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writing-wrxngs · 3 years

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Character Guide!

(Just a little guide to how I personally depict the characters I write about and their roles in my stories.)

Philza

The father of Techno, Wilbur and Tommy. I know a lot of people make Phil just a much older brother, but the Dadza content is just too much for me to ignore

He’s always tried his best for his sons. He’s a good father who tries to balance his sons desires with what’s best for them. His boys mean the world to him.

As a father, he’s firm but never strict. He wants the boys to be their own people, but knows he needs to teach them lessons and give them structure to do so.

He is NOT impartial when the boys fight. He will decide who is in the wrong and give them a lecture. If all parties are in the wrong, everyone is getting sat down and talked to. For some reason this does not deter them from fighting.

He loves seeing the boys flourish. He enjoys being wanted and parenting his sons, but seeing them become independent men is amazing to him. The day that he feels all of his sons are completely self sufficient will be the best day of his life.

His wings are just prt of him. Why he has wings isn’t fully known, he’s just a human with wings. I just like that he has wings. Whether he can fly or not is unknown.

Technoblade

Age has been tweaked to be a year older that Wilbur, give or take. He might be even less than a year older than Wilbur, but he’s older. I chose this for him simply bc Wilbur is far too chaotic to be the eldest. The vibes were off.

He’s simultaneously arrogant and awkward. He loves attention (clout) and being the best but cannot do social interaction.

Likes his chaos and anarchy, but has a line. He knows where to stop and knows when to stop his brothers.

Quite responsible. As responsible and willing to care for his brothers, he still does NOT act like a parent to them. He is nowhere near as gentle with them as Phil, and also often gets in over his head with them.

He’s the most skilled fighter around. He is infamously ruthless, and never holds back, even if his opponent is a loved one. Whether it’s swords, bows, or fists, he will come out on top. He’s had this title for quite a while.

I’ve personally interpreted his mc skin as a pig mask that he wears often. When he’s out or when he’s fighting, he wears it over his face. In company of his family, or very close friends, he wears it up on top of his head.

He played violin when he was younger, his lessons starting when he was young, and he still can play, but does not often.

Wilbur

Extreme middle child energy. He’s his own sort of unstoppable chaos. He can equally be the shitty little brother to Techno and the jerk older brother to Tommy. He also desperately craves validation in spite of how much he’s cared for, and would die for praise.

He’s well known for being well spoken and charismatic. He’s charming and always says the right words. He is amicable and gets along with almost anyone.

He’s still terribly insecure, though, and uses this as a front, putting up walls that sometimes fall if someone, usually his family strike the right place. On the opposite side of the same coin, he still has a big ego at times.

As mean or abrasive as he can be at times, he still genuinely cares about the people he loves. Even as skewed as his morals get at times, he still can be humbled at times and be his true self if something cracks him.

He is also a musician, since he plays guitar and sings, however he also writes songs and places this above performing. Being able to create as compared to Tecnho who simply plays is something he’s very prideful of. Still, writing does stress him at times, especially if he has writer block.

Pogtopia Wilbur is a man who’s lost everything. He’s grasping at straws and no longer cares about who he hurts in achieving his goals, his narcissism shining full through. He’s extremely far gone, but is not yet lost.

Side note, to differentiate between his character and irl, I use Wil for in character and Will for irl.

Tommy

Chaotic youngest sibling to the max. Every day he wakes up and chooses to be a problem. Is a bother, and loves it. Can be overly blunt sometimes and often says the wrong thing or doesn’t read the room properly. His energy never matches the others.

He’s considered the funny one of the family, but slightly dislikes this moniker as he feels like it’s far too one dimensional compared to Wil’s charisma and Techno’s violence. He wants to set himself apart but hasn’t found it yet.

Really wants to be on the same level of his brothers. There’s a significant age gap and Tommy is still just 16, but he’s already chomping at the bit to be independent.

Is fiercely loyal to his family, but especially Wilbur. When they were younger, Tommy was practically Wilbur’s shadow, and honestly, he still idolizes Wil a bit.

Tommy knows how to cut through bullshit like a champ. He is especially good at breaking down Wilbur’s walls and bring him back down to earth when he’s inflated.

Also Tommy is absolutely the main character of the DreamSMP, maybe even in general. Main character energy.

Tubbo

I try to keep my Tubbo usage as little as possible, since I know he’s a bit uncomfortable with fanfic in general. I keep him as a side character. Never about him

He’s Tommy’s best friend and will always stand by him. Tubbo simultaneously matches, increases and dampens Tommy’s chaotic abilities.

He’s a bit smarter than Tommy, and better with things like sympathy and tact.

Canonically has died once. I don’t count deaths that don’t move the plot forward as deaths due to the nature of Minecraft. He was resurrected using some special hand wave magic that I’ve used to explain respawning. It’s not quite healing nor is it necromancy. (Okay, maybe it is necromancy. I had to go check bc I didn’t know off the top of my head. I main paladins it’s not my wheelhouse)

Post festival Tubbo is covered in scars from the burns. They’re mostly on the right side of his body, and sort of start by his torso and stretch like tendrils up his neck/face and down his arm. He’s not insecure about them at all but they are a bit painful.

Tubbo does not have parents. Well, he once did but he can’t remember them. I’ve kept it vague but he likely lived with a family and was separated from them at a young age but was able to take care of himself especially after befriending Tommy some time ago.

Niki

She is incredibly kind, sensitive but equally so is she outspoken and strong willed.

She’s a healer, and is one of the few people capable of resurrecting others, though she is not the most skilled as she only learned how to do this after moving to the SMP.

She’s a bit idealistic and sees the best in everyone, unless they’re completely evil. She believes if she’s seen the good in people, they can be good.

She’s 100% the most level headed in the whole of the SMP. God help you if you cross her, though.

Like I said in my FYI, I don’t ship her with anyone!!! She’s just really sweet and lovey and if you accuse me of making ship content I’ll literally cut you.

Everyone else will probably just make cameos based solely on their SMP characters, but with the way things are looking, I actually might have to get to know more mcyters to write about them.

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kiribakuhappiness · 3 years

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Fic ask game 17 and 6?

Fic Ask Game:

17: What has been the proudest moment for you so far since you started writing?

This is gonna sound so absolutely cheesy and cringe because it really doesn’t have much to do with my own writing at all but - whenever I get messages from other people (usually anons) who tell me that they’ve started writing again because they’ve been following along with my blog for a bit and I inspired them to just say fuck it and get back into it (or to start writing for the very first time in general!)

Seriously, trust me, I know how dumb that all probably sounds, but I think that is quite possibly the coolest thing I will ever do; inspire other people to enjoy the same things that I do. The internet is such a weird, wonderful, horrifying place because everyone is so encouraging and friendly until suddenly you’re Doing The Thing and then everyone seems to develop some kind of a vendetta against you because you’re making moves when they’re not or you’re not making The Right Moves or you’re making the Right Moves but you’re not from the Right Demographic to be making those kinds of moves and honestly? I’m fucking over it.

If you’re not confident enough in your own damn writing and you’re not having fun with it and are completely content writing literally just for yourself, then you need to a choose a different hobby/career path. Thinking that someone else is going to “steal your thunder away” or whatever else just because they write a similar story to yours or write a story that you’ve been thinking about writing for a while is a big ole red fucking flag - and if you’ve never heard anyone say this before, then listen to me real closely when I’m telling you right now.

Your story is just as unique of a creation as you are - even if you’re using the same old damn tropes to tell the same old damn story. I can write a Fake Dating story and litter it with hundreds of overused tropes and as long as I’m actually enjoying what I’m writing and as long as I’m giving it a proper effort to make it my own, then there is literally no one else who can write the same story as me, even if all of the elements and characters within the story are exactly the same. They won’t be able to replicate the way that I express certain emotions through the characters, they won’t be able to simulate the flow of a carefully constructed conversation/interaction like I can, they won’t be able to nail the imagery or the flowery sentence structures or the scattered symbolism or whatever else it is about your writing that makes you LOVE WRITING so damn much.

So whenever I get a long rambling Ask about how someone on this random blogsite in this random corner of the internet read my KiriBaku stories and were inspired to try writing or picking up writing again as a hobby? Bro - there is absolutely nothing else that I could ever create that would be cooler and make me feel more proud of myself than that. I truly fucking mean that.

6: What are some topics you will never write about?

This is a really interesting question because I know that a lot of people get really defensive about these kinds of things - whether it’s because they feel really passionately about a certain topic or perhaps they feel like it’s not their place to write about certain things, the reasons vary and the reactions to them vary even more.

For me (personally); there is nothing I won’t write if I have good reason for writing it.

This isn’t me tooting the ole “I Can Write Whatever I Want Cause Fuck Censorship” horn, because quite frankly I find that mindset to be kind of childish and ignorant to have (don’t misinterpret what I just fucking said, you internet scoundrels. I am not calling the act of having that kind of mindset childish or ignorant, I am saying that usually the people who have that kind of mindset are younger or uniformed in some way).

Just because you can write about something doesn’t mean you should.

Recently, I got some rather colorful Anon Hate about Cold Turkey, and honestly, I was expecting it to happen at some point to some degree, and while I won’t get into all of the gory details because like I’ve said many times before this blog space is for positive interactions and I feel like things like that are best left between the sender and the blog owner (though if you’d really like a response from me to something like that - try taking yourself off Anon next time so we can have a proper chat). But I understand where they were coming from when they sent it, which is why I chose to hear what they were saying but not directly engage.

To them - literally for all they know - I am just some random person on the internet who wrote some smut and that on its own is enough to condemn me right off the bat. Dude, I get it. I am literally the easiest target in that regard, internet trolls and those who feel they have a social justice to impart will obviously trickle into my Asks after posting a story like that because that’s how they feel and nothing I say or do can take that away from them (and it shouldn’t). It doesn’t hurt my feelings, I don’t take “You’re Horrible, go Choke” very seriously from an internet stranger, and that’s mostly because I know for a fact that person probably didn’t even attempt to read my story before they sent me all of that unnecessary hate.

It wasn’t just a smut story - it was a story that contained smut, and there’s a difference.

There are many people who use smut purely as a way to let loose on some of their most wild fantasies (whether those fantasies are morally grounding or not is a totally different topic), and honestly, as long as it doesn’t involve anything unsavory (and you all know EXACTLY what I’m talking about and if you don’t then bless you, you are what’s right with this world) then it really isn’t any of my damn business what they choose to write about on the internet.

I��m not their fucking mom. I’m not their therapist. I’m not their dictator or their president and, quite frankly, they are NOT my responsibility. I can look at something and be like, damn, that’s kind of fucked up in a way that my own emotional trauma doesn’t cope well with (I am not a foot fetish person blah gag sorry I just don’t get the appeal LMAO), but then I can just scroll past it and move on with my day.

But writing a story that contains smut doesn’t mean the story itself isn’t trying to make some kind of a point, or portray some type of healthy boundaries within a sexually active relationship (whatever relationship that may be), or try and enforce the idea that just because you have a connection with someone and just because it feels good, that doesn’t mean things will just magically work out if nobody ever openly discusses what they’re feeling.

That was literally the whole point of Cold Turkey, and I think that if the Anon who sent me that hate were to have actually read the story, then they probably would have recognized that and they might have even appreciated the overall message (or maybe they still wouldn’t, and that’s fine too)!

In the story, Katsuki believes that being attracted to Kirishima is like having an addiction because it helps to put a mental barrier between himself and his emotions that he is so unequipped to handle, and so to combat those undesirable feelings, he reacts in a sexually deviant way because in the moment it feels like the right thing to do in order to get what he wants without having to deal with any of the stuff that he doesn’t. But then he comes to realize that there’s far more to loving another person than just your sexual attraction towards them (which we see when there starts to become this emotional distance between them despite having been such good friends beforehand and despite having taken their relationship to the next level), so then he tries to defensively shoot to the opposite end of the spectrum and ignore literally everything that he is feeling in order to stumble back into the Friend Zone and maintain the relationship that they had before they were ever sexually active with each other - which he then realizes isn’t enough for him anymore. Kirishima was the perfect catalyst for this situation because at the end of the story, he showed Katsuki that there can be a happy medium between them, where they can exist together as friends and as lovers, and how all of that messy emotional stuff can still be portrayed in a healthy, sexy, fulfilling story that keeps the reader invested without falling victim to the same old toxic relationship tropes that usually come with this type of story.

There’s nothing I won’t write about if I have a good reason for it. Pretending that things don’t happen in real life and so shouldn’t happen in fiction is the same as turning a blind eye to gay relationships in fiction as being nothing more than either just “A Light-Hearted Wholesome Fic” or “Ravage Crazy Fantasy Sex.” There is a healthy medium, with beneficial values and positive outcomes, because Love is still Love and the experiences we all go through are one in the same.

Don’t let other people tell you differently. We are all humans, and we all deserve to know that the love we feel for others is in no way deviant or forbidden or taboo (whether that be with another man, or another woman, or another non-binary, or another of any of the other various labels that we like to give that make us easier to separate and manipulate and isolate from each other).

So if I write something with smut in it, or I write something with excessive violence, or I write something unsavory, I’m not doing it for shits and giggles or because I get some kind of sick pleasure from it. I’m not trying to provide shock value and I’m not trying to pry off of other people’s traumatic experiences (I’m not even trying to show any of my own because that’s my own business!)

I think a writer’s responsibility, especially in fiction, is to tell a story; a realistic story, a relatable story, a funny story, a heart-warming story, a sexy story, a heart-wrenching story. And yes, it’s all just fun and games, and no, people probably shouldn’t take it as seriously as they do, but that’s the great thing about participating in fandoms and choosing to be on the internet, everyone has their own opinions and beliefs (whether you like or not), and everyone has advice to give and wisdom to share and not everyone is filled with malicious intent if you’re willing to accept all of that for what it is.

These Ask responses got crazy long LMAO sorry sorry!! I just had so much to say and I wanted to say it in a way where I could get my point of inclusion and perspective across! I feel very passionately about these kinds of things and I don’t generally get to discuss them so openly so I really appreciate anyone who has made it this far! Thank you so much for the questions!! <3

#ask game #writing ask game #asks

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talks-refined · 4 years

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Why azula, in my opinion, shouldn’t have had a redemption arc

i know it’s a complicated subject in this fandom but i wanted to give my two cents on it! i promise this isn’t me just going “booh evil”

okay so here’s the thing. the reason this is so complicated to answer is because it needs to ask pretty existential and complex questions like, can everyone be redeemed? how is evil made? how much of you is really only your upbringing? is it possible to be inherently bad? what do we fundamentally deserve? can you separate yourself completely from what you’ve been since birth and if so, what’s left?

now if you walked up to me and asked those questions, my answer would probably be something along the lines of “i don’t know, i just got here”. so that’s not what i’m gonna try to answer here

notice how i said “shouldn’t have had” and not “deserved”. i can’t tell you what azula “deserved”— probably a nicer childhood and therapy— but i can also say azula didn’t “deserve” anything. she’s a character, she’s words on paper, animation and voiced acting. there isn’t a real azula, an actual 14 years old child soldier out there awaiting to turn good. characters are story arcs, development, goals... what makes their value isn’t morals but what they bring to the story. and azula brings so much that, in my opinion, being ultimately redeemed would cheapen

first off: zuko. i’ve seen people say azula shouldn’t get a redemption arc because then her story would just be the same as zuko. it’s... not true, obviously, they’re different characters for a reason, but there is a part of truth i wanna point out here:

zuko and azula’s stories are diametrical opposites. two siblings, a boy and a girl, a firebending prodigy and one who’s average at the very best, one favored by his mother, the other favored by her father, one impulsive and one calculating. At the beginning of the story, one angry and unstable, the other calm and confident, one banished, desperate and without honor, and the other a princess and leader, acclaimed by all, who radiates regal energy.

“(ozai) said she was born lucky. he said i was lucky to be born. i don’t need luck, though. i don’t want it. i’ve always had to struggle and fight and that’s made me strong. that’s made me who i am.”

( zuko, to aang, season 1 finale )

that first sentence was the hook that told the viewers azula would come in the picture in season 2 and it tells you exactly the opposite dynamics their characters would develop on. azula is perfect, zuko is a failure is the message we’re supposed to get, at least that’s how they view each other and themselves, because that’s what their father taught them. but here’s the thing: luck is by definition elusive, and perfection is by definition unattainable. azula spends her life building herself around the vision that failure is inexcusable. because she’s at such a high place, because she’s so perfect, she can never fail, because she can’t and because she’s not allowed to. that mentality is bound to doom her, it’s inevitable. it’s a direct opposition to zuko, who builds himself in the fact that he’s failed so many times, that he made so many mistakes, that each taught him lessons. when zuko fails once, he knows he can get up because he was miserable for so long that it taught him he can survive anything. when azula fails once, she crumbles. azula is a cautionary tale of perfectionism, and cautionary tales can’t have happy endings. zuko’s approach of life has to reach a happy ending, because he’ll always look for one, it has to reach a redemption arc because he’s not scared of the mistakes he’s made in the past and he is always trying to better himself (the redemption comes when he realises he was trying to meet the wrong standards). azula’s approach of life guarantees a downfall because she’s convinced that failure is the end.

both their stories mirror each other, backwards. when we meet zuko, he’s failing, always, and when we leave him, he finally won. when we meet azula she’s winning, always, and when we leave her, she finally (by which i mean that it’s inevitable, not that it’s good) fails.

and there’s another reason (let’s pretend this is structured, okay?), that’s a little more complicated, and it has to do with ozai.

you know how ozai is barely present in the series? i’ve seen some people argue that azula is a better villain because she’s scarier or because we see her more. here’s the thing:

when you’re trying to portray something that’s really, really awful, it’s easier not show it. when you show something, in it’s entirety (in that context that would mean making ozai a deep, 3 dimensional character that we see develop) it’s... small. to define is to limit (- oscar wilde). when you only show small things tho, details, in movies it can be shadows, think the beginning of stranger things when you don’t see monsters, but can feel a threat, that’s when it can get scary as shit. because whatever limited, physical (or character-ial? is that a word) form you chose for the villain isn’t there in people’s minds, it’s only their own imagination trying to comprehend what you made them feel. and what people imagine based on only fear, or anger, is easily scarier than any five headed monster you can put onscreen.

that’s what ozai is: a looming threat. hell, i’m not even sure we see his face until season 3. he only has a handful of scenes. but i hate him. i hate him so much i could scream into a pillow and he’s so vicious it sends shivers down my spine. you know why? because of what he did to zuko and azula.

when you wanna keep your main villain mysterious, it’s good to give the audience characters that he’s interacted with. characters that he’s close to enough to have had an effect on them, so they can perceive a part of him. and boy did he have an effect on his children

( to be fair here: that idea and most of what i’m saying about it came from Overly Sarcastic Productions video on minions as a trope. it’s really good i love their whole channel, red is amazing)

season 1: meet zuko. he’s a sixteen years old. he’s a bad guy, but written so that you sympathise with him to a certain extent. then comes the Tragic Backstory Episode and you learn that he was challenged to a duel as a thirteen years old by his father after he spoke without permission in a meeting, begged for mercy, got half of his face burned off at the hands of his father, and was banished from his home to search for the avatar, who was dead as far as anyone knew.

now you’ve seen very little of ozai after this episode, but you’re ready to fight that guy, right? i know i am.

it gains a level of depth with azula. after being introduced to a character who is starving for his father’s love and approval, we’re introduced to a new character, who seemingly has all of that. azula is zuko’s ever winning rival. she has everything he wants, her honor, her title, her father’s favors.

