(intrusive thoughts - creeping charlie)

From An Old Internet Veteran: Go, and Sin No More

I wish I could explain to young people how wild the internet was as it went from the ‘weird niche thing for lame nerds’ irrelevancy of the early 90s and the “Boy This World Wide Web Thing Sure Is Nifty”-style painful optimism that describes 97% of Western Culture between 1994 and 2002 to the ‘Mad Max But Statistically Less Australian” culture that was the internet from 2002 to around 2010. I come neither to praise this era of internet nor condemn it. I merely want understanding. I cannot polish a lumpen pile of rape jokes, Chuck Norris glorification, “ironic” racism, and numa numa fat shaming and say that it’s misunderstood comedic genius. Trash is still trash even if it wins a bunch of Emmys. But at the same time I cannot take you with me back to the 90s and get you to feel, on a visceral level, what it was like to live in a place where Bart Simpson was both promoted as a real and present danger to the moral upbringing of the world’s children and was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential icons of the 20th century. And because I cannot do that I cannot get you to understand how freeing it felt to be on the internet in that Mad Max era. Ten years before a yellow boy shouting “Don’t have a cow” while doing a pathetic kick-flip on a chunky skateboard was considered the potential downfall of humanity’s children, but now you could make something so risqué that the old-guard stuffed-shirt in 1994 would have died on the spot, his brain unable to consider anything so outside his moral world view. I cannot easily make you understand a time when nobody just said whatever it was they wanted, not just because they had no platform to do so but because the rigidity of social convention was so strong. Nobody ever had hardcore lesbian sex on Northern Exposure on prime time television. Nobody on the X-Files ever died by having their head smashed in a car door repeatedly like a melon until viscera spilled all over the pavement. You could not have made Game of Thrones or Steven Universe in 1995. Forget the graphics, forget the budget, you simply couldn’t do or say any of that on television for either kids or adults. The Mad Max internet changed that - changed the very firmament of what was acceptable in media for every genre and for every demographic.  Is this a good thing? Not particularly. Is this a bad thing? Not particularly. If this sound frustratingly ambivalent that’s because it is: were we to go back and do it all again, knowing all that we know now, would we do it the same way? No. But then, we would not know all that we know now had we not learned it by making the attempt in the first place.

This poor comfort for someone who dives into some 2006 webcomic with a reputation of a Legacy Touchstone and finds it full of ‘jokes’ about their gender, or sexual preference, or the liberal use of the r-slur, or a kind of hyper-suburban comedic racial ignorance. I am not here to argue that that had any value merely because it was transgressive. But the same space that opened-up to let such ugly things out also opened-up places for marginalized groups to made themselves known, groups who never before had such public voices.

