episode ranking. The previous parts can be found here [link]. If you’ve enjoyed and/or hated my commentary or want to chime in with your own opinion, feel free to comment or send me an ask. So here it is, the top 10:

10. 3x4 – Sins of the Father

Watch 1x6 and then this one right after and tell me these aren’t the same episode. I fought so hard to get this episode to the top 10. At first I was shocked to find an episode in season 3 that I enjoyed this much, but here we are. This episode has the fun feeling of adventure that a lot of season 2 has. I didn’t remember much from this episode before my rewatch, and I was pleasantly surprised. Kate had a lot of potential at this point, and I don’t have much to complain about her besides her terrible braid. Tuck was a great therapist, and I enjoyed his scene with Edmund. The reason why I think this episode is a better version of 1x6 is because of the story of the guest characters. The biggest negative thing in this episode is the Much-Kate-Allan love triangle. But aside from that, I truly enjoyed this episode, and I don’t care what anyone thinks, this belongs in my top 10.

9. 2x7 – Show Me The Money

Marian finding out about her father’s death is one of the saddest things in the whole series. Allan and Robin’s fight is also amazing. Those two things are the highlights of this episode, and together with everything else in this episode they make this a great and fun adventure. Allan works so well as a bad guy, and it’s almost a shame he didn’t get to do this longer. I don’t have a lot to say about this episode other than that I really like it.

8. 1x4 – Parent Hood

In this episode we see for the first time someone dying for Robin. The episode is just very solid, and I originally had this on the number 5 spot on this list. The scene with Roy and his mother is heartbreaking. In this episode the Sheriff is finally becoming the unapologetic villain I love. I wish the fact that Gisborne had a bastard child he almost got killed had been brought up later on. Overall, this episode has always been one of my favorites, and it is the first one from season 1 I included in my rewatch.

7. 2x11 – Treasure of the Nation

I loved Prince John, so of course I’m going to love his mother. The queen is a delightful guest character, and she steals any scene she’s in. The real reason why this episode is this high on the list is Marian’s plotline. I love her and Allan’s interactions in this episode, and it’s great to get the Nightwatchman back after such a long time. It’s a shame that she had to give that role up, because as I said earlier, this is where a part of her character died. This episode also inspired us to have a conversation about how everyone would act like in an escape room, so it gets a few points for that.

6. 2x10 – Walkabout

I want to watch a play that is written, directed, and acted by the Sheriff. He is so wonderfully dramatic in this. Unlike in the season 3 finale, in this episode the idea of Nottingham being threatened is executed a lot better. I like how Allan tries to keep every option open for himself. The scene where Much finds out about Robin and Marian’s engagement is so sweet and touching. (In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I love Much and want happiness for him.) This episode also highlights well the differences between how each of the characters approach their cause. It’s obvious that John just wants to do good, but he is unable to view the larger picture. This episode has the right amount of tension, and with a little bit of tweaking, it could have been made into a two-part season finale.

5. 1x7 – Brothers in Arms

When we were watching this episode, my friend was so tired that after the episode finished, I had to answer the question “Wait, was one of them Allan’s brother?”. This episode is the first one where the heroes truly fail, and even though they manage to just save Marian, she still ends up engaged to Gisborne. The scene with Allan and Djaq (and Will, because even though he doesn’t speak, he’s there, and it says a lot about their dynamic) is sweet, and it adds a lot to her character. The necklace storyline is intense and keeps the story interesting until the very end. I had not expected this to end up being the best episode of season 1, but then again, there were many surprises when I was making this list.

4. 2x12 – A Good Day to Die

I love this episode. It’s rare to get an episode where the characters just sit down and talk about their feelings. Allan has his small crisis and ends up switching sides. It’s also great to once more see someone punch him in the face. I love the scene where the Sheriff is practicing his speech like any good villain. Will and Djaq are cute, even if their scene is very cheesy. I wish they had gotten together a few episodes earlier or stuck around for season 3, so that we could have seen more of them together and how it affects the rest of the gang. The highlight of this episode, however, is Much’s speech. The line “just because I love you doesn’t mean I can’t hate you too” is one of my favorite lines in the whole series. It’s a shame that Much gets sidelined in season 3. The characters have to face each other and themselves, and it makes this episode stand out.

3. 2x9 – Lardner’s Ring

I love this episode. It’s the best fun adventure episode this series has to offer. The Fool is a wonderful guest character. Where did he come from? What are his motives? It doesn’t matter, he’s here for comedy and chaos. He’s living my ideal life. Robin’s proposal is very in-character and sweet. There’s so much comedy in this episode, but it doesn’t overshadow the more serious scenes. This episode provided us with a great and frequently used “I hope you’re enjoying it, Allan. I couldn’t live with myself if I were you” WhatsApp-sticker (the line may not be completely accurate since I don’t remember how it goes in English). This episode has everything I could want from a Robin Hood -episode. The only reason why it is not on the first or second place is that there are two episodes that are even better.

2. 2x5 – Ducking and Diving

No placement in this list was as difficult to determine as deciding between the first and second place. After a very long conversation and going back and forth with it many times, this is the end result. Ducking and Diving is a perfect episode. Trying to find the spy is like a round of Among Us. Allan’s conversation with Djaq and final confrontation with Robin are amazing scenes. Robin’s plan of making it seem like the spy is Will confused me back when I first watched the episode, but looking at it now, it’s one of Robin’s better plans. Matilda is also one of the greatest guest characters this show has, I would watch a whole show about just her life. Everything in this episode ties together nicely, and the plot works both in the context of this episode and for the whole series.

1. 2x4 – Angel of Death

If I could only show one episode of this show to someone in order to convince them to watch the entire series, I would show them Angel of Death. And it is exactly what I did when we started this very chaotic viewing (and rewatch for me). This episode has everything. The plot is amazing, and the characters work well. Joseph is a good character. He reminds me of an academic who is really passionate about one thing in his field, only to find out someone has done research on his thesis topic and disproved his whole theory. I like that John is the one to come up with the cure for the poison. But really, Will is the character that shines in this episode. He didn’t get an episode for himself in season 1, so it’s good to see it happen here. He flips completely after seeing his father die, and even though Luke doesn’t get a lot of time in this episode, the relationship between the brothers is portrayed well. Allan’s betrayal also gets a body count, which sets up him having to be unmasked in the following episode. On top of all this, the sheriff is just plain evil, which is fun to watch. This episode is just perfect, and at this point I’ve seen it at least three times in the past few months, and I would still watch it again.

So there we go, the full ranking of all RH episodes. This rewatch was my favorite so far, because I got to watch the show with someone who had never seen it before. I’d like to thank anyone who read this 6000-word essay on a show that ended well over a decade ago. You didn’t need to, but you did anyway.

#robin hood bbc #bbc robin hood #rh episode ranking #this is a long one but I wanted top 10 in one post #I fought so hard to get number 10 into top 10 #idk what my next rh take will be #I kind of want to rant about s3 some more #anyway if someone's reading this send me your takes on my ranking #I'm starved for attention

14 notes · View notes

dreamerinsilico · 4 years

Text

Thanks to The Good Place s4 having made its way to Netflix, and me having Feelings, I’m going to take a bit to publicly chew on them now.

TL;DR: same as basically every take I’ve seen, it was a great finale that handled each of the characters in a way that made sense and also I cried through most of the last episode. But also I have vaguely cranky philosophical ruminations about it that don’t make me appreciate the show any less, but definitely want to yap about it.

(Details under the cut, because spoilers and also this may get long. Also apparently it’s going to involve some spoilers for The Old Guard. And maybe a few minor NBC Hannibal references.)

So, first I want to reiterate: the way the show ended, given everything else the show had done, made sense and was emotionally satisfying to me. I loved it.

In a bigger-picture sense, though... I’d really like to see more media that interfaces with the concept of immortality without concluding that death is the only way to give the human (or humanoid) existence meaning. Where we end up in the finale of The Good Place makes sense, in that it’s already been established that there’s an afterlife that doesn’t really have any inherent meaning beyond individual souls’ experiences of it and their relationships with one another. And it’s not hard to imagine that a lot of the small dramas and conflicts that provide variation to even very peaceful lives would be invalidated without any kind of pressure from those material needs. Given the foundations of the show, Our Heroes’ decision about how to change The Good Place for the better is... the only reasonable conclusion.

And, you know, I don’t blame the show for not being The piece of media I’m hoping for to just come out and say outright, “you know, actually fuck this whole death thing. Not a fan. Don’t need it. Let’s get rid of it.” That’s not what this show was ever even remotely trying to be about. It’s about coping with the reality of the human experience in the 20th/21st century, which includes death. (Even with my transhumanist leanings, as a bioengineer and also someone who ardently pays attention to other fields, I will not even hint at denying that this is going to be a mandatory part of our reality for quite a while yet.)

The conclusion the show draws that I very much do agree with (regardless of one’s stance on death) is that we require some form of tension to inject meaning. When I picture myself in the Final Form of the Good Place, I think most of my energy and desire would be focused on (I guess like a combo of Chidi and Tahani) asking questions of people there, and making peace with relationships that had somehow been left hanging. There’s a finite amount of each of those. I’d run out eventually. My scientific passion would have a hard time finding an outlet, because the laws of physics don’t apply and I can’t interface with living people who could still make use of my expertise and stubborn propensity to problem-solve. I’d like to think my creative leanings would still matter, but I’m not positive to what degree they would in that environment. (It’s worth a chuckle to me now that when they offhandedly noted that Shakespeare’s thousands of posthumous plays weren’t anywhere near as good as the ones he wrote on Earth, I was initially indignant. But with further thought it makes sense that the longer one is removed from that tension I referenced previously, the harder it would be to make meaningful art. Or to even have that art be appreciated by the audience, since, on the audience side, successful art plucks against the tension of the strings the audience itself carries. And when your audience is restricted to people in paradise who have already at-least-mostly self-actualized....)

Something about the finale that I’m still chewing over how I feel about was the very last scene. The implication of some form of reincarnation. (If that wasn’t supposed to be the takeaway from that... well, please tell me, but I *think* I remember some kind of rewards card reference with Eleanor and Michael from an earlier season?) The incurable romantic part of me appreciates the concept of reincarnation on principle, so that’s one thing. It’s also entirely in keeping with Chidi’s metaphor about a wave returning to the ocean - that wave is gone; it’ll never be there again, but the stuff of it is still there and ready to take form again. But the part of me that very much sympathizes with Simone and, while not being a neurologist, is very concerned with Theory of Mind... reincarnation doesn’t do much for that part. If I die, and my metaphysical essence eventually shows up in a different human who has no connection via memory to their past lives... well, that’s very aesthetically pleasing, I guess, but the point to me is, the information was still lost. When I died, my subjective experiences, memories, and capacity to act upon the world as Dae the Irascible Multi-Academic was lost, because my reincarnation doesn’t have access to that (much as I did not have access to my previous selves’s experiences).

Anyway, speaking of incurable romantics, let’s talk about The Old Guard! When I was previously starting to complain about no media that interacts with immortality as a concept avoiding the canard of “death gives life meaning,” I stopped myself. Because you know what, The Old Guard didn’t fucking go there, and I’m proud of everyone who worked on it for that. Booker thinks death is the answer because he has lost hope. But the person he appeals to, the person he thinks he’s doing a favor, is Andy. Who has lived millennia more than he has, lost the implied-love-of-her-life, and still has the will to keep going. Her questioning of that is intrinsic to the storyline, but at NO POINT does she ever indicate she wants to die. And Nile’s appearance reinvigorates her, even as she knows she now actually has an expiration date. (And the expiration date is not what invigorates her. It is Nile and the attendant situation reminding her of why they do what they do.) I ultimately really like The Old Guard’s take on immortality, because it gives us a spectrum of reactions to it. Nile, generally freaked-out and not happy about any of this but trying to do best by the people she loves. Booker, jaded and wanting to end it all. Andy, pretty jaded but when push comes to shove wants to keep fucking trying, and doesn’t just step back and abdicate responsibility when it’s clear she isn’t going to be around much longer. Joe and Nicky, not necessarily always happy with their circumstances, but taking strength from their relationships, not just with each other, but with the group as a whole. (I have a whole essay brewing, which may or may not eventually see the light, about their romantic connection being important but kind of only a part of their overall attitude about the group and how that is intensely important.)