(i think it’s worth noting that making your children compete for your love is already a red flag for noticing pieces of shit)

but it’s not enough. azula has everything, she is everything ozai values (cunning, strong, ruthless) and even then it’s not enough to please him. nothing will ever be good enough. and you see two children fighting, breaking themselves to please a father that is seemingly incapable of love, but keeps baiting them, giving them impossible standards to reach so they’ll always keep trying to please him.

okay, now you hate him, right?

but here’s the thing: because azula was a firebending prodigy, she got a taste of her father’s approval. he saw himself in her, where he saw too much of iroh and ursa in zuko. he was proud of her.

he was never proud of zuko. too soft, not strong, or fearless enough. because of that, zuko was never close to his dad. all he got was disdain. because of that, he forms bonds with other people (with his mother and uncle, at first) that expose him to another vision of life. and in exile, after chasing relentlessly, part of him is pushed to the realisation that he can live without his father’s approval. because he had to.

azula on the other hand, quickly becomes all ozai’s. from flashbacks you can clearly tell each of them gravitates around one parent, zuko around ursa and azula around ozai. even in her other relationships (zuko, tylee, mai...) she behaves according to what her father taught her, how to manipulate and hurt others

and ursa has flaws, god i’m not saying she doesn’t. that deserves a post in itself. but she values things like kindness, softness and love. ozai values strength, power and cunning. childhood is a formative stage: you often build yourself on the way you were raised. zuko had those conflicting values, because ursa, and ozai more indirectly, both taught him. but ozai isolated azula from other (adult) presences. this is more speculation but i really think it’s true, for what it’s worth. we rarely ever see ursa and azula interact, and when we do ursa is i think always? reprimanding azula for something that ozai taught her. it doesn’t seem like they spend enough time together for her to teach her daughter a better way.

that’s the thing. ozai’s “love”, or at least approval, was azula’s curse. zuko thinks it’s something he has to aim for, and later realizes it’s only ever going to be conditional and manipulative and stops trying. because he knew another way. but azula always lived with it. it isolated her, prevented her from ever finding a better way. his “love” is what did this to her

so yeah. none of this is saying that azula could never have been good. she was 14, she had a whole life ahead, i’m not some psychology master that can tell you exactly if it’s even possible to unlearn so much manipulation and abuse- i want to believe it is. but this is a story, and to me it’s the more nuanced, more interesting, better story they could’ve written. i think having those two very different and very paralleled stories, for a show that doesn’t shy away from complexity the way atla does, was very important.

while i was writing this, i showed it to a friend, who can speak for toxic households better than i can, and gave me a new perspective and the best conclusion: when in an abusive parental relationship, there’s always a tearing hesitation between ‘breaking free’ and doing what’s best for you, and staying loyal to your parent, someone you’re supposed to love and who’s supposed to love you. zuko is a message of hope ; azula is a warning

#azula #princess azula #atla #Avatar The Last Airbender #azula redemption arc #please be nice

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colorseeingchick · 3 years

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The Inevitable Dystopia of My Hero Academia (WITHOUT manga spoilers)

As noted by your local political science anime lover.

(This is a summary/rambling about a political science paper I wrote on My Hero. This is only based on the anime. I’m not caught up on the manga)

Warnings: Vague reference to abuse (Endeavor), discussion of political theory, discourse.

A/N: It’s lengthy and all over the place. It also might be impossible to follow. So I’m sorry in advance lol.

THESE ARE JUST MY OPINIONS AND A FORM OF DISCOURSE. I’m open to discussing if you have thoughts! Political science is about understanding policy and structures, not taking a stance. Any comparisons to ‘modern society’ are in reference to 1st world/developed societies, as those are the governments that parallel the My Hero Academia government.

The politics of My Hero Academia is... pretty morbid if you ask me. It’s not worse than the real world, sure, but maybe that’s why it’s all the scarier. Even with quirks and super powers, the impossible becoming possible, it isn’t enough to save them from the undesirable. Their society seems to have fallen into a cycle of suffering and oppression that has no end.

Now, I know no one really gets excited about political theory (unless you’re like me, then please be my friend), but there are some concepts that you’ll need to understand in order to follow along with my argument. So bear with me.

First, utopia. Utopia is probably a term you’ve heard casually, but the definition political theorists hold it to is simply- “a good place.” Often times it is depicted as a far away dreamland, only possible in the realm of fiction (and this makes sense given that My Hero is fictional). It is very important to understand that utopia is not necessarily perfect. It’s just better than average. There are a few standards that characterize utopia, one being the utopian focus on having very strict laws to repress the unstable nature of mankind [1]. I’ll come back to this.

Next is dystopia. Dystopia as an idea was actually made in response to utopia. It’s the ‘not-utopia,’ and is lumped with ‘anti-utopia’ (this comment is in reference to the semiotic square, if you would like to develop a further look into it). The simplest way to understand dystopia is to know it’s ‘a not-good place.’ [2] But that’s surprisingly broad. Dystopias can be a failed utopia, or they could have developed on their own as a result of any number of reasons. You’ve probably seen all sorts of depictions of dystopia (climate dystopias, medical dystopias, technology-based dystopias, literally any YA novel from my childhood, you get the idea). Its key to note that unlike an apocalypse, where there is utter destruction and it ends with complete annihilation of humanity, there is hope* inherently written into it.

*Hope here meaning there’s theoretically a way for the government to be changed/overthrown without death of the majority.

Now that all that boring stuff is out of the way- let’s talk about My Hero Academia.

I’d argue that, at first glance, Hero Society seems to be working towards utopia. When reading from Deku’s perspective, especially in the beginning, you would think that their society is close to becoming utopian. The impossible is possible, being a hero is a reality, and a symbol of peace tangibly and definitively exists. When you compare it to pre-quirk society, these changes would appear to be developments. As for the ‘in progress’ aspect, I think Hawks verbalizes it best when he says his goal is for heroes to have too much time on their hands. They aren’t there yet, but if that goal is achieved, it would be a mark of utopia.

They’ve achieved some level of utopian standards by meeting the ‘strict laws to repress the unstable nature’ standard. Think about the concept of licensing quirks, quirk regulation, and the government institutions that regulate quirk society. Remember when Tomura cornered Deku at the shopping mall and mentioned something along the lines of, ‘all these people could wield their quirks at any moment they want, but choose not to? Instead they smile and laugh.’

He has a point. Why is that? From a political theorist point of view, it’s honestly very shocking. For centuries, theorists have argued about how to manage human nature. It’s a difficult task as is. Give everyone superpowers? That would have to be 10x as chaotic. But in the My Hero world, it’s not. It’s well organized. The government took action to regulate the physical instability of humanity which arose from quirks. What’s so impressive to me is that they managed to mitigate (not eliminate) the instability of human nature/behavior along with it.

But if you take a step back to look at My Hero Academia, slowing down and stepping out of Deku’s shoes, I don’t think the instinct is to classify it as a utopia in progress. Of course, its superpowered with quirks- adding to the realm of possibility. But crime of all sorts is superpowered, just as the justice systems/law enforcement in the country.

When I made this realization, I understood I had kind of been drawn into the propaganda the society puts out. It’s a sort of cloak built up by the positive media around the heroes, the narrative being focused on young heroes and their great mentors, and the universal title of ‘villain’ being put on everyone that breaks the government’s laws (this really bothers me, and maybe I’ll discuss it another time). Things aren’t better. Crime rates have gone down I believe, but the anti-hero sentiments being harbored are more intense than in certain real world societies. Hero society hasn’t necessarily resolved any of the problems that our society would have. The balance is the same, but the possible actions people can take, or the behaviors that are exhibited, are scaled up on both sides of the law.

What’s worse is that- even if its not a universal experience, this society is also a dystopia for many people. The first hint of this society being less than perfect is when we hear from Stain and his pursuit of a ‘just society’ by eliminating fraudulent heroes. His ideals are surprisingly level-headed, and very rigorous in standard, even if it is based in questionable morals. But it’s easy to brush it off. However, its less deniable as you learn more about these characters.

Shigaraki was abandoned and waited for heroes to save him, but they didn’t. Overhaul was also an orphan living on the streets. Eri was abandoned by her mother because of her quirk. Twice was villainized, when in reality he has mental health issues (dissociative identity disorder I believe). It broke my heart when Twice said “heroes only save good people.” Who decided they were bad people? Why weren’t they saved?

Also, can we talk about the quirkism? (Which I don’t know if that’s a real term within this fandom yet, it might be, but just to be on the same page, I mean quirk-based discrimination) You have people like Shinsou, who’s treated as villain even though he wants be a hero- solely because of his quirk. I believe Toga was also treated poorly because of the nature of her quirk as well (correct me if I’m wrong). And then you have Midoriya, who was harassed and bullied for not having a quirk at all. Clearly none of them have control over the way they were born, and yet they all had to deal with how society treats them because of the uncontrollable. (At this point I’m sure its clear there are a lot of parallels with the discourse around quirkism, racism, and sexism, which is a whole nother conversation).

Having good quirks also seems to get you a pass, or puts you outside the reach of the law. The only example I need for this is Endeavor and his children. Despite all the abuse he’s done that makes him a villain in my book, he stays the number 2 hero. That’s all I need to say.

The suffering of all these individuals is a direct result of the failure of the government. And this isn’t a ‘government should have taken extra steps to help them.’ This is a situation where the government’s structure, including the sensationalized media and monopolization of quirk use, has actively attacked and oppressed people who otherwise would have been untargeted.

This is a world of misery for them- the people who make up the underworld. We call them villains and criminals because they are- but I don’t think its fair to call all of them bad people. They definitely didn’t start out that way. They are the results of suffering. They are created by a society that solely aims to remove them from existence. This hero society is so unjust that its faults create its own villains. The villains they aim to stop came to be because of the ‘heroes’ in the first place. The irony there is painful, and I hate that it’s a sort of self fulfilling prophecy.

The reason why I think it’s morbid is because there is no escape. Quirk society in its current state is undeniably a dystopia for many. But the issue is (and this was the crux of my argument in my paper) dystopia and utopia inevitably and consistently coinhabit space. What is utopia to one will be a dystopia to another. There is no way to get everyone to uniformly view society.

What that means is, somebody will always be suffering in this society. At least, that’s the cycle that’s been set up. In the episode where Tamaki got shot with a quirk erasing bullet and Kirishima fought the gangster on quirk enhancing drugs, that gangster did say that this was ‘their time’ to rise. “It’ll be the age of those who live in the shadows.” They’re not looking for resolution. They’re looking for revenge. They want to flip the script and be the ones living in utopia while everyone else is subject to suffering. The concept of everyone living happily in harmony and true peace isn’t even in consideration.

There seems to be no middle ground, no solution to the push and pull between the ‘heroes’ and ‘villains.’ The unfairness will continue to be passed around, and unless someone can break the cycle, attack the corruption of the system at its roots,

the problem is not going to go away.

Sources!

[1] Claeys, Gregory, and Fatima Vieira. “The Concept of Utopia.” In The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

[2] Robinson , Kim Stanley. “Dystopias Now.” Commune, November 17, 2018. https://communemag.com/dystopias-now/.

#my hero academia #boku no hero academia #my hero academia politics #boku no hero politics #political science and anime #political science #anime #discourse #colorseeingchick writes #discourse with the colorseeingchick

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 4 years

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David's actual return was... bad. What would a good return have been like? As a kid I always expected someone to find him and for him to end up in Yeerk custody and that'd be how they found out who the Animorphs were. I do kind of like Crayak using him but just to get to Rachel, because it'd be a bad idea to give any power to David.

I really like that idea of David finding a way to tell the yeerks about the Animorphs! It even fits with the existing structure of the series – he returns in #48, and the yeerks find the Animorphs in #49.

My own suggestion for how to make The Return better?

Make it not a dream.

I have a peeve about dream plots, I’ll acknowledge. I think that at best they can be an opportunity for an eensy bit of characterization, a heapton of setting, and exactly zero plot. That said, there are also many scenes in #48 that are potentially scary/cool/interesting, if they just happened for realsies.

If the events of #48 really did occur in canon, then:

Jake and Rachel do what they’ve been threatening since #7, and have an argument that escalates into physical violence.

This helps set up Rachel going full Blood Knight in #52, and Jake doing the same in #53, because these two keep each other ethical-ish any time they butt heads over morality and are forced to defend their decisions to each other. If the Berensons’ bond has fractured to the point where they’re brawling in morph, then each of them is lacking the other as a check on their behavior.

Marco and Ax’s intelligence analysis determines that (even though they didn’t know it at the time) the events of #46 were the final straw for the yeerks’ secrecy.

The conversation between Rachel and Marco at Ax’s scoop helps sell the idea that the Animorphs’ world is slowly coming to an end. Too many humans witnessed too much on that aircraft carrier, too many hosts have escaped the yeerks, and the invasion is becoming an open secret. It’s ominous as hell, because the Animorphs have an inkling that the start of open war will be the end of their ability to live at home with their families, and it’s highly effective at setting up the events of the next several books.

Rachel kicks the elephant in the room by pointing out that Marco and Ax get away with bloodthirstiness while she doesn’t, because gender.

Rachel basically comes out and tells Tobias that Marco is every bit as ruthless as she is, and that Ax is just as quick to kill. And she’s not wrong. But Marco and Ax kill coldly, they kill rationally, they kill from a distance, and they kill as boys. Rachel kills quickly, she kills angrily, she kills up close, and she kills as a girl. Therefore, their friends don’t tell Marco he’s “worrying” (#22), “terrifying” (#35), “out of control” (#37) or “psycho” (#52). Their friends don’t get into screaming matches with Ax or act frightened of him.

But Rachel’s a girl, and nice girls are supposed to control their emotions. Nice girls aren’t supposed to enjoy growing into big strong creatures who can rip their enemies apart. Nice girls should never be aggressive, and if they are it’s probably because they’re too emotional. It’s a good point, one I wish came up more often.

Crayak’s deal with Rachel comes due in a way that none of the Animorphs could’ve predicted.

If everything with David is canon, then there’s a fascinating follow-up to Crayak’s offer in #27. Crayak isn’t just drawing on Rachel’s violent side, he’s drawing on her Achilles heel: that David gets under her skin. It’s a great wrap-up to the Crayak plot. It shows that Rachel’s the Ellimist’s favorite not because of her natural-born gifts, but because of her choices. She’s capable of ruthless violence, but whenever possible she chooses compassion.

There’s also the fascinating ambiguity in the line “kill your cousin,” and the fact that Rachel interprets it to mean Jake — and of course she’s about to kill Tom. Dozens of fandalites have expended gallons of ink on the question of how to interpret that motif, but it has far more impact if Rachel truly is talking to Crayak in this book as well as in #27.

Cassie’s forced to confront what they did to David.

Leaving aside Rachel for a second, there’s a ton of potential for how this book could change Cassie going into her Big Character Moment in #50. She never feels the level of guilt over David that Rachel and even Jake do, I think partially because Cassie’s morality isn’t nearly as human-centric and therefore not nearly as horrified by the idea of making a human into a rat. But if Cassie’s confronted with the reality that she designed and executed a plan that ended with a kid her age trapped in what he considers to be a fate worse than death, then the implications for her character development are almost infinite.

Rachel embraces an unpretty female power fantasy.

I love mecha-Rachel. Mecha-Rachel is big and ugly and strong, capable of ripping her enemies limb from limb while still being fundamentally Rachel-shaped.

Rachel, maybe more than any other Animorph, has to put up with society telling her that her body is wrong. Everyone from Marco to her gymnastics coach feels entitled to tell her that she’s too big and tall for a girl. Everyone from random guys on the street to her own classmates feels entitled to sexualize her body because she’s female. Rachel doesn’t feel mismatched or dysmorphic the way Tobias does, but she is aware of (and fed up by) the expectations of what her body “should” be.

Mecha-Rachel is unfeminine to the extent that she takes up space — a lot of space — and takes no prisoners. But she’s still got the aspects of femininity that Rachel loves, from flowing hair to long nails. Mecha-Rachel is exactly the kind of shape that makes morphing so fun to fantasize about, especially for little girls.

Rachel kills David.

This is maybe what I want most out of #48: for Rachel to kill David for real. Because, as she tells Cassie, somebody has to do it. Because she’s strong enough. Because she’s compassionate enough. Because she understands David. Because she understands herself. Because she’s been a rat, and she’s been just like David in lots of less literal ways. Because she doesn’t know what the right answer is, so she’s willing to respect David’s wishes for lack of a better way out.

Visser Three gets kidnapped and thrown out of a pokéball and beheaded and then gets better and yet also mysteriously thinks that it’s not suspicious at all one of the andalite bandits looks like a giant human, oh and also there are sentient rats who speak their own rat language.

On second thought, we can leave out all of this nonsense.

Honestly, 99% of my frustration with this book comes from the fact that I can’t tell how seriously to take it. If it’s just a dream, then a fat lot of nothing happens in the war between #47 and #49, and Rachel’s last book before her death also contains a fat lot of nothing. If it was something that happened in canon, then I think I’d really enjoy everything in this book except the (non-David) sentient rats. With only a few tweaks — the first scene taking place in California not D.C., the fight with Visser Three getting cut, the sentient rats getting swapped for more human minions — it works pretty well as a real Animorphs plot, one that helps smooth the transition in both tactics and morality that occurs in the last ~10 books. This book has some genuinely cool stuff in it, and I want that cool stuff to be part of the real events of the story.

#animorphs #david animorphs #the return #48 #animorphs spoilers #rachel berenson #animorphs meta #joysweeper #asks

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seyaryminamoto · 4 years

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(1/2) What if the reason Bryke left was because Netflix wanted to give Azula a redemption arc? Or maybe somebody wanted to change the first scene of the show so that Katara wasn't with Sokka when he went fishing and so Aang wasn't unfrozen until years later... *whistles innocently* And they realized this route would allow them to make a longer series, meaning more content, meaning more profit. Jokes aside, I realize both of these options are 99% not the reason Bryke left, but imagine if...

(2/2) they were? Like, how funny would that be? Well, the latter possibility would be sort of funny, while the former would be somewhat depressing actually. Anyway, I'm surprised how many people are complaining about Bryke's departure. From what I've seen, people primarily shit on them and any praise in regards to ATLA goes to other writers/artists. I already didn't have any high expectations out of the live-action version, but this latest development didn't really worsen them much.

x’D not wrong about the second option being hilarious, though I’d hope I’d have heard something about it, if just out of sheer decency by Netflix to contact the cruel mind behind not sending Sokka fishing with Katara... (?)

Anyways, Bryke’s involvement in ATLA’s writing is often up-played by casual viewers, and downplayed by hardcore fans. There’s no sure way to know how much work they did on ATLA’s writing, seeing as there’s a fair amount of reports that suggest Aaron Ehasz, imposed on Bryke by Nickelodeon, reeled the story into what it became. I’ve even seen people claiming Bryke’s original ending would have featured Aang leaving Katara and Sokka behind while flying off to find more airbenders after the show ended. Not half as feel-good an ending as the show’s, right? Then there’s also reports that male!Toph was going to be in a love triangle with Katara and Aang... adding Zuko to the mix, as he often was added by extra ATLA content, Katara was likely to have three possible love interests, if Bryke had gone forward with this? Considering how Korra outright had three different love interests in ALL the members of her gang, this doesn’t sound like that outlandish a claim, whether there’s real sources for it or not. If they were willing to do it with Korra, I’d believe they’d have done it with Katara.

Ehasz is indeed credited for female!Toph and Azula, in the art book (I think) Bryke are outright featured saying Ehasz is the main artificer behind Azula being who she was, rather than Zuko’s older brother (Bryke’s original concept for her character). With this in mind, when Ehasz comes out and claims that, in a hypothetical book 4, he would have redeemed Azula to also finish Zuko’s personal character arc, and then Bryke show up claiming there NEVER was a book 4 possibility, you get a clearer understanding of where Bryke are likely standing in regards of Azula’s redemption :’) if that’s what Netflix wanted (... though I question they’d have pitched it since the get-go), it’d be no surprise that Bryke wouldn’t hear of it.