Imagine an apocalypse. Imagine society rebuilding in the ashes. Imagine how many false starts and missteps there would be and you begin to understand just a little of what that period was like. It was embarrassing. It was cruel. It was childish and stupid. But in living through it we grew up. Or, at least, those of us capable of growing up grew up, and learned, and learned to be better - learned what better was. And then we built new places where other people could learn too - and spread the gospel of being better. One of the things that always irritates me when it comes to young people talking about the past is the unexamined privilege of knowledge being at your fingertips. It’s more than just everyone carrying a wireless-internet connected computer in their pocket at all times. It’s more than just a Wikipedia with hundreds of millions of articles and a reputation for fact sourcing. It’s more than just a Google that works. If you never experienced it you cannot imagine what using WebCrawler was like in 1995 against Ask Jeeves in 2005 against Google in 2015 - or even Google between 2005 and 2015. Most people don’t go around thinking about SEO and search engine algorithms but maybe we should because anyone who wants to go “this info’s been on the internet since day one so people have no excuse not to know it” disingenuously argues that information search and retrieval has been consistent across the decades. There was a time - not all that long ago - when to look something up on-line involved getting the tacit agreement of everyone in your household to lose the use of the sole telephone for as long as you were web browsing. There was a time - not all that long ago - when ‘looking something up’ was to burden everyone around you with inconveniences, and while you were doing your web searches there was no guarantee what you wanted could be found with the primitive technology of the day. Do you know how much I’ve learned since joining Tumblr in 2011? On a fundamental level, both about myself and the make-up of our species in terms of social conception? I recently went through a bunch of old posts, removing those with broken links and meaningless content, but also shit that just embarrasses me now - mostly opinions from a period where I hadn’t yet had a chance to learn because the spaces in which to learn it did not yet exist. It’s not just things like communities for [demographic X] - it’s things like “communities for [demographic X] with an ability to broadcast their voices and have platforms able to network their ideas and audience halls able to receive them and a search engine to guide people to that community and a basic understanding that the community even exists in the first place.” And this does not even begin to touch on internet access, something that even now is not a universal thing, and for which getting angry about people’s ignorance reflects a bias all its own. I say all this because I think that a core tenant of cringe culture is a myth of universal access to knowledge and universal awareness of one’s own ignorance. I look back on old posts of things I said and I cringe with self-hatred - cringe enough to rip them down and stuff them in the trash. “HOW DID I THINK THAT?” and “HOW DID I NOT KNOW?” But why should I have known - what, in my life, would ever have put better ideas across my desk? That I can meaningfully speak now about privilege and intersectionality and historiography is because between then and now I was put in a place to learn these things. I was exposed to ideas that I had never before been exposed to, and was given the grace to learn. I am tired of the expectation that every aspect of our past selves should be held to the same standard as the present. (Yes, to all the disingenuous bad-faith trolls out there, I obviously and of course am advocating for complete and total uncritical pardon for everything in the past ever. Were you a neo-Nazi ten years ago? Water under the bridge without question because that’s obviously, obviously, obviously the sort of extreme outlier case I am talking about good on you for being clever enough to notice.) But for the non-dipshits out there who understand how to read without injecting insincere hyperbole into every argument, I want us to be kinder to our past selves when we have learned to be better. It’s okay that you used to like Sherlock - there were genuinely fun things about it, and it’s okay that you didn’t possess an expert grasp of post-graduate feminist critical theory when you were 21. Or 31. Or 41. More concepts of academia have filtered into mainstream consciousness than ever before - and in saying that we should remember the corollary that ten, twenty, thirty years ago that was not the case. We knew less, had access to less, and were exposed to narrower viewpoints than we are today. It is unfortunate - but it was not our fault, and we cannot easily blame ourselves for it any longer. Nothing makes my blood boil more than seeing people taking umbrage that... oh, Farmer Joe McSmithHead of Buttnut, Alabama in 1963 was ignorant of internal Chinese politics and said some untrue things about Chinese Communism. But the only thing Farmer Joe had to tell him of the outside world was a radio that played country music, a TV with four channels and strict content guidelines to only show pleasant, moral, and god-fearing content, and the three books in the Buttnut library, two of which were the Bible. There have, and will always be, certain moral lines so obvious that people of any era should always be held accountable to them. But above that, in the more trivial space of media consumption, absorption, and critique, we have to learn to be more forgiving - to ourselves and to others, so long as in the present we have changed. Did you use the r-slur a lot because it was practically a form of punctuation on 4chan and that’s where you learned the ways of the internet? Did you learn the harmfulness of this practice and cease to do it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Did you and your friends used to make jokes about how Mexicans smelled because you saw Seinfeld do that in his standup and the whole TV laughed as though it was funny? Did you realize one day ‘wait a minute that’s actually super gross’ and stop repeating it? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. Have you gone back to a beloved childhood property and found it’s full of woman-beating and weird views on homosexuality? Did you find yourself able to critique this beloved thing and did not defensively double-down on shielding it from all harsh words? Then I do not condemn thee - go, and sin no more. I will not allow us to dismiss the cruelty and hurt of Mad Max Internet Culture with a flippant ‘well that’s just how it was back then” but nor will I allow anyone to condemn us all as being consciously unfeeling, willfully ignorant, purposefully hateful. Some of us were. But some of us did not know, could not have known, needed to learn - and we were lucky enough to live in a time before cringe culture and cancel culture where we were allowed to have that opportunity to learn and grow. We need that today, for all young people who think themselves as woke as can be and ten years from now will look back and blush with shame for things they said and did in total ignorance. The sin is choosing to never change, not failing to change sooner.