And because apparently I’m just going to keep tacking on essay-stubs to this one post, when I thought about how to start this, I also thought about how Hannibal Lecter (in NBC Hannibal) says, “The thought that my life could end at any moment frees me to fully appreciate the beauty and art and horror of everything this world has to offer.” And I’m just kind of marinating in that (hah) for the moment because it represents a hedonism that The Good Place, in aggregate, rejects. But you can’t really compare those two stances, because of course, Hannibal Lecter is a human, subject to human standards of beauty and horror. I shouldn’t go off on a big tangent about this here, because the point of NBC Hannibal is emphatically not about immortality or mortality, but I felt it worth mentioning because a) hyperfixation and b) it’s an interesting thread in the wider discussion I’m interested in, that I like placing in context.

Anyway if you’ve bothered to read all of this, thank you profusely. I have a lot of feelings about The Good Place which mostly boil down to “I loved it,” but I can’t help but poke at the whole death thing. That’s kind of a sore spot for me in media.

#the good place #meta #tv shows #the old guard #hannibal #(last two tags minor discussion but including for archival purposes)

10 notes · View notes

wisdomrays · 3 years

Text

TAFAKKUR: Part 273

A DEAD END FOR SCIENCE OR A CALL TO THE CREATOR

The scientists of the world have been engaged in solving the problem of deciphering the so-called human genome during the last few decades. At the turn of the millennium the genetic map had finally been deciphered in general. Nevertheless, classic genetics and all of the more recent research efforts in biology, biochemistry, physiology and some inter-disciplinary methodologies have found themselves, it could be said, at a dead end. But this is only a dead end if we fail to recognize that we are all governed by a single supreme intellect, by the Divine Providence, Who voices His Will by means of the Words.

The name of God is different in different languages of the world and in the minds of those who accept the Creator as the only God; the Christians, Muslims, Jews and other believers, around 60-70% of the global population. Yet this name corresponds for them with the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. In all these instances, there is a Holy Word, in one form or another. The task of every believer is to recognize the very form that the Creator uses to call His Creation. This is a personal issue that originates from the religion that one worships.

So, what is the problem that faces genetics at the beginning of the 3rd millennium and how does it correspond with the Creator’s expressed will and His call to us?

It is here where there is a prospect for a remarkable breakthrough in knowledge, if only… This “if only” can be connected to academic achievements and issues.

In fact, over the last three or four years scientists have discovered by very sophisticated means and through careful research that the genetic code that governs the human body-and, in a broader sense, everything that is alive in Nature-accounts for no more than 1% of the DNA molecular length of the structure that determines the development of all living species. This discovery was as shocking for scientists as the deciphering of the genetic code had been. They concluded that the genetic programming occurred in the DNA molecular “free zone.” Here, scientists-among them the Russian naturalists A.G. Gurevitch and V.I. Vernadskiy, who some 50-70 years ago claimed that a purely materialistic understanding of the gene was the limit to which non-believing science could go-were proven to be right.

The new discoveries are most certainly related to the emergence of such sophisticated physical instruments as the laser, holography, sol tonics and even powerful computers. Modern technology has proved, without a doubt that the program in space and time for the creation of the human organism is not based on random accident, but rather is predetermined from “above.” The protein molecules and the amino acids that comprise the gene (to date, more than twenty different types of amino acids have been discovered) are placed in a particular order. A single fitting lock-and-key relation exists in the composition of the genetic code components. In addition, it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the genetic code of species that live on the Earth has not changed in three billion years, i.e., there is no room to talk about evolution, the principal postulate of materialists. Then, who or what has created the origin for everything that exists today on our planet several billion years after the creation of the Earth?

Then there is another puzzle: Why does the genetic code have such a small place, only taking up 1% of the DNA?

Scientists in Russia have learned that 99% of DNA-which was previously considered to be useless-hides within itself the so-called “genetic computer” that comprises the programs needed to make living organisms into a variety of species and these mask the genetic features that are unique to a particular species. It is not completely clear how the mechanism of this so-called genetic computer works, but it does work. The concept of a holographic mechanism for the storage, transference, and recovery of information was developed as the result of an experiment.

Scientists took a freshly cut leaf, chopped off part of it, and put this between two slides and two photo plates. As the picture developed, it became clear that the leaf was depicted whole. In short, an idea or a phantom had been photographed. These first experiments were conducted in Russia in the 1960s.

Russian, American, and British genetic scientists continuously repeated the experiment, taking phantom photographs of different objects, and came to the conclusion that science was dealing with a multidimensional picture of the leaf, or its hologram.

Based on this, some other puzzles were solved. The “genetic computer” manages the development of holograms by means of special static waves, called sol tones (the name sol tonics, a special scientific branch, is derived from this term) that function in the DNA embryo cells.

Scientists have long since established that out of one single fertilized ovule other ovules start to instantly develop, as if on command; these are responsible, for instance, for making bone, muscle, nerve and other systems within the human body. And over this totally material process there floats a totally immaterial phantom that dictates and shows the embryo the way to develop.

In other words, there is a certain image according to which development proceeds. The DNA is the text that controls this creation, with its inherent rules of composition; it is possible to perceive the DNA as being made up of letters, i.e. a word. At first there was the Word! This is a quote from the Bible. In Islam, Almighty Allah gave the Word by means of the Qur’an (reading) to Muhammad. A phrase from the Qur’an describes the above process in an amazingly simple and pertinent way:

It is He Who fashions you in the wombs as He will. There is no deity but He, the All-Glorious (with irresistible might), the All-Wise. (Al Imran, 3:6)

The Word of the Creator, according to which the genome “works,” is registered with greater security in the bio-system apparatus. It will only disappear in conjunction with the last of the human beings. This may be the very idea behind what is called the Day of Judgment, or Doomsday in Islam and other religions.

In the context of Einstein’s principles of a single field theory, as well as in Shipov’s physical vacuum theory, it may be possible to find clarification of the phenomenon, when in one case a wave matrix (copy) remains “clean,” but distorted in another.

It is worth discussing here those things that have already been proven. The programs written in the DNA cannot have emerged as a result of simple evolution, in the very least as, due to the huge volume of information contained here, the time required would have exceeded the time that the Universe has existed, that is around 15 billion years. We have established an approximate time that would be required for the genetic transformations that determine the essence of human beings to occur. It is substantially less…

Another study has been carried out that does not fit into the traditional materialistic frames. It seems that the internal structural information of DNA alone is not enough to develop an accurate replica of the image organism from the composition of the protein elements. Numerous experiments carried out by Russian scientists (in particular, from the Moscow Scientific and Cardiology Center) have proved that a frog embryo that has been purposefully protected to a great degree from external influences, distorts, suffering from malformation and finally dying. This means that a DNA has to be connected-maybe by means of sol tones waves or other contacts still unknown to us-with an “external source” that guides the genome-bio-computer work from somewhere in Space. One cannot but recall Muhammad here, the last of the Greatest Prophets, who categorically rejected the possibility of not only seeing, but even imagining the Almighty.

There are few people who still argue about the existence of the soul. The time when the soul departs from the body has been well-documented by scientists, doctors, and naturalists. As a matter of fact, the soul emerges when the heart cells die, that is, when the organism as a whole dies. It is at this time that a certain phantom of the genetic apparatus is formed, similar to the one described above in the phenomenon of the phantom leaf. It is interesting to contemplate the idea that the phantom of a human genetic apparatus that has lost their life by force would possess a high biological reaction and would therefore be in a position to distort and destroy any healthy molecules that may be close by. One cannot but recall the imperative ban on killing the innocent that is contained both in the Old Testament and the Qur’an, a call to leave retaliation to Him and to Him only.

In conclusion to my brief essay on the necessity of belief in today’s science, the common scientific way tries to explain “how,” but it fails to answer the question of “why” that lies behind the mystery of existence. Any scientific approach rejecting faith is doomed to fail; for faith is an inherent need for us. The belief in Him, the Single and Almighty, is genetically programmed. In a hadith reported in Sahih al-Bukhari, God’s Messenger states that every person is born in the primordial nature (fitra) of Islam.

Here, at the beginning of the 3rd millennium, at the height of our scientific achievements, we have come to understand God as a natural phenomenon. We must follow His guidance and not distort the Word or the Image of love that has been implanted by the Creator in our genetic code with mindless acts and evil speeches.

2 notes · View notes

bbq-hawks-wings · 5 years

Note

I want to express an unpopular opinion. I hope for your understanding, because such things don't like to listen. Why does everyone think that Hawks is a bird? I couldn' fit my logical arguments into the askbox :( (about how he sits on a pole "like a bird", supposedly likes jewelry and so on). Even his quirk is called Fierce Wings, not a Hawk, not a Red Bird. Do you remember the names of the quirks of Hound Dog and Tsuyu-chan? We haven't evidence to believe that Hawks is behaves like a bird.

I do believe very much he’s a bird, and if you would let me friend, I would love to try and prove it to you because I think the evidence is overwhelming. I’ll make a TL;DR at the end but I’d really like to take the opportunity to perhaps teach others at least one method for literary analysis since it can be a really dry and boring subject to learn in school but is SO useful not only for getting good grades but getting into colleges as well as interpreting both entertainment and genuinely important information like the news, history, laws, and scientific papers. Using fiction - especially such a rich, engaging one like HeroAca - is a great way to try it out without the pressure of a grade. I don’t have the qualifications to teach in any formal capacity, but as a “peer” tutor I hope I can be helpful.

I’m going to put everything under the cut from here because this is going to get LONG, but I promise the TL;DR at the end will be very easy to read. If you liked this sort of unofficial tutorial please let me know. I’d love to help make “academic” skills like this more accessible for those who might benefit from it and enjoy it, but it doesn’t make sense to put in all that effort moving forward if I’m garbage at it.

Before we get too into things, I want to lay out a few notes to keep in mind as we go.

I will only be using the official translations from Viz’s Shonen Jump website when available. Fan translations are more than close enough to casually enjoy and follow the story, but professional translators are paid to know and get various nuances correct and some of the trickier cultural background behind certain phrases (for example, the phrase “where the rubber meets the road” might make zero sense in a foreign language if translated literally, so an equal cultural phrase should be used instead) that give more exact information. Rarely is this too important, but sometimes it helps, plus it supports the source material.

If you’ve followed my blog for a while you might know I’m very fond of doing this kind of thing in my spare time and that I’m a huge fan of YouTube channels like Game/Film Theory, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Extra Credits, and Wisecrack that do this kind of thing with popular media as well. If you like this sort of content, may I encourage you to check them out after this to see how else you can apply these kinds of analytical skills to things that aren’t homework.

My writing style tends to meander, but I do my best to cut out the fat and only include relevant information so even though there’s a lot of information here, please know that I’m trying to be thorough and explain things to the best of my ability. If I seem to go off on a tangent, I’m trying to set up or contextualize information to explain why it’s relevant and then come back to the point. In other words, please be patient and bear with me as I go.

Now, to start, I want to explain at least my method for analyzing a text/piece of media. There is a set order and number of steps to take, and it’s as follows:

Read the material all the way through.

Come up with a hypothesis about something you’ve noticed when reading it. (In this case, it’s “Is Hawks actually supposed to be a bird?”)

Collect as much relevant information as possible and test the evidence to see if it supports the hypothesis we’ve made.

Step back and look at everything again with those points in mind.

Determine if we were right or wrong with the evidence we have.

If we were wrong, go back to step 3 to figure out what fell apart and see if we need to go back to step 2.

If that sequence sounds familiar it’s because it’s the scientific method! Aha, didn’t think we’d be pulling science into all this, did you? Don’t worry, we won’t be putting numbers or formulas anywhere near this discussion - the scientific method is just a way we can observe something and test if what we thought about it is actually true; and it applies to almost everything we as humans can observe - from the laws of the universe, to arts and crafts, to philosophy and religion, and so on! When you think about it that way, whole new possibilities can open up for you when it comes to understanding how the world works.

So with that set let’s (finally) begin!

Steps 1 and 2 are already done. We’ve read the manga and want to prove that Hawks is a bird. (We’re going to try and prove he IS a bird because in the context of the series there’s a lot that *isn’t* a bird and less stuff that *is* which will make our job easier.) So now, we’re onto:

Step 3 - collect data and see what conclusions we can get just from our evidence.

Now, to pause again (I know, bear with me!) there’s a few different kinds of information and considerations we have to keep in mind as we collect. There are four kinds of information that are important to know about in order to determine if it’s good data that will help us with the testing phase in Step 4. The kinds of information to keep in mind are:

Explicit information - this is information that is directly spelled out for us. For example, Hawks says, “I like my coffee sweet.” and his character sheet says “Hawk’s favorite food is chicken.” That’s all there is to it, and it’s pretty hard to argue with. This is the easiest type of info to find.