There’s no denying Bryke had interesting ideas, and that they worked to build a pretty complex world, but we cannot know how much of that world was solely their doing, and how much of it was also created by the input of the larger team of writers involved in ATLA’s original show. LOK, on the other hand, features a clusterfuck of worldbuilding that doesn’t always make sense, including no shortage of retcons (not only of pre-existing lore, LOK even retcons itself up to three times regarding explaining why and who decided to keep Korra in a compound for most her formative years), terribly written romance (whenever it’s written), poor storytelling decisions that outright derrailed their show and even turned their protagonist into the B-plot for the bulk of the final season... and what a coincidence that this time Bryke had no one breathing down their necks telling them what to do: they had a lot more creative freedom in LOK than in ATLA. There was no Nickelodeon imposed Head Writer, and they didn’t bring Ehasz back of their own volition. Whether because Ehasz isn’t that great to work with or because Bryke simply didn’t want anyone else to poke their noses into THEIR story, Bryke didn’t want any supervision over LOK. And as many loud fans as LOK may have, LOK’s storytelling quality simply doesn’t measure up to ATLA’s, and I refuse to blame Nickelodeon for that when all evidence indicates Bryke had no idea what they wanted for Korra in the first place.

What I’m saying is... Bryke do seem to benefit from having someone else reeling in their ideas, probably providing genuine structure, making them seriously reason with WHERE they’re taking the story. This, going by ATLA’s much clearer structure, is something I’m willing to believe Ehasz offered, and something Bryke lacked, by their own volition, in LOK. It’s also something they lack in the comics, seeing as, up to date, they haven’t done anything in them that really lives up to their potential, as far as I know. “The comics don’t have any direction and aren’t advancing their world’s story” has become a far more frequent complaint with each newly announced and released comic volume, whether by supportive or antagonistic fans. Why might that be...?

It’s possible, of course, that Netflix’s team simply isn’t the kind of team Bryke can work with positively. Maybe they’re too stiff, maybe they’re not that creative, maybe they’re unable to compromise and it’s not all on Bryke?

But with the precedent Bryke has set (ATLA, with supervision, manages quality storytelling, despite its many flaws, whereas LOK, without it, is a storytelling failure), I wouldn’t be surprised that they were outright unwililng to compromise their own ideas after experiencing the full freedom of working on LOK without anyone telling them what to do, and that upon finding they wouldn’t have that same freedom this time, they quit.

Does this mean the show will automatically be better or worse? Eh... beats me, frankly. There’s no denying Bryke did endeavor to develop a large, unique world with the Avatarverse, but as much as the fandom believes otherwise, what made the Avatar world unique wasn’t merely that it wasn’t “white”. This particular qualm by the fandom feels really narrowminded to me, and I’m not saying this because I believe there should be white people in Avatar, hell no: what I do mean is that ATLA had an Asian setting, but the narrative frequently imposed western values on it. They recreated many elements of Asian cultures, but morally? ATLA couldn’t be more western. Is that a good or a bad thing? Beats me. But there’s a lot of occidental influence in ATLA’s narrative, even more of it in LOK, and that somehow doesn’t bother people nearly as much as it bothers them that the liveaction cast isn’t western in the least. Yes, it’s true, the cast shouldn’t be western: but there are many regards in which the original ATLA could pioneer a better understanding of many Asian cultures, and it doesn’t. Even something as complex as the Fire Nation’s cultural practices (no, I don’t mean the genocide and supermacy, I mean everything else) is outright blasted by the show’s western moralism from the get-go rather than seen as what a different culture values (already offered a few thoughts about this on this other ask).

Therefore, in terms of casting, which seems the main concern of the bulk of the fandom, I highly doubt Netflix will be willing to repeat the same mistake M. Night’s fiasco committed. They can’t be that stupid. They’ve done a lot of big diversity efforts in the past, whether insincere or not, in many regards, so I seriously doubt they need Bryke sitting in the casting booth repeating “NO WHITE ACTORS! NO WHITE ACTORS!” to the top of their lungs to remind Netflix's executives that this just can’t happen. Seriously, if that’s what their input for the show was supposed to be about, Netflix was better off saving up the money of hiring those two as main consultants or executives and using that coin to pay the likely lousy salaries of the non-white actors they’ll surely hire :’) I doubt, seriously, that Bryke’s problem had anything to do with white casting. If Netflix entered this deal and didn’t do their homework first, then they’re basically dooming themselves since day one and the show would suck with or without Bryke’s involvement. This is not impossible, but really stupid, and an absolutely failed business venture to jump into.

In the end, I don’t know what that liveaction will shape up into. I don’t exactly care much either, which is why I didn’t really debate this subject before answering this ask... I’m pretty detached from canon these days, as things stand. I can’t even bring myself up to reading the plot of the Kyoshi novels, no matter if people keep telling me they’re ~actually good!~, let alone will I want to rewatch ATLA in liveaction when I’ve become increasingly infuriated by liveaction remakes with each new one Disney releases :’) from the moment it was announced, I knew this remake wouldn’t be for me. It’s not likely they’ll do anything with it that I’ll really want to see, or that they’ll change things in a way that resolves my frequent complaints about the show’s storytelling mishaps. Therefore, I’d always meant to leave it be and let everyone else enjoy it...

... And Bryke’s absence from the project doesn’t really change my mind on that front. At this point, crediting them for the entire success of ATLA is incredibly naïve, especially seeing how none of their later projects have even come close to ATLA’s level of storytelling quality. Likewise, it’d be naïve to assume Netflix is guaranteed to do better without Bryke’s “meddling”. If anything, without Bryke’s likely persistence that the show be kept close to its roots, Netflix is bound to fall into its frequent, known tendencies of pandering to certain crowds at the cost of quality storytelling because Hollywood overused and bad tropes are where success is at! They’ll likely flatten characters, turn them into edgy, non-humorous versions of themselves, not unlike in M. Night’s film, and then everyone will hate the show anyways for offering such dull and simplistic characterization compared to the original :’)

In short... there’s no winning scenario. There really isn’t. I assumed there wouldn’t be one anyhow, from the get-go, at least for myself? But now that Bryke are out, the fandom is divided in about four factions:

The ones who will watch and support the liveaction no matter what.

The ones who think it will suck balls because Bryke aren’t in it.

The ones who think it will be an improvement because Bryke aren’t in it.

The ones who won’t watch it no matter what.

Me... I’ve been in camp #4 from the start. Bryke being part of this project didn’t reassure me, neither does their absence... and I’m still as convinced this show won’t be my thing today as I was when it was first announced. So... *shrug* we live and let die. I mean, first of all we have to wait and see if the show’s production will even survive the pandemic first, so we can worry about how bad or good it will be if Bryke’s departure + COVID-19 didn’t destroy it altogether already :’D

#anon #no offense to anyone who genuinely looked forward to this show #if you all wanted to enjoy it well #maybe you still will?#even bryke acknowledge that :'D #but I wasn't going to no matter what so #*shrug*

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arecomicsevengood · 4 years

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Quarantine Movie-Watching Journal, Continued

Throughout all this quarantine time I’ve been chronicling my watching movies, I’ve also been reading books, but have had assorted troubles on a level that seems close to basic comprehension, or just getting on their wavelength. Part of this is having a certain tendency towards the difficult or avant-garde in terms of what I think is “good,” but also wanting things to make sense or have a certain level of clarity: It’s maybe a difficult balance to strike but I don’t know, plenty of books pull it off, I have plenty of favorites. Nothing I’ve read recently has really been hitting, the only thing I’ve found compulsively readable is Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex series, which I would hesitate to recommend as I also think they’re kind of bad. I want clarity on a certain level, and mystery on a deeper one; a lot of things essentially get the formula backwards, and feel incredibly obvious and free of ideas while employing obfuscatory language. (This isn’t to say I like “straightforward” prose, the “mystery” I’m referring to is basically created as an act of alchemy when language is functioning on its highest level, and insight, mood, imagery, and motion are all generated simultaneously. This isn’t “plain speech” I’m describing, but it doesn’t short-circuit the brain’s ability to make sense of it.)

In watching a lot of older movies I find that one of the things that help them maintain a level of interest is I possess a certain confusion about their cultural context. Even if something is a perfectly straightforward mainstream entertainment, there is still a sense of confusion or mystery about it, where you can follow it perfectly, but don’t necessarily know where it’s coming from, so it’s unclear where it’s going. In contrast, watching modern movies, especially more mainstream things but also, generally speaking, everything, I feel like not only do I know exactly where it’s coming from it’s also aggressively spelling everything out, as if to avoid moral confusion. This is also combined with a certain aggressiveness to the editing, so even as everything too fast-paced on certain level, it also ends up being too long, because it needs to fit in a certain level of redundancy. Older things tend to have a greater degree of storytelling clarity that’s also premised on a higher level of trust in the viewer’s ability to intuit things. Maybe there’s also a greater level of reliance on a set of semiotic devices that we’ve become more critical of over time, but what’s emerged in their absence feels more self-consciously insistent.

Little Women (2019) dir. Greta Gerwig

After watching this I looked up on IMDB to see what Gerwig is up to now and she’s slated to direct a Barbie movie? I hate this era, where success doesn’t lead to any actual clout to make important or interesting work, but instead forces artists into these traps of economic contract where they service a trademark. Also this movie is kind of weird because all these actresses are in their twenties but I think are meant to be playing teenagers for most of it? Or even younger? This movie basically feels like it is meant to be for children but is given this gloss over it to maybe seem appealing to young adult modern feminists but it doesn’t really seem like it would be except to the extent they’re indulging a youthful nostalgia.

Shirley (2020) dir. Josephine Decker

I’ve been wanting to watch Decker’s last movie Madeline’s Madeline because a lady I met and thought was cute has a small role in it. I guess all her movies are about artists and performers? I like that this one seems capable of depicting a fiction writer without just presenting their work as autobiographical but I guess that’s because it’s, you know, a real person whose story is being told. Elisabeth Moss is pretty good as Shirley Jackson. Jackson acts real weird and petulant and destructive and I sort of went in feeling like she would be depicted as a manipulative monster, but watching it I felt like it was probably well-researched and accurate to how she was but not in a way that makes me dislike Shirley Jackson — but also I do like destructive difficult personalities and I think that’s basically a fine and acceptable way for artists, or anyone, to behave. I still don’t think this is really a good movie, Shirley Jackson is not really the lead but more like the only interesting character: She’s got an obnoxious and self-satisfied husband, but the movie is more about this couple that moves in — a woman who’s pretty dull is the focal point, and her husband is boring, and manipulative too, albeit in a very commonplace way. Pretty average.

The Predator (2018) dir. Shane Black

A movie about how people with Asperger’s are the next step in human evolution that nonetheless uses the r-word slur to describe them, filled with some of the most generic actors imaginable. I like Shane Black movies as much as the next guy, but am indifferent to the Predator franchise. Maybe because, despite the R rating, they really do feel like they’re made to sell toys, like so many cartoons of the eighties? I hope the sequel the ending transparently sets up never gets made.

The Lighthouse (2019) dir. Robert Eggers

Wasn’t able to finish The Witch and I stopped and started this one a few times. Tries to avoid accusations that “all these modern horror movies are dumb as shit” by not being a horror movie but it also isn’t really anything else — Not funny enough to be a comedy nor evocative enough to be an art movie. Sort of like High Life in the sense that Robert Pattinson isn’t actually good in it but maybe it’s surprising that a mainstream actor would be in a “weird movie,” but he doesn’t really have to do anything in either, at least as far as building a character goes. It’s underwritten enough he might not even know how to read. Willem Dafoe is ok as a guy doing the sea captain voice from The Simpsons.

The Whistlers (2020) dir. Corneliu Poromboiu

Contemporary crime thing that vaguely reminded me of all the other post-Tarantino crime movies made in the past 25 years that I don’t really remember, particularly the ones in other languages. This one’s got characters learning a whistling language to communicate in a way cops will just thing is birds. Also a semi-complicated plot, told non-linearly. The female lead also pretends to be a prostitute and has sex with a criminal dude so the police watching him with hidden cameras don’t figure out what she’s up to, although, if I understand the plot, I’m pretty sure they work it out anyway.

Pain And Glory (2019) dir. Pedro Almodovar

This one stars Antonio Banderas, is pretty plainly autobiographical, being about a filmmaker approaching the end of his life -- Penelope Cruz plays the mother in flashbacks that are then shown to be a filmed recreation as an autobiographical work is begun, which is the sort of twist that could seem corny but isn’t. The film has a weird/interesting structure, the slow revelation of details from the character’s past forming a narrative a film can be made of eventually but before that there’s this totally separate story involving an actor, heroin use, and an ex-lover. That stuff’s good but also it sort of wraps up halfway through. Like, a bundle of narrative threads culminate, and then the film keeps going, to eventually tie up other bits that seem incidental. Maybe this would be fine in a theater but streamed at home I got a bit anxious. Penelope Cruz made me think “I could watch Vanilla Sky” but it turned out I can’t, it’s unwatchable.

High Heels (1991) dir. Pedro Almodovar

I love Almodovar, my stance has been that there’s a degree of diminishing returns the more of his work you see but it’s been years since I’ve seen one of his movies, and at this point I remember very little of any of them. This one’s on Criterion as part of a collection of films with scores by Ryuichi Sakamoto — Sakamoto’s not my favorite member of Yellow Magic Orchestra but he’s certainly an adept talent, and this one operates differently than I’d expect from him, most of the music feels saxophone-led, sort of in a jazz vein. Obviously you can compose for this instrumentation but yeah, not what I’d expect. The movie itself is pretty solid: bright colors, some melodrama, a ridiculous twist, a sense of humor which feels both over the top and somewhat deadpan. A woman’s mother returns to Spain after close to a lifetime away, she ends up sleeping with the daughter’s husband, he turns up dead, the daughter reveals he killed her stepfather as a child. The movie is primarily about the daughter’s yearning for the approval for an emotionally distant mother, at one point she summarizes the Bergman movie Autumn Sonata for her, but Almodovar is gayer and more sexually perverse than Bergman. so it’s less dour than I’m maybe making it sound. At one point the daughter is wearing a sweater with the pattern of the Maryland flag on it? But the credits reveal all her outfits are by Chanel.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) dir. Volker Schlondorff

The score is closer to what I would expect from Sakamoto here, in a martial/industrial vein, though not exclusively. Stars Natasha Richardson, and her performance feels related to what she did in Patty Hearst — a depiction of a woman shutting down parts of herself for the sake of her own survival, displaying inner reserves of strength through the appearance of submission. This seems a lot better than the current Hulu show, although I think it’s largely dismissed? It’s been a while since I read the book so I can’t remember how many liberties it takes. Obviously there remain traces of an exploitation bent in a weird way, through depiction of women in dehumanized sexual contexts but I feel like this movie is good at depicting competition between women in the context of a rigged patriarchal system.

Merry Christmas Mister Lawrence (1983) dir. Nagisa Oshima

Never seen any of Oshima’s films, despite the allure of explicit sex in an artsy context. This has Sakamoto in it opposite David Bowie. There’s a lot of English language being spoken in a thick Japanese accent. David Bowie plays a prisoner of war Sakamoto, as a military officer, falls in love with and tries to keep from harm, his score does the heavy lifting of highlighting these emotions. Was not super-into this movie but it’s always interesting to think about how popular YMO were, and if these are the type of faces you enjoy looking at you can do that. Sakamoto’s got a weird hairline. The movie is fine considered in the context of like, 1980s movies (not my fave decade) that are period military dramas (not my favorite genre) and exist in this Japanese film context that is neither super-insane and exuberant in its style nor is it super-austere and minimal.

A Farewell To Arms (1932) dir. Frank Borzage

Very well-shot piece of romance, starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes, in an adaptation of a Ernest Hemingway novel I don’t remember whether or not I read in high school. Hemingway didn’t like it, maybe because there were a lot of changes, which confuses the issue of whether or not I know the source material further. I don’t like this movie as much as I liked History Is Made At Night but it makes a lot more sense as a narrative, easily reduced to a bare-bones plot: He’s in the army, she’s a nurse, people don’t want them to be together during World War I, he ends up deserting to be with her. Feels lush, romantic, dreamy and swooning, but I feel like the strengths are more in the cinematography than the characters — the leads are fine enough, though not super deep, beyond the depths of their love, but the supporting cast is a bit dull.

War Of The Worlds (2005) dir. Steven Spielberg

Feel like I had heard this one was good? I appreciate Tom Cruise in the Mission: Impossible movies, and Spielberg some of the time I guess. This is a blockbuster that feels post-9/11 in a way where I wonder what a post-Corona thing would feel like — feel like it would shy away from away from a lot of spectacle or something but probably I’m wrong about that. So this one focuses on a parent and his children making their way across an increasingly demolished landscape to make it to the other parent, alien monsters are in the way, kinda just seems logistically weird or like the premise of the quest is unsound given the stakes should probably just be survival? But maybe this is post-covid thinking of how such a thing would operate — the disaster picture with a “human element” to focus the narrative on is a decades-old form and one I don’t really get down with nor do I think is generally considered to age well - i.e. I don’t remember growing up with The Towering Inferno being on TV.

My Twentieth Century (1989) dir. Ildiko Enyedi

Weird Hungarian movie where like… angels/stars observe? As two twins are born in the late eighteen-hundreds and go on to have separate lives? One as an anarchist, the other as like a party girl type who seduces rich men. The latter gets more attention than the former. Sort of a fairy tale atmosphere, which makes the explicit sex scenes awkward. There’s also a scene where a guy gives a sexist lecture about how women should be allowed to vote even though they have no sense of logic and are obsessed with sex. He draws a dick on the chalkboard and talks about how women can’t understand beauty since they are obsessed with erections which are disgusting. Not really sure what it adds to the movie as a whole since I’m not sure which one of the two characters played by the same actress is meant to be watching it, but it’s funny. A lot of things are confusing about this movie, but it’s still sort of interesting and therefore worthwhile I guess. Apparently the director has a new movie on Netflix — I don’t have Netflix at the moment but might get it for a month or two in the future to catch up on assorted things like Sion Sono’s The Forest Of Love and the David Lynch content.

His Girl Friday (1940) dir. Howard Hawks

not into this one. Rosalind Russell wears a cool suit at first though. Features the thing where a male romantic lead (Cary Grant) is openly manipulative but it’s sort of viewed as fine and funny because the woman in question is confident and modern, which kinda feels like a fascinating view into the gender dynamics of the time, although I don’t think it works as a comedy as far as me being able to figure out what the jokes are. The journalists getting caught up in crime intrigue plot is cool though, that kind of feels like something that always works.

Lured (1947) dir. Douglas Sirk

Kind of have no idea why I watched all the older Douglas Sirk movies on the Criterion Channel at this point, even the ones I liked I don’t think I liked that much? This one stars Lucille Ball, who I don’t love. Other movies I watched recently that were partly comedies and partly suspense things worked better than this. This one’s about attractive young women disappearing and Lucille Ball getting hired by the police to be an undercover detective. She ends up finding love, but then the man she gets engaged to is framed for murder by the actual killer. Features scenes where the police (led by Charles Coburn, who’s fine in this) talk about how crazy Baudelaire was. Wouldn’t recommend.

Far From Heaven (2002) dir. Todd Haynes

Not sure I have any strong feelings towards Todd Haynes, but it seems likely I might end up watching a bunch of his movies eventually. This came out in high school, and I had no interest in it, but I’m more charitable towards the whole fifties melodrama thing it’s paying homage to now. Julianne Moore stars as a woman whose husband (Dennis Quaid) is gay and repressing himself via alcoholism, who strikes up a friendship with her black gardener, (Dennis Haysbert) which scandalizes her neighbors. The moments Moore and Haysbert spend together are maybe the most interesting - particularly them going to an all-black restaurant - but the aspect of them being watched and judged feels more cliched. Similarly, the stuff about Dennis Quaid’s homosexuality is most interesting as a lived-in thing, and his drinking, hitting his wife, etc., is less so. The veins of sensuality running through the movie are richer than the plot structure that unites them. This might be one of the things that makes Carol a superior movie.

