what gets me the most about the nct dream thing is that it was an edited video and not a live.....someone okay'ed these comments

A brief history of Unitarian Universalism (casual, with swears, have not fact checked as such but I think it’s correct): In New England back before US independence, there was Calvinism -- you know, that predestination thing, you’re already going to go to heaven or hell, but you should be good anyways so people will think you’re going to heaven, or something like that. Then there wasn’t. Then there was Congregationalism. Which was a lot more chill, but still very “fuck Catholicism”. And around this time, deism was on the rise: the idea that maybe God created the universe, then fucked off, and hasn’t been actively involved with anything since. Then, some people who were actually reading the Bible, because you can’t look down on Catholicism unless you actually read the Bible, were like... wait, maybe Jesus isn’t all that. You know -- the Savior, the Son of God, one third of the Trinity, all that. Maybe he was just, like... a prophet, or some guy who said some interesting things. A teacher. And other congregationalists were like: uh, what, no, Jesus has to be all that. If you don’t think Jesus is all that, how can you even call yourself a Christian? And they decided they couldn’t really be around each other any more. So the first group, which was mostly in Boston, started calling themselves Unitarians (because they rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and instead believed in a one part God), and incidentally at some point also stopped calling themselves Christians because the other guys had a point, and the others called themselves the United Church of Christ (UCC.) Emerson and Thorough -- sorry, Thoreau -- were both Unitarians, as were John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and pretty much everyone else from Boston in early US history. (We like to claim Jefferson, because his beliefs were kindasorta similar to Unitarian beliefs at the time, but as I understand it he was never actually part of a Unitarian congregation.) (Btw: if you’re lgbtq+ and Christian, they’re a pretty friendly denomination. If you’re lgbtq+ and Christian and you think the UCC is too liberal (in the religious sense) or you want a majority-lgbtq+ congregation, consider MCC, which is otherwise unconnected to all this. If you’re not Christian and are lgbtq+ -- atheist/agnostic, or maybe something else if you’re down with worshipping with people that aren’t specifically your thing -- Unitarian Universalism tends to be pretty good. As in: we have a bunch of gay/lesbian ministers and other religious leaders, and a few transgender ones. (Knowledge of less mainstream lgbtq+ identities can vary a lot between congregations and generations -- the younger generations tend to be more aware than the gen x’ers.) I’ve been involved with Church of the Larger Fellowship for most of the past year, which did zoom worship before it got cool and serves people around the world, and people like me who live a mile from a UU brick and mortar congregation but still can’t get their disabled ass over there anyways. Anyways, CLF has more POC on the worship team than most UU congregations (the denomination does tend to run pretty white), is very social justice oriented even by UU standards, and is somewhat more cool about general weirdness than most congregations, which again for UU congregations is saying something.) Then, at some point (sadly, I’m significantly more familiar with the history of the first U than the second) there was this other protestant denomination in the South (as in, the US South) where people decided that God was too nice to send people to hell for all eternity, so they started calling themselves the Universalists, as in Universal Salvation. All dogs go to heaven. Well, time passed, each denomination evolved in its own way. (In particular, Unitarianism caught humanism pretty hard -- the joke was the Unitarians believe in one God at most.) In the -- ok, I’ll look this one up -- in 1961, there was a big old merger, creating Unitarian Universalism, and in the process, everyone got together and was all...wait, so what are our official beliefs about God and stuff? Should we even have official beliefs about God? Maybe we can unify around some ideas around how people should treat each other instead. So they did: they drafted a set of Principles (broad-strokes guidelines on how people should act -- peace is good, truth is good, people have value, stuff like that) and a set of Sources (where UU’s get their ideas about God and morality and so on from, starting with direct experience) and left everything else up to the individual. And then a little while later, the tree-huggers got a seventh Principle and a sixth Source added in -- respect for the environment and Earth-centered religions, respectively -- so now the joke is that UU’s believe in one God, more or less. Currently there’s a movement on to add an 8th Principal that explicitly names racial equality and fighting oppression as something we value, since while the current Principles mention justice and equality, they don’t specifically name race, and the people of color who have stuck with the predominantly white denomination figure Unitarian Universalism can and should be doing better on that front. Unitarian Universalism runs religiously liberal (ie, decentralized, individualistic, non-authoritarian, non-dogmatic, inclined to believe science over the Bible) and politically progressive. Unitarian Universalist congregations tend to be very politically active and concerned with social justice, mostly in a well-educated middle class kind of way: committees, Robert’s Rules of Order, donating to non-profits, Get Out the Vote, inviting in speakers and asking “questions” that aren’t really questions, forming partnerships with other congregations and community organizations, etc. Many UU congregations have put a Black Lives Matter sign out (and when necessary keep putting it out when it gets torn down or vandalized), shown up for the protests, opposed the weird immigration BS that’s been going on in the US recently, etc. In addition to more charity style work, like food pantries and homeless shelters.