what really bothered me about that four lung post was the way she feels obliged to actually -thank- people for participating in surveillance culture. that, to me, is really sad. it's a very good reflection, i think, of how in critiquing surveillance culture people often feel forced to concede to its self-image of greater moral purity in order to avoid inviting too much scrutiny to themselves. you can critique the form of surveillance culture -- as long as you quickly acknowledge its practical usefulness and good accomplishments, lest you be seen as sympathetic to molesters. this is different from simply acknowledging that most people participating in surveillance culture are probably well intentioned, because you have to explicitly thank people for perpetuating the culture itself. it's the same thing when people make these sorts of flippant posts that are like,

me: talking about how callouts can be abused and stuff some bad person / bad fandom shipper / etc: yeah! it really sucks cause i can't do bad things! me: i'm not associated with you

it's a form of, like, appeasement. it's a way of saying, "look, i accept the basic framework of your logic, that critiques of surveillance culture are more prone to encouraging predators than surveillance culture itself. i am not a predator and i don't support predators. i acknowledge that surveillance culture holds predators in check; or at least, that the general spirit of it is correct, even if the specifics are flawed. please don't kill me."

but surveillance culture really isn't better at this. the reason that a culture of widespread mutual policing held in check by guilt and fear, or any system that values law and order, can look so morally pure by comparison to anti-surveillance rhetoric is precisely because surveillance culture encourages abusive people to rise within the ranks and become a part of the loud and authoritative voices declaring the standards by which everyone else shall be measured lest they seem friendly to perpetrators. in short: it looks good because it says it is good, and if you think otherwise, there's a good chance that you're collaborating with perpetrators if you aren't one yourself. and if you repeat a lie a thousand times...

extremely stupid perpetrators may be weeded out, but then you're left with the people who've insinuated themselves into positions of power, who are very good at hiding behind charisma or by condemning the faults of others.

in fact, surveillance culture actually encourages this actively, not just as a side effect. because any bad action can be seen as a stepping stone toward monstrosity and exile [callout], every small bad action becomes an existential crisis. it encourages people to conceal their faults and bad actions and to develop themselves as a kind of celebrity to their peers, and even, again, as a culturally prioritized voice of hellfire and damnation, often using their identity as a tool to insulate themselves from criticism by well meaning fellow activist-types. surveillance culture loves building up perpetrators because the more "powerful" the abuser can be seen to be, the more emotional drama can be wrought out of tearing them down, and such powerful abusers being publicly condemned and/or exiled can even be used to prop up the mythology of surveillance culture itself while disguising the fact that this is all part of its normal and encouraged function. we shot down this powerful abuser! clearly surveillance is doing something right.

fundamentally, the problem here is disgust. people use disgust to build social capital, by vilifying people for minor microaggressions or simply disagreeing in an unfavored way. disgust is part of the everyday routine of maintaining social capital in these spaces. every day your eyes are assaulted with barrages of dozens or hundreds of reblogs condemning the latest (or often, several months or years old) trend in oppressive or abusive behavior or loudly consigning obviously bad ideologies or groups of people to the dumpster, or handwringing about another stupid fandom or what have you. disgust is woven into the fabric of these online social justice spaces; it's a big part of how you know you're in one at all. it's how you remind everyone that you are one of them, that you are not collaborating with perpetrators; it's a way of reminding everyone that you fear the law.

we treat perpetration as a mark of monstrosity and any bad action can be seen as part of a road to abuse. it's a vicious cycle because loud public disgust and vilification and alienation of the perpetrator incentivizes exactly what surveillance culture claims to be against. it's essentially removing any reason to be better at all, while completely ignoring why toxicity and abuse happens by aggressively individualizing it. despite social justice claims of structural critique and change, and sometimes acknowledging that structural harm can manifest as toxicity, only one cause can ever be ultimately indicted in an act of abuse or toxicity: the perpetrator theirself. this is not to say, of course, that victims should be obliged to interact with or "love" their abusers, nor that perpetrators should never be held to any sort of personal responsibility. but responsibility is different from damnation. a culture of disgust turns abuse from a problem to be addressed into a source of emotional drama to be exploited, and a kind of looming personal apocalypse that encourages people to hide their faults, to pretend to be perfect, to self-aggrandize and capitalize on popularity to always keep a step ahead of their moral debts. and the crowd eats it up every step of the way, right on to their final fall from grace. toxicity and abuse can never be seen as stemming from trauma or social conditions, but ultimately just an innate individual greed and selfishness which might be informed by trauma but really has nothing to do with it. there's just no fucking way to talk about any of this and that frustrates me to no end.

hansbekhart

reblogged your post and added:

I’d rather discuss what you think of my argument.