The Violent Men (1955) dir. Rudolph Mate

This stars a bunch of people I don’t like — Glenn Ford, Edward G Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck is fine in other stuff but boring here. Dianne Foster plays her daughter, and that’s the meatiest role basically- she gets to denounce violent men. This is a western about a guy being pressured to sell his land for cheap. Criterion Channel programmed this as part of a series called “western noir” and I don’t know about this stuff. Foster’s character is definitely the most interesting part — her parents are essentially these gangsters running the town, her teen angst feels like it stems from an inherent morality and disgust with them. Stanwyck is cheating on Foster’s father (Robinson) with a guy I think is his brother who also enforces the violence. The mom tries to kill the father, and then is herself killed by a woman in love with the person she’s sleeping with, so the daughter, you would think, would go through a gamut of emotions. But she’s a totally secondary to Glenn Ford’s male lead, who she ends up riding off into the sunset with — he initially was involved in a relationship with a woman who didn’t care about his inherent morality in favor of a materialism, but she just sort of gets dropped from the narrative at a certain point. The movie really tries to play it both ways with regards to the violence, but I feel like that’s pretty common actually: While I feel like today the title might primarily be intended as an indictment, it also feels like at the time it was very much the sales pitch to the audience.

Shane (1953) dir. George Stevens

Classic western, about homesteaders just trying to live who end up needing to get in gunfights with people who want their land. Jean Arthur plays the wife and mother, which is why I sought it out (especially sicne she had established rapport with Stevens) but she’s barely in it. The titular Shane is a good dude who wanders through and ends up helping them out. The kid’s infatuation of Shane is really annoying to me personally. I love how this has two big fist-fights though, the second of which is a They Live style thing, a conflict between friends that becomes incredibly drawn out. The first fight is also just incredibly brutal and well-choreographed, probably the high point of the movie.

Cast A Deadly Spell (1991) dir. Martin Campbell

TV movie made for HBO with very Vertigo Comics energy, I started off thinking “this is dumb” but very quickly got on its side. It’s a riff on HP Lovecraft mythology set in a 1940s Los Angeles where everyone uses magic except for one private detective, whose name is Harry Lovecraft. Pretty PG-rated, some practical effects (not the best kind, more like gargoyle demon creature costumes I assume are made of foam), and a pretty easily foreseeable “twist” ending where the apocalypse is averted because the virgin sacrifice just lost her virginity to a cop. Not actually that clever but clever enough to work and be consistently enjoyable. Julianne Moore plays a nightclub singer. My interest in this is brought about because there’s a sequel (where I guess the deal is the detective does use magic, and no one else does) called Witch Hunt starring Dennis Hopper and directed by Paul Schrader.

Jennifer’s Body (2009) dir. Karyn Kusama

The climax of Cast A Deadly Spell shares a plot point with this, which I think is being reevaluated as a “cult classic” to what I assume is the same audience that valued the Scott Pilgrim movie: People ten years younger than me who think it’s charming when things are completely obnoxious. A lot of musical cues, all mixed at too loud relative to the rest of the audio, bad jokes. This tone does help power the whole nihilistic, I-enjoy-seeing-these-superfluous-characters-die aspect of the plot but the sort of emotional core of the horror is less present. This movie is basically fine, by lowered modern movies standards, but it’s perfectly disposable and not really worth valuing in any way. I watched Kusama’s movie Destroyer starring Nicole Kidman a year ago and don’t remember anything about it now.

Dead Ringers (1988) dir. David Cronenberg

Rewatch. I think for a while I would’ve considered this my favorite Cronenberg but nowadays I might favor eXistenZ? Jeremy Irons in dual roles as twin brothers, with different personalities, but who routinely impersonate each other, and whose lives begin to deteriorate as a relationship with a woman leads to them individuate themselves from each other. They’re gynecologists, and the whole thing is suffused with an air of creepiness. There’s this sense of airlessness to the movie, a sense of panic, which is present incredibly early on and just sort of keeps going, getting weirder and more uncomfortable as you become accustomed to it, that feels like a sure sign of mastery. I’m fascinated to think about how watching it in a crowd, or on a date, would feel. Most movies don’t operate like this.

Imagine The Sound (1981) dir. Ron Mann

Mann is the director of Comic Book Confidential, which I saw as a middle schooler. This is a documentary about free jazz, featuring interviews and performance footage. Paul Bley and Cecil Taylor are both shown playing solo piano, which isn’t my favorite context to hear them in. Bill Dixon and Archie Shepp say some cool stuff, there is some nice trio footage of Shepp with a rhythm section.

Born In Flames (1983) dir. Lizzie Borden

Easily the best movie I watched for the first time in the time period I’m covering in this post. I heard about this years ago but only seeing it now, when it feels super-relevant. It is shot in New York in the eighties, features plenty of documentation of the city as it was, but in the context of the movie, there has been a socialist revolution ten years earlier, and this film then documents the struggle of the women, particularly black women, who are slipping through the cracks, and fighting for the ongoing quest to make a utopia, but exist in opposition to the party in power. While focusing on black women, there’s also plenty of white women, also opposed to and more progre.ssive than the people in power, but that are having their own conversations which are very different. There’s also montage sequences of women performing labor that cut between women wrapping up chicken to close-ups of a condom being rolled onto a erect penis. The title song is by the Red Krayola, circa the Kangaroo? era where Lora Logic provided vocals. So yeah, this movie rules! It would be a good double-feature with The Spook Who Sat By The Door, though in a film school context, or a sociology context, you would need to do a great deal of groundwork first. Could also work as a double-feature with The Falls for how what you are seeing is the aftermath of a great sociological reshaping realized on a low-budget. I think I put off this movie I think because I was skeptical of the director’s self-conscious “artist’s name” but it turns out they got it legally named as a young child.

State Of Siege (1972) dir. Costa-Gavras

Also really good! Better than Born In Flames when considered in terms of its level of craft. Would make for a fine double feature with my beloved Patty Hearst. Tightly structured over the course of a week, leftist terrorists kidnap an American and interrogate him about what exactly he’s doing in their Latin American country that’s being run by death squads. He denies wrong-doing, but basically everything he’s done is already known to them. This exists in parallel to police interrogations of leftists. Pretty large scale, tons of characters, some basically incidental. Screenplay’s written by the guy who wrote Battle Of Algiers.

Olivia (1951) dir. Jacqueline Audry

French movie sort of about lesbian love at an all-girl’s boarding school that’s weird because everyone seems like they’re feeling homosexual love, but just for one instructor who eggs everyone on. Everyone acts weird in this one, basically. There’s a lot of doting. The atmosphere is pretty unfathomable to me. Chaste-seeming in some ways, but also like everyone is being psychologically tortured by being subject to the whims of each other, but also just rolling with it in this deferential way. Seems like it could feel “emotionally true” to a lesbian experience but only in highly, highly specific circumstances?

Lucia (1968) dir. Humberto Solas

Good score in this one, which is not that much like I Am Cuba but I feel obligated to compare them anyway - both are from Cuba and use this three-story anthology structure. All the stories in this movie revolve around different women named Lucia, in three different, historically important, time periods. The first is about a woman who falls in love with a man from Spain, during the time of Cuba’s war of independence, he says he doesn’t think about politics, but this is one lie among several. This ends with brutal sequences of war. The second takes place under the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. The third takes place post-revolution, and is about a literacy coach teaching a woman to read and write under the eye of a domineering chauvinistic husband. As with I Am Cuba, it is the very act of considering these three stories together that brings out their propagandistic aspect, and makes them feel less like individual stories. They’re all beautifully shot, although it’s less in less of a show-offy way than I Am Cuba.

Mr. Klein (1976) dir. Joseph Losey

This one’s got a cool premise- About an art dealer, played by Alain Delon, who is buying art from Jews at low prices as they leave occupied France quickly, but who then starts getting confused for another person with the same name as him, who is Jewish. Gets sort of Kakfa-esque but also remains grounded in this world where there are rational explanations for things. (at least as far as the holocaust is rational) So the line gets walked between bits that feel vaguely verging on nightmare but also sort of maintain the plausible deniability of belonging to the waking world, of a paranoia for something the exact scope of which remains unnamed. Ends with Klein as one of many in a trainyard full of people being sent off to concentration camps, which to me felt sort of tasteless, as a large-scale recreation, but that feels deliberate, as a way of offsetting the scope of the film being primarily focused on one person, whose relationship to the larger horror, before it affected him, was parasitic.

Husbands (1970) dir. John Cassavetes

Not into this one. The semi-improvisatory nature of the dialogue never coalesces into characters that seem to have a real core to them, there’s always just this sort of drunken aggression mode. What even is there to these characters, besides the aggression they treat women with? What separates them from one another, makes them distinct entities, beyond the sense they egg each other on?

Casino (1995) dir. Martin Scorsese

Rewatch. Joe Pesci plays the violent Italian guy, Robert De Niro plays the level-headed Jew, Sharon Stone plays the blonde who gets strung out on drugs. Three hours long to contain everyone’s arcs, but also sort of feels like it neatly has act breaks at pretty close to the hour marks, while also telling this pretty big historical sweeping piece about how corporate control comes to Las Vegas, the notion that “the house always wins” but even the individual whose job it is to run the house is himself situated inside a larger house. Both here and in Raging Bull, De Niro plays a character whose third act involves trying to be an entertainer for reasons of ego, and it’s so weird. Yeah, a great movie, one of the few that the reductive view of Scorsese as “someone who just makes mob movies” applies to, I have no opinion on whether it’s better than Goodfella or not.

Blue Collar (1978) dir. Paul Schrader

Not great. Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, and Yaphet Kotto co-star. Sometimes feels like maybe it’s meant to function partly as a comedy but doesn’t. It’s also mostly a crime movie, about people working at an auto plant who decide to rob their union’s vault. They end up not making any money from that robbery, but the union can claim insurance funds, so they get to benefit while the working men continue to be shafted, worried about the consequences of what they’ve done. Kotto dies, and Pryor and Keitel are turned against each other by circumstance, which the film tries to play off as being about the divisions among people that keep the working class weak. I definitely feel like the Schrader oeuvre begins with Hardcore.

Mona Lisa (1986) dir. Neil Jordan

This ends up kind of feeling like a lesser version of Hardcore, with British accents. Bob Hoskins, out of jail, starts driving for a prostitute, they dislike each other at first, but become friendly. She asks him to track down a younger girl she was friends with, who a pimp has gotten strung out on drugs. (Hoskins is also a father to a daughter, though his relationship with the mother is strained from having gone to prison.) Hoskins’ character isn’t that interesting and the film revolves around him, the female lead is more interesting but deliberately removed from the larger narrative. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good Neil Jordan movie.

The Untouchables (1987) dir. Brian De Palma

Rewatch. Great Ennio Morricone score in this one, a real reminder of a different era in terms of what constituted a blockbuster or a prestige picture. David Mamet provides the screenplay. De Palma is pretty reined-in, while Mission: Impossible is an insane procession of sequences of top-notch visual storytelling, the most De Palma trademark thing here is a first-person perspective of a home invasion scene, watching Sean Connery, that ends up being a deliberate choice of a limited perspective to surprise as he gets lured to his death. I feel like there’s a straight line between this movie and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (1990), but obviously what that line runs through is the reality-rewriting effect of Tim Burton’s Batman.

Pulp Fiction (1994) dir. Quentin Tarantino

Rewatch. Can scarcely comprehend how it would’ve felt to see this in a theater when it came out. I watched it the first time in college on a laptop and headphones and it blew me away, even after years of a bunch of it being referenced on The Simpsons and everywhere else. I haven’t seen it since. Rewatching is this exercise in seeing what you don’t remember when everything’s been processed a million times. Feels like Tarantino’s best screenplay due to its construction, more so than any dialogue, which is obviously a little in love with itself. Samuel Jackson wears a Krazy Kat t-shirt after his suit gets covered in blood. Quentin Tarantino casts himself as the white guy who gets to say the n-word a bunch.

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centaurianthropology · 4 years

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The Magnus Archives Season 4 Binge-a-thon (Contains spoilers through the finale)

I’m back! Life and work have been crazy, but I really wanted to binge the half-season since I last listened in order to get in on the season finale. It’s been quite the experience. The last time I binged TMA was season 1, since I started listening at the beginning of season 2. I had really wondered which way was better listening: twenty minutes every week, having things play out gradually, or in one huge go.

I have to say, things flow really well as one run-through binge. I couldn’t say I hands-down prefer doing it this way, but that the structure really holds up as a binge. Plus, the evolving storyline begins to run at a less gradual pace. The build-up of tension is strong, and I really ended up enjoying my binge.

I think part of the danger of listening to each week is that you get lost in the minutia. It lets you pick over everything, which can be great, but it can also be frustrating. The character choices are that much more maddening when you have to wait a week to see how things turn out (and one character in particular in this latter half of season 4 I found particularly frustrating, so I think that listening week by week to that would have been a challenge).

I figured I’d go through some thoughts on the episodes, starting with where I left off at ‘Decrypted’ and going from there. I’ll be talking about episodes in little chunks as I go, with random comments in each section:

Decrypted, Infectious Doubts, Threshold

It’s interesting how much the Lonely was infecting the whole Institute at this stage in the story, although during these episodes it seemed like everyone hadn’t quite noticed it. Or they’d gotten so used to it during Jon’s coma that they stopped noticing how bad things were getting.

Listening now, it seems like Basira got hit the hardest, and that combines with the fact that she also seems to notice it the least. While in season 3 she was the level-headed one, here she’s trying to take that level-headedness too far. She wants all the answers so she can make the best decisions, but she refuses to wait for answers, and she refuses to acknowledge that those answers might be complicated.

The Lonely may also be the explanation for her detachment. As in the plot as she is, she’s desperate to not engage emotionally with any of it. Even Daisy seems to be held at arms-length, and Jon is labeled a monster without any unpacking of that term or what it would mean. She also seems to refuse to address how close Jon and Daisy’s behaviors have been, at their worst, and that Jon is in the throes of his hunger, while Daisy was starved of hers forcibly. She chooses to remain calm and chooses to work to overcome the Hunt, but her initial detox program was very much not of her own choosing. She has simply chosen to stick to it, to embrace the good thing that came out of her imprisonment in the Buried. Jon is struggling because he’s not being forcibly weaned, and no amount of Basira calling him a monster is going to prompt him to stop.

I think that Basira, at this point, is perhaps the most blinkered of the characters. She’s so focused on results that she refuses to do any sort of self-inventory. She’s so convinced of her own rationality that she misses the places where she’s irrational: Jon has always been a semi-threat to her, so she can much more easily slide into thinking of him as a monster. Daisy, on the other hand, was her partner; someone she trusted and cared about. It’s much harder to look at someone you love and call them a monster. She can see the shades of gray in Daisy, but it’s easier to ignore them in Jon.

As much as I think Basira likes to think of herself as the rational one, I think Melanie and Daisy fit that better at this point. Both have passed through their own marking by one of the powers, and both have had their own time as monsters. And that gives them both an outsider’s perspective on the situation, and an insider’s perspective. And both had to be forcibly wrenched away from their respective powers. As much as Melanie resents being torn away against her will, without any say in how it happened, she now has the perspective to look at Jon’s monstrousness as both something very not good, but something complicated. Her own feelings toward Jon are complicated. He helped her, but he took away her free will to do it. He’s a monster, but so was she.

Daisy is even further along that path of understanding, having been given a LOT of time to think in the Buried about herself and her choices. She understands far more than Melanie, and far far more than Basira how the lines between monster and personal choice blur until there is no hard line between them. She has to own all her choices, because she may have been deep in the hunt, but being chosen by a power often happens because you love it as much as you fear it. With perspective, she knows that her choices were awful. That she was awful. But in that moment, she chose the Hunt every time.

She wants to help Jon and Martin, but also knows that people need to want her help before it can really be given. I think that’s why she left as soon as Martin told her to go. If he wanted to reject her help, she couldn’t stop him.

Melanie is also embracing perspective, choosing to go to therapy. Choosing to make herself better. If she’s doing that, her demand that Jon also do better carries more weight. He’s not yet wrenched free, but he like Daisy still has choices to make. They’re just a lot harder when he’s inside looking out.

Jon, of course, is deep into his own monsterhood, his guilt, and his isolation. The guilt is keeping him at least a little grounded, but the isolation is definitely not helping him not become a monster. People overcoming addiction have to make the choice themselves, yes, but they also need support. They need people to hold them accountable, but also know what they’ve been through so genuinely useful advice can be given. Confronting Jon was necessary to prevent him descending further, but I feel like Daisy’s understanding and Melanie’s therapy probably helped more than Basira’s “You’re a monster; don’t eat people” statement.

Martin wasn’t in any of these episodes, but he continues to reach out in ways that keep him at as much of an emotional arm’s length as Basira, simply without any of the confrontation. He gave the tape to Daisy and the others after he found out about Jon feeding on people, but didn’t confront him himself. He’s avoiding all contact with people, making it ‘easier’. He may have a plan, but he’s also deeply infected by the Lonely. Like Basira, I wonder if he has much perspective on himself. They both think they’re playing things smart, but they both seem to be missing glaring parts of the world closing in around them.

Weaver, Extended Surveillance, Concrete Jungle

Jon’s addiction is tied into desire, and also into terror, and also it’s as much a choice as it is for people addicted to drugs to take their next hit. They do know it’s not good for them, but they make the choice, because it feels good, because they love it as much as they hate it. And that analogy, in spite of never being directly brought up in these episodes, continues to be driven home by the statements he reads. A relationship with an addiction is complicated, and is often used as a substitute for something else initially. How much of Jon’s embracing of the Eye was originally driven by his terror of the Web, deep seated and still child-like? I think he fears Annabel Caine more than any other avatar, because she strikes at his worst fear: to be manipulated, to be pushed back to his childhood helplessness, to be lured and consumed against his will. Isn’t it better, from his perspective, to be consumed by his will, by a power he knows and in many ways loves?

One thing I’ve noticed is that the people who are servants of powers embrace those powers as much as they fear them. It’s not a new revelation to say that Jude Perry loves the Desolation, or that Jane Prentiss both loved and feared the Corruption. But seeing that in Jon is harder, because he has something that they seemed to lack: moral qualms about what he’s doing. He can acknowledge that the Beholding is as bad as any of the others, but how much of that is an intellectual acknowledgement? How much of him revels in the Knowing in a way in the same way Jane reveled in the song of the hive?

But of course, in his isolation, he’s struggling to hold onto those intellectual moral qualms, when the hunger is so strong. He can recognize the justifications for harm in other monsters, and even in himself, but his recognition isn’t the visceral pull that the hunger is. And with a very rickety support system, it feels almost inevitable that he’ll tip over and feed again. His one saving grace right now seems to be that his skill at analysis is just as powerful when turned against himself as it is when it’s turned outside. He knows he’s slipping. He knows that he no longer cares as much about investigation, about the victims of statements, as he does getting his next story, his next hit. And no amount of admonishment is going to stop that craving.

The other thing that seems to keep him anchored is Martin, but that’s an anchor growing more and more distant, closer to his intellectual understanding and further away from the deep-seated emotional attachment that might be enough to overcome the hunger. Jon is continually concerned about Martin, wondering how he is to anyone who will listen. I think of Gertrude being Agnes’ anchor, both holding one another to the world. That was done to them, but I have to wonder if Martin and Jon have started anchoring one another simply through affinity. Martin is trying to cut off all ties, but he keeps looking out for Jon. He can’t help but try to keep Jon good and as human as possible.

The conversation between Georgie and Martin was interesting. Georgie has chosen to help Melanie because Melanie isn’t as deep in it as Jon, and because Melanie is actively seeking therapy and help. Georgie seems firmly in the camp that she’s willing to help, but will only help those actively helping themselves. And I get that. She is an outsider reaching in. And she needs to protect herself as well; she’s right that tying oneself to Jon is probably going to get one killed. She’s not obliged to die for him, or for anyone. And from her perspective, he isn’t even reaching for the ropes being thrown to him.