Point is: yeah it’s got flaws (don’t even get me started on Unitarian Universalism’s flaws) but if you’re a social justice person and want to meet other social justice people who are doing things, Unitarian Universalism can be a good place to look for that. You get more done in groups.

You’re less likely to burn out, too. With marginalization, it’s complicated, right? Again, for LGBTQ+ people, it’s going to be better than most religious organizations. For people a little bit on the autism spectrum, you probably won’t be the only one. (If you’re unmistakeably autistic, people might be weird/ableist; it might depend on the congregation.) If you’re from a working class background or are currently kinda broke, you might run into some frustrations or feel like you don’t fit in; if you’re a poc or if you’re disabled (or your kid is) or you want a lot of personal support, you might struggle more -- this really might vary a lot, but at least the congregations I’m used to tend to assume congregants can mostly stand on their own feet, metaphorically speaking, and have some extra time/money/skills/whatever that can be directed out into the wider world. It can be a good place for pagans and Buddhists and other people who don’t want a church but are having trouble finding a church-like religious community where you can hang out with people on the same spiritual path. (Uh, for a while UU congregations were emphatically not churches and some officially still aren’t; others gave up and were all “eh, it looks like a church, whatever, we’re just a weird church.) Some congregations are more atheist-dominated than others -- many avoid Jesus language most of the time, some avoid God language most of the time (UU’s who believe in God tend to believe in God in a relatively abstract/metaphorical way), some I hear are pagan-heavy, others do use Christian language a lot more. In all honesty you don’t have to go to Sunday worship if you don’t want to, and really a lot of UU’s don’t; if you want to be heavily involved in the congregation but don’t want to go to Sunday worship and don’t want to deal with pressure to, one way out is to teach RE (religious education -- basically “Sunday school”) the RE curricula are amazing, just absolutely astounding, and if you’re teaching it you get a ton of leeway with adjusting anything you don’t like. (Which could happen -- a lot of this stuff was developed before the idea that cultural appropriation is a big problem became mainstream in social justice circles.) What adult worship is like has basically zero correlation (perhaps negative correlation) to what RE is like. (Which sucks for young adults coming of age in a UU congregation, like I said don’t get me started on UU’s flaws.) Finally: for people who care about sex positivity and sex ed, Unitarian Universalists (in partnership with UCC) developed Our Whole Lives, a sex ed curriculum that, well, it’s not abstinence based education. You wouldn’t expect sex ed coming from a religious org to be better than the sex ed in schools, would you? And yet. Comprehensive sex ed that acknowledges gay bi and trans people and that disabled people have sex too and teaches about birth control and masturbation and abuse and consent and boundaries and bullying and internet safety and abortion. It’s good stuff. The course aimed at teens is most popular of course, but there’s actually (age-appropriate) OWL curricula for all stages of life: young kids, adults, older adults, everyone. And it’s versatile enough to be taught in secular contexts (after school programs etc). Given the direction that unfortunately a lot of school districts in the US have been going in in terms of sex ed, it’s a really important program.

Andy on Asian Animation or SYAC: The Master Review 2

Let’s talk a bit about anime and Dobson’s work relation with it.