Implicit information - this is info that isn’t directly spelled out but is noticeable either in the background or as actions, patterns, or behaviors that can be observed. For example, Hawks has mentioned in at least three very different places his concerns over people getting hurt while he tries to get in with the League:

Chapter 191 when confronting Dabi about the Nomu he says, “You said you’d release it in the factory on the coast, not in the middle of the damn city!”

Chapter 191 again in a flashback with the Hero Commission he asks, “What about the people who might be hurt while I’m infiltrating the League?”

Chapter 240 when discovering how much influence and power the League has gained, “If someone had taken down the League sooner, all those good citizens wouldn’t have had to die!”

Hawks never says in so many words, “I never want innocent people to get hurt under any circumstances!” but the pattern of behavior and concern is consistent enough to form a pattern and clue us in that this is a key part of his character to keep in mind.

Peripheral information - this is information that isn’t directly to do with Hawks or maybe even the series as a whole but is still relevant to keep in mind for his character and the questions we’re asking. This may include extra content that isn’t the “series” proper, but is still an official source like interviews with Horikoshi, etc. but it can go even further. For example, while we try to prove that he’s a bird, we should have some knowledge about what makes a bird a bird, some specific and notable birdlike habits/behaviors/features, etc. This is just to show how wide-ranging we need to cast our informational net.

Contextual information - this will be important when we get to Step 4, but it’s good to keep in mind now. This is when we compare evidence against the broader scope of the series and consider the circumstances under which we find the information. For example, if I told you, “Harry kicked a dog.” you might think “What a jerk! What decent person kicks a dog?”; but if I said, “Harry kicked a dog while trying to keep it from biting his kid.” suddenly it re-frames the story. “Is the kid ok? Why was that dog attacking? Harry put himself in danger to keep his kid safe - what a great dad!”

I’ll go chronologically to make it easier to follow my evidence as I gather and give references as to where I found that information. I’ll go through the manga first, and then any peripheral sources that are either direct informational companions to the series (like character books or bonus character information sheets) and interviews with Horikoshi. Please note the categories these details fall into may vary based on opinion/interpretation, but I did my best to list them out for reference.

Chapter 185 - Explicit Type: Feathered wings - regardless of the specifics of his quirk it’s undeniable his wings are made up of feathers which is a distinctly birdlike quality. There are many mythical creatures and even dinosaurs that also have feathered wings, but this is our first big piece of evidence.

Chapter 186 - Peripheral Type: Large appetite - birds have an incredibly fast metabolism because flying takes so much energy. They’re constantly eating. Plenty of young men are big eaters, but it was specifically pointed out and works towards our hypothesis so we’ll keep it in our back pocket for now.

Chapter 186 - Implicit/Peripheral Type: Fantastic vision - Hawks senses the Nomu coming before the audience even is able to make out what’s headed their way. It could be implied his wings caught it first, which might be the case, but he looks directly at the Nomu and brings Endeavor’s attention to it. Birds have fantastic long-range vision, especially birds of prey that mainly swoop in from high in the air to ambush highly perceptive prey. Also good to add to the pile.

Chapter 192 + Volume 20 Cover - Implicit/Peripheral type: Wears jewelry and bright colors - birds are well documented to be drawn to bright colors and are known for decorating their nests with trinkets. Scientists actually have to be careful when tagging birds with tracking bracelets because they can accidentally make him VASTLY more popular with the ladies by giving him a brightly colored band to the point they can’t resist him! Male birds are also known for having bright, colorful displays for attracting and wooing mates. While Hawks isn’t the only male character to wear jewelry in the series, he’s the only one (to my recollection) that wears as MUCH jewelry so often both during and outside of work. It may not be obvious, but the illustration on Volume 20 is actually an advertisement for his line of (presumably) luxury jewelry. In other words, Hawks on some level is synonymous with style and flair to the point he can make money by selling jewelry with his name on it.

Chapter 20 Volume Cover - Explicit Type: Hawk emblem on the watch face - If the name “Hawks” didn’t give it away, he’s very clearly trying to align himself with more avian qualities if his merch has bird motifs. In other words Hawk = “Hero Hawks” and “Hero Hawks” = bird.

Chapter 192, 244, clear file illustration - Peripheral Type: birdlike posture. Chapter 244 isn’t quite released yet on the official site as of writing this, but when Hawks swoops in and beats the kids to the punch apprehending the criminals trying to subdue Endeavor, his hands are clenched in a very talon-like manner similar to a swooping eagle. When walking with Endeavor in 192, he holds his resting hand in a similar fashion. On the clear file illustration he’s not only perched on his tippy toes in a pose that has been famously called “owling” (remember that trend/meme, y’all?) but his wings are slightly outstretched to catch the breeze to keep from falling over which a lot of birds can be seen doing when they don’t have great purchase on a surface in a place that’s a little windy. The fact that he seems to gravitate to high places like birds are often seen doing might also be a noteworthy indication.

Extra sources:

Hawks Shifuku: Horikoshi describes Hawks as a “bird person” and says that his initial design was based off of Takahiro from his old manga.

Takahiro’s design:

Current character design: The banner image on my blog was commissioned from a friend of mine who doesn’t follow the series. When I showed her reference images of Hawks, you know what she said? “Oh! His hair is feathers!” Even his eyebrows have that fluffy/scruffy texture to them that his hair has. The markings on his eyes can also be seen on him as a young child in Chapter 191 which means it isn’t makeup meant to tie in a theme or look. He has those dark, pointed eye markings like many birds do. So on some genetic level he resembles a bird.

Step 4: Testing our hypothesis with the gathered evidence.

There’s already a lot of compelling evidence that already closely aligns him to birds which is promising. However, to really prove our point we should try to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt he is a bird. To do that this time around I’m going to see how the series treats people with animal-based quirks and see if it’s consistent with the way Hawks is portrayed.

You bring up Hound Dog and Tsuyu, and they’re fantastic examples. Let’s start with Hound.

He’s pretty straight forward - he’s like a dog. He has a dog face, has dog-like tendencies, and dog-like abilities. Superpower: dog.

And in Tsuyu’s case - quirk: frog, just frog. She’s stated explicitly to have frog-like features, frog-like tendencies, have frog-like abilities, and even comes from a “froggy family.”

So with these two very explicitly animal-like characters the common theme seems to be “If they’re considered to be like a specific animal, they have to physically resemble that animal, act like that animal at times, and have abilities like that animal.” Let’s see if another animal-quirk character matches up and then put Hawks to the test.

Spinner’s quirk is Gecko. Based on our criteria, is he a gecko?

Does he look like a gecko, even vaguely?

Yes, he’s covered head to toe in scales, and his face is very lizard-like.

Does he occasionally act like a gecko?

Unclear. We haven’t really seen any evidence of this, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t. For the sake of our argument, we’ll just say no and move on.

Does he have gecko-like abilities?

Yes! Though most of his abilities are limited to things like being able to stick to walls, it’s still gecko-like in origin and qualifies.

Spinner hits clearly hits ⅔ criteria and our standards seem pretty consistent, so let’s see how Hawks stands up.

Does he look like a bird?

Not all of his features may explicitly scream “avian” at first, but upon closer observation and with his clear previous inspiration this is a resounding yes.

Does he act like a bird?

Many of the mannerisms and behaviors he displays can just be chalked up to him being a little eccentric, but with the sheer number of them that also parallel birds in some way this is also a pretty convincing yes.

Does he have bird-like abilities?

While most of the emphasis is on his wings and what they can do, it does seem that he not only possesses things like heightened senses which could be attributed to avian abilities but he also very much possess high intelligence and incredibly fast reaction times which birds are also known for.

Even if we only gave Hawks a “maybe/half a point” for those last two, he still meets the 2⁄3 that Spinner did. So we have another question to ask: Does a character have to have an explicitly named “animal” quirk to be considered to be/resemble a specific animal? Let’s look at Ojirou and Tokoyami for reference.

Ojirou’s quirk is just “tail,” but he’s been described by his peers and classmates as a monkey and does seem to share some more monkey-like features. It isn’t lumped in with his quirk because the only notable monkey-like quality he possesses is a tail. He doesn’t have fangs or an opposable toe - he just has a tail. For quirk classification as far as hero work goes, that’s the only important thing to note.

Tokoyami, on the other hand has an entire literal bird head, but nothing else. He has a beak, feathers, and even in illustrations of him as a baby he had fluffier feathers on his head. Even with only those details, he just screams “bird!” However, his quirk is classified as “Dark Shadow” because that’s what sets him apart for hero work.

Back at Hawks we see his quirk classified as “fierce wings” but like Ojirou and especially like Tokoyami, the emphasis on his wings is what sets his abilities as a hero apart. Otherwise, he’s just a guy who looks and acts a LOT like a bird.

But astute observers may have noticed I’ve left out a detail that’s more or less a nail in the coffin on the whole matter, so let me ask a question: Tsuyu in particular has something else of note that solidifies in our minds that she is, indeed, a frog - she explicitly calls herself a frog. Could we say the same about Hawks?

Chapter 199 - Explicit Type

Bingo. Hawks has known himself for as long as he’s been alive. He knows his habits, his impulses, his family/genes, and so on. If he calls himself a bird, are we going to call him a liar? In fact, he calls himself a bird not once, but twice!

That’s pretty much it. With the evidence stacked to that degree, I’d be hard pressed to NOT believe he’s a bird.

That was a long amount of text to get through, so if you’re here at the end thank you for sticking out with me to this point. I really appreciate it. This is more or less the process I use when analyzing anything and everything whether it be HeroAca related or not. Maybe it’ll help you if you’ve struggled with literary analysis, or at the very least I hope you got some enjoyment out of it.

TL;DR If Hawks looks like a bird, walks (acts) like a bird, is based on a bird (character), and calls himself a bird, he’s probably a bird.

#hawks bnha #bnha hawks #hawks #hawks mha #mha hawks #she writes #let's talk hawks #bnha meta #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #manga spoilers

366 notes · View notes

transhermetic-witchery · 3 years

Text

Message Spent

The following is a text, a corpus, a canon. The client shall remain unnamed. Beginning Transcription in...

3...

2...

1...

Bezel. It is here, a name. A name born of the verb born of the noun which is a synonym for frame, for barrier, for boundary between symbols and the places which view them. You got that so far? Should I keep going?

There are things, shapes, which don't suffer names well, at least not for long. I met Bezel when I was visiting, playing tourist. It is not a someone, nor an object in the way a particular stone or home may bear a name to distinguish it from others of the same type or class.

A wave is a name we give an abstraction, names we place on different things to confuse ourselves between them. This confusion, surprisingly, is helpful. Not a birch, or a maple, mulberry, or pine, but a tree. Waves pass through water, through metal, and again, metals' sparks.

Why I'm hiring you to write in this particular venue, in this particular way, is so that the little ripples don't get lost just because you (or I for that matter) discard them because we don't understand how they got there. Editing is a useful habit, but not for all uses.

I will make mistakes, you will transcribe oddly or poorly, and if we leave the option open, we will fiddle and tweak and generally make a mess of things by making them legible, presentable, or perhaps acceptable.

Nuggets.

Bertrand.

Sarsaparilla.

There we go, good luck interpolating that.

Alright, time to go back and remind myself of where I was headed. You don't have to include notes like this in the text.

Actually, you know what, go ahead. Just cram it all in there. Seems fitting. Besides, I may add the caveat too late and then you couldn't oblige anyway. No need to put you in a bind like that.

Bezel, that's where I started, I'll continue with that. It's a good glossary word to start with here. Can't have a gate without a boundary, and it sure is tough to get somewhere by having already been there... or, at least tough to give directions that way.

Calling attention to disjoints, faults, gaps, and the like, that seems to be the local language. Walls are good for many things, bad at others, but often good structures on which to rest when tired.

Did you ever notice how few advocacy groups there are for gravity? Or how scant moral codes there are that forbid pickpocket the Sun? A conspicuous lack of charities collecting for the cause of keeping river rocks smooth. And I've never been yelled at for not sweating glass.

There are things that enforce themselves but do so largely unnoticed, and there ate things that enforce themselves which we fancy might do otherwise. And then there are things which we enforce which are enforced by us and need that pressure to not evaporate.

Cold water boils in low enough pressure, and so do some ideas. It is polite to eat with your mouth closed. A particular word means a particular thing. We just don't do that here. That's something something unnatural something something tradition.

Bezel is a character in the story I'm telling, but like how the number twelve is a character in math, or 人 is a character on screen. Story isn't the right word, but it's the one I've gotten hold of and it's in the neighborhood.