Then I hope you don’t mind me putting this in an extra post, as the original thread is getting quite long. 

I’m copying/posting your last reply here:

I don’t think it’s a contradiction though. I think it’s a miscommunication, stemming mostly from privilege. The disconnect in this argument is over what, exactly, is problematic.

Fandom has always imagined itself as a place of progressive values - a place where (predominately) women can explore their own sexuality and recreate community in a way that isn’t hostile to them, as a lot of the real world is. But this world we’ve created still has all of the prejudices that each member was brought up with - there’s no way that it couldn’t, firstly because many of our prejudices are invisible to us, and secondly because a lot of fandom works were created specifically to remix that already-existing culture: fan fiction is a mirror that we bend to find stories that include ourselves.

I think that the expression “fandom has always imagined itself” is a bit of a generalisation that does not hold up to close scrutiny: fandom is extremely diverse, and I don’t necessarily think that everyone who participates in it - or even the majority of people who participate in it - frame their contribution in these terms, or see it in that light. 

So while such a narrative exists, especially when it comes to the defense and representation of fandom in media, I wouldn’t agree that this idea of “progressiveness” is at the center of fandom for a majority of fans - at least not for those who never engage on a meta level. People often politicize fandom, but I’d argue that fandom, as such, is personal rather than political.

I absolutely agree wtih you that fandom content reflects our perception of the world, and all of our biases. But for me, that’s pretty much a given, and I’d like to add that the same applies to every kind of art and literature: whether we try to avoid it or not, everthing that we create is a reflection of our environment (geographical, historical, political), our personality, our prejudices and biases, our personal issues. 

And since it’s squeezed through what could arguably be called a feminist lens (because it positions female sexuality and self-exploration at its center), we fool ourselves into thinking that all the bad stuff - the parts of the world we were so alienated by that we were compelled to fix them - all that ugliness, we think it all gets left on the other side of the glass.

I don’t think that is the case, actually. At least I can’t confirm that from my own perspective and experiences. Very few people that I’ve spoken to - very few people who I argue with - would claim that fanworks are necessarily “better” or “less problematic” than the sources they derive from. Such a statment, I think, would be difficult to uphold when one takes a closer look at the average fanwork, the 90% between “My Immortal” and your Personal Favorite. 

I think that there might be a bit of confusion - or disagreement - about the nature and purpose of fanworks. In my understanding, fanworks are a form of wish-fulfillment and self-empowerment for those who create it. Fanworks can be progressive, sure, and they can be political, but I see that as side effect rather than a primary purpose. First and foremost, fanworks are hedonistic. They are the self-expression of individuals, the purely self-indulgent outlet for personal creativity. 

Of course, I have no idea what goes on in the mind of any given fan creator or writer. But speaking from my own perspective, when I write fanfiction, I write things for my own, personal enjoyment, for my own, personal amusement, or, if I wanted to be flippant: Because I can. Nothing inherently progressive about that. 

I’m saying “we” not just as a fan, but as a demographically representative one. Fandom is majority straight, white, and female - I’m two of those things, and can pass for the third. The reason I called this the White Feminism of discourse is because that’s where I think it comes from: a centering of a certain sort of narrative and victimhood to the exclusion of all others. Not necessarily out of maliciousness, but because a large proportion of fans don’t see the persistently racist problems in fandom - because it doesn’t affect them. Because they’ve never experienced racism personally, and are blind to the way they (we) perpetuate the microaggressions or outright racism that literally every fan of color has experienced in fandom. It’s a language we can’t hear unless we really, really listen.

Fandom is mostly white and female, though not necessarily straight, but that’s another matter. 

I think we need to make a distinction here, and that’s between fandom as a space for individuals, and the idea of fandom as it is currently presented in media by pro-fandom voices, which indeed often paints fandom as a beacon of progressiveness and female empowerment. 

When it comes to the individual fan and their contribution to fandom ... I hate to say it, but there is no reason why any given fan should priotitize anything but their own, selfish enjoyment. I’m not in fandom to contribute to the joy and happiness of other people. I’m here for my own. 

Creating art of fiction is always a selfish act. No writer writes something they don’t want to write (unless they’re paid for it, or course), no artist paints something that they don’t want to paint. That’s how we create: it’s our personal, self-indulgent vision that we turn into something that other people might enjoy. Or not enjoy, whatever the case may be. 