Contrast that with Martin’s perspective, which is that Jon needs help, and that waiting until he helps himself could be disastrous. This is also right, but the problem is that if Jon is drowning, Martin isn’t really getting in the water any more than Georgie is. He’s avoiding Jon, but is offended that Georgie is doing the same. I can only hope she held up a mirror to his own decisions. He’s choosing to protect himself every bit as much as he’s ‘falling on the grenade’ in order to try and stop the Extinction. And trying to protect Jon from afar is as much a defense of himself as what Georgie is doing. Both are reasonable. Jon is self-destructing. But Martin was also right that he needs help. And for someone to help Jon, they almost certainly have to wade into all the danger that being around him entail. Georgie’s decision not to be that person is frankly the healthier decision. No one owes anyone drowning with them. But that’s a decision each person has to make: how much are they willing to help? How much of a life-line do they throw? Georgie has helped, but also protects herself and respects Melanie for doing the same. Daisy is helping a decent amount because she’s been there, and with a few bad days she could end up right back where Jon is. It’s why people with addictions are often the ones to help others with addiction. You sort of have to understand it from the inside.

Martin doesn’t know he understands it from the inside, because he doesn’t realize how much he’s falling to the Lonely. Disappearing whenever personal confrontation occurs isn’t healthy. He was an open wound of caring and emotion before, so it’s understandable that he’s swinging the pendulum to be less vulnerable, but he’s swung it too hard, and he’s drifting away. And as much as he wants to help Jon, he’s not. If he really wants to be Jon’s anchor, he has to be willing to open up all his emotional wounds again. And he has to make that hard decision knowing how much it could cost him. Or he has to let go entirely. He’s in limbo, Jon anchoring him, but the tie between them is frayed.

‘Cul-de-Sac’ offered up a way to take hold of that tie and make it strong again. The Lonely very nearly claimed the narrator as a victim, but in the moment he was almost totally lost to it, a call from his husband and the words “I love you” brought him back. It gave him a way out, and as much as he believes he has to trust Martin’s decisions regarding his work with the Lonely, he also knows that the Lonely is seductive, that it has you do its work for it, that Martin is plagued with self-doubt and self-esteem issues, and that the Lonely is feeding on that. Jon is trying to trust, but Jon also needs to reach out and help, just as much as Martin needs to do the same, if they both choose to take that route.

Basira has also apparently not made any real choice regarding whether or not she’ll help Jon. She continues to be around Jon, but isn’t helping. She’s very intelligent, but increasingly … black-and-white, which makes her blinkered. And Elias was right: it also is making her predictable. It’s like she’s trying to be more like Daisy as Daisy becomes more like Basira used to be. But her taking a harsh tone with Jon and telling him ‘just don’t do it’ is likely to go exactly as well as everyone who’s ever told a drug addict to just stop. Stopping is usually the hardest thing an addict ever has to do, and increasingly, Basira seems to want things to just happen. If Daisy has learned patience, Basira has lost hers. And that means that she also seems like she’s lost perspective.

And then there’s Melanie. I really like that Melanie is sort of taking the middle-road of Georgie’s approach and Daisy’s. She’s stuck there, and she’s still interacting with Jon. Hell, her reactions to him pulling facts out of the ether are more like frustrated rolling of eyes than genuine anger at this point. But she’s also unapologetic that helping the Eye—whether it be passively or actively—is wrong. For her own good, she’s opting out. She knows she could get sick. She knows she could die. But she is making a choice. And like Georgie, I can respect that choice.

Elias continues to be an evil delight. Seriously, what a fantastic villain. He gloats, he’s gleeful, but also urbane and intelligent. The little moments of vulnerability sometimes feel like manipulation, so it’s hard to tell exactly how much he could be damaged. He, of all people, seems to have taken Annabel’s advice to heart. He is always either under- or overestimated. And that just makes him fun.

Big Picture, A Gravedigger’s Envy, Love Bombing

Simoooon!!! My favorite wacky wizard is just as much a delight as I had expected. He’s a ton of fun. He’s old and he’s full of joy, and he’s horrible. He’s my favorite. I also managed to predict that he was centuries old! So pleased to find that out.

It’s interesting to find out that so much of the rituals are bound up in the feeling and the fear. All the ways the powers manifest or work are based on those feelings. So rituals are made up because they ‘feel’ right, and it seems like they all fail because none of them genuinely generate the fear necessary to bring one power into ascendance over the others. It seems that the balance is not only something most are dedicated to, but that it’s harder to upset on a global scale than people thought. Robert Smirke, for example, seemed to think that the world was balanced on a knife’s edge, one second away from falling to a power. And every fear took a cue from him and generated a ton of rituals. But none of them have worked. Because the truth definitely seems to be that none of them know what they’re doing. They’re groping around for greater meaning, when it’s all really based on feelings and impressions. That may make Simon one of the most effective avatars, as well as one of the most sanguine with the way the world works. He’s not trying too hard to make the Vast win because he’s realized how difficult and potentially pointless that might be.

The end of ‘Big Picture’ has another confrontation between Basira and someone, this time Martin. She’s taking the same tack with him as she did with Jon: telling him she doesn’t trust him, that he’s an idiot for working with Peter, etc. Again, acting as Daisy might once have done, and again, I don’t see that she accomplished much. She let Martin know that Jon’s heard of the Extinction, that he trusts Martin, and that’s about it. Beyond that, they’re much in the same position. Whatever her goals are in this situation, they’re either escaping me, or she has no real goals aside from being angry at everyone around her for not being as useful to her as she wants them to be.

Helen, on the other hand, is as helpful and delightful as Simon, while being just as dangerous and malicious. She’s becoming more and more the Distortion, less an less Helen as she lets go of her guilt and embraces the feeding and the hunger. She’s Jon’s ally, but is also unpredictable and is clearly playing her own game, learning the maze under the Archives, but refusing to let him in on what lies at its heart. Their discussion about Jane Prentiss, about choice, throws more light on Jon’s choices.

And the thing that sets him apart from the other monsters: his guilt, his burning humanity. And his connection to others. She looks at this as temporary. Not the feelings, which may well persist, but the effect those feelings have had on his actions. And I think that’s the hard truth that Basira has failed to impart as an outsider: Helen, as an insider to being a monster, gets that there is no hard line between the one-you-were and the one-you-are. She gets that being a monster is as subjective as the powers or the rituals are. It’s about feeling. And Jon clings to his feelings and his connections. And because of this he’s been finding excuses for his behavior. But he still chooses it. He knows that he shouldn’t want the drugs, but he keeps giving in to the temptation before the guilt spiral starts over again. They all choose, and their choices may be guided by having no good alternatives, but the choice has always been his. Of course he gets to keep what makes him fundamentally Jon, because Jon is the perfect Archivist. He didn’t need personality traits grafted onto him. They came ready made for the Eye. How long had it waited for someone just like him?

But the thing about choice is that it’s yours. Accepting that he makes the choices and that they are his alone means that he can control them. He can take whatever control he can muster, even in the face of danger and death. He can make the choice Melanie did, or a different choice. He can choose to act, knowing that his actions are owned only by himself. There’s power in that, every bit as much as there is responsibility.

And Daisy is the perfect example of that. She doesn’t want to go back to the Hunt. She’d die first, but she also will let that Hunt slip back in just a bit to protect Jon from Trevor and Julia. Hearing her and Jon work through her impulses to listen to the blood, to find her way back to calm with his help, was one of the first indications that he really does get that choice. And I find myself hoping that if he can help Daisy, he can learn to make those same choices, and that she’ll be there to guide him back when he needs it.

Bloody Mary, Cost of Living, Reflection

Jon going looking for knowledge the Eye didn’t want him to know was encouraging, and the revelation of Eric Delano’s page was a hell of a thing. First, of course, there was James Wright (watching everyone through pictures and any eye available) before there was Elias, and Elias ‘changed’ a lot. Another point for the Elias-is-Jonah theory, perhaps.

There was also the confrontation of Gertrude with a former assistant, how emotionally distant she was from him and the others, and how hungry she was for knowledge. She wants explanations, not stories though. More practical and less lyrical than Jon. And less emotional. Jon feels thing deeply and desperately. It might be his salvation, as I’ve mentioned, but also it makes him just as human as her, despite his more outward monstrousness.

Eric was definitely in an abusive relationship with Mary, but after the betrayal and what Gertrude put him through, she seemed preferable. And that’s thing, isn’t it? Betrayal and under-handedness hurt worse than straightforward evil in the TMA world. And so Eric accepted Mary and blinded himself to get out of the Institute, and wasn’t even too hurt that Mary turned right around and killed him for his sacrifice. He found the way out because he had someone he loved: his son. Much as tearing the bullet out of Melanie broke her free of the Slaughter, Eric tearing his eyes out let him free of the Beholding.

Could Jon help but entertain that fantasy? Running away, tearing out the part of himself that is a monster once and for all? No more hunger, no more temptation.

But Martin’s right. He can’t do it. Because Jon is still choosing the Beholding, he still loves to Know. He’s turning away from freedom actively. And for Jon, running away with Martin was just this perfect potential ideal, but would never become reality without some really fundamental commitment that both of them lack right now. As much as Jon is sunk in his love for what he knows, Martin is sunk in denial about how much he might actually mean to Jon. He can reject Jon’s proposal easily, because he can’t believe Jon would ever really give up power just for a chance to run away with Martin.

Martin is sunk deep, and Jon, who could reach him if he tried, isn’t trying. Just as he isn’t tearing his eyes out. He’ll be passive, and he’ll look at Martin like an ideal, but the real issue is that neither of them is reaching out to one another as a PERSON. As more than the ideal that they’ve both seen one another as. Being an anchor is all well and good, but eventually you need to dig in and get to know one another to have a true reason to stay human. And they’re both lacking that right now.

Martin is drifting hard. Realizing that he might only think he misses Jon’s voice, that he cares about Jon, that even his love is getting lost to the Lonely is very hard to hear. Because Martin threw himself into all this to save Jon, and he’s not even horrified that he’s losing the original motivation for giving himself to the Lonely. He seems to be going through the motions, letting everything happen, taking the easiest and least ‘noisy’ way out. And that’s the draw of the Lonely right there, isn’t it? There’s no real pain to lose yourself, because by the time you’re lost, you just don’t care. Martin is being eaten by apathy, and that’s the hardest thing to shake. He just doesn’t care enough to do it.

I really appreciate Jon finally confronting Basira about her hypocrisy. The fact that she’s willing to give Daisy over to the Hunt to keep her alive, but is demanding that Jon starve himself to death if he has to is the height of hypocrisy. It’s also deeply disrespectful of Daisy’s very difficult choice. I appreciate that Jon stood up for Daisy’s stand, and I hope that it causes Basira to reflect about how she’s gone about her approach to Jon and Daisy.

Because honestly, they’re both questioning their natures. Daisy understands better, but Jon is actively exploring his nature, and the nature of monstrousness. ‘Cost of Living’ is the perfect example of the entitled nature of a monster’s survival. Each time she was confronted with their death, she found someone to exchange a life with. And what was at first a one-off quickly became a continuous vampirism, one ‘unworthy’ life after another. At each step she blamed the victim, explained her actions by the good she was doing. Jon feels the same pull, but also a revulsion for her self-justification.

And some people would rather do anything other than serve that sort of monstrousness. Melanie gouged her own eyes out, leaving the Archives as definitively as possible. I’ll miss the hell out of her character, but I am so glad that she found a way out. I’m glad that, of all of them, she was the one who seized Eric’s solution. Jon would never do it. Basira won’t do it. Martin won’t. But Melanie still could. She tried so hard to leave for so long that it’s fantastic she gets to go on her own terms. And I’m so glad Jon respected her decision; that she left as bravely and calmly as possible for leaving by ambulance.

Rotten Core, Panopticon

So Martin or someone else left his final tape to Jon. Peter might have left it, Annabel could have done, so many others could have. But the simple question is, what will Jon do with the information that Martin is walking off to oblivion?

Dekker’s final statement was something I wasn’t expecting. It makes sense with the Extinction storyline gearing up, but it’s still strange to hear the end of this remarkable and remarkably eventful life. And to go out in such a horrific way is tragic. He searched for the Extinction so long, only to get taken down by the Corruption. Just accidentally stumbled on John Amhurst, and though it’s good to know that Dekker properly contained Amhurst, it leaves his work unfinished. But then, I think the work of people like Dekker or Gertrude always have unfinished business when they’re finally killed.

Jon is not nearly so sanguine with death. Hearing that the Extinction may be slow or strange or not real at all, he can’t not follow Martin down into the tunnels. He tried to get a second opinion from Melanie, who is with Georgie—in all senses of the word—but she’s out. He tried to go to Helen, who is not interested in helping because it entertains her more if he finds out what’s in the tunnels on his own. She may think he’d just go home and give into his hunger, but the one thing that anchors him is in those tunnels. So Jon is definitely going in.

At least he waited for Daisy and Basira, as much as it must have killed him not to go charging in. And he’s lucky he did. Peter Lukas set the Not-Them loose again, and Trevor and Julia are also back to finish Jon off. And of course, Elias has also made a jail break to be there for the final show of whatever it was that Peter planned.

And it directly affects him, of course, because we finally got that confirmation: Elias Bouchard and Jonah Magnus are one in the same. Jonah left his body behind in the Panopticon that lies at the heart of the labyrinth, permanently jacked into the All-Seeing Eye. That was the Watcher’s Crown, attempted first as himself, and again in other bodies. Peter wants to overthrow Elias, to replace him with a willing puppet in Martin. The temptation of having that sort of power must have been undeniable.

But it all still hinged on Martin choosing to serve the Lonely, to give himself freely to the Panipticon and to Peter’s power. And Martin has been playing this game well. Telling Peter what he wants to hear, all to see what his end-game was. Listening to Peter and Elias duke it out verbally over him, Martin clearly knew that this was never about the Extinction. This was just a stupid bet about whether or not Peter could steal Martin away.

So Martin refuses. As much as he wanted to kill Jonah, he refused the game (but in so doing handed the victory to Jonah).

The reason he knew that Peter wasn’t being straight with him about the Extinction was more than a little heart-breaking, but very in keeping with why he couldn’t believe Jon would really run away with him: Martin cannot believe that he’s important enough to be made a priority, let alone to be made a hero. And so, even though Elias won the round, Peter had one more game to play: he threw Martin into the Lonely, and both he and Elias waited for Jon to arrive. Because consuming the Archivist would certainly wrench the ultimate victory from Elias’ hands.

But Elias is far too calm, and far too pleased with this turn for it not to be just as much set up in his favor as Peter’s. He might have verbally warned Jon against going into the Lonely, but he was all too eager to show him the way. This is just more of his game, and I’ll be interested to see how it plays out.

The Last

Which leads us to the penultimate episode of the season, Jon plunging into the Lonely after Martin. The end-game of whatever bet or game Peter and Elias have been playing with one another turns out to have hinged on first Martin giving into the Lonely, and then Jon following him down. Elias’ biggest pawn is on the line, and Peter has put himself on the line, letting something like the Archivist into his world.

At first, Peter clearly has the home advantage over Jon. He confronts Jon with the fact that he and Martin have been chasing the ideal of one another for so long, but they don’t really know one another. But Jon is pissed, and Jon is hungry, and when faced with dying for Martin, he didn’t even hesitate. Peter doesn’t understand love, or any connection. And so he can’t understand how deeply tied Jon and Martin are to one another. Hell, I don’t know if they quite understand it, except that they’d walk through hell to find one another.

So instead of giving in, Jon fakes his own drift into the Lonely to draw Peter in close, and then goes after him hardHearing Peter’s story was interesting, but not particularly sympathetic. He was created to be a Lukas, certainly, but he also relished it and wallowed in the upper-class life he was given. He wallowed in his loneliness, and hated everyone around him. Sure, his family messed him up, but he embraced it while other siblings didn’t.

So hearing that Gertrude took down his ritual with a call to a newspaper? Amazing. Wonderful. Perhaps my favorite takedown of hers ever. I laughed out loud at Peter Lukas drowning in community outreach.

And hearing Jon tear him apart? Also amazing. Potentially terrible, because once you open that door, it’s hard to close it, and Jon’s “Stubborn fool” is as close to truly being lost to the monster as we’ve heard Jon on tape. But if Jon had to feed, tearing Peter apart wasn’t a bad way to do it. But of course, that means Jon doesn’t get an answer as to how Elias gets him.

But Jon does get Martin. And that reunion? The “I see you”? So beautiful. They’ve built to that moment for so long that the quiet conversation, walking out of the Lonely hand-in-hand and so gentle, was utter perfection.

Which is why having this be the second-to-last episode of the season is so ominous.

The Eye Opens

Here we come to the end, and we begin with domesticity and a continuation of the gentle quietness started last episode. It seems, from the date of the statement, that Martin and Jon did get at least some time together before this episode to settle in and be together, and it shows. There’s a comfort and a familiarity between them I’ve never heard. Whatever time they’ve spent getting to know one another, they clearly fit together exactly as well as they’d hoped.

They may be on the run, uncertain if Trevor or Julia or the Not-Them are still alive, but it has an almost honeymoon feel to it. They’re in contact with Basira, but seem distant from all that, here in their coccoon in the woods with its crackling fire and poetic cows.

And it’s really lovely. Hearing them together, quiet and gentle and happy, was wrenching if only because it came so early in the episode. And then it hits. Jonah, smuggled in as a disguised statement, slipping in and taking over Jon’s body and forcing him to read against his will. You can hear Jon struggling not to read at first, perhaps knowing what was coming, but Jonah’s will was too strong. He’s too good at control to let Jon slip his noose here at the end.

And the end, as it turns out, is the end of the world. It’s discarding the Watcher’s Crown as a botched job, and instead embracing a new ritual: the Magnus Archives. The transformation of Jonathan Sims not into the Archivist, but into the Archive.

And Jonah will become king of the ashes of a ruined world.

Jonah, Rayner, Lukas, and likely Fairchild all came together to become not only the first to realize that the world was almost guaranteed to end, but to figure out how to handle it. Only Smirke kept to his guns and refused to embrace the end. He tried to use balance to prevent it, to keep it from ever tipping over, but one by one the others embraced one power and decided that if the world was going to end, then it should end to their benefit.

Jonah tried the Watcher’s Crown, sitting in the Panopticon, but failed except to become a mind freed of his body. He built the Institute to help himself with the race, trying the Watcher’s Crown again and again, each new body dying and giving rise to another.

And then he realized that the Watcher’s Crown was a flawed ritual from the off. All the rituals were flawed. All the rituals were doomed to failure, because every ritual only involved a single fear. And so there wasn’t enough fear to keep it going. Every one, even the ones not stopped, failed under its own weight.

The true ritual was the Archive itself. Turning a person into an Archive, and through him, with every other power burned into him, tearing open reality. Because the true ritual HAD to have all the fears involved, because all fears are one fear, each blending into each, each reliant on another. And so all powers had to come through at the same time, with the Eye watching over all.

And Jon has been marked by every single fear, chosen by Magnus after he survived Mr. Spider. Stabbed by Michael, burned by Jude, thrown into freefall by Mike Crewe, cut by the Slaughter when he tried to save Melanie, went into the Buried bodily to rescue Daisy … more and more and more until he went into the Lonely to save Martin and took the final step. He consumed stories, consumed lives. He embraced his own power in destroying Peter. He chose to be the Archive at every turn, built himself as a record, wove a tapestry of every fear to create something greater than each alone.

And so Magnus used his Archive. He used Jon’s body and his power, and then left Jonathan Sims, both tied to and gutted by the world he created, behind as the world cracked open. We finish the season with Jon and Martin, clutched together in their cabin, Jon knowing that the whole world has been consumed by the powers and by his own embrace of the Archive.

“Look at the sky, Martin. Look at the sky! It’s looking back.”