I think we can all agree, that starting from the late 90s and early 2000s on, anime and manga became extremely popular in the western world. Sure, Japanese animation was nothing completely new to us (Speed Racer, Nadia-Secret of Blue Water, Samurai Pizza Cats, Sailor Moon, Kimba and Akira e.g. come to my mind as properties already known in the west before 1995) but it really was around this time that thanks to “mainstream” stuff like Dragon Ball and Pokemon people became aware of how different Japanese animation was from western. Eventually resulting in the really good shit (like Cowboy Bebop, Black Lagoon, Kenshin and Heat Guy J) coming over and enriching nerd culture for more than just a few people who knew of it as an obscurity at that point. Now, if you know anything about Dobson, you likely know that his relationship with anime is rather… complicated to say the least. Or, to let him explain it with his own words…

Dobson essentially likes silly and wacky 90s anime. But later on he hated anime in general, because it got too popular and a bad experience with an anime club in college soured his enjoyment of it. Furthermore, he put the blame on his lackluster art style and storytelling capabilities as seen in the likes of Formera, Patty and Alex ze Pirate, on anime in general, while also claiming that Disney pulling the plug on 2D animation is the result of the “anime inspired” Treasure Planet, meaning anime in a sense deprived him of his chance at working at his dream job and “ruining” western animation.

Which to me has always been ignorant as fuck. For starters, I can understand not liking certain stories or genres, either for objective or subjective reasons. But to hate on an entire nation’s form of entertainment (not just individual shows or genres), depriving yourself of the chance of potentially watching a lot of good stuff while also being rather insulting to these other works and people enjoying them? Especially when the stuff you can supposedly “stomach” has been rather simplistic compared to other things?

 Second, blaming Japan for “poisoning” your art style? What, did the ghost of Osamu Tezuka possess you and FORCE you to put sweatdrops on your characters forehead while also going for the rather simplistic character style of Rumiko Takahashi, as well as emulating the slapstick of the likes as Slayers and Ranma ½?

 Next, if he had emulated them successfully, I say he would have actually managed to tell decent enough stories worth to read online. Not create Uncle Peggy aka “Discount Happosai” or the bland proto-Isekai known as Formera.

I mean, let’s give some context here: There have been people who successfully managed to emulate certain anime and manga aesthetics into western animation and make it work. Otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten the likes of Avatar-The last Airbender, Samurai Jack, the Animatrix, Thundercats 2011, Super Robot Monkey Hyperforce Go, Kim Possible, W.I.T.C.H, Megas XLR and Wakfu. You know, shows that are actually awesome as hell.

Heck, Dobson’s favorite animated show of the last decade, Steven Universe, is heavily inspired by anime aesthetics to the point of being embarrassing.

 But Dobson… well, he emulated anime aesthetics in his work the same way as these crimes against animation did.

Combined with his general shortcomings as a storyteller it is no wonder his initial comics did not do well.

 Lastly, and sorry for digressing here a bit, but if the Wikipedia entry on Treasure Planet is something to go by, there was no real inspiration by anime involved in making this movie.

Supposedly the idea of making an animated Treasure Planet in outer space movie was already pitched by Ron Clements WAY BACK in 1985 but only came to be after Michael Eisner greenlighted stuff in the late 90s. Design wise the movie was supposed to look 70% traditional and 30% sci-fi inspired and people took inspiration for the art style by illustrators associated with the Brandywine School of Illustration. A western style of illustration established in the 19th century, that had a big impact on the illustration styles for many 19th and early 20th century adventure novels and short stories.

What, is anime supposed to be the only form of animation allowed to have sci fi elements or steampunk in it? Fucks sake, The Lion King and Atlantis, which came out one year earlier to Treasure Planet, were likely more inspired by anime. Don’t believe me? Watch Atlantis and then a certain anime by Studio Gainax called “Nadia-Secret of Blue Water”. Or read up on the controversy surrounding the two.

The truth is, it is not entirely clear what caused Disney to shut down 2D feature film animation in the early 2000s. In fact, if anything, most people put the blame on Michael Eisner and a certain change in the publics taste in movies in general, combined with Disney trying to turn almost every movie they had into a franchise via cheap follow up movies on video and DVD.

And even if Disney did not shut down, are we really supposed to believe that a certain guy with fedora would have made it big at Disney to the point Alex ze Pirate would have been made into a feature film?