It's an act of reminding myself of the local pressure needed to maintain the ecosystem of ideas where I happen to be. A reminder that I can move to somewhere with more or less or different pressure if it suits me or I need a different context.

It is a golden flag of a warning to remind myself to use the door rather than claw at the wall, to do the local bubble the respect of not bursting it without cause. But that is neither here nor there because it is staunchly between.

The panic of feeling every boundary is there to ensnare, impede, or imprison leaves a long wake of leaky membranes, violent depressurization, and a lot of wounds vulnerable to opportunistic infections. Oops. Mistakes worth learning from.

So what is the payload here? Why did I commission this work? And why through such roundabout methods? An abstract device. Seemed the thing to do. Filters.

Absorbing State. Another vocab word for the glossary. One of my personal favorites. An absorbing state is a state that, once entered, one does not exit. That may be water running down hill until it enters the ocean where it stays forever (in an oversimplified model), or death.

Things transition between states. On a technical level, that is the founding principle behind computation, look up Markov Chains if you wanna up the legibility of things in general. Moods, beliefs, and other experiential events can also usefully be described as states.

Let's steal a scene. Juliet on the balcony, lovestruck Romeo below. That's a scene, and just to be pedantic let's map "state" onto "scene" and see where that takes us. Some things have to happen in order for these kids to die for our entertainment.

If lines aren't said, plot ain't played out, sets aren't struck, then these two lovebirds loom peacefully and romantically entwined in Balcony State indefinitely. And, well, hang on, aren't they dead? We saw it happen. Very sad. How are they alive and well in Balcony?

Another reason for going about this project this way is to ensure publication, to cement the digital footprint. Drafts sit and await rigor, await scrutiny, and I love both of those, but I tried to eat them rather than own them. An approach, mine, but not the only or recommended.

The ghosts of discourse still linger in libraries, the academic sort, and they are lovely or terrible or very in their own ways. And the living rampage through songs and drinks and smells as always. But now, we have a nifty sort of substrate between. And not just receipts.

I was frightened to spill ink for a long while. What if I'm misunderstood, or worse what if I am understood but incorrect?!

I thought it was a matter of picking the right cause, of allying myself with whatever was stronger or righter or deeper or taller or betterer. Craved that clear thoughtless ringing of certainty and affirmation. But wait... Hmm...

They, you know the ones, the right ones, the pedestal dwellers, what's this proscenium, what's this stage? What are the chances that this message is compelling because it matches how I'm compelled. Well, that's just doubt. That's probably bad. Am good. Am brave. See me.

Wait a spell, why am I compelled? What are these rewards I'm driven to seek, these hurts I'm calloused to, I should be calloused to, I didn't need it anyway. But if I didn't need it because I'm strong, and I'm doing what they say to get the thing that was mine they took .

Oh. Ohhhhh. Ewwwwwwwww. Get it off let me out get it out of me!

Huh. That's better. What a relief. Wow. Oh wow. This is amazing! Is this what freedom tastes like?!?!

Okay, what's next? Hello? Oh. Yeah. I mean, yay! But, yeah.

...1

...2

...3

1 note · View note

desiree-harding-fic · 5 years

Text

Broken Engagement Au (Chapter 1???)

“I’m not going to write another long fic while I already have a WIP,” I say through gritted teeth. “I’m not going to do it it’s a stupid decision and I’m not going to do it.”

So @fandomsnstuff is to blame for this and I can say that because she’s an incorrigible enabler, but here’s 1500 words of broken engagement because I can’t get over it.

CREDIT: Taako’s last name has been shamelessly stolen from Bureau of Badass by Chemicallywrit and miceenscene on Ao3, and @bureauofbadass on tumblr. Because it’s been my modern au name for Taako ever since I read that fic the first time, which, if you haven’t read it, drop everything and I’ll see you in a few days. Now that’s some writing.

Check the #broken engagement au tag on my blog for more snippets!

————————

“Angus?” Taako says mildly from behind his desk.

“Hmm??” The kid hums from where he’s hanging upside down off Taako’s ratty classroom couch in the corner. His glasses are half falling off his face, but he’s got a book held up a few inches from his nose anyway. The thing is, the book is right-side up.

“Whatcha doin’ there, kiddo?” Taako asks, marking through another sentence on the paper in front of him with a frown.

“Well, sir,” Angus starts in that tone that always makes Taako bite down on a grin, “I read them too fast right side up. I think my comprehension is suffering because the words go by too fast.”

“Bullshit,” Taako says, ignoring Angus’s language, sir! “Your comprehension is fine and you know it. You’re just a show-off nerd,” he teases.

“Says the one who had a powerpoint about LGBT influences in 16th Century literature ready last week for the eventuality that someone in your class called Mercutio ‘kinda gay,’”

“Hey, that was a good lesson –” Taako starts in, but the kid sits up abruptly on the couch, putting the book down and picking up his phone. Taako can hear another buzz of a message coming in as the kid is scrolling through it.

“My dad’s here, sir,” he says, “he’s on his way to the room now.”

“About time.” Taako puts the essay back in the section folder, slips it into his bag to grade when he gets home. The grading is endless. One of his least favorite parts of the job. Who needs grades anyway? All his kids are smart. Seems dumb to hold them all to the same arbitrary standard.

“I’m sorry for keeping you, sir,” Angus says, and he’s moved over to the desk he threw his backpack down on when he came into the room almost an hour ago. He looks a little unsure, and Taako curses himself silently in his head.

“It’s ok, kid,” he says, trying to make sure he sounds like he means it so Angus won’t feel bad, “I told you, it ain’t no thing for me to stay after a bit to talk to your old man.”

Angus is… a special case. Taako’s never had anything like him in a class before. Kid’s only just turned 12 years old and he’s already starting high school. A real whiz-kid, but it’s a tough world out there, high school being full of teenagers of all shapes, sizes, and personalities, for a literal kid –

Hence Taako.

He’s been teaching at Neverwinter Academy for almost four years now, grateful every second of the time that anyone deigned to give him a job (and thank the gods for Principal Davenport), much less at a premier private school where he’s largely allowed to make his own curriculum with only a few guidelines. It’s a good job. Taako likes it. It’s stable and it’s safe and no one’s going to die from Taako’s lecturing and he actually kind of has a knack with the kids, weirdly enough.

Hence Angus and Taako.

Neverwinter Secondary Academy has a mentorship program. Kids who seem to struggle a bit academically get paired with a faculty adviser to help see them through. Well Angus is anything but struggling – he’s gotten straight As on every assignment Taako’s given thus far – but all the same, Taako was contacted at the beginning of the year about the kid. He was placed right in the program anyway, not for academic reasons for once, but for social.

You have a knack for getting close to the students, Davenport’s email had read. While I see no reason why Angus shouldn’t succeed at NSA, he might have some difficulty adjusting socially. His parent originally contacted us about the idea, and I have to say I agree that giving Angus an extra support figure can only be beneficial.

Taako had agreed, of course; how could he say no? And meeting Angus had really cinched it. Kid’s only been in Taako’s class a little over a month, but he’s already maybe one of Taako’s favorite students, like, ever. Not that Taako plays favorites. He likes all his students just the same, thank you very much.

(Angus is definitely his favorite.)

It didn’t help that the kid’s a goofball smartass nerd, either, which is the exact archetype that makes up like… 98% of Taako’s family and close friends. It doesn’t help that he’s got a single parent keeping everything together at home based on the school records and the email chain back and forth. It doesn’t help that his dad, who he mentions about as often to Taako as people talk about like… the weather, seems like a really genuine guy who’s trying really hard based on the email chain they’ve had going. Angus’s dad set up the parent/teacher conference, even, to check in on how things are going, one-on-one with Angus’s adviser. It’s almost disgustingly practical and good and loving and it seems like everything in this kid’s entire life has been engineered to make Taako fuckin’ love him.

It’s really not fair. He teaches like 90 students. He’s not supposed to have favorites.

And yet.

There’s a knock on Taako’s door and they both look up, Angus smiling immediately, which definitely isn’t cute, Taako, Christ, and Taako gets up from his desk and smooths his shirt out. He dressed normal today and everything. He knows the kids like his… eccentric style, but parents? Parents are always a different game. And knowing he was about to meet Angus’s dad today gave him pause that morning. Still. The soft blue button down and slacks are a touch rumpled from a day’s work. He could look better.

He gets up and goes to the door, Angus trailing along behind.

*****

Neverwinter Secondary Academy could be a maze for all Kravitz’s skill navigating his way to Angus’s classroom, which is of course the farthest from the front office that any in this place could be, surely, and he’s already late after being kept at work, and he’s sure that Angus’s teacher is at the very least unimpressed with him and more likely annoyed, which is just what he needed -

He finally finds his way, sees the sign reading T. Peynirci, and he takes a moment to smooth out the wrinkles in his jacket from the day (which of course does no good because it never does), before he raises his hand and knocks on Mr. Peynirci’s door.

And Taako opens it.

“Ah,” Taako says, and then nothing else, his hand hovering in midair where it was clearly extended for a handshake -

“Dad!” Angus says, “this is my adviser and English teacher, Mr. Peynirci,” and there’s a little bit of a sneer in it that Kravitz doesn’t know the context for, “Taako, this is my dad.” And it’s exactly how an introduction should go, all crossed t’s and dotted i’s -

And Kravitz’s brain is on high alert, emergency sirens blaring.

And his first thought, infuriatingly, is how good Taako looks, now, still, after all this time. Which is ridiculous because Kravitz can hardly recognize him (he’s wearing glasses, for Christ’s sake) and also because he hasn’t seen Taako in over twelve years and he’s supposed to be past those thoughts by now -

The second thought is who on Earth entrusted Taako with the care and keeping (and the education) of a bunch of impressionable teenagers, much less his son’s mental, emotional, and social well-being -

The third thought is that Angus is right there and Kravitz has been staring blankly at Taako for what is likely about to become a second too long -

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Peynirci,” he says, reaching out and shaking Taako’s hand, though he doesn’t want to touch him, does he? (He does, he does so much.) Nice to meet you, he says, and he shakes Taako’s hand, and he can feel his grip, too tight, can see, perfectly, the moment Taako’s eyes go from shocked and awed to empty, except for a spark, just a spark of malice, right there. He regrets everything.

“Likewise, Mr. McDonald,” Taako says, releasing Kravitz’s hand, and Kravitz nearly winces from it. Because it was one thing, wasn’t it, to make the decision to pretend that Taako was a stranger, but it’s another to be on the receiving end of it, to see Taako introducing himself as though he’s going to trip over Kravitz’s very name, as though he’s never had to say it out loud before this moment. As though Taako didn’t spend years falling asleep and waking up beside Kravitz, didn’t spend years going out and pressing himself against Kravitz in dim bars, tipsy and warm. As though he didn’t spend a year wearing a ring Kravitz selected for him, and sized to fit just so. As though he didn’t almost take that name and make it his own.

“Let’s sit down, shall we?” Taako says, and he smiles without any of his teeth.

#taz balance #taako taaco #kravitz #taakitz #broken engagement au #my writing #thanks laura

98 notes · View notes

divainity-a3 · 4 years

Text

topic: reggie + family ( relationships & dynamic ) spoiler tw: archie afterlife, reggie & me, archie comics (2015) GENERAL TW: ABUSE, ABUSE MENTION, MENTAL ILLNESS !

abstract: it’s no secret that reggie’s parents play an absent role, both in reggie’s life & overall in most of the original, campy archie comics. we see lots of mr. & mrs. andrews, we never get enough of the coopers & the lodges, and we get glimpses of gladys & jellybean jones, but never really the mantles ——— why is that ? what do we even know about ricky and vicky mantle, his alleged parents, if anything at all ? and what little do we get from the comics and wikipedia to give us clues ? in this essay i will be going through the things that i know and accept as canon for my reggie’s relationship with ricky and vicky mantle and why reggie having a brother according to wikipedia makes absolutely no sense !