The Future

And so we head toward the final season of ‘The Magnus Archives’. Daisy and Basira may both be alive, or Basira isn’t sharing the fact that she’s already killed Daisy as she promised. Melanie and Georgie got out, but there’s not a lot of getting out of an apocalyptic world.

And the world is apocalyptic. Jonah intends to sit the throne of this world, but I’ll be interested to hear if things go to his plan, of if the powers are so much larger than him that he is swept aside as every other living being will be. This seems like the sort of plan born of hubris, from a man so desperate not to die that he’ll burn the whole world to survive it. And I just don’t see fully manifested fears giving much of a shit about Jonah Magnus.

And that leaves Jon and Martin. Jon is having a well-deserved breakdown over his part in this, but I don’t think he’ll get to do so for long. If the Archive was needed to rip the world open, it may be the only way to repair it. Whether that requires Jon to die, or Jon to lose every bit of Archivist in himself to do it, or something else entirely remains to be seen. But he at least has Martin this time, and I genuinely hope that whatever path they walk in the final season, they walk it together. That they fall together or rise together. One or the other being alone at the end would be the worst possible outcome for them at this point. They anchored one another in the Lonely, and they might well be the thing that pulls one another through to saving the world. Going down together might be a sort of bittersweet happy ending for an Archive and the man that keeps him human. What will the world be like now that all the powers are here? Would people like Simon and the other avatar glory in this new world, or does a complete manifestation of all the powers make moot all the appeal of their gods? I’m interested to find out who might be interested in a return to a normal world, and who love their new reality.

40 more episodes until the end. It’s been a hell of a binge, and honestly? I’m very interested to see how thing play out come April.

#The Magnus Archives #analysis #I'm back!#whoo!

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haeddoti · 4 years

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This is my first blog-post and it is about some of the books I read between year 7 and 11 in my German high school. These books aren’t in a particular order, I just wrote all of them down and took some notes to guide me along. I’ll give a brief summary and then my thoughts about the books.

Without further due, let’s get into the series!

Nr. 1 “Hexen in der Stadt-Ingeborg Engelhardt”

We read this book in seventh grade and immediately after reading (actually during reading as well) we asked ourselves how and why someone thought “Hell yeah, that’s a topic for 11 year olds” since the book is originally listed for grade 5 and 6.

The story takes place in a German town during the Thirty years war, the witch hunts are running wild and the church is all over the place. The story follows a family of four who live in this town, the father is a doctor, one daughter is read-headed and the other a sleep walker. And although the father is greatly needed in this time, the towns people are really suspicious of the family, and they have to flee the city.

First of all, the book was so dense, it was almost unbearable. Definitely not something for children and yet the book won the “Youth literature award” in Germany, so I guess it wasn’t too bad after all. I honestly don’t remember a lot from it, I know we watched a horrible movie about it and I also remember that the pacing(?) in the book was weird, because the first 80% or so took reaaaally long to read through and virtually nothing happened and then in the last 20% everything happened all at once and it was just too much.

Nr. 2 “Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee-Thomas Brussig”

The only (apparent) reason why we read this book was because we had our final class trip to Berlin in year 10.

The setting is the DDR, East-Berlin to be precise, somewhere around 1970ish. Our protagonist Micha lives in a street which was cut in half my the Berlin Wall and he, unfortunately enough, lives in East-Berlin. He frequent meets with his friends in a nearby park where they listen to West-Music and swoon about Miriam, the neighborhood beauty who is kinda a not-like-other-girls-girl.

All in all, the books is about searching happiness and thinking about how it is so very close and yet never being able to reach it.

It was comfortable to read and overall it was an okay novel. I don’t remember much about it, although I literally read it a year ago. The insight about east-Berlin was cool, and the author definitely implemented own experiences and as someone who grew up in post-split Westgermany it was rather informative and interesting. The quote on the back of the book was also pretty.

“Happy people have a bad memory and rich memoirs”

Nr. 3 “Frühlings Erwachen-Frank Wendekind”

(Springs Awakening)

Oh. My. God. This whole topic was such a BS and I hated every second of it.

The book takes place, once again, in a German Town in a time where there is no Sex-Ed, aka 1900th century, which is also the topic of the book; Sex-Ed gone wrong. Our first protagonist Wendla grows up in a home with a loving, strict mother and far, far away from everything unholy like sex. Our second protagonist, Melchior, is a really smart, really handsome boy who is the top of his class and who likes to read provocative literature which makes him think about masturbation. His best friend is also handsome but really stupid but the social pressure keeps him from dropping out of school- that and his strict, abusive father. Melchior and Wendla fall in love (he hits her with sticks after she metions that she has never been hurt before), have Sex(he rapes her) and after Wendla gets pregnant and dies after an attempted abortion via poisonous plants her aunt have her, Melchior is only mildly devastated. He turns sad, and kinda crazy, after his best friend commits suicide. He has a rendez-vous with the ghost and death itself, he is happy again? I dunno, the whole book was all over the place.

Worse than the book was the discussions we had in class afterwards. One time we had to argue whether it was in-fact rape or if it was just sex. Second discussion we had was about Wendla being a masochist.

The worst thing about the whole topic was the stupid ass movie adaptation.

You think Percy Jackson has it bad? Oh boy. Ohhh boy. The movie plays in the 2000s, graffiti, cool skater boys, rapper-wannabes and early 2000s fashion included. The names stayed tho, cause why not name the male protagonist Melchior in 2001. There are scenes where teenagers, TEENAGERS, go to a brothel. Ah, I forgot.

They are 13-14, book and movie alike.

10/10 would NOT recommend.

Nr. 4 “Der Besuch der alten Dame-Friedrich Dürrenmatt”

(The visit)

(No, not the horror movie)

Oh my goodness, I loved this book.

Picture this. A small town in a German province far away from any major cities with a single trail connection between Hambourg and Zurich, aka the whole length of Germany, where virtually nothing happens. One day, a former resident, comes for a visit. But not just anyone, Claire frikking Zachanassian comes for a visit.

And for blood, because this sixty-something, badass multi-billionaire who got her fortune by marrying a bunch of men who died coincidentally one after the other proposes to the town an offer.

One billion for the head of the man, Alfred the third, who expelled her out of the town after getting her pregnant and lying about it in court after she sued him.

They sent her away in the train, called her a hoe and laughed about her. She lived in a brother for a little while, her son died, and a horny, rich man decided to marry her because why not.

At first the towns people are disgusted by the offer, outraged by the immoral offer and they straight up deny it. “I’ll wait, Claire says”.

You see, the town is really, really poor. Not only because it is in a terrible location commercially wise, but also because Claire bought every factory in the town and brought them all to a stand still to slowly dry the city out. She planned this revenge.

And you see, the proposal of 500 million split between the inhabitants and 500 million for the industry of the city sounds great if you are on the brink of disaster and hunger and misery. But surely, with such an immoral offer, no one would want to commit a crime? Or would they.

Because, now that I look at it, Alfred really did something horrible… maybe, just maybe I can allow myself to stack up some dept.

And Alfred grew more and more paranoid. Begging Claire to stop this, apologizing on his knees, crying and sleeping with one open eye at all times.

We discussed in our class what we would do. We didn’t really came to a conclusion since we had nothing to compare, not one of us was ever asked to make such a decision. “It depends” was our final answer.

They do kill him in the end. It doesn’t end happy, Claire isn’t happy, but she does give the towns people their money. I really enjoyed reading this book. The female “antagonist” was refreshingly bad-ass and the moral despair was entertaining to read.

We learn that Claire is rich and powerful, but that she lost so much innocence, so much energy to enjoy her life in such young years that, as a reader, you cannot not sympathize with her.

Nr. 5 “Das Versprechen-Friedrich Dürrenmatt”

(The pledge)

Hands down the best book I’ve read in school.

This book is originally a critique by Dürrenmatt about the emerging detective novel genre where everything always works out.

The setting is in a Swiss town, 1950ish, and in the beginning the reader takes on the role of an author who meets a certain Dr. H who works for the police. They become friends and take a ride through the mountains. Upon taking a stop at a gas station, Dr. H introduces us to a seemingly old, smoking, alcohol-reeking man and a scruffy looking girl. The narrator is confused, asks who these people are, and back in the car, we learn that this is the former detective, no-one-escapes-me, super-brain Matthäi.

From that point on the narrator switches and we are now in a third person narrator perspective.

Matthäi is introduced again, this happening in the past, as a hard-working, clean, structured man who doesn’t smoke, drink or disobeys rules. No one really likes him in the office, but they value that he just so good at his job. But because he is so unapproachable, they want to sent him away to Jordan.

The week he was planning to travel there, a young girl is raped and then brutally murdered in a small town nearby. And because he is Mister Superbrain, he goes there to help investigate.

The other officers at the crime scene are (understandably) uncomfortable, they don’t want to talk to the family, or the people there in general. So Matthäi talks to everyone. He is a very calm, collected, cold man. So he meets with the family, tells them what happened to their daughter and is utterly, completely shocked when the mother just blankly stares in his face, and asks him to promise her to find the murderer of her daughter. He is shocked by the lack of emotion in this moment and sees himself in this cold visage of the mother. He promises her, just to get away from her as fast as possible, and drives back to be office.

I don’t want to spoil too much because this book is just so good, but oh my god

I’m in general a sucker for drastic changes in character or demeanor (hence why I liked The Visit so much as well) but his book takes everything to another level. They “plottwist” is so incredibly frustrating and nerve wraking to read, the perspective changes provide so much more depth.

And for the first time I finally read a really intricate, morally gray character.

Nr. 6 “Nathan der Weise-G. E. Lessing”

(Nathan the Wise)

This book was kinda eh. If I had so summarize it as fast as possible it would probably be “Religion and accidental incest”. It is about the three world religions and stereotypes between them, about genocide and also about stigmatization. It ends on a nice note, tho.

The only really remarkable passage of this book is the so-called “Ringparabel” in which Nathan answers to the question which religion is the real, big OG of them all. It is pretty nice and the symbolism is really fitting as well. The beginning of the book is incredibly boring but it does get better in the end. All in all not a total waste of time and money but nothing I would read again.

Nr. 7 “Die Leiden des jungen Werther- Goethe”

(The sorrows of young Werther)

Ah yes, no German class without Goethe. This book is written in a way that lets the reader really seep into Werthers emotion because it is written as a letter-novel. Werther is a young, nature-loving guy who (in the beginning of the book) is just really happy, go-lucky and over all nice. Then he meets Lotte, a young, pretty, smart and book-loving woman who is empathic to all those around her. He falls in love with her, despite knowing that she is literally engaged and about to marry. She knows he loves her, her fiance know he loves her and literally everyone knows he loves her and they are ok with it? I dunno. Werther has a severe Seasonal-affective-Disorder. He kinda makes it through the first winter after meeting Lotte but never really recovers, even during summer. In the second winter, he can’t take it anymore and he commits suicide.

I liked the book (not only because I can identify with the SAD). In the end we learn that Lotte isn’t as good as we originally think she is; She is actually really possessive of Werther and although she wants him to be happy, she doesn’t think anyone is good enough for him and thus he should just stay close to her. She enjoys the attention given by her husband, who is actually really nice and whom she does love, and by Werther who is utterly and completely obsessed with her.

Opinions on this book split 50/50 with my friends. Some of them think like me and they see the heart break and the desire to move on but ultimately, the way attraction is so so strong. Some other friends, more specifically my Help-with-Maths-Go-to-Guy hated this book with a burning passion. I can see why. The imagery is sometimes a tad too far-fetched and the wording is, in true Goethe-Fashion really hard to read and the sentences are kinda messed up as well.

But in the end it is still the book which opened the way for Goethe to be one of the greatest writers in Europe and I can see why.

Oh wow. This concludes all the books I read thus far. There will be definitely more to come next year and maybe I’ll do another post like this once I read some more.

I hope you enjoyed to read my thoughts and maybe felt inspired to look into one of these as well!

See you soon!

#books #german highschool #goethe #durrenmatt #my thoughts and opinions #we read more but these are the ones i recall best

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rivetgoth · 4 years

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OC #5 - Giorgio Marcello

Okay! Here’s another OC profile. Admittedly I’ve been dreading this one because to be honest Giorgio is probably my worst/one of my worst OCs morally and I gained like a dozen followers this week LOL, but I guess this is the chance for y’all to really see how stupid some of these characters are. *thinking* Anyway, he’s much more of a villain character, and he’s probably the only character of mine where I really felt the need to throw a big “I don’t condone his actions” stamp on him, because while I obviously don’t write any of my characters to be morally commendable I think Giorgio is good at being especially deplorable. He’s very fun though. I think absolutely irredeemably bad characters who are still stylish and obnoxious are really fun to work with ;D

Giorgio is the older half brother of Giovanni and Vittoria. He’s in his early forties and… bi. While Giovanni and Vittoria are the product of their father’s second marriage, Giorgio is a product of the first. He has an elder full blood brother, Antonio, and a twin brother, Matteo. All three of them were really spoiled as kids, their parents Vittorio and Maria loved them dearly and even after Maria died Vittorio remained very fond of them. However, because it was only fair, Antonio was destined to inherit the majority of the Marcello Candy Company as the oldest child, but Giorgio and Matteo were still loved and extremely spoiled and encouraged to become powerful, high-ranking members of the Fresno Megalopolis. So Giorgio grew up in a strange spot, where he was not necessarily his father’s favorite, but he was still spoiled and loved dearly, but he always felt that hint of inferiority and desperation to prove himself and get on top. As adults, Matteo would end up becoming a high ranking officer and eventual a captain of the Street Patrol, the Fresno police force, and Giorgio would go to medical school to become a successful celebrity plastic surgeon at Himmel Medicine.

Giorgio is interested in glamour and beauty and pushing the limits of the human body to achieve perfection. He doesn’t really care if anybody lives or dies as long as it moves forward his research. He frequently undergoes surgeries of his own, sometimes even operating on himself directly for fun, constantly changing his look entirely. He looks like the product of countless, extensive plastic surgeries, and he’s always adding to the changes and modifying his looks in new and exciting ways. On a physical level alone he’s very inspired by people like Pete Burns. In the public eye he’s very charming. Many people adore him, considering him a pioneer of the medical world and a crucial figure of Fresno, although many people (including his younger half sister, Sofia, an avid activist against the treatment of her family to the rest of the city) are also very vocally against his inhumane experiments and lack of consideration for any life but his own… But with the power he has between both Himmel Medicine and the Marcello Candy Company backing him up, he tends to manage to get away with almost anything.

Matteo and Giorgio are extremely close... maybe too close, if you know what I mean, but nothing has necessarily been proven to the public about the extent of their relationship. Either way, through his connections at Himmel, Giorgio has been able to actively “partner” with the Street Patrol and specifically his brother many times. In fact, Giorgio was a huge advocate for Himmel buying out the Street Patrol force and the prison complex, so that Himmel would be able to arrest criminals and drag them straight to the operating room. And, if crime rates have been low and Giorgio is restless, bored, or feeling inspired, he can convince Matteo to go out and find someone who won’t be missed and arrest them for whatever he can possibly charge them on, no matter how much of a stretch it is, giving Giorgio a new plaything.

He’s pioneered a number of experimental surgeries, and what he finds the most fascinating is experimenting with living creatures on a genetic level, tampering with their DNA and genetic structure and modifying their very cells. One of his first “successful” projects was creating a genetically enhanced super-K9 for the Street Patrol, as a gift to his brother. Although it took the “sacrifice” of countless litters of puppies, he eventually was able to bioengineer a german shepherd beast at least triple the size of a regular shepherd and significantly more vicious. A typical Street Patrol K-9 can’t be near anything except the Patrol officer assigned to it, or it’ll do everything in its power to maul it to death. These are terrible and aggressive animals that should never have been born. They tend to look kind of awful and rotting, because the experiment still wasn’t completely perfect upon releasing the first batch, and the dogs’ flesh couldn’t fully grow and stretch around the size of the enhanced canines, making it look like it’s covered in exposed muscle and horribly stretched skin. It’s a really terrible animal that’s killed plenty of poor people, and, since animals are easier to get ahold of for testing than people, Giorgio continues to work with dogs, trying to perfect his K-9 creation, further the designer pet market, as well as using them as early test subjects for eventual human experiments as well.

Once Giorgio had moved up from dogs he began experimenting with splicing and modifying genetics in humans. One of his early experiments for such a thing was the Icarus Project, which involved sewing non-human, artificial body parts to humans as a form of extreme cosmetic surgery. Angel Steel was the primary subject of Giorgio’s major experiment within the Icarus Project, which involved grafting huge, artificial angel wings into Angel’s muscles and flesh and nervous system. Thenceforth, as Angel was trapped within Himmel’s control, Giorgio and Angel had an extensive relationship together. Giorgio was endlessly amused by Angel and saw him as something of a muse. He saw him as a living doll and would endlessly experiment with him and toy with him, careful for one of the first times in his life not to kill his subject. Giorgio frequently bribed and drugged Angel with the heavily addictive candies he received in bulk from his father’s company. For Giorgio, this was perhaps the closest he had ever come to feeling like he truly “loved” someone. He awkwardly would attempt to keep Angel chained to him emotionally in whatever way possible, such as genetically engineering puppies and insisting that he and Angel were to raise them together. He never really cared at all about Angel’s actual well being though, and what he didn’t realize was that over the course of this relationship Angel was successfully gathering bits and pieces of information that would eventually lead to his escape. A heartbroken Giorgio would put a bounty on his head and label him a dangerous terrorist to the public, stating that he would reward whoever brought him Angel’s body, alive or dead, with a hefty reward.

...Which brings me to another one of Giorgio’s experiments, Leatherette, who is one of the bounty hunters that Giorgio sends out after Angel. Leatherette is going to get his own post as well (I might do him next, actually), but to keep things short, he was once a member of the Street Patrol and a close friend to Matteo, and after attempting to defect, was arrested and brought directly by Matteo to Giorgio, telling him to do whatever he wished to him. Giorgio used Leatherette as a guinea pig for the next step of the Icarus Project, moving beyond grafting external things to the body and now beginning to tamper with humans on a genetic level, specifically by attempting to insert animal DNA into a living being. Afraid that adding too much would kill his subject, he spliced only a small amount of bull DNA with Leatherette’s preexisting DNA, creating a sort of minotaur bull-man monster out of him, and partnering with Himmel’s neurology department to brainwash him into a sort of soldier for Himmel… More on all of that later.

Giorgio’s experiments moved forward from there to creating 200%ers, people spliced with an entire living creature - Think of The Fly. When Brundle and the fly go through the machine together, they come out a single thing. 100% human and 100% fly. This, with some more control, is what Giorgio expands his operations to. Thus, the living being to come out the other end would be 200% alive. One of the first people to undergo this operation is Cosmo Halloway, Vittoria’s boyfriend. I’m going to talk about him soon too, but basically, he splices himself with a snake and becomes half snake.

Currently, one of Giorgio’s main concerns is that he cannot genetically modify unborn humans without killing the fetus. He can modify dogs but genetically modified human fetuses are consistently stillborn. This is a problem alongside his other main focus, which is removing the sterility that happens whenever a 200%er is created, since, similar to the way a donkey and a horse mating results in sterile offspring, a human splicing their DNA with another creature leaves them sterile. It’s a work in progress, and he doesn’t really care how many people have to die and how many infants are born stillborn to get his desired results.