The argument that I often hear is “if your personal enjoyment comes at the price of other people’s hurt feelings, it’s oppressive and immoral”, but that only applies when I actually force people to consume the product of my imagination. But as long as they have the freedom of choice, why should their feelings take precedence over mine? 

Especially, and I feel that this is an important point that doesn’t get stressed often enough, when I don’t even know who these people are? We’re on the internet. I have no idea whether the person I’m dealing with is actually who they claim to be. I have no idea what their life looks like. I have no idea whether they were actually “triggered” by something (I’m using quotation marks because the way the word is used here on tumblr, it can mean anything, from mild annoyance to great anxiety) or are just striving strive for power and control. 

I can totally get where the people who write this sort of positivity posts about fandom are coming from, and I can get why it seems like these are attacks out of left field. But when you (and not meaning you specifically, OP - all of us) claim essentially that all media/fandom is good, and all ways of consuming media/fan fiction are good, that ignores the way that media/fandom continues to be a really hostile and ugly place for a lot of people. You may mean, “There is no bad way to explore your sexuality,” but it can sound like you really mean “Even if it includes explicit, unqualified racism.”

But who says that media/fandom has to be “good”? Who made that rule when I wasn’t looking? When I “joined” fandom, I never agreed to limit my own, personal enjoyment to what minorities find acceptable. And while I get that some people think they’re entitled to that - that it should be my goal as a “decent person” to make them feel included, safe, welcome, and cared for - that’s not what I’m here for. 

You may find this a controversial statement, but actually, it shouldn’t be controversial at all. I get that some people would like me to sign a metaphorical contract, with the fine print written in their favor, but the truth is that such a contract does not exist within fandom.

No other person has the actual authority to tell me that my own enjoyment should not be my sole and ultimate goal. People might think they have the moral authority to tell me that, but there is no reason why I should have to accept that.

Why should I let other people dictate what my contribution to fandom should look like? Or, what’s more to the point, why should I let a bunch of strangers with funny urls do that, who willingly choose to engage with the content that I post on my blog or to my AO3 account? 

ESPECIALLY because, when confronted with that exact challenge, a lot of people double down on that and admit that yeah, the racism doesn’t really bother them. Which is what’s happening here.

It’s not a contradiction, but an unwillingness to confront an ugly truth about fandom because it doesn’t personally affect you. Fandom has a huge problem with racism, and pointing that out is not an act of The Morality Police.

Well, I’m one of these people. Though I think it’s fair to say that while racism does, in fact, bother me, my understanding of racism does not conform with the US American definition, and I’m not inclined to re-frame my worldview according to US American sociological theories just because fan culture happens to be dominated by US Americans. 

It’s not only racism, though, is it? It’s  “abuse” and “homophobia” and “transphobia” and “ableism” and “misogyny” and so on, and I can tell you that most of what I’ve written and published would raise the hackles of one minority or another, if they came looking. 

Or rather, raise the hackles of some individuals, which is another issue: very rarely, in my experience, has there been an agreement within a minority group on whether something was actually “harmful” or “offensive”. So, when I’m faced with a couple of people who come to my inbox, often in a very hostile manner, to tell me that something is offensive to people of color, or Jewish people, or trans people, or disabled people, and so on, they might be making a lot of noise, but I have no real means to say whether they are actually representative of the minority they claim to speak for.

In reality, it might look a little like this: My piece of dark fic, which was clearly labeled as such, got twohundred hits. Ten people left kudos, one left a positive but trivial comment, and now suddenly three people, one after the other, leave their comments in quick succession, neiher politely worded nor inviting a discussion, informing me that this piece of fiction is problematic and needs to disappear. Because they say so. 

That’s the point where I have to ask myself: if I give in to that kind of intimidation and pressure, am I doing it because these people are in the right, or because I’m afraid? Am I willing to follow their moral code, which apparently includes dogpiling, intimidation, and name-calling, or do I trust my own? 

Meanwhile, the people in my comment section are in all likelihood not willing to take my opinion into account. Any attempt on my side to justify myself just leads to statements like “check your privilege”, “you’re a nazi apologist”, “white (cis, straight, abled) people don’t get a say in this”. Disagreement is not an option. They’ve decided that my content problematic, that I am problematic, and that’s that.