SECTION I. THE MANTLE FAMILY TREE

i. the mantles are an upper - middle class family. more upper than middle, given how reggie spends his allowance, & ranking - wise, i headcanon the mantles to be the second richest family in riverdale right below the lodges. since the dawning of the original archie comics in the 50s, we’ve known richard and victoria mantle as ricky and vicky mantle, the well-off parents of their son, reginald victor mantle.

ricky canonically owns riverdale’s most popular newspaper the riverdale gazette and while vicky’s profession isn’t specified, i assume she either works in the secretarial portion of the paper along with the mantles’ other enterprises. y’know, the way heteronormative rich couples do. while the paper’s popularity generates a significant amount of revenue for the mantles, it isn’t their main source of income— investments & other business deals are. using their hard earned (not) inheritance and what they’ve made from paper circulation and subscriptions, they turn it into more profit by investing it in the right places. fiscally, the family is very well-off and happy. in every other department ? debatable.

ii. the mantles are more or less, absent parents. and always have been. for starters, as i said it earlier: we don’t ever see them in the damn comics. even in cw’sriverdale— ricky and vicky are nowhere to be found. even according to reggie’s wikipedia, we don’t know all too much about his mother and father aside from their professions but the archie reboot comics offer a different perspective that i choose to adopt.

exhibit a. reggie and me (2015) / issue #2 context: reggie coming home distressed after having accidentally pushed archie into a pond. betty went off at him, he ran home crying to an empty house. his dog, vader, is narrating, recalling how reggie describes it as one of the worst days of his life.

exhibit b. reggie and me (2015) / issue #4 context: reggie attemptng to make an effort with his dad only to be rejected immediately.

exhibit c. archie (2015) / issue #6 context: reggie’s coming back home from a failed attempt at persuading hiram lodge to let him into his inner circle.

exhibit d. afterlife with archie (2015) / issue #9 context: in a dystopian take on archie comics, reggie is reflecting on his entire life existentially while confessing his sins to kevin keller, someone he’s come to trust.

conclusions drawn:

coming home to an empty house wasn’t and still isn’t uncommon for reggie. across the multiple comics i reference, the narrative seems to be the same. his parents consistently don’t show up for him. are constantly working, and more importantly never home. and even when they are home, they pay no mind to their only son, seen in how reggie attempts to get his fathers attention after seeing archie and his dad play ball. i can also assume that reggie had to raise/take care of himself, given that there’s no maid to be seen in any of the scenes where the ricky and vicky aren’t there. while the mantles clearly make sure he doesn’t starve, they don’t exactly do… anything else. as we see when reggie comes home crying, no one’s there to hold him. no one’s there to tell him he’s okay and that he’s valid. so he has to tell himself. and as he gets older and more self-sufficient, his parents start giving even less of a fuck about him being on his own. furthermore, reggie also has to teach himself what is right and wrong as a result, having little to no guidance from the people who are supposed to fulfill that role. obviously, we know how that works out.

ricky and vicky missed out on a lot of reggie’s milestones. being out on business trips all the time leads me to believe that the mantles missed out on a lot of reggie’s overall life and more importantly accomplishments (even if he doesn’t have a lot of them). to name a few things, i headcanon the mantles to have missed his middle school graduation, his first football game, multiple recitals through the years, and the day reggie got deemed captain of the football team, something he actually considers one of his bigger achievements in life. i also headcanon that reggie had to teach himself how to drive, shave, ask a girl out and all the other cheesy, heteronormative stuff rich families instill. the mantles sure do come back to reap the benefits though, happy to use reggie for bragging rights.

reggie blamed himself a lot for his parents not being around and developed deep-seeded insecurities about it growing up.i think it’s reasonable to think that a child as young as he was used to believe that something was wrong with him with his parents never seeming to want to be around him. that shit hurt him and that is where reggie’s need to constantly be around people and have companionship comes from—— it’s an underlying desire to be wanted for once. but he’d never tell that to anyone.

reggie acting out started out as an attempt to get attention from his parents. the only time parents will really be forced to pay attention to their children is when they have to answer for them. so it’s reasonable, i think, to assume that a lot of his bad behavior started out at least as a way to get his parents to give him the time of day. i don’t think the same applies to reggie in the present day, but nonetheless, —————old habits die hard. more on that, later.

SECTION II. THE MANTLE LEGACY

i. reggie is, and always will be, an only child. according to reggie’s wikipedia, he also allegedly has a younger brother named oliver mantle that made a brief appearance once in a single issue like 40 years ago. in my canon, i’m choosing to ignore this for two reasons: a.because it literally just doesn’t make any sense for reggie to have any siblings. ricky and vicky can barely take care of reggie, god forbid they abuse and neglect another child. the idea is nice and it would mean that reggie would have someone to confide in, but alas i don’t think the mantles would be so … kind.

and b. because there’s absolutely no significant information and/or canon attached to thisalleged oliver mantle and so i have to conclude that he was just thrown in at some point during the original archie run because the writers realized they didn’t develop reggie’s family background in any aspect.

ii. however, reggie does have two cousins. the writers do this on multiple occasions to all the characters, throwing in relatives here and there and they actually did give reggie two cousins which i actually do accept in my canon. their names are regina(first cousin) and may (third removed cousin), both of which are from vicky’s side of the family. reggie doesn’t care for may all that much but regina is someone he actually can get along with as they share the same kind of humor.

other than that reggie’s the only mantle heir, putting immense pressure on him to marry rich and carry on the family name———— but that’s a different meta for another time.

SECTION III. PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL ABUSE & NEGLECT

ii. reggie himself is a victim physical and emotional abuse, mainly from his father, in addition to overall parental neglect. now don’t get it twisted, i’m not saying ms. vicky had absolutely nothing to do with reggie’s childhood trauma, but ricky certainly had the more prominent role as an instigator and we get proof of that on several occasions. i headcanon that vicky never laid a finger on reggie and truly does love him deep down, but her passiveness & allowing the abuse to happen has made reggie view her just as antagonistically as he does ricky ( and for good reason ). she’s a bystander and nothing more, a spineless bitch that never intervened, only spoiled him in hopes it would make up for his emotional scars. she pretends she’s not as bad, reggie thinks and knows otherwise.

exhibit a: afterlife with archie (2015) / issue #9 context: in a dystopian take on archie comics, reggie is reflecting on his entire life existentially while confessing his sins to kevin keller, someone he’s come to trust. the first page of the issue is titled ARCHIE & REGGIE, all about comparing the two and their different persona’s but more importantly, their different upbringings.

conclusions drawn:

while the sentiment of this side-by-side is aimed to highlight the fact that reggie is a spoiled kid that likes to act out, what stands out more so to me is what looks like intense pressure to perform from ricky. while i did say earlier that reggie’s parents have a very absent role in his life, obviously there are public appearances to keep up. the mantles can’t come across as unsupportive an absent, they need to put on an image. while you’d think this is a good thing that would force the mantles to show up more, my concern here comes from the reason for the fight being over the fact that reggie’s team, not just reggie, not winning a baseball game. despite never being there to emotionally support reggie, to me it seems like ricky expects perfection. i believe the pressure might be more so for athletic performance than academic, given that reggie’s wikidoes specifically cite reggie’s natural-born athletic excellence. i think it’s also worth noting as well that since my reggie is asian and i firmly believe this pressure is present (i’m asian myself, the struggle is real). reggie has slowly cared less and less and we’ll get to that later but, you get it.

the panels also have drastically different interactions between parent and child, ricky’s looking borderline abusive and more importantly, public. one could argue that it only looks like ricky only has a tight pinch on reggie’s ear, but i also have concerns about the extent of ricky’s expectations and what lengths he’d go to make them known, especially when reggie didn’t fulfill them as a kid. this leads me to my next piece of evidence.

exhibit b: archie (2015) / issue #30 context: ricky has recently bailed him out reggie out of jail, having been charged with vehicular manslaughter. despite ricky having pulled several strings to get him out, reggie’s still acting out and in getting ready for the riverdale spring dance, has taken it upon himself to go through his father’s wardrobe without asking to dress himself for the occasion.

conclusions drawn:

reggie has an unforgiving memory. rightfully so, as he’s been going through this vicious cycle for as long as he can remember, but take note his ability to citeextremely hurtful things that ricky has been guilty of saying about his own son and, in some cases, said to his own son’s face. he plays it off as a snarky comeback, but to me, that’s a cheap coping mechanism and speaks to a greater desensitization on reggie’s end towards constantly receiving such disappointing and demeaning remarks from his own father. he expects it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to hear.

ricky has a horrible temper. i say this because his temper is shown to go from 0 to 100 extremely quick (literally read any of the new archie reboot, you’ll pick up on it) until reggie puts him in his place. i honestly headcanon that ricky hasundiagnosed bpd (disclaimer: my mother has bpd) and that this extreme range of temperament is something reggie has had to develop a defense to and it’s taken years for him to do. it’d take a lot of convincing to try and tell me that this temper has never escalated into physical altercations. especially from a toxically masculine man like ricky ? no chance.

the abuse is physical as well as emotional. absent parenting aside, look at the way ricky’s holding onto reggie’s collar. that grip is like ice and furthermore it’s also the first thing ricky does in confronting his own son. immediate physical invasion of space isn’t promising in parental maneuvers and yeah, we might’ve laughed all the time at how archie’s parents would grab him by the ear and drag him home when he was in trouble in the classic comics, it was all in good fun back in the day but reggie didn’t get the same, comical treatment. in fact, far from it.

it’s happened before. the way reggie cuts his father off right in the middle of his alleged apology, simply telling him to get out of his personal space? the fact thatreggie has to tell him to stop makes it seem like ricky is a creature of habit and that he defaults unhealthily to physical confrontation. and honestly who would be surprised ? reggie’s immediate, nearly nonchalant defense makes me think he’s done this many times before. whether or not ricky’s willingness to back off comes from him trying to improve himself as a father, his efforts don’t seem to be working.

reggie’s acting out has become a method of survival. this argument is bit of speculation on my end and comes from what makes sense to me, but in my eyes reggie’s acting out as an almost-adult is both an act of defiance and an act of survival. i headcanon that once reggie grew up and became more aware of his family’s ‘clout,’ he began to weaponize it. remember the ‘mantle family image’ thing i talked about earlier? jackpot. while reggie might have had to put up with abuse silently growing up, he soon figured out that if his father was gonna do anything, he couldn’t leave a mark. otherwise, people would ask questions. i mean, imagine if he went to the press with a sob story about all the times conglomerate boss ricky mantle hurt his own son… what would his family do then ? reggie doesn’t give a fuck about the family, and for that he has leverage. the mantles can’t have a scandal, that’s bad for business ! reggie holds that over his father’s head, knowing it’ll get him to back off the way he does in the last panels and ricky knows better than to test his son’s boldness. so reggie doing whatever he wants, knowing ricky can’t do jack shit to him ? that’shis power source. that’s what gets him out of bed every day. it’s where his hubris comes from, his arrogance. knowing he’s the shit because he is. this is where he finds his ground, making sure he never gets hurt again, and if he does it’s only on his terms. no one elses.

tl; dr: ricky and vicky mantle aren’t shit, there’s absolutely no way reggie has a brother, reggie raised himself for the most part since he was about 9 years old, reggie grew up and continues to grow up in an empty house, a good portion of reggie’s insecurities come from his childhood when he blamed himself for his parents not being around, and reggie is a victim of emotional and physical abuse as well as neglect.

so have mercy on him. he isn’t inherently evil and while his actions aren’t always excusable, it’s worth remembering that no one was there to teach him otherwise.

#I. ❰ HEADCANONS / METAS. ❱#reposting this bc im remaking reg's old blog

6 notes · View notes

latenightcinephile · 4 years

Text

#736: ‘Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer’, dir. Thorold Dickinson, 1955.

Another film without much to recommend it, and a few things that would actively steer many viewers away from it. Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer is on the list because it was the first feature film produced in Israel - not the first feature film produced by Israelis, mind, but the first made within the nation’s borders. At least on paper it forms one of the major inciting texts of Israel’s national cinema. And yet, almost immediately, this distinction begins to break down. It’s a feature film made in Israel, funded by and directed by British people, made largely in English (not in Hebrew, as most Israeli films ever since have been) and with a British protagonist as one of the major group of four. Many of the most specific hallmarks of national cinema are either arguable or completely absent from this film. So, we need to approach the more nebulous definition of national cinema instead. Does Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer say anything about the nation of Israel shortly after the war of 1948?

There’s no real way of sugar-coating this. The answer is yes. Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer is a film that functions as pro-Zionist propaganda.

For a long time, I wasn’t sure whether the film knew it was doing this. There were techniques here that were connected to the history of cinema propaganda, but there’s a great difference between using tropes common to war pseudo-documentary and intending to make propaganda. Right from the start of the film, Dickinson employs a lot of these tropes. In order to orient the viewer, we are literally given a map of the Middle East with voiceover narration - the direct-address style of documentary common in Britain at the time. Shortly afterwards, within the diegesis of the film, our band of four soldiers from diverse backgrounds are also shown a tactical diorama of Hill 24. In doing so, there is a parallel drawn between the facts of the historical context and the emotions surrounding this particular mission. The history has a map and is true; the emotional narrative also has a map and therefore must be true.