Giorgio finds something very erotic in the surgery process and the intimacy of the “penetration” once someone is cut open. He sleeps with patients often, entirely regardless of gender, and even outside of the operating room he enjoys things like knifeplay. He doesn’t really see other people as people at all, but as “canvasses” for his art, which are his experiments. He doesn’t really have any moral decency whatsoever and is happy to exert his power to get his way in any scenario. He’s a very vocal advocate for far right late capitalism where the local megacorps that run the world - Himmel, in particular, of course - get a limitless amount of power. He’s entirely depraved and debauched. And the thing is, because he’s so successful, he’s just allowed to keep doing what he does. No one has stopped him yet, and he’s still a hugely prolific figure in Fresno. He’s good at putting on a smile when he’s in the public eye and insisting that what he does is for the common good. He has a lot in common with Giovanni in the sense that he’s very flamboyant and adores glamour, but unlike GIovanni, who lives with quite a bit of guilt and self-hate to the point that he finds it in himself to self-reflect at times and regret his actions or be aware of other people’s existence, Giorgio never has those moments… except, perhaps briefly, when Angel Steel ran away. But by then it was far too late (to fix what he had done or learn from it).

Giovanni and Vittoria want nothing to do with Giorgio. Although he didn’t outright beat Giovanni as Antonio did, he was always full of snide remarks and cruel comments towards both Giovanni and Vittoria. Vittoria eventually ends up forced to interact with him a bit, as her boyfriend is so entangled in Giorgio’s experiments now, but they’re not on remotely good terms. Giorgio is especially close to Matteo, of course, and also frequently enjoys the company of Antonio, although even Antonio finds him easy to get annoyed by. He’s really a terrible person.

#daily OC talk

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jonsameta · 5 years

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Hi, me again!

jesuiscommejesuis: Haha, I’m on that GoT grind and probably won’t stop until the premiere 😂. I trust your opinion so unfortunately you have to endure another ask from me. Anyway…I think that most of us have considered the possibility of Jonsa not being canon. (RIP me if that happens). But my question isn’t about whether Jonsa will be or won’t be (I’ve come to terms with the fact that GoT will end how GRRM always intended it to end) it’s about what that possibility means for all of the evidence, clues, foreshadowing, etc that we’ve gathered. In your opinion will Jonsa not happening render those clues and meta meaningless and we were all crazy after all? Or do they take on a new meaning and point us in a new direction? Idk if that even makes sense. Maybe I’m just afraid that Jonsa wont happen and I’m afraid for no other reason other than that I will have looked and sounded insane to all of my GoT friends and had nothing to show for it. Also do you know of any interviews or blog posts from GRRM possibly supporting Jonsa? Same for D&D? Or any other people on or working with the show? Thank you so much!! 💙

—-

Hi there,

The thing about theories is they’re like Shrodinger’s cat. If you try to be objective, you have to entertain the possibility that it won’t happen, but it can’t completely be false until proven otherwise. That said, some theories are more probable than others because there’s material within the text that thematically undoes something. This is because a story’s themes (which differs depending on the adaptation but it can’t be completely divorced from the original source either) define its boundaries because they essentially make up “the heart of the story”, not the plot. They give the main characters a moral dilemma that drives their journeys. Considering the themes of the story - both bookwise and showwise - Jonsa is very probable because it answers a lot of long standing character arcs that go beyond these characters and provides a bookend that Jon/Dany cannot considering R+L=J.

I think anything in this story has to be considered according to the politics - even the fantasy part because the personal is political. With such a spread out story only the themes and the morality dilemmas of politics that the smallest moment can have is what holds it all together. And I think the strongest argument for the probability of Jonsa comes from a structural level of gauging the politics.

Jon’s parentage is a political game changer and the way it’s been built up it cannot just be for personal angst - especially when the element of his parentage revealing him to have a higher claim than Dany is brought up. It doesn’t just affect him or his relationship with Dany. It affects Westeros and Dany’s own longstanding goal.

Jon may not want to be king, but Dany is walking in as a very unpopular figure into the North and the way she has gone about her campaign hasn’t improved her reputation and only worsened it. And Jon himself will lose popularity after having 1) bent the knee to a Targaryen, 2) consorting with a Targaryen and 3) being a secret Targaryen.

Dany doesn’t realise that although Jon claims to have pledged his allegiance to her, it doesn’t mean the North has fallen into her hands. He’s only lost their faith from this move so no Targaryen by themselves could claim the North. Not to mention the Vale and Riverlands are more allied to Sansa than they are to Jon. To regain faith, he’d have to separate himself from Dany and the Targaryen identity a bit and yet he would need a political statement that only a marriage alliance to Stark could give if he were to remain in power. There’s also the pesky issue of how unknowingly Sansa and the Starks have more allies than Dany (or Jon without the Starks) does as everyone comes into Winterfell. So Sansa’s constant label as “key to the North” and the importance of marriage alliances becomes very important here. He can’t become king or even gain the faith of the people (back) without Sansa. So in that case, the whole notion of the Pact of Ice and Fire being fulfilled through Dany and Jon falls apart because Jon will be seen as an outsider. @thelawyerthatwaspromised has even written a post with infographics to make it easier to understand. It’s like R+L=J resets the chessboard. Ironically, what the audience thought Jon/Dany’s union would do politically is far more possible through Jon/Sansa.

As it makes sense as a political match, the possibility of it happening and impacting the narrative increases a lot more. The original outline also matters here because clearly the pseudo-incest tag didn’t stop the author. However, as the characters haven’t interacted in real time in the books and aren’t close, there’s not much people have asked him about it nor has GRRM has said about it unless you count his vague reply once (”I won’t say more than I’ve already said in the books”). I’d say there’s more to be gauged from what he has to say about other ships that fandom roots for, that isn’t as positive as they make it out to be - whether Jon/rya, San/San, San/rion or Jon/Dany. It’s not obvious because he hardly shuts down possibilities but there’s reading between the lines. It becomes more obvious through a process of elimination. It’s also because Jon/Sansa as a ship tramples over so many ships that fandoms have banked on that people are inclined to dismiss it rather than re-evaluate the pre-existing ships.

On the show, people have been coy too but there’s more content to gauge as the characters have already reunited and their dynamic has become pretty pivotal to the story. Where D&D shut down Dany and Yara ever happening, in the same panel they evaded a question about Jon and Sansa being developed as a romantic relationship. Aiden Gil/lian commented on how Jon’s parentage opens up possibilities for Jon and Sansa’s relationship romantically at the end of season 6. Sophie was asked about it post season 6 and she said it was possible because it’s GOT and they’re cousins. Also, there’s Liam Cunnin/gham who once liked a Jonsa fanvideo lol and he barely has any likes. Sophie has said it’s possible, even as she joked about how it would be embarrassing to film an intimate scene. Kit has somehow avoided all questioning, but he has some pretty interesting reactions regarding Jon and Sansa’s relationship - either in the words he chooses (”She twists him like no one else”) or how over the top his reaction to Sansa is when he talks about how annoying she is to the point where he’s flushed and red and laughing while saying “I’ve gotten really animated now that Sansa has come into the story”. Bryan Cogman has a lot to say regarding this dynamic too, that he even wrote Jon leaving Ghost behind to watch over Sansa when he left for Dragonstone.

What helps regarding the show is that it’s not just the actors or the political sense, but the camerawork and visual framing that makes their scenes very confusing because they’re shot as a romantic couple about to happen, as @trinuviel has explored in her series “All is Subtext”. This notion that it was “framed” or “shot” that way was echoed by multiple reviewers and podcasts through season 6 and even into the beginning of season 7.

A huge part of this was because it very subtly visually paralleled more positive romantic ships on the show like Ned/Cat, Jaime/Brienne, Robb/Talisa, Sam/Gilly, Missandei/Greyworm and even Jon/Ygritte to some extent. This is over a course of 7 episodes under 5 different directors. One of the most telling scenes for me was when they did two back to back parallels to Ned/Cat and Jaime/Brienne after Jon chokeholds Littlefinger over Sansa and they go on to give a Jaime/Brienne-esque goodbye. The same director Mark Mylod directed both the season 6 Jaime/Brienne and season 7 Jon/Sansa goodbye. Bryan Cogman even confirmed that the Littlefinger chokehold was meant to parallel Ned doing the same over Cat.

But in my opinion, what weirdly cemented it was how Jon/Dany contrasted Jon/Sansa’s dynamic and framing. There were a lot of structural decisions made that undercut the Jon/Dany “romance” and made Jon/Sansa look more compatible and romantic, which is something I explored in my “Undoing Romance” series. Again, this is looking beyond the actors. The biggest tell for me was that they never got a first kiss so romantic tension was never released but just dissipated over plot exposition. Moreover, how is it that Jon and Sansa have more parallels with romantic ships than Jon/Dany do? Why do Jon/Sansa have more Robb/Talisa framing through season 6 than Jon/Dany through season 7 if that’s what’s happening? Why was there no passionate first kiss like theirs? We just skipped to the sex in between a montage that told us how related they are.

Why didn’t Jon look back at Dany when Jorah did, while he looked back at Sansa? Why does Jon react more violently to Sansa’s suitors than to Jorah? Why are these characters caught in triangle with interlopers, who pose a political threat but are also interested in one romantically? Why is this dynamic given so much importance where there’s tension but also there’s emotional vulnerability that pours out contrasting Jon/Sansa’s and Sansa and Arya’s season 6 and season 7 battlements scenes respectively. Why did they reveal R+L=J at the end of season 6 - the season in which people questioned what the hell was happening in the Jon/Sansa dynamic and a whole season before Jon met Dany. Both season finales also teased conflict because of political claims that change because of R+L=J. Where his parentage reveal, relieves Jon/Sansa of the direct incest factor because it biologically distances them, it makes Jon and Dany biologically more related - especially because she’s heavily inbred herself.

So it is a situation of “will they/won’t they?” but even more subtly because the cast and crew always skips past discussing it and with Jon/Dany happening people take it as accidental chemistry. There’s no heavy dismissal from the TPTB though when there could’ve been or laughing at it like Tormund and Brienne, which is totally for laughs and a show ship. What they do keep saying is that this relationship is key to watch and you have to wonder: why is it so important? To me it’s not about the actors chemistry or singular scenes. It’s about the story’s intrinsic narrative structure and the camera framing that makes the visual subtext convey more than the text does.

The show frames Jon and Sansa’s relationship is odd because we know they weren’t close and Arya was his favorite and yet they take up quite an important part in each other’s arc at this point, where they both want to trust each other completely but don’t and yet their vulnerability comes out most around each other in these last two seasons. They’re being built up more slowly than Jon/Dany and more subtly so while people expect a full blown romance, I expect something more subtle, more quiet and thus emotionally rewarding for these characters individual and collective arcs. If it happens, D&D are building it up as a plot twist/game changer because it’s related to politics. But it’s not to say there can’t be emotional catharsis too because these characters have a lot of issues that they answer pretty well.

Hope that answers your questions.

- lostlittlesatellites

#anti-jonerys #tagged anti: for those who would want to filter it out #asks #jesuiscommejesuis #submission

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tsukiprotranslations · 5 years

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[Translation] Machine Elements - Glossary

QUELL Profiles were supposed to be next and then VAZZROCK but because a lot of terms come up that are a bit too technical and world-exclusive, I decided to go ahead with the glossary first ^^

Also, thank you so much to Deea for the scans and for helping with the editing for the previous Machine Elements posts~!

※ Please don’t re-post and re-translate this interview under any circumstances. If you want to translate it to your native language, I can provide the kanji I transcribed from the scans ^^

Under the cut, enjoy~!

꧁GLOSSARY꧂

☐ RUINS

① The wreckage of a place filled with the remains of seemingly complex machinery made with technology much advanced than the current civilization’s capabilities.

No one knows where it came from, who made them, and what they were used for.

But, there is no doubt that those ruins existed together with humans 3000 years ago and that they were related in some way.

From what is known, there are legends that human life and other forms of vegetation were cradled in this thing called the [Ruins], a legend known to a lot of people that it came from the Heavens. Though a lot of scholars have studied it and have made plausible explanations, important questions still remain.

One, why did mankind suddenly abandon all those advanced knowledge and skills?

Two, why is there no record left of the Ruins aside from the ones from 3000 years ago?

② The Ruins are scattered everywhere. There are records of it being seen deep under the sea, deep in the highest mountains, and even in the deep forests that not even people from before have explored. What is known is that it was dotted with a lot of different kinds of regions everywhere.

In other words, there are still a lot more things left to be discovered.

☐ RUINS (continued)

③ It is understood what kinds of knowledge and skills these Ruins possessed but how they were put to practical use and what worth they had remains unfathomable.

Because it is academically and monetarily valuable, the Ruins are regarded as one part of a certain existing country, protected by its national laws. However, since some of the borders existing remain ambiguous, a lot of other countries continue to fight over some of the Ruins’ borders. It is not an uncommon occurrence for these countries to continue fighting for ownership.

The reports about the Ruins were disseminated to the public societies and so, the relics are being illegally dug and are being scattered all over. The poor preservation state is also becoming a problem.

Because of all that’s mentioned, the way of trying to solve the mystery of the Ruins is becoming more rugged than ever.

④ Each Ruin has their own untouchable space called a [SPIRIT].

Most theories dictate that hidden inside the structure probably lies the Ruin’s core mechanism. It’s because of the external action interference that it was called SPIRIT (SPIRIT = Mind, Body, and Soul).

The SPIRIT is covered by a particularly strong metallic material. The planet’s current technology can’t disassemble or move it so it’s impossible for them to be able to take a look inside.

Many scholars have attempted to solve this mystery but so far, none has made successful progress.

There are theories that say that it’s the SPIRIT’s powers that make it possible for the Ruins to move while some theorize that the SPIRIT is where each Ruins’ religious place lies and that it is hiding a god inside of it.

⑤ For a long time, it was believed that Ruins were only sighted either above ground or underwater but recently, because of a certain incident, Ruins that move in the sky have also been discovered.

However, with the current technology, there exists no machinery that can take humans up to the floating Ruins. Since no one has managed to step foot inside of one, no one knows what they could look like within.

☐ MACHINE ELEMENTS

① Just like the name suggests, they are the world’s foundations, invisible elements.

In old texts, what was written inside was [Foundation] but, as time passed by, it unknowingly turned into [Machine Elements]. (1)

It seems that this was because of all the machine relics that were being excavated from the Ruins around the world.

② The Machine Elements are roughly divided into four: [Fire] [Water] [Wind] and [Earth]. However, in the recent years, relics which contained two additional Elements called [Light] and [Darkness]. It became a huge topic of interest.

However, those relics suddenly disappeared.

Since there was a lack of evidence, and as people gradually forgot about it, it was never officially recognized.

③ The nature of the materials makes it possible for the Machine Elements to be operated as long as they share the same Element. As such, each Ruins’ foundation has their own Element.

For example, coal that is imbued with its natural Machine Element of fire will make it easier to burn and ignite.

Medicinal plants that holds its natural Machine Element of water will make its healing properties more effective… et cetera.

Among human beings, there are those that are born with an affinity for handling their natural Element. As such, those people go on to work as Craftsmen.

④ While the Machine Elements are something that people are familiar with, there are many who do not know or are unsure of it because they are not seen by the eyes.

What decides whether one is good at handling their Machine Element or not?

Where does the variation in the Machine Element’s material come from?

Are the Machine Elements limited or infinite?

What exactly is a Machine Element’s composition?

The only thing that is certain is the fact that humankind lives with these Machine Elements as their world’s [Foundation] despite it being vague and unclear to them.

☐ GUILDS

① A Guild is a group of Craftsmen that have the privileged status to use special skills and special techniques.

Each Guild has their own specialty. There are guilds that specialize in engineering machinery, there are guilds that are specially skilled with handling their natural Machine Element, the Foundation of their world. Then, there are guilds that focus on fighting, there are guilds that specialize in market and trade, and many other kinds.

② The Guilds vary with the number of its members and what kind of activities they do.

The 12 leading Guilds are known and named after the 12 regions where their bases are located at and so, they have come to be known as [The Twelve Regions]. They are strongly independent and do not take orders even from the National States. Not only that, but they also have exceptional capabilities and are very influential.

Thus, if one person becomes a Guildmaster, he is treated like a world-level VIP, the same way the rulers of the National States are treated.

These [Twelve Regions] make up the Guild Federation (traditionally just called the ‘Federation’), which organizes the guilds all over the world. In order to be called a guild, it is a must to get the Federation’s approval.

The rule of the Federation is that there will be no hierarchy within the guilds, that all guilds are to be equal. In the present day, as well as in the past, all guilds were of equal status and power. The way of decision is done by majority voting.

③ It has been closely related to the people’s lives for a long time that some people are more devoted to their guilds than their own nations.

Since the Guilds generally respect the nation where their bases are located, it is believed that there has never been a confrontation between Nation and Guild.

④ It is often misunderstood but, not all Guild members are Craftsmen nor does it mean that all Craftsmen are Guild members.

There are members in charge of clerk work, people who are in charge accounting… There are also those in charge of business matters. A lot of normal, non-Craftsmen people can also be members of Guilds.

According to the latest statistics, about half of the Craftsmen population work for guilds while the other half do independent work.

While being a Guild member might bring special privileges, they also come with unique restrictions. There are many Craftsmen who are aware and therefore dislike the idea of being in a guild.

⑤ Establishing a guild is surprisingly easy.

If a representative Guildmaster sends a letter of notification to the Guild Federation, it is possible for them to get their certification as quick as the next day after as long as they pass the Federation’s examination.

It is not possible for a guild to be established if there is no Craftsman present. As long as there is one, be it the Guildmaster or not, it is possible to be approved even if the rest of the members are ordinary people.

There are a lot of cases where a skilled Craftsman or a world-class Meister create their own guild with just their students and disciples. However, if this Craftsman retires or dies without a successor to follow him, the Guild is automatically deleted from record.

⑥ The proof of being a Guild member varies from Guild to Guild.

There are guilds that wear matching ornaments, guilds that use tattoos as proof, guilds that didn’t know proof were needed, and even guilds who decide not to have any at all.

Though it is rare for a member to use that proof to do evil acts and taint the Guild’s name, it is usually judged by a National Agency. But, before they actually come to hold a judgment, the concerned member will already receive punishment from the Guild.

Whether the punishment will be a personal one or whether it will be pardoned is also another proof of the privilege of being a Guild member.

⑦ In order to protect the public order of a guild whose base is located in huge cities, only the Guild itself and the Guild Federation will be keeping a strict watch on the guild members’ activities.

Though guilds do their activities with guaranteed independence, if what they do is essentially against public and moral standards then, the Guild Federation will have to interfere.

There is a guild that specializes in watching over those guilds and they do so by sending spies (often called the “Doves”) to guilds all over the world,

☐ CRAFTSMEN

A title given to those who have mastered a certain technique or skill.

A degree or a qualification.

Twice every year, awards are given to those who performed exceptionally in the simultaneous testing that the Machine City of Suzaku does.

Those who are recognized as exceptional Craftsmen are given silver rings as proof of their accomplishments.

Although the title and the ring itself have no special powers, it does grant a higher social status, providing credibility and making it easier to find employment and job promotions.

Since having a skilled Craftsman is vital to the survival of a guild, it has become a special feature for the famous guilds from all over the world to come to the testing site to be able to scout those that perform exceptionally.

By the way, whether a skilled Craftsman decides to join a guild is of his own volition. And although forcing someone to join a guild is an offense, there are still reports of it happening in the present day.

☐ MEISTER

It is a title given to a Craftsman who has exhibited astonishing abilities.

There are only a few of them in the world, a genius among geniuses, and as such they are always the focus of public attention.

They don’t particularly like the attention so there are some Meisters who live while concealing their title.

While personal achievements are a must to be considered a Meister, they also need to be referred by someone from the Twelve Regions and in addition, their qualification needs to be agreed upon by the majority of the Guild Federation. As such, only very few people hold the title.

☐ TWELVE REGIONS

The twelve Guilds representing the world.

Though not necessarily large, there are guilds that kept the name of their guild from its long history.

Guild names like Procellarum, Fluna, Seleas, SOARA, VAZZY are some of them.

Though there are the independent and well-known established guilds, there have also been relatively new guilds coming into light and there have been voices of concern regarding their detachment from the current situations.

☐ TENSION BETWEEN NATIONS

Though there is continuous tension with the national borders, there has never been an armed clash between nations for at least 50 years.