I’ve seen this play out in a variety of instances, and quite honestly, I think it’s very important that people don’t give in to that kind of bullying. 

Finally, let me just add, for good measure: I think you’re right in one point, and that is that we might want to stop pretending that fandom is all about progressiveness, when progressiveness is mostly accidental, and yes, we can absolutely point out that fandom content reflects the preferences of those who contribute to it. If that’s mostly white women, the content will reflect that, as we’ve basically agreed above. 

On the other hand, if everyone keeps making the kind of content that they want to see, instead of bemoaning that others don’t make it for them, fandom will continue to change.

Just don’t expect fans to go to great length to make fandom a better place for others if that’s not what they signed up for. 

On tattoo culture: 

Some of y'all are pretentious as fuck. That said, this shit helps me cope with my baggage, and the universal Thing seems to be “we’re individuals celebrating artistry,” so ... we’re in this together.

Tattoos are a form of therapy, for me.

I think long and hard about every single one I want to get. That, plus not having much money, is why I only have 4. 

So, technically, my first tattoo was simple... and not pictured here because I was stupid and uneducated and went to a shitty place, and it faded into nothingness within months. It was just the word “Breathe” in my handwriting. It still had a lot of meaning, because that’s a lifesaving word to people with anxiety - but I’m not that upset that it’s gone, either. Perhaps I’ll put it back later, somewhere else.

My first real, legit, artistry tattoo was the logo for Diablo 3 on my left thigh. (Artist plug.) The story behind that was basically… my dad and I have a strained relationship at the best of times. Nbd. I love him, I just acknowledge that he is a human being with flaws.

Nothing against him; I think he’s a pretty cool dude. If he ever reads this, that might be a little awkward, but it’s nothing I haven’t said to his face before. “Hey, you did good in some ways, but you kind of fucked me up, so…”

Anyway, we bonded over video games and shit like that, and the first game we played together was Diablo. Like, the original one. I pressed random buttons while sitting on his lap, and I was scared shitless of caves. I’d get super upset if a character died. (To this day, I hate caves in video games.) YMMV if a toddler should be playing a game like Diablo, but honestly, that’s the thing that fucked up my childhood the least. 

So, fast forward two decades and some change, and it seemed like a really fitting first tattoo. One of my favorite games, a nod to my dad; it’s perfect. (Note: I initially hated D3, and even now, I abhor the Witch Doctor, but Reaper of Souls fixed all my issues with it. But seriously, minionmancer 4 lyfe. Blizzard, give me my female necromancer, immediately. I’ve waited like twenty years for this.)

So … my next tattoo was the butterfly. (Artist plug #2.) Some of you may recognize it as the Butterfly Project, and you’d be right; the anti-self-harm sentiment of doing something beautiful instead of something ugly, something something symbolic transformation, you get the idea. In my case, it’s kind of literally transformative, in that the body surrounds a nasty scar. The colors are also that of bi pride (with a seafoam green accent, since I needed four colors). It’s supposed to also be stained glass, but that part honestly is #aesthetic and doesn’t have any special meaning.

After that, the semi colon on my knuckle. It’s got a match, on EC’s sternum; we drew the designs for one another, and it’s super sappy platonic moirail soulmate fluff. “We have matching tattoos in one another’s handwriting!” 

The meaning of the semi-colon is an anti-suicide thing. My story isn’t over; that’s the general idea, anyway. Both of us have … issues, but there’s a lot of love there, so we’re ok.

Lastly, the geometric scales. (Same artist as the butterfly.) Ah, astrology, how I loathe your flippant disregard for actual science. You would think that astrology, sharing a suffix with geology, psychology, biology, and other sciencey things would be actual science. But no. Astrology is bullshit zodiac crap. Astronomy is the actual science.

… I love linguistics, but that annoys me.

Regardless, the scales have nevertheless called to me; libra & gemini are the two most “torn” signs, in a way, both caught between opposing forces. Ambivalent, as it were. (Watch “Girl, Interrupted.” Do it.) I’ve never felt in balance, as I should, but … I strive to be. And I happen to be a libra. 

On to the phrase: Aut inveniam viam aut faciam. “I shall either find a way or make one.” It has a few variations, obviously, since it was never directly quoted. Supposedly, when Hannibal’s generals told him that it was impossible to cross the Alps by elephant, this was his response. (No, not that Hannibal. Pretty sure this one didn’t eat people.) Dubious, I know, especially since he wouldn’t have spoken Latin. The sentence appears repeatedly in the tragedies of Seneca, as well, though mostly just the first half of the phrase.