But Dobson could never quite understand this and instead of “reinventing” himself properly, he would rant about anime and its fans in one form or another…

 And on the peak of his hissy fit create this little art piece he baptized Anime Sux. Alternatively “West vs East”. Or as I like to call it, slap a jap.

Now, the pic was done in 2008 and Dobson claimed sometimes in the last decade, that he no longer holds his old opinions. Unfortunately, by that point he would also more or less use the chance to vent in his webcomic about anime (or rather its fans), which brings us finally back to SYAC.

 While Dobson never outright thematized in more detail WHY he hates anime and manga in SYAC (likely cause if his comic reasoning was even slightly like his reasoning in his blogs, people would have torn him apart like a bag of paper) he did use the format to punch down on anime fans and their preferences.

 For example, for someone who has a 4chan story going around of having been rather arrogant towards others in college for not liking Ranma ½, Dobson has THIS little college related comic to show off, where he portrays an aspiring manga artist as a delusional jackass.

Then in this strip titled manga, his manga fan is essentially portrayed as a young woman dressing up like a very stereotypical high school anime girl, who is in the wrong for even just DARING to draw her comics in the direction manga are read.

On one hand, I get Dobson’s point. She could be at risk of alienating a market of readers as she is obviously drawing for a western audience. Then again, if she doesn’t draw a traditional western comic but a manga, why shouldn’t she? I mean, as long as she enjoys it, which I assume she does as she seems genuinely just happy when stating that she likes manga, why not let her? Plus, this comic was drawn in the late 2000s. I think by then most people kinda knew how to read from right to left, so Dobson’s claim she would alienate or confuse people is kinda redundant. If anything I find a) Dobson getting angry at her just very petty (just let her have fun) and b) portraying a western manga fan as someone who would be confused by the sheer idea of reading stuff from right to left is also in itself just really dumb and insulting. What is Dobson trying to imply? That anime fans are so stuck in the way they consume certain media, they can’t act according to “western standards” again?

Then there is this strip where yet another female anime fan is essentially portrayed as the embodiment of how “ignorant” manga fans are of the idea of different art styles...

Which becomes rather laughable once Dobson describes his style as a mixture of European, American and  Japanese. Why? Because he is the one oversimplifying things, rather than the anime fan.

You see while anime and manga of all sorts do share certain aesthetics (like the black and white art style, emphasize on the eyes of characters, the way hair is drawn, recurring tropes within certain genres and so on) style wise (both in art and storytelling) there can be severe differences, depending on the artist alone. Akira Toriyama’s style differentiates significantly from the likes of Eichiro Oda, Rumiko Takahashi, Kentaro Miura, Tezuka, Kaori Yuki and so forth.

The same also goes for many western artists. Herge had a significantly different style from Uderzo and Goscinny. Don Rosa has a different style in which he drew Scrooge McDuck than Carl Barks did. Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee draw mainstream superheroes differently compared to how Jack Kirby, George Perez and others did. Heck, Ethan Van Sciver and Jim Lee were closely associated with Green Lantern in the 2000s and look how they differentiate.

 Which btw is the kind of skill level Dobson would have needed to have, to make it in the mainstream industry

So when Dobson says “I draw in a combination of American, Western and Japanese” all I can think is the following: THAT DOESN’T NARROW IT DOWN! WHAT THE HECK HAVE YOU LEARNT IN COLLEGE ABOUT COMICS? WHICH ARTISTS, WORKS AND STORYTELLERS DO YOU TRY TO EITHER EMULATE OR HAVE BEEN INSPIRED BY?

Then there is this little thing…

Where do I even begin? How about the fact that Dobson’s hand in the last panel looks like he has lost a thumb? The fact that the little boy, anime fan or not, is aware of Sae Sawanoguchi, a character from a short lived OVA and anime series from the 90s, which considering his age, I kinda doubt he would be aware off. Unlike Dobson, who got into anime in the 90s and admits in fact within the posts I loaded up earlier, that he had watched the anime in particular, known in the west as Magic User Club.