Still, this kind of thing is accidentally done all the time, and it leads to the kind of overreading that plagues first-year essays and academic journals. Any interest I had in figuring out whether the film was a deliberate piece of electioneering was rapidly overcome by the film’s plot, which spends way too long focusing on the British and American characters at the expense of any clear understanding of Israeli identity. This almost certainly was more interesting at the time of the film’s release: I’m almost instantly distrustful of any film ‘about’ a nation that builds its major narratives around the colonists, even if it turns out the colonists were wrong and have seen the error of their ways. By today’s standards, we see way too much of Finnegan (Edward Mulhare), and his story is just dull. Any parallels between Ireland (where Finnegan was born) and Israel, both in a complicated relationship with their surrounding territories, is just... absent. If Hill 24 is propaganda, I thought, it must surely have something to say about this idea of nationhood. If it doesn’t, why is this film significant at all?

I’d forgotten, through a mix of tiredness and distraction, that one of the most important things that didactic cinema can do is be boring and self-evident. What we have is a story about how four people from different backgrounds come to believe in the fight on behalf of Israel; a fight that, under a charitable reading, sought to take territory in order to unite separate geographic communities. Hill 24 makes the Arab forces surrounding Israel homogenous and thoughtless; it makes the importance of Hill 24 a question of integrity, not of taking land that was not part of the original proposal. And of course it doesn’t - that would defeat the purpose.

The film’s strongest part is the end, where we have one final flashback to determine Goodman’s (Michael Wager) backstory. What has until now been an affair without conspicuous style suddenly breaks loose, summoning all kinds of unreliable camerawork that borders on the poetic. News of the World has been replaced by a particularly allegorical episode of The Twilight Zone. This interlude does sweep away the stuffiness of the preceding 75 minutes, but it’s difficult to know why this happens. Is Goodman’s story of the Nazi who will fight anyone an exaggeration or an outright lie? Is it just a feature of Goodman’s own flair for storytelling? (Wager’s voiceover is a damn sight more interesting than anyone else who serves this function during the film.)

No matter, because we’re here for the big reveal. The opening moments of the film tell us that the four protagonists will die trying to take Hill 24, so there’s no real spoiler here. The shot of the four of them in the back of the truck heading up to the site is a powerful image because of this: it takes on a kind of urgency because of its proximity to their deaths that the flashbacks simply do not have. But after they die, and after the Hill is declared as belonging to Israel (here Dickinson takes another jab at the Arab leader smugly declaring that it must belong to them because nobody is alive), Dickinson pulls out the last few stops. Soaring choral music plays over aerial shots of Israel’s diverse biomes, suggesting that Hill 24 is the one piece of land that connects all of Israel into one territory, both literally and metaphorically - metaphorically, because of the sacrifice our protagonists were willing to go to. It’s a cinematic moment of unification, and the film concludes with a title card telling us that this is not the end but, rather, ‘The Beginning’.

I really want to dislike this film for the nakedness of its ambition, but I find myself almost admiring it. It’s not compelling, being far too boring for that, and it’s not completely absent of merit, thanks to those final sequences. I find myself thinking of it as a curious counterargument to national cinema rhetoric. Many of the most famous national cinemas not only say something about cultural identity, but have their own relationship to cinema style. You can tell a French New Wave film from an Iranian New Wave film by looking at them. Egypt, Japan and Poland all have unusual traits that come from when they discovered particular film techniques, and which ones they privileged. By contrast, Israel came into being after many of these national cinemas were formed, and perhaps it missed its opportunity to have a particular relationship to style. In lieu of this, it chooses to make mythology of its roots. In itself, it’s not a criticism, but every culture does this, and Hill 24 doesn’t exactly add anything to Israel’s cultural history that was otherwise missing. Fifteen years later, the ‘new sensitivity’ movement would finally bring something new to the table.

#1001 movies #thorold dickinson #hill 24 doesn't answer #national cinema #watch as this foolhardy film major tries to explain the middle east conflict

0 notes

mjwood93 · 5 years

Photo

When Wright is Right, When Wright is Wrong: Thoughts on N.T. Wright and “How God Became King”

 A note to the reader: This is my first foray into a blogpost dealing with Theology so, please be gracious. I understand I have a long way to go in terms of writing and am open to constructive criticism.

 I’ve never enjoyed disagreeing with someone more.

 N.T. Wright is the well-known, highly controversial New Testament Scholar, current Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Saint Andrews. He was former Bishop of Durham, and is well known for his four volume work on Christian Origins and the People of God. 

I have not had that much experience at all with Wright until fairly recently. Wright is someone who I’ve always heard Christians rant and rave about. In my undergrad I always heard about his claims of “How there’s so much more” and “How we got it all wrong” as Christians when it comes to the Gospels, or Scripture as a whole. It wasn’t until I started reading more Reformed authors and those into Biblical Scholarship that I really started to see him pop up more, which would make sense in reading academic work. I was very curious why Reformed authors would quote Wright in particular, because from what I knew at the time they claimed to be at odds with their theological systems as a whole. I decided to delve into Wright myself, and purchased the book “How God Became King”. I have supplemented this reading with listening to interviews and lectures on how the Reformed and broader Evangelical community view him, as well as some lectures from the former Bishop himself, to try and get a full picture of his theology. 

So, from the get-go, would I recommend N.T. Wright? Well, yes and no. Let’s get something straight here, there are ALOT of good things about Wright and to completely blanket him as a complete enemy to Christianity is just wrong, but for as many good things that Wright says, there are just as many bad ones that do greater damage to someone who may not have a full understanding of the Gospel. But first, let’s start with the positives:

 When Wright is (W)Right 

1. The first thing I will say about Wright is that he is a brilliant, readable, clear, sometimes humorous, and insightful communicator. He can write easily for the layperson as well as an academic. For example, I especially enjoyed reading about his views on the Temple in the Bible, and while I’ve read and listened to many Reformed authors convey their thoughts on this theme, Wright is the one who has communicated that theme probably with the most ease and coherence. 

2. I think it is great that he is a proponent of Biblical Theology or “whole-bible” theology. My generation is probably the most illiterate generation of Christians from a Scriptural standpoint. We can quote Bible verses in and out of context without having any idea of how that verse or passage of Scripture fits into the rest of Scripture as a whole in terms of context and canon. Many Christians today cannot even tell us what the broad story lines or themes of Scripture are, how they run through the rest of Scripture, why they are laid out that way, most important of all being how that relates to Christ and by extension to His Church. In “How God Became King”, Wright is able to give us “mini-tours” if you will on the themes of Israel, Temple, Christ, and most of all Kingdom from Genesis to Revelation. I would make a few modifications, but for the most part Wright is correct in how he lays out each of one of these themes, and one is able to follow them with ease and coherence as I said before. The fact that he is giving a broad outline and cares so much about it is different from the rest of shallow Christianity. 

3. From what I’ve heard, when it comes to apologetics dealing with the Resurrection and Historical Jesus, he is a must read. Just from the snapshot I’ve gotten in “How God Became King” how he deals with Enlightenment thinkers, as well as calling out flaws of the Jesus Seminar, I’m definitely adding “Jesus and the Victory of God”, and “The Resurrection and the Son of God” to my reading list. You will find these along with other books of his referenced in almost any scholarly bibliography. 

4. He is able to point out flaws in our current Western tradition that should not be ignored. Wright is correct when saying that some Christians incorrectly make the Gospel about “just going to Heaven when you die”. The Gospel is not a Heaven-destination flight, it is about the fact that we are dead in our sin, and it is only by God’s power through faith in Christ that we have a reconciled relationship with God the Father so that we can live in obedience for His Glory. Sadly, Wright does not make this the Gospel at all, which I will have to deal with later. 

5. Though not in HGBK, another positive thing about Wright is that he is against homosexual marriage. When it comes to this subject we should find an ally in Wright.

 6. Also not in HGBK, but another good thing about Wright, is that he is in support of more theologically-related Worship. Specifically Psalmody or Psalm-singing. His Plenary Address in 2012 at the Calvin Symposium of Worship on the Psalms is one of the best lectures I’ve ever heard. Seriously. If there is one thing you check out from Wright, let this be it and nothing more. 

Now, on to some more concerning matters. 

When Wright is Definitely Wrong 

1. The Gospel and our Sinful Condition - Though the Kingdom theme is one that is central to the Bible and God Himself (I’m reading a book right now God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants that deals with this), the Gospel is not “Jesus is King over all Heaven and Earth” and that’s it. The Gospel is how through the substitutionary atonement of Christ, sinners have a reconciled relationship to God the Father and are declared righteous in and through the work of Christ alone, and can now truly be obedient to Him by the Holy Spirit for God’s Glory. Instead of this Penal Substitutionary atonement view, Wright holds the Christus Victor atonement view, which basically says Christ overcame the powers of the world and took all the consequences (effects) of sin and evil in the world, and defeated the dark spiritual powers of the earth and the rest of the cosmos, so now Jesus is King over all the Earth and in Heaven. Now, this is correct, but it does not go far enough, and it does nothing to affect our SINFUL CONDITION and standing before a holy God. The Bible says we are dead in our sin and cannot choose God. The Christus Victor view presupposes that we are able to choose God and Christ on our own and therefore at the very LEAST ends up being Arminian. Though Wright says many Christians do not have the dial turned up on the Kingdom when teaching the Bible, I think Wright goes too far and turns it up to eleven, drowning out everything else. Another way I would put this is, that Wright says a lot about Jesus being King, but does nothing with Christ’s role of mediator as Our Great High Priest. Wright never ultimately defines what he wants this Theocratical Kingdom of Jesus on Earth to be and look like.  

2. Justification - New Perspective on Paul. In very broad terms this means justification is mainly or solely a corporate/communal matter and doesn’t really deal with individual justification. Individual justification is largely a Western thought process. Wright uses his own translations of the New Testament (which in my opinion are just very clunky to read) and in HGBK, he literally translates a passage that deals with our individual justification before God and translates the word justification into “God’s covenant-faithfulness” i.e. God keeping you in the community. This does not deal with our repentance and again, our sinful condition. To emphasize our corporate standing with the Church is important when one becomes a Christian, but to completely divorce that from our individual standing before a holy God undercuts the Gospel. To make justification solely a corporate matter also could lead to a works-based salvation of how one stays in the community. Behind the New Perspective of Paul there is also an undercurrent of ecumenicalism and that “if we can just get rid of what Luther said about justification, then we can we can see that really each denomination of protestantism and Catholics aren’t that different at all. It was Luther who read Romans and Galatians wrong, so the Christian church has misread the Bible for the past 500 years”. Really? If we read the Patristic fathers, we can see very easily that this is not the case at all for the doctrine of Justification. 

3. Inerrancy of God’s Word - Wright emphasizes the human author when talking about the Bible. Now don’t get me wrong, this is important to do. The Bible did not just drop out of Heaven, it was written over long periods of time by different authors who all had their unique writing style and wrote in different genres and in different cultural contexts in three languages. But I don’t think Wright ever relates the human authors of the Bible to God speaking. The problem is in the Bible we see Moses and others writing something in their books and when it is referred to later in the Bible, it is quoted something to the effect of “The Lord says…” To say the Bible is filled with error because of the fallibility of the human author or to say that the Bible is an authority but not our final authority for our faith and practice are slippery slope arguments. If the Bible is in error in some part where do we find them and where does the error begin and end? If the Bible is not our final authority then what is? Culture? Man? Experience? As someone who holds a Christ-Centered view of Scripture it is astounding to me that he says the whole Bible points to Christ yet he believes the Bible is not inerrant. The only way it could do that is if it was. He says multiple times in this book that Scripture DOES have authority but what that authority looks like and how much authority it has he never really defines. It is outside of HGBK that he has stated he thinks of the doctrine of Inerrancy as a response to the Catholic Church and Enlightenment thinkers of their day.

 4. Evolution - Wright is a supporter of Bio-Logos and from what I know, is at the very least, open to Theistic Evolution being the way the opening Genesis chapters took place. While I understand the intention of this view, ultimately Evolution and Christianity are two different world-views, one being based on chaos and naturalism, while the other is based on order and Truth. While I do think one can be a Christian and a Theistic Evolutionist, and there is grace to be given as long as one truly professes Christ as Lord and bears fruit, I do think they have seriously mis-stepped logically in their worldview, and do not realize the full implications of holding such a worldview relating to the Gospel. There is much more I could say on the whole Genesis issue, but I’ll leave that for another time. 