I’m also not, at all, the first person to use it as a motto. And most of the people who do use it don’t understand that it isn’t necessarily the best motto to have; it pretty strongly implies being a headstrong, foolhardy piece of shit, if we’re being totally honest.

But… that’s kind of what I am. 

That’s kind of a defining feature for why I’ve survived this long, albeit not terribly successfully. A friend of mine, who we shall call DG, once said of people that “everyone has rooms locking away monsters.” Some people keep them closed & locked, forever, and are too afraid to go near it. Some people leave the door open. (Some people don’t even have monsters that are all that scary, and that’s ok, too.) 

And me? I would be the one to kick the door in, somehow trip over the doorknob, and fight to the death, every time. 

So that’s me. I either find a way, or I make one. I’ve further ripped open a gaping wound in order to climb a fence to freedom and survival. I’ve done a lot of stupid shit, but there isn’t a bone in my body that knows how to lay down and die.

My goal is to achieve some kind of balance in my being. As I am now, I’m askew; the goal is to be level. And I’ll either find a way… or I’ll make one. But I sure as shit am not going to give up. 

So, those are my tattoo meanings. Everyone has their own shit, and some people just do it for the # a e s t h e t i c - and that’s fine, too. 

Like I said - the universal Thing is that we’re all individuals celebrating artistry, so we’re kind of in this together. 

Animes I watched recently

After „Saga of Tanya the Evil“ (short version: A brutal and fascinating look not just at the horrors of war, but also at the people who happily make it horrible), I also watched some other anime that I wanted to talk about. These were all on the front page of Crunchyroll, so if you know more about anime than about trains, then you may not find anything all that new here.

By the way: There will not be a Trains In Anime review for any of them. Almost all of them feature trains in minor roles, but all of them are set in modern-day Japan (often with more or less magic stuff added). The problem with that is that animators generally get modern-day japanese trains right, or at least so right that I can’t tell the difference, and there’s really not much to say on that front. So here just some general notes:

Interviews with Monster Girls

I strongly think the english title carries completely wrong connotations. It’s a slice-of-life school anime where some of the kids are various kinds of demons that used to be feared and hated, but are now accepted in normal schools. It’s a nice and sweet look at minority issues, with a focus on disability, including things like endonyms and exonyms for groups, accessibility, prejudice and so on.

Like all these stories (see also: X-Men, Star Trek) it suffers from the problem where it’s talking about minorities and the problems they face without actually having any minorities of any kind in it. That doesn’t undercut its point, but it’s a waste of potential.

What does actually undercut its point are all the jokes about inappropriate teacher-student relationships, since one of the main characters is a teacher for the other main characters. It always stays at a level where it’s all just jokes, but it’s there with an intensity where I’m always expecting something really uncomfortable to happen (though it hasn’t yet), and that expectation is making me uncomfortable. So overall a big maybe on the recommendation side.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure

Well… this does feature several characters who could be shortened to JoJo, and it is certainly bizarre, so the title isn’t lying. It seems to be an action anime with a very stylised visual language, featuring the guy with the worst hair cut in the world on his mission to convince everyone that it isn’t actually all that bad, or something. Truth to be told, I didn’t like any of the characters, I found nothing interesting in the premise, and I stopped watching after the first episode. I know it’s really popular, so maybe things will improve later. Or maybe it just isn’t for me.

Twin Star Exorcists

Fundamentally a standard anime of the type „giant faceless monsters threaten mankind; the only protection are weirdly-dressed wizard-types using overly flashy fight moves; we follow a young badass and his team on his way to become the most badass of all time“ (sub-type: Modern-day Japan, monsters are invisible to everyone but mages). Its unique selling point is that it is also a love story: The youngest most badass is actually two people, a boy and a girl, and destiny has foretold that they’ll fall in love, get married, and have a child that will end the war and put them and all of their friends out of a job. (Weirdly, despite that, most of them never try to develop a backup career path).