However, the recent phenomena of the discovery of the [Light] and [Dark] Elements, as well as the appearance of the floating Ruins has caused a great upset to the already decades-long established concepts. The tension between major powers have recently started to grow as well.

The floating Ruins in particular have been suspected of being a new weapon that a certain nation has developed. And though it has been ruled out as a possibility, the tension still continues to rise.

Translator’s Notes:

(1) The kanji characters for “Foundation” are 「基礎」and the kanji characters for “Machine Elements” are 「機素」 They’re both pronounced “kiso” so over the years, the writers of the olden texts replaced “Foundation” with “Machine Elements” to further suit the machine relics that they use as the foundation/basis to maintain their world.

※ Please don’t re-post any of these translations without permission. Please just like/reblog them instead.

If you like this, please consider buying me a ko-fi here to support my work. (o^▽^o)Thank you!!

#kisosekai #machine elements #tsukipro agf #agf 2018 #my translations #ahhhhh i can't believe how much thought and care went into the world building for this!!!#stan tsukipro yall

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pfenniged · 5 years

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Can you explain why Anne Elliot is your favourite Austen heroine?

Surely! (This literally took like, two and half hours of writing and editing. What is my life).

Background:

So, essentially, to get into this analysis, I have to preface this with Persuasion being written in 1817, near the end of Austen’s life and published six months after her death. Really, if you compare the type of satirical protagonists she was writing at the beginning of her career (see Northanger Abbey, which convinced my entire English Literature 2 class in university that Austen was insipid despite being prefaced as a gothic parody), to later, Pride and Prejudice, to Persuasion, I think it really traces the development of Austen as a writer (Austen referred to her in one of her letters as “a heroine who is almost too good for me.”)

Not to say she didn’t have more ‘mature’ protagonists early on; Elinor Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility is really my second favourite protagonist from Austen’s works, and she is essentially the one person in the Dashwood household who keeps everything together; without her, the entire operation would fall apart. It’s the reason why she’s the ‘sense’ in the aforementioned title.

But where Anne Elliot differs I think, is that Elinor, despite being the ‘older’ sister, is never really seen as being devoid of prospects in regards to her future and marriage, despite the family falling on hard times. Anne, on the other hand, is actually a marked difference from Austen’s usual protagonists. Whereas her other protagonists are usually concerned with climbing the social ladder of society (or essentially, scorning the playing of this game in society, but still knowing it’s expected of her anyway (See Lizzie Bennet), Anne is from a noble family that due to her father Sir Walter Elliot’s vanity and selfishness, is on its descent down on the social ladder, a caricature of the old, outdated, titled class in a world of new British industry.

Sir Walter Scott, and the Changing Ideal of The Gentlemen in Society:

This is another place where Jane Austen differs in her characterisation and brings up an important contrast that is lacking in her other work to an extent in terms of her other main heroines: while the other heroines are more concerned with upward mobility through marriage because that is what society has expected of them, Anne Elliot’s father (who’s will dominates her own), is concerned with DOWNWARD mobility. The idea that he will be seen as ‘lesser than’ for allowing his daughter to marry someone she loves.

The difference is, is where you have CHOICE to an extent in a burgeoning middle class family, even if you were marrying for money, you have that upward mobility. You have opportunities. When your family is so focused on maintaining the facade of an untouchable deity, you are literally frozen into that mold, even if you want to be a part of that changing world and changing model of what should be considered an ‘ideal’ match, or a modern pairing.

While unadvantageous matches are dismissed in other Austen works, it is often due to the person having some fault of character (I.E: Philanderer, drunkard, etc.) that’s obviously not going to change anytime soon, and what someone is, to an extent, able to control. People are able to control whether they cheat on someone or not; people are able to control showing up and embarrassing themselves at social functions if they have an inkling of self-awareness. And these matches are usually rejected outright because of the family’s concern for the daughter’s feelings (See Lizzie and Mr. Collins, for example, even though it would be an advantageous match (-INSERT LADY CATHERINE DE BOURGH QUOTE HERE-)

But the sad thing in Anne’s case, I think, is that it shows the dying breed of noblewomen, who, once they get ‘older,’ have nowhere to go but down socially if they don’t become a ‘spinster’ or completely devoted to their family household and name. These older, more distinguished families during 1817, were slowly and surely becoming more and more obsolete, and I think it’s VERY astute of Austen to recognise that. Men could now make their fortune at sea- they COULD be “new money.” More and more, these noble people who didn’t work and didn’t have a profession besides being a member of the landed gentry, were becoming more and more dated in the movement of England towards mechanisation and the new Victorian age of industry.

‘Captain Wentworth is the prototype of the ‘new gentleman.’ Maintaining the good manners, consideration, and sensitivity of the older type, Wentworth adds the qualities of gallantry, independence, and bravery that come with being a well- respected Naval officer.

Like Admiral Croft, who allows his wife to drive the carriage alongside him and to help him steer, Captain Wentworth will defer to Anne throughout their marriage. Austen envisions this kind of equal partnership as the ideal marriage.’

Meanwhile Sir Walter does not present this same sort of guidance for the females in his life. He is so self-involved that he fails to make good decisions for the family as a whole; his other two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, share his vanity and self-importance. While Anne is seen as a direct parallel with her good-natured (dead) mother, she still has to deal with these outdated morals, before coming her true self. She still has to learn to support her own views, even if they are contrary to those in a position of power in her life, and essentially, dominate her day-to-day dealings and her actual character of how she defines herself.

Becoming One’s Self: Learning Self-Assurance and The Positives of ‘Negative’ Qualities:

The one thing I do love about Anne is that she doesn’t have a ‘weakness of character,’ contrary to Wentworth’s bitter words which are clearly directed at her when they first meet again after so long. That’s one thing I usually see (predominantly male) commentators say Anne’s fault is as a female protagonist is as simple as a reading of the title; namely, that she’s too easily persuaded.

However, that’s an overtly simplistic view. Often people directly correlate an individual being persuaded as simply being ‘weak-willed.’ Anne Elliot is anything but. She constantly rebels against the vanity of her father and the stupidity of her sisters, at the same time being aware of the social structure in which they must operate. She is the individual at the beginning of the novel who is dealing directly with money; and while this was at the time often seen as a ‘man’s’ role, it is Anne taking control of getting their family back into good stead and out of debt after her dippy father gets them into debt and remains completely useless throughout the entire procedure except to complain about who they might let the house out to, simply because they ARE ‘new money.’ She IS open to new roles in society, and new conventions.

This leads directly to the biggest criticism levelled against her at the beginning of the novel: that after being dismissed by Anne, Captain Wentworth basically publicly declares (because #bitteraf) that ‘any woman he marries will have a strong character and independent mind.’

The funny thing is, Anne already has these. She never lacked them. ‘What ‘persuasion’ truly refers to is whether it is better to be firm in one’s convictions or to be open to the suggestions of others.

‘The conclusion implies that what might be considered Anne’s flaw, her ability to be persuaded by others, is not really a flaw at all. It is left to the reader to agree or disagree with this. ‘

Anne is not stupid in that she is convinced or persuaded by any Joe Schmow who comes along; she considers the opinions of those she respects. She ultimately comes to the right decision in marrying Wentworth later in life, but it’s understandable how a nineteen year old would doubt this decision when advised by those adults around her. It is now that she is older, in considering other people’s opinions, that she is more likely able to come to her decision herself, rather than letting other people’s opinions overweigh her own.

‘Anne is feminine in this way while possessing none of what Austen clearly sees as the negative characteristics of her gender; Anne is neither catty, flighty, nor hysterical. On the contrary, she is level-headed in difficult situations and constant in her affections. Such qualities make her the desirable sister to marry; she is the first choice of Charles Musgrove, Captain Wentworth, and Mr. Elliot.’

Ageism: Austen’s Hinting at an Age-Old Philosophy against the Modern Woman:

At twenty-seven, Anne is literally considered a woman ‘far past her bloom of youth.’ She is constantly surrounded by younger women, both demonstrating interest in her father and in Wentworth. While ageism wasn’t clearly developed as a recognised societal practice in the 19th century, I think it demonstrates, when Jane wrote this so close to her death, and having never married herself, the pressures on women in society even later in life. This is seen more bluntly in the character of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, but I think the fact that people constantly remind Anne of something she cannot control could arguably draw parallels to social status and how birth status cannot be controlled, by a more modern reading of the piece. Women cannot control ageing, any more than a man can control being born into a lower class. But while men could continue to marry for upward mobility or money (up to ridiculous ages and with ridiculously younger wives), women don’t have that luxury once they are ‘past their prime,’ even if they also have the avenue of upward mobility through marriage (see Charlotte Lucas again).

Lost Love, aka THEY TOTALLY MIGHT HAVE BONED BUT PROBABLY NOT:

“There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.”

The best thing about Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot’s love story is that we already knew they WERE in love; as opposed to all her other stories, which involve individuals arguably falling INTO love rather than HAVING been in love (Looking’ at you, Mansfield Park), Wentworth x Anne Elliot was a THING. They were a hot and HEAVY thing.

I essentially have nothing to add here except that makes their entire story 10000000x more painful when they clearly still have feelings for one another and have to run in the same social circles.

That is all.

Separate Spheres: AKA LETS ALL HELP EACH OTHER MMKAY AND BE EQUAL PARTNERS IN LOVEEEE:

Lastly, Austen also considers the idea of ‘separate spheres.’

‘The idea of separate spheres was a nineteenth-century doctrine that there are two domains of life: the public and the domestic. Traditionally, the male would be in charge of the public domain (finances, legal matters, etc.) while the female would be in charge of the private domain (running the house, ordering the servants, etc.).

This novel questions the idea of separate spheres by introducing the Crofts. Presented as an example of a happy, ideal marriage, Admiral and Mrs. Croft share the spheres of their life. Mrs. Croft joins her husband on his ships at sea, and Admiral Croft is happy to help his wife in the chores around the home. They have such a partnership that they even share the task of driving a carriage. Austen, in this novel, challenges the prevailing notion of separate spheres.’

As mentioned before, from the beginning of the novel, as a noblewoman, Anne is already crossing the line of separate spheres by undertaking financial and legal matters since her father is essentially too much of a pussy to do so (this antiquated ideal of gentlemanly qualities). She has already made a discreet step into the public domain by her actions, without ever really truly making a bold statement.

By the insertion of the Crofts within the narrative, it really foreshadows how this sort of relationship can work as equals, and how such an amalgamation of the spheres should not be looked down upon. It’s a subtly progressive message that none of the other books really deal with (besides perhaps a tad in Sense and Sensibility with Elinor), and I love her all the more for it. ♥

#I love how this slowly degraded into meme language and then I gave up #help me #it's 2:30 in the morning #Jane Austen #theory #literature #literature theory #Anne elliot #writing #reading #regency period #future reference #personal #answers #Persuasion #captain fredrick wentworth

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jbuffyangel · 5 years

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Do you think they are low key assassinating John Diggle’s character to make NTA and BS look better and have a purpose? His arc last season and the beginning of this one has started to make me resent him and I hate it because he was one of my absolute favs. It kinda sounds like BS helps get Oliver out of prison because she’s the DA and I just can’t believe that even she would be more loyal to him and Felicity than JOHN FREAKING DIGGLE. I hope he starts making sense soon. I hate his storyline😔💔

This is probably not going to be a popular response, but… no I don’t think they are assassinating John’s character to help prop the Newbies and Bl*ck S*ren.

I think it’s really important not to put characters on a pedestal. They have to be allowed to make mistakes. Characters can be unlikable when they are making mistakes. I know Diggle has been the moral compass on Arrow and his behavior of late is extremely challenging. It’s okay to not like a character when they are acting in an unlikable way.

However, it’s okay for John not to be perfect all the time. It’s okay with me that he screws up. I’m also okay being angry with him over those mistakes. I have zero doubts he will step onto the right path again, but I am okay with Arrow exploring this storyline with John.

Sometimes I feel like it’s okay to get angry with Oliver, Bl*ck S*ren and the Newbies, but it’s not okay to ever be angry with Diggle and Felicity. This is just how I feel sometimes. It doesn’t mean it’s true.

Felicity and Diggle are human like everyone else. They will make mistakes. I feel it’s important for me as a viewer to leave room for those mistakes. I need to leave room for the humanity in Diggle and Felicity. They won’t always react the way I think they should. They won’t always make the right calls.

I firmly believe issues have been building with Diggle for years. Pretty much since Season 4.

The Newbies and Bl*ck S*ren weren’t even part of the show then. John quit Team Arrow when the Newbies were being total ass hats. His issues with Oliver had very little to do with the Newbies and zero to do with Bl*ck S*ren.

John is going through something else entirely. He is looking for his place in the world because he feels displaced. I’m really not kidding around when I call it a mid life crisis. So much of John’s purpose was wrapped up in saving Oliver Queen.

His question in Season 6 was where does he go now that Oliver is saved?

I think some of his fatalistic approach to Oliver being lost to them forever is, in part, because John feels like he lost Oliver long before prison.

We can say, “John you are crazy and Oliver still needs you. PARTICULARLY NOW THAT HIS WIFE AND CHILD ARE UNDER THREAT,” but it doesn’t mean John knows that. It doesn’t mean John is in a position to truly understand it. I think the character is really lost without Oliver in a lot of ways. I think John has been lost for a long time.

I wrote a meta on this not long ago called the “The Ascension of Oliver Queen and Descension of John Diggle.” I encourage you to read it Anon. I map out the direction I think these characters are going, but I’ll go through some of it here.

The show is slowly going through a monumental shift. It’s no longer going to be entirely about Oliver’s screw ups and saving his soul. We are watching Oliver retain all his goodness, all the lessons he’s learned over the past 10 years, during his time, at Slabside.

Old Oliver would spiral into darkness after being cut off from Felicity and Diggle for a day. He’s not killing in prison even though he’s absolutely justified to do so. He isn’t skinning men alive.Oliver has mostly solved problems with his morality in tact. Oliver retaining his light in prison, on his own, without Diggle and Felicity holding his hand, is unbelievably important.

The whole show is about OLIVER becoming a superhero. Well… we’re pretty damn close. He’s not a full cooked turkey yet, but we’re getting there! If Oliver is nearing a fully realized superhero then it means the moral compass on the show is HIM. It’s not about Diggle telling him right from wrong anymore. It’s about Oliver knowing right from wrong.

This gives John’s character a freedom he’s never had before. Diggle couldn’t screw up because Oliver was a disaster zone. John had to reign Oliver in or else there’d be corpses up and down Star City. Diggle had to be on a righteous path in order to direct Oliver there. Otherwise, Oliver would have turned into Prometheus.

But now Oliver is doing a damn fine job taking care of himself on his own. A lot of that is causing John’s spiral. That said, Diggle can screw up without Oliver becoming a disaster. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The more Diggle screws up, the more lost he becomes, the more he needs Oliver Queen’s help. It’s a reverse of their relationship. The bond remains the same. However, it’s Oliver’s turn to save John. I think Diggle has earned that.

So, it means I have to give his character the same room I gave Oliver. If I allowed Oliver to screw up massively and do stupid things, then I have to allow Diggle the same humanity. If Oliver didn’t always do the right thing then Diggle doesn’t always have to either. They start at opposite ends of the spectrum, but Oliver and Diggle’s journey is ultimately one in the same. They’ll end up in the same spot, but it doesn’t preclude either character from messing up along the way.

John’s reaction to Felicity and Diaz is frustrating. But in Diggle’s defense he believes A.R.G.U.S. is the best way to capture Diaz. He’s not prepared to go off book like Felicity is. Is he wrong? YES. But Diggle’s decision is backed up by a lot of of his previous actions.

John left Team Arrow because he no longer had purpose. He thought his new purpose would be Green Arrow. He wanted to slot B (be Oliver) in for A (save Oliver) and boom he’s good to go. Oliver didn’t give up the hood though and it triggered quite an angry reaction from John. One that’s been brewing since Andy died.

Diggle walked away from the team then too. He re enlisted in the army. When John is feeling lost he doubles down on rules, regulations and structure. He leaves the world of living outside the law, the world of Oliver Queen, behind.

It’s the same with leaving Team Arrow. John left vigilante life behind and doubled down on being the good solider only this time at A.R.G.U.S. His hesitancy to go outside the rules of A.R.G.U.S. to help Felicity are extremely in line with where his character ended last season. This isn’t something the Arrow writers are going to drop. John’s arc isn’t over.

John admitted to Felicity he’s scared. He knows everything being a vigilante cost Oliver and Diggle doesn’t have it in him to risk the same. John isn’t prepared to go to prison, be without his wife and child, for the sake of the hood. Diggle is merely admitting he doesn’t have the same drive as Oliver.

The writers aren’t trying to cast Diggle in a bad light for the sake of the Newbies and Bl*ck S*ren. The writers are drawing a distinction between Oliver Queen and John Diggle. What makes Oliver Queen a superhero? Why is Oliver Queen worthy of the hood? Oliver is prepared to lose everything and John is not. It doesn’t make John a bad man. It makes him human. Superheroes are next level human. They do things and sacrifice things most people in their right minds would never do.

Does that mean John won’t be a superhero as Spartan? No. John admitted his fears wearing the hood. He said no. It also has to make him question if he’s really cut out for vigilante life at all - including Spartan. However, simply because this is where John is at now doesn’t mean this is where he will end up.

I don’t agree Diggle would never turn his back on Felicity Smoak. He’s left the team before. Diggle has isolated himself from both Oliver and Felicity. He was prepared to spend his life in jail, separated from his wife and child.

If Diggle can walk away from his wife and son then he can walk from anyone. But we have to look at his state of mind when he made those decisions. Diggle wasn’t in a good place mentally.

I don’t believe he’s in a good place mentally now. Maybe he’s keeping up appearances better under that A.R.G.U.S. uniform, but I still think he’s on a downward slope. More importantly, I don’t believe John is looking at it like he’s turned his back on Felicity. He’s trying to catch Diaz same as her, but Diggle doesn’t want to do it Felicity’s way.

Yes, he’s wrong. Yes, he’s Pod Diggle. Yes, I am angry at him. Yes, I will drag him in reviews. I’ve done all of that with Oliver too. But do Diggle’s actions seem out of the blue or out of line to me given where I see the character at this point? No. This feels like the next progression in his arc.

As far as The Newbies, yeah we have some helping Felicity and some not. Rene has to help Felicity. If he doesn’t the writers might as well kill him. Rene refusing to help is full character assassination. The only way for Rene to remain on this show is to help Felicity. But I’m not giving him points since he caused the problem.

I really don’t see that having anything to do with Diggle. In a lot of ways, John believes he’s honoring Oliver’s sacrifice by playing by the rules. He’s still helping the city, but legally. This all fits with where John’s mind is at regarding vigilantism.

Curtis and Dinah have helped sparingly, but not to the level I think both characters should help, since they are also a large part of the reason Oliver is in prison. Nothing they’ve done has really secured any significant redemption in my eyes. By the same token, those actions have neither positively or negatively impact Diggle’s character.

As for Bl*ck S*ren, she’s out for herself. She wants revenge on Diaz. She’s not helping because she wants Oliver and Felicity to reunite and make all kinds of babies. Diaz killed Quentin and she wants to kill Diaz. I say, “Faster pussy cat kill kill,” but I don’t think her motivations are purely focused on helping Felicity. So again no points from me.

If the stars line up and Bl*ck S*ren’s motivations and Felicity’s motivations meld then great. I’m Team Help Felicity. Is there a chance I’ll be happier with Bl*ck S*ren’s character than John’s? Yes, we are living in the Upside Down because John himself is upside down. He’s going to need Oliver’s help to see the world clearly again.

#asks #john diggle #oliver queen #arrow #arrow spoilers #john diggle meta #oliver queen meta #oliver and diggle #Anonymous #anti black siren #anti rene ramirez #anti newbies #anti dinah drake #anti curtis holt

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