Then there is the implication by Dobson, that anime is so “corruptive” as a medium, little kids don’t even know the most basic characters in western animation because of it. I expect in a next panel, that all of sudden some 50s PSA guy comes along and lectures me that if I want this kind of thing not to happen at MY convention, I need to teach little kids more about the GOOD western animation, instead of the BAD eastern one. Then there is this rather unflattering portrayal of a shonen ai/shojou ai fangirl…

 Which makes me laugh cause honestly, even some of the worst shonen ai and shojou ai can do better in portraying a “realistic” gay relationship than Patty if you ask me.

Also, as much as I think fangirls can be extremely thirsty (I have read my fair share of extremely stupid yaoi and yuri fanfics) I think that in hindsight Dobson is really not anyone to complain about shipping obsession and sex when he himself has KorraSami, the Ladybug fandom and a certain rat pirate under his floppy belt.

As you can imagine, Dobson would get heat for those comics, considering how he himself has been greatly inspired by anime and manga for his major comics. And while I don’t have any explicit deviantart posts of him reacting to criticism in that regard, I do have this comic which addresses it directly.

 And yeah, if I were schoolgirl number 4, I would just sigh and walk away after telling Dobson that his mistakes and shortcomings are not related to having consumed anime, but rather by what sort of anime (and other stories) he had consumed and the amount of effort he had put in creating his stories instead of emulating just something more popular. Plus, if you really want people to draw more from life, how about drawing more from life yourself down the line? And no, tracing Star Wars movie frames does not count.

Finally, Dobson, considering how very little most people think of your work, I say mission accomplished: People have learnt from your mistakes and know not to be a Dobson.

And at last, there is this comic, which kinda wraps up Dobson’s “vendetta” with anime and manga fans within the pages of SYAC.

By trying to mock anime fans and make them look just as shallow as he is. I at least suppose. Honestly, the message of this comic is rather muddled. On one hand, I would say the strawman accusing Dobson hates anime just because it is popular is very simplified. After all, Dobson has made his reasons for not liking anime clear in a few more details. It’s just that the details in and on themselves in real life are still rather shallow and boil down to a lot of personal bias rather than an objective criticism of actual flaws. Which I think is worth pointing out.

But frankly, what is Dobson trying to say or point out here? That the strawman is not so different or even dumber than him, because he hates Justin Bieber for “shallow” and superficial reasons too?

Okay, this doesn’t quite work as well as Dobson wants. First, the argument Dobson’s strawman makes is in huge parts based on some verified statements Dobson made for not liking anime. Second, he just says a name and that triggers the guy to express his hatred for Bieber. We don’t know why the guy hates Bieber and you could make in fact the case, that he hates him not because he is popular, but because he has a genuine issue with the artist, his work or his behavior as a human being. Third, if you want to make yourself look like the better person Dobson, try to argue with the guy and make solid arguments why you don’t like anime. Instead you just deflect the criticism by changing the subject and then try to make yourself look like the “smarter” person in the room by mocking your critic in the most condescending manner.

Which as I think about it, sounds like your modus operandi on twitter and tumblr.

Weirdly enough, that more or less marks the “end” of Dobson tackling anime fans and the beef he has with them within the pages of SYAC. Despite how much Dobson’s negative reputation especially in early years was build around him hating on anime and belittling its fans, he didn’t really do more afterwards in the Dobson focused pages of SYAC. And mind you, those strips were also separated by other strips in-between, focused on Dobson just being at conventions.

Unfortunately for him, the strips didn’t really help in any way to diminish that negative reputation and instead just confirmed for many, that Dobson can’t handle criticism about his flawed opinion on anime. If anything, it just made people think even less of Dobson, as the strips just painted him as someone who would rather portray his critics as strawman he can be “rightfully” annoyed at, instead of fellow humans with slightly different tastes in entertainment, who are still worth listening to.

So, now that we have the anime fan related “annoyances” out of the way, what other sort of silly problems in making webcomics would Dobson cover in his strips and are “relatable” to everyone?