5. Caricatures of the Reformed traditions and their creeds - One thing I was continually disappointed in by the opening and closing chapters of HGBK, was how Wright ultimately makes it seem like HE has found the answer to what everyone else has been missing for the past two-thousand years. Nowhere in HGBK does Wright give any scholarly evidence for what he claims about the Creeds and Confessions. He claims that they do not tell the whole story of Christianity and he makes it seem like this was all former Christians of the time knew and repeated. “They miss the whole part about Israel and there is nothing about the Kingdom!” is what Wright basically exclaims, but teaching the story arc of the Bible was not what creeds and confessions were for. They were formed to combat against heresies of the day to mark out truth from error. The Puritans and other past Christians wrote extensively on the Kingdom and about Israel and the Church being the new creation of the one true people of God. I honestly just don’t know where he gets this idea, unless it is just to help sell the book. 

So, to come full circle, would I recommend Wright? Again yes, and no. I would not recommend him at all to someone who is a new Christian; someone who is still trying to flesh out the Gospel and the theme of Kingdom in their own study of the Word. I would want to make sure if someone did read Wright, that they knew what they were in for and that I could trust them with discerning different parts of theological systems. Is he completely wrong on everything? No. As I’ve said earlier, with the themes of Scripture that he does get right, he can be very clear and helpful. Sometimes he adds new insights and angles that I had not previously thought of before. His influence has gone far and wide, laying the groundwork for non-profits such as The Bible Project (who, while I like a good amount of their stuff, basically hold the same theology as Wright). His research and work on Second Temple Judaism should not be ignored. I do plan on reading his book on the Psalms and his Christian Origins series at some point. Reading Wright has helped me become a more discerning reader, and though it may be awhile before I pick up another book of his, the thoughts and discussion that have come out of reading him ultimately have been beneficial to me. I feel like I have much more of a grasp on what he actually believes, and could articulate that to someone else. And that should be one our goals as Christians who encounter and engage other world-views and those who even share (or claim to share) our own. If we are truly saved by the Gospel and believe what it says, then we should know that we have nothing to fear because His Truth will remain and conquer over all. It is sad to me that such a brilliant mind who gets large swaths and themes that lead up to and come out of the Gospel correct, but gets the central core of the Gospel wrong. I pray that he sees his error and comes to joyfully embrace the True Gospel for what it is.

#n. t. wright #reformed #christianity #christ #book #theology

0 notes

dontcallmesensei · 7 years

Text

The Truth About Learning Japanese

(I’m going to start with a random side note: If I ever get a book deal to write Japanese primer, I’m going to call it I Eat Cake Everyday: A Complete Guide to Japanese with Stupid Sentences.)

It’s been a while since we’ve just talked, so I wanted to just take a moment to do that.

I think every Japanese platform at one point write an article about “the deep truth” of learning Japanese, claiming to give you the golden key that you need to become fluent in only 6 months or 1 year or whatever.

The argument for those kinds of posts isn’t hard to understand: People are fundamentally similar. If people are fundamentally similar, it is very likely that works for me will will work for you. Thus, if this works for me, it will work for you. This does work for me. Therefore, it will work for you (most likely.)

This is why all articles start with something like, “I guarantee you that I’m no genius. [Insert daily task that the writer struggles with on a daily basis.] I’m just a regular person that tried out a few things until I found a winning formula.”

I, personally, want to do my own take on this kind of article. I won’t offer a golden key, but I’ll talk about learning Japanese.

1. Japanese is Coded in the Most Inefficient Writing System in the World

Kanji, the logographs that are the bane of all Japanese-learner’s existence, comes from China. Kanji itself, 漢字, means “Chinese characters.” Kanji were invented to suit the needs of the Chinese language (from way back when, before Mandarin/Standard Chinese was a thing.) Japanese, on the other hand, is a language isolate, and it is not related to Chinese. So the use of these Chinese characters has over time been used in different ways for different words and with different readings- for Kanji tend to have multiple readings, sometimes being just 2 and at other times 8.

In Eastern Asia, the use of Chinese characters was widespread. It was used in Korea, in Vietnam, in Japan, to some varying extent in Malaysia, and the territories these nations conquered.

Korea developed an ingenious writing system called Hangeul, which now has all but totally substituted Chinese characters. Vietnam adopted the Roman alphabet with many diacritics. Japanese, well, Japanese developed two writing systems based on morae. These two writing systems could be used to write out the entirety of Japanese. Kanji is not really necessary. Further, there is no evidence to suggest that there are so many homophones such that even with context one could not make head or tails out of what was being said.

So, Japanese does have a potential unique writing system that is easy to learn (it’s easier than Hangeul in my opinion), but it does not use it exclusively because of cultural reasons. Kanji is just hardwired into the culture.

But here’s where my personal opinion and advice come in: If you have to choose between loving Kanji and hating it, hate it. Don’t romanticize it. Don’t go “above and beyond” what you have to know because of your love for Kanji. Just learn what you have to learn, and leave it at that.

“How many Kanji must someone learn?” The official common use Kanji list (the Jōyō Kanji) lists 2,136 Kanji. How many readings are among these Kanji? Somewhere around 3,869. There are also some variations on Kanji that one should keep in mind and some Kanji that one sees only in names, so add around 400 Kanji to the official list and about 400 new readings.

“How many Kanji must I learn for my first year of Japanese?” All of them. That’s my honest advice. Don’t aim to learn only a few Kanji. If you’re going to learn Kanji, learn them all. Think in that mindset. As soon as you decide you want to learn Japanese, work on Kanji. Before you enter a classroom and learn your first few greetings and whatnot, make sure you know all the common use Kanji, or at least that you’re well on your way to knowing all the Kanji.

2. Language Learning is an Intensive Process

Learning a language is a process that scientists haven’t quite been able to describe accurately. We do know, nevertheless, that it’s a heck of a lot different from learning chemistry or carpentry or bicycling.

In the Western world, there is this idea that one can learn a language in a classroom, normally as a subject period, with periods lasting somewhere from 50 to 70 minutes. Here’s the truth: it doesn’t work very well. (There are historic reasons for this way of learning a language, but we can talk about that some other time.) The success rates of language acquisition in classrooms is ridiculously low. This does not mean that language classes are bad: but it means that it just isn’t enough.

There are many reasons why learning a language in and of itself may be hard. It’d take forever to talk about all of them.

But let’s talk a bit about lexicons. A lexicon, here, refers to the dictionary in your brain where you store the words you know. If you’re monolingual- you have a standard dictionary in your brain with a word and definitions. If you were raised bilingual, then you have one lexicon with two words and definitions. That is to say, if you’re an English-Spanish speaker, then you have “cat” and “gato” in the same space in your brain and you know that what applies to one applies to the other. Then, depending on your fluency and use, you may have two supplementary dictionaries where you store all the information about words that don’t exist in the other language and idioms and expressions and things like that.

Now, if you’re an English speaker and, say, you want to learn German, part of what you’ll learn to do is to process your English lexicon entries into German. What that means is that you learn to engineer English words into German. “Father” turns into “Vater,” “to drink” turns into “trinken,” “Love” turns into “Liebe,” etc. So the words that have no relation with English (the non-cognates), turn into a supplementary lexicon and everything else is put through a mental processor.

Because the brain can do this is the reason why many people in Europe can speak many languages. The fact that someone can speak Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, and French is not terribly impressive. The overlap in words (and in grammar) is so immense that what you’re doing is processing one language into another and you’re guaranteed an astonishing success rate.

Japanese, however, is different because it’s a language isolate. You can’t process one language into another. You have to learn words one by one. That takes time. It takes repetition. Memorization is as much an active process as it is a subconscious process. When people talk about the benefits of “immersion,” what they’re talking about most of the time is putting your brain into survival mode, i.e. either you learn all these words (and grammar stuff) or else you will not be able to survive and thus you will die. That is one way of doing it, and if you do not choose this path you have to commit some serious time to this. I believe that if one knows around 5,000 of the most frequently used words in any given language, one is guaranteed to know at least 95% of all the words one will hear/read in a day (given that one doesn’t go read a super technical manual on how to calibrate a nuclear reactor or something like that.) So, the question becomes how will you memorize 5,000 words? How long will that take? If one learns 10 a day, then it’s 500 days, and if one learns 50 a day, it’s 100 days.

The tradeoff when it comes to speed is that the faster you learn something, the faster you forget. (When you relearn something, it should be faster nevertheless.) So how much time will you commit to learning a language? How will you follow that up? These are important questions.

3. Japanese Media is Considerably Insular

Japan isn’t like the United States. The United States wants every nation to know what music it likes, what fashion it wears, what it believes ideologically and socially, etc. The U.S. is everywhere.

South Korea, recently, is everywhere. K-Pop, K-Dramas, K-SNL, K-Beauty. If you want to know what Korea is up to, it’s pretty easy to find out. They want you know!

Japan... eh. Japan is pretty good at making anime available globally. People know about Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon and the Mighty Atom and all that. When it comes to dramas and movies and tv shows, they’re not quite interested in that. Ages ago I wrote a post on the misconception of “Whacky Japanese Game Shows,” where I basically explained that most of those shows aren’t game shows but segments on variety shows, the only person in my mind having totally insane game shows being Beat Takeshi.

Okay, fine, what does this mean? This means two important things. First, one’s expose to the language outside of going to Japan or talking to Japanese people will be based highly on anime, which is fine but there are other styles of expressing oneself. One needs a bit of variety. If one goes the information/news route, then one is exposing oneself to something very formal and literary, but dull. Second, it means that when people teach Japanese, they’re going to assume that one wants to speak Japanese for business purposes. This sounds strange to say, but let me put it like this: Japanese is an important part of the world economy and STEM and anime, on the other hand, is not a sufficiently large part of Japanese culture so that the Japanese can figure you want to learn Japanese for that sole purpose. If you want to speak Japanese, then it must be for business purposes (and we’ll consider academics to be within business.) So you learn Japanese through the perspective of honorific and respectful language. This isn’t a bad thing either, but the desire to make you sound nice will often lead to lies about how Japanese actually works at a grammatical level.

(On the other hand, in South Korea the K-Pop/K-Drama boom is such a big deal that people around the world start learning Korean in hopes of auditioning for the big production companies in hopes of becoming actors, singers, dancers, and hosts.)

So here’s my advice: Once you have your feet wet with Japanese, once you know your Kanji and you know how to analyze a sentence (even if the lexicon isn’t all there yet), look at something that isn’t anime. I recommend movies, a lot of which are quite nice. Okuribito (Departures) was a great movie. An (Red Bean Paste) is a more recent film that was wonderful. Look up some movies. Sit down, and watch them. Watch it with subtitles, so you know what the movie’s about. But watch it a second time and a third time without subtitles. Try to see if you can make out a few sentences, read a few signs that appear in the background, take note of expressions or words you keep hearing. No, you won’t be able to understand the whole film all of a sudden, but it’s something new and something good and the more Japanese you learn, the more you will be able to return to the film and make out. Eventually, you will be able to listen to a sentence, pause the film, and look up the words you don’t know.

4. Learning Japanese Doesn’t Happen with One Method Alone

This is rather obvious, but it’s worth finishing this off with. There is an abundance of book series, CDs, cassettes, and even online resources (our own included.)

A language is greater than any method, than any curriculum, than any teacher. No one source has all the answers. One has to be encouraged from day one to look at many resources.

A library is a language learner’s best friend. Why? Because books can be expensive, and you will probably not need all the resources you dabble into for a long time. So, when you begin learning Japanese, look at the entire Japanese section, order a few famous books through InterLibrary Loan, if you have access to that, and sit down and just read the books, as if they were novels. Don’t memorize a thing. Don’t do the exercises. Just figure out their style, their aims, their perspective. Do read the footnotes! The more footnotes a book has, the more useful it tends to be in the long run. Information that isn’t relevant in Lesson 1 may be absolutely vital in Lesson 10.

Check out some old books if you can. The way people learn a language today is not the same way they learned it 50 or 100 years ago. The most useful Italian grammar book I ever read was written in the 1800′s. Japanese books published before World War II may have some slightly outdated things, such as the /we/ and /wi/ morae, but they will be good for most of everything else. I’m personally dying to get library privileges again somewhere to be able to look into these, so if I find some good book titles I’ll let you know.

Because a lot of language instruction was, until recently, modeled after the way Greek and Latin was taught, reading some of our own material gets you familiar with the lingo, should you heed my advice. So people like to talk about cases and declensions and conjugations and moods and all that. The works of William George Aston are some of the most important books on Japanese historically. So, if you can find originals of those, please do read them.