The story is straightforward except for a filler arc that is nice but not well integrated with character development, meaning the power level of the two heroes and how much respect they get from their peers fluctuates widely. Either way, the show works really well when it is about the two main characters and how they first become a team, then friends, then maybe something more. It works considerably less well when it’s about its own mythology, its Big Bad and so on. This is partly because it has nothing new and interesting to offer there. But the biggest problem is that this is always focused on the boy, even though the girl is just as deeply involved in the whole thing as he is.

Sadly, we seem to be heading for the end now, and here they screwed it all up. The guy main hero pulled an „I’ll be an asshole to you now so you’ll stay away while I sacrifice myself so you can be safe“. It works in no small part because she’s currently in a wheelchair, still recovering from a previous fight, and physically can’t stop him. I hate him for that. Of course it’s very clear that in the next few episodes, she will come to his side and her love for him will save him. Still, he totally took away her choice in the matter and did not respect either her skill or her involvement in the matter. That bothers me to no end. It also doesn’t help that the show is now all about the relationship of the male hero and the main villain, and the backstory of the main hero, all of which are things we’ve seen in every other anime of this type before as well.

In the end, live’s too short for average TV, and so I’m not going to recommend this. Sure, if you’re bored, you could do a lot worse than watch this. Maybe stop after the end of the arc where they put the city in the air. But you could also watch something so much better (e.g. the two right after this), so why bother?

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid

Easily my favourite of the bunch, despite the weirdest premise: A normal woman got so drunk that she apparently ended up finding an actual real-life dragon, saved it from some unspecified harm, and offered it to move in with her. The dragon (who can magically transform into more or less a human woman) agrees and moves in to become her maid. From there follows a story with quite a bit of fan service, lots of humorous „fish out of water“ moments, but mostly just a really nice and sweet story about these people connecting, becoming friends, and becoming better people as a result. It’s adorable, funny, well-paced and animated, and really worth a watch. The opening also has great ear-worm qualities.

Food Wars

The most epic battle anime ever… and it’s about cook-offs. This entire thing feels like a Gintama sketch that has gotten way too big, but they’re doing it entirely straight-faced, and it’s glorious. The premise is that a bunch of kids with unique dress and cooking styles (i.e. standard anime heroes) are at an elite cooking academy to become the bests chefs ever. And the way they do is through intense crowd-drawing cooking competitions that are portrayed as classic Shounen anime fights.

The novelty value is one thing, but this also really nails the execution. Between opponents, judges and an adoring public, every move on the stage gets commented on as if it meant the difference between life and death. „Oh no, he added apples. Could it be-?“ A simple „but there’s also soup!“ is delivered with more impact than someone in Bleach learning a new form of their sword. The visual metaphors for the battles and especially the verdicts by the judges are ridiculously over-the-top and amazing.

Of course it has all the standard tropes. You better believe that defeat means friendship, that characters question their entire life choices when faced with a superior meal, and that you totally can win by remembering how important your friends and family are. There’s also a great roster of characters that seem stock, but are really well executed, like „evil spying bad guy chef“, „fan service chef“, „cute girl with self-esteem issues chef“, „working class hero chef“ (our protagonist), „scary rocker chef“ (specialty: sea food) or, my personal favourite, „mad scientist chef“. She’s just so delightfully bratty.

When I watch an episode, at some point I always just start giggling uncontrollably and never ever stop. This is the yardstick by which I will measure all other battle animes from now on. Thanks to weird web design, Crunchyroll may decide to start you on season two, and having watched it like that, I think this may be the best way to experience the show. Just the barest of character introductions and then right into the madness. Either way, if you like anime where people battle each other and want to become stronger for their friends and family interest you at all, then you have to watch this.

Chaos;Child

I wanted to write something flippant here about how it seems to be trying to be weird just for weirdness’s sake, or how none of the characters are interesting or likeable, or the zeroth episode that seems to be there just to fool you into thinking that this whole thing is deeper than it really is… but that would all be dishonest.

This is an anime about truly bizarre murders, committed (it is hinted) through mind control, with lots of weird and seemingly disjointed elements and characters and events that don’t seem physically possible, and it’s really, really good. After watching the zeroth and first episode, I do actually think all the things I mentioned above, but those are all irrelevant: The murders really are horrific, the tense scenes really are tense, and I’m genuinely getting scared. In fact, I got so scared that I decided to stop watching.

If you’re into that kind of show, then this may be a very good example of that kind of show. But remember: Do you want nightmares? Because this is how you get nightmares.