Lets see some of these examples in the next part.

alright. writing this “little” piece to exorcise the demon inside of me that wants to expand my teenagers meta further than it needs to go (if you weren't aware I'm writing a post, well an essay, wellll a short paper, about why teenagers fits on the black parade- stay tuned) BUT i cannot stop thinking about the multiple little "rockstar to kill" moments within the song/music video/live performances so... I'm self-indulgently going to write about it :)

anyway, at its most simplified, teenagers is a song about the violence within adolescents and being an adult whose afraid of that capability. that is the basic, surface-level understanding of the song. inherently, with mcr specifically, that sets up a conflict between the narrator of the song and the song’s audience. that means conflict is generational- it duplicates itself over and and over which allows for several different understandings of the narrator’s perspective. the cyclical nature means they could be speaking to a representation of what they view as the fundamental corruption of the youth, both by outside focuses and their very human nature, as the narrator become more cynical in their old age. it could be representative of them talking to their past self, reminiscing on the revenge fantasies they had in high school or the ways they were made to feel like an outcast when they were young. and they also could be speaking directly to the very literal future about their concerns as a mentoring figure (teenagers, to me, functions in layers, its interpretation can shift and change depending on the context) right now we’re preoccupied with that last perspective both within the song and the video’s contextualization, and into this wider idea of what the band’s purpose was (or how they saw their purpose).

putting the rest under a read more out of respect <333

moving into the actual text with that in mind, what becomes significant is the tonal contrast between being the seemly scathing, sarcastic indictment of Dangerous Teenagers on the surface to the actual understanding (if we’re talking about the single on its own) which is moreso criticizing the Authority figures who create and mold this violence either purposely (cog in the murder machine) or with indifference (you’ll never fit in much/they’ll leave you alone/as well as the implication of having to take matters into your own hands because the adults are absent). As a result, the song, on its own, isn’t actually blaming teenagers for the violence they perpetuate, but the narrator attempts to extend their understanding and offer advice. here is a figure looking to bring catharsis without patronizing. like this is most clearly expressed in the use of “maybe they’ll leave you alone, but not me” at the end of the chorus, which in this reading means the other adults may leave you alone, the but I am stepping in to tell you that both self-directed and outward expressions of violence are bullshit and useless and that’s what everyone else is expecting of you so fucking stop it! (this can obviously be re-figured within the context of the album- because, interestingly, the pronouns are purposely confusing with the multiple uses of they in this section) the violence is never explicitly vilified by the speaker,- its exaggerated- what you have under your shirt won’t solve anything isn’t that obvious how ridiculous it sounds, how ridiculous I sound saying it out loud? but also, the violence is implicit. the conflict is still there. the teenagers still scare the shit out of the narrator. so what gives?

well. the song is still about the gulf between generations. the speaker is still afraid and out of touch, regardless of the leadership role they’ve assumed or the perspective of the past they can offer. there is ultimately a limit to how much they can give.

which leads us right into the music video.

So first things first, Black Parade as a whole is heavily inspired by Pink Floyd’s The Wall musically, but the actual aesthetics of the wall are kind of divorced from the ww1 cabaret weimar thing that parade is drenched in (bc britian circa the 1950s is boring and the wall is purposely very ugly and grey and removed from emotion which isn’t dramatic enough for what mcr had in mind). However, teenagers exists as a sort of connecting point between the two-  the music video of Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 (which you can watch here if you’ve never seen it) is clearly an influence on the subject matter and the setting and the “plot” of teenagers video- it serves as a sort of a parallel to it. more specifically, there are the “running shots” of kids making their way through unlit hallways into the auditorium that evoke the children in the pink floyd video marching through the school. there’s also the line “cog in the murder machine”, which seem particularly inspired from the depiction of children as going through machines and coming out the other side stiff, wooden, and obedient. then the backdrop of the large bomb centered in my chem’s stage show mimics the shot of the headmaster standing behind the large, lit up clock- especially since that where the teenagers in the crowd of mcr’s video all begin acting in unison, similar to the children in the wall all falling into line (but, like, just the use of ww2 era bomb imagery and gas masks in general is very reminiscent of the early wartime parts of the wall anyway). so in a vague sense, there is a huge connection between teenagers and that emulation and replication of the wall.

however, the most striking similarity is that, in the same way the students destroy their school in a moment of violent inspiration after sequences of disconcerting compliance, the group of high schoolers in teenagers do the same against the band. the difference is that in the case of the teenagers, the explosion is directed at the source of their outburst (they switch from the on-beat fist-punching to wild moshing as the song devolves and ray’s solo starts) instead of in opposition to a more institutional suppressive force. they are not motivated to action because of something done to them, instead it is the actual music itself that serves as both the impetus of conformity and the fuse that destroys that same unison action and then the band. and what’s significant is the particularity of the actions the crowd takes: they steal the band’s instruments from them and they bodily remove gerard from the microphone. like contrast this violence against the band vs the desolation row video where the whole band is physically incapacitated- there, its about knocking them around and getting them to stop (ray is beat down by police, bobs drums are destroyed, etc etc). but here, its about taking their places- the act of destruction is calculated but not purposely cruel. so, in teenagers being a parallel to Another Brick, that moment of turning on the band is the moment of violence but is also the moment of freedom. the difference in the two becomes the ways in which the band is responsible for reawakening the fire within the audience and giving them a purpose. which here is “killing the rockstar” by taking over, taking their places. and that is the nature of music and the nature of the conflict implicit to becoming the “rockstars”

it brings us right back around to that generational conflict: except when your talking about mcr’s realationship with their audience, that becomes the fostering of a group of outcasts and weirdos and freaks and giving them the tools to save themselves, yes. but also giving them the opportunity to do exactly what they did. to pick instruments and take their places. its the cyclical nature of creation and destruction “because when we get old and lazy some of you guys are gonna have to eat us alive by starting your own fucking band (x), that idea of needing a “rockstar to kill” has been refigured to mean something newer, positive. we are the ones killing them, but not in the way of typical martyring where a crowd of detractors and nonbelievers burns you at the stake- but instead by continuing the natural cycle of art, true genuine art. just as mcr is built off of so many influences- creating an entirely new project out of that existing landscape of sound that reaches people and gives them an outlet, we are doing the same things. by besmirching metal and punk by mixing them together, by “selling out” so they could put together a rock opera, by adding theater into a hyper masculine culture of nu-metal and post-hardcore, by making deeply emotional music that was still violent or angry, by writing the way they did they killed the bands they loved and made something better. its the the way in which the creative cycle is a rebirth, of scavenging the good things from the people who came before you and moving forward and taking the world by storm. here, in the video, the audience redirects their violence at the band, yes. but that is the point. teenagers still scare the shit out of the narrator, but that’s not going to stop them from reaching out, from speaking to them directly, from performing until their very last moments

until they take over. until they kill the rockstar. until we eat them alive.

in the end, that is the mission of my chemical romance, isn’t it- to inspire that level of passion, to turn the music into a life-raft and then gasoline and fire in your gut and then a sense of purpose and then into freedom and endless joy? and isn’t it the greatest act of love, the truest expression of admiration to tear them apart, build ourselves creations out of the wreckage to fill the space they leave behind, and then lay them to rest when the time has come?

I’m writing a story in which a nation of nonhumans, having been trapped in a pocket dimension for two millenia, integrates into human society. Would it be insensitive to have them successfully argue that, as they were indigenous peoples of the Americas, they should be legally recognized as a Native American tribe with tribal sovereignty? Native Americans (specifically of the Ojibwe tribe) magically trapped them in the first place, but I’m hoping that’s ok because all humans have magic, not just

“Native American mystics” or w/e, and the character designs aren’t based off any NA myths. But they’re VERY inhuman, resembling animals, and a subplot is that they’re called “monsters” so often they begin to embrace/reclaim the term. It’s mainly just a device to deal with the logistics of integrating thousands of new people (with their own established government) into the American political system at once, so I can scrap it if needed.

Ancient Monsters Indigenous to America; Should They be Called Native?

So. There are four parts to this question, based off how you’ve worded the question. 

1- Native Americans Shunning An “Okay” Group

2- Native American Monsters

3- Imposing Monsters Where None Exist

4- What Makes Someone Native

One at a time:

Native Americans Shunning an Okay Group

If these inhuman people are a genuine threat or were a genuine threat, then this is less relevant. But even if some of them were a threat, and the whole group was shunned, you end up recreating a big piece of racism in modern day:

Natives hate outsiders “needlessly.” If only they gave this group a chance, they’d