So yeah, food for thought

#Japanese #Langblr #Studyblr

499 notes · View notes

davidcarterr · 5 years

Text

Dan Joyce Interview

To coincide with the beginning of work to open up the full space at Southbank, The Arts and Humanities Research Council have commissioned and released ‘You Can Make History’. Edited and shot by skateboarder, film maker and one-time member of Dirty Sanchez, Dan Joyce, the film takes up the current situation at Southbank and incorporates voices representing every stakeholder involved in the process of protecting and reclaiming the Undercroft for all.

Obviously, this is by no means the first film to address Southbank’s multi-layered meaning as a space, nor to discuss the role that the Undercroft has played in global skateboard culture, but it is probably the first time that the multitude of voices invested in the process have been put together in one place.

We caught up with Dan Joyce to discuss the process so as to give you all a little context to the film below. If you missed our previous interview with LLSB detailing the work to open up the Southbank’s available space – you can catch that here: LLSB interview

Big thanks to Dan for his time and for providing a selection of his photography to illustrate this piece.

youtube

Can you give us the back story to this video project firstly please Dan? How did it come about?

I was contacted by the academics a few years ago about making a film covering the LLSB story. I said straight away that Winstan Whitter had already made a film and had a lot of archive footage and that he would be better person than I to tell the story.

Long story short: they made another film together, and then Henry Edwards Wood made another follow up film with them. I made the third one, which is the one we’re discussing here ‘You Can Make History’.

This felt like the first time that a Southbank documentary piece really engaged with all the stakeholders in every capacity, with everybody from those involved in the original design and construction of the space, original LSD heads, Southbank staff; right through to current LLSB heads speaking from their own perspectives: how did you go about getting this access?

Basically due to a lot of work being put in by the LLSB team and the academics that had worked alongside them. They had been trying to interview Dennis Crompton for years but he was a very hard person to tie down. The previous films had only really been told from the skater’s point of view, whereas I wanted this to reveal all aspects of the story.

At this point that was a much easier thing to do, because so much time had passed, Pushing Boarders had happened and skateboarding in general had become a much bigger and more recognised thing both academically, and in a wider cultural sense.

The Southbank meet ups had got everyone together and people had started engaging with each other and telling all these old stories. It became clear that there were multiple layers of age groups and users all open to talk about their experiences. Older skaters were now introducing their children to Southbank and the like. It was just the right time to make a film like this one really.

Dennis Crompton

It’s amazing to see the way that the official voices of the Southbank Centre have fully embraced its life as a skateboard spot now, after so many decades of perceived animosity between the two groups. Dennis Crompton in particular really seemed to love the fact that the space had been adopted and reinvigorated by skateboarding. He must’ve been an interesting person to speak to…

I think Dennis Crompton and Mike McCart both thought that skateboarding was a fad at first and that it would die off. I don’t think they realised the depth of the culture surrounding it, or that it was a lifestyle, and that once you became a skater, you are in for life. He had so many good stories. I have all the full interviews. I will be giving all of the complete interviews to LLSB and they will be archived. These may be released as podcasts in the future.

How did you go about accessing all the archive skate footage of SB?

Through having the table and the meet ups, the SB community started to grow and they started sharing memories and footage. The Facebook group was a great resource for finding old footage. Winstan and Henry both donated a lot of footage. Thanks so much.

There’s also a fair bit of your own skate footage in there too, right? What stuff did you film personally?

I shot the first LLSB event, when they first organised themselves and painted everything white. I followed Chewy around for a while and got some great footage. I had totally forgotten that I’d even shot this until it came to making this film. I also realised I had footage of Dylan Rieder from when he was there at the HUF demo. It felt really fitting that I used it for this. I also shot Urbside being built, so I used some of this footage too.

What’s your own history with Southbank itself? What’s your earliest memory of visiting SB?

My dad used to be a youth worker in Camden when I was growing up. He was part of the first team that organised Cantalowes skatepark. He used to take me to Cantalowes and Southbank when I was a kid.

I then went to university in London in the 90’s, I got a grant, bought a video camera and used to go down to the Southbank and film skateboarding instead of going to Uni. That camera was stolen from my flat and I ended up moving to Leeds after that.

Did you get a chance to skate it in its original state?

Yeah I skated the original lay out, (well not the original 70’s/80’s layout but the one before the hoardings went up), a lot. I filmed Carl Shipman frontside flipping the high bar, then I shot Neil Urwin switch frontside flipping the cut down bar. I also frontside 180 ollied a picnic table out of the little banks. I have spent a lot of time in the Undercroft going back a couple of decades.

Listening to Chris Allen talk about the Undercroft from the perspective of its function was fascinating, (as in the banks exist to provide access to the different levels incorporated into the original design). How did filming these interviews change your own perception of what Southbank is?

It was a dream come true really, the first day of interviews we went behind the wall and got to see all the old bits, it was amazing.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing again, I had so many good memories flood back. I was also sent all the original plans, I felt very honoured to be asked to do this, it also made so much sense as I had come around full circle from my days at Uni in the early 90’s.

It definitely seems as though the Undercroft space in particular was deliberately created to be ‘interesting’ in so far as its purpose was loosely defined but yet it was still made to look visual appealing, at least in a topographical sense as Chris Allen says. It’s tempting to see it as designed ‘for skateboarding before skateboarding’ to an extent isn’t it?

Definitely, at least looked at from today’s perspective and taking in mind Dennis and co’s belief in the importance of making space interesting.

The group of architects who comprised the Archigram group were very revolutionary and wanted to implement some very radical thinking into their designs.

I asked Dennis about some of this; hopefully I will be able to share the full interviews at some point.

How did you link up with Jim Slater, (one of the original London Skates Dominate AKA ‘LSD’ crew who are credited with discovering the Southbank)? Listening to him talk about the first time that skateboarders skated at SB was amazing – were there plenty of LSD tales that you heard from him that didn’t make it into the film?

Jim Slater was the first interview we shot and it really set the mood of the whole film. He was such a key figure and we owe a lot to him and his crew. It turns out he lives really close to where I live too.

He talked about lots of the nonsense they used to get up to back in the 70’s, way too much to make it into this piece. I plan to do some more filming with him this summer and I’d like to make a mini doc’ with him. I’d love to film some slalom too – I’ve built an RC Hovercraft to film this with.

Dan Adams

The current R.a.D book project really feeds into this too, as so much iconic imagery related to the older incarnation of Southbank the spot are tied into TLB, Wig, Dobie, etc. I’m assuming Dan was more than happy to open up the R.a.D archives for this project right?

Whilst we were filming this, the R.a.D kickstarter was in full swing, I wanted them to reach their goal and I thought they were a key part of this story. Dan was really helpful and showed us so many good photos.

I’d love to sit down with him again and go though what he has. There’s just so much work involved involving in the archiving process, I don’t think people realise just how much stuff he’s working through on his own. Maybe we should plan a big scan weekend? Everyone could turn up with a scanner and scan away…

The idea of skateboarding being accepted as a true part of the heritage of the city really comes through in this film Dan – was that the intention, in terms of your story-telling aims? It’s definitely much more than just a celebration of skateboarding, right?

I think this is mainly due to the passing of time and the effect that has on people’s perceptions as regards the cultural depth and value of Southbank as a place. When you can look back over five decades of skate culture, you start to realise the importance of what has happened there.

As we went through the R.a.D archive we realised that certain photos that wouldn’t have been printed due to not being technically good enough at the time they were shot were now usable as they told a different story and were just as important as the ones that were printed. The fact that other sports that were initially perceived as fads have come and gone over the same time frame, whilst skateboarding has grown and evolved, so much really allows everyone to realise how important this story is.

Listening to people connected to the institution revel in the heritage aspect of SB’s status as an iconic skate spot is pretty bonkers really, particularly to skaters of our age…

I think that half of the space being closed off for so long has helped make this place even more mysterious. There is a whole generation who had no idea it used to be bigger. They only know Southbank as it is now so it must be even weirder and even more exciting to them.

We must speak up about this thing we have, it really does have the power to change the world

I think the response and the overwhelming support given to the idea of reclaiming the lost space has shown the institution the multiple layers of its users across all age groups, and it made them realise how skateboarding is directly connected to so much of the creative industries. Skateboarders found a way to tell non-skaters how much this thing that previously we’ve never had to explain to people, means to us. This is a good thing, we must speak up about this thing we have, it really does have the power to change the world.

It also seems as if skateboarding has reached a point now where it’s value to wider culture, and to non-skaters is undeniable – do you think that’s happened partly because of what LLSB has achieved, or maybe just as part of the process of skateboarding growing up from what was relatively a very ‘new phenomenon’ until recently?

I think its just time again. There are now multiple generations all skating together. There are now more female skaters than ever. Skateboarding has become a lot more inclusive. It’s a coming of age process that has really cemented skateboarding culture’s position into society in general I think and made it an impossible thing to ignore.

There genuinely doesn’t feel to be any animosity towards the skaters any more either. When the likes of Mike McCart talk about moving away from conflict towards embracing collaboration – it does sound as if they wholeheartedly mean it. Was that the impression you got?

Absolutely, that is definitely the impression I got from making this film.

I just think Mike McCart and all the people involved in Southbank the institution genuinely understand who we are now. I don’t think they realised that we all still skated and were all still regular users of the space. I think the threat of closure brought older skaters out of the woodwork again too, which in turn added even more weight to the arguments of LLSB.

The things that Paul Richards says about how the dust settling and everyone working together benefits every stakeholder with a connection to the Southbank Centre really rings true doesn’t it? Especially when you factor in the plans for the Education Centre to sit alongside what LLSB have achieved. Community really does seem to have won through here…

I just hope that skaters will be included in the programming of the youth centre, I would love to share story telling skills, and be involved in doing workshops about film making or zine making.

It’s interesting to hear Southbank staff talk about how the academic conceptualization of skateboarding and its relationship to SB really helped the institution understand what the aims of LLSB. Do you see that as part of skateboarding’s growing up process that we touched on earlier? In so far as if academia can see value in it, then it becomes more tangible to an institution like SB?

I think we have all grown up really; skaters have matured and the culture has matured with them. We are starting to care more about how we represent ourselves and how what we do can benefit others.

Skaters have matured and the culture has matured with them. We are starting to care more about how we represent ourselves and how what we do can benefit others

DIY spots are popping up all over the country and their value to the communities that they touch can be seen and appreciated by a wider audience than that purely inside skateboarding. As we’ve discussed already – it definitely is a part of skateboarding’s coming of age process I think.

Another thing that really stood out to me was the comment about the Southbank Centre putting ‘skating in the sports box, rather than the culture box’ – in a lot of ways that seems to be the major shift here really. And potentially, the main lesson that other projects like LLSB can share in, would you agree?

That’s one of the main things that struck me too. I believe that switch in attitude was triggered by the sheer force of so many different generations and groups of skaters coming forwards to stand up for skateboarding and to explain how multifarious its culture is. Institutionally, this process allowed the Southbank Centre to comprehend how multi-layered skateboarding is and how connected we are to the arts. I think they just believed it was a fad and that you gave up when you grew up previously.

The way it’s put together really reflects what Paul Richards says about the multitude of voices all coming together. Did that idea inform the editing process?

I wanted to show all the different age groups that are still active users. I used loads of different cameras to help show this. I wasn’t bothered by resolution. Editing-wise it was crucial to incorporate as many different voices into the film as possible to reflect the situation as it is.

How long have you been working on this and what were some of the hardest aspects of making the film?

I started shooting last June and I finished it at Christmas. Internal politics were a bit of a problem at times but I tried to not get involved.

How was it received at the premiere?

It was amazing, a lot of old heads turned up, it was great to see everyone. From the reaction in the cinema it seemed to have been very well received.

You’re a filmmaker by trade these days, right? What other stuff have you been working on recently?

I have been working very closely with Huck Magazine recently. Also have a few things planned with Blast Skates. I’m planning another documentary piece at the moment. I’m always involved in something or other.

Let’s end on an obvious one – if I were to ask you what the most memorable thing ever done on a skateboard at Southbank was – what would you say and why?

Carl Shipman frontside flip over the bar after the Plan B premiere. I will never forget that day. When the new space opens, I want Carl to come down and do it again.

Interview by Ben Powell

The post Dan Joyce Interview appeared first on Slam City Skates Blog.

Dan Joyce Interview published first on https://medium.com/@LaderaSkateboar

0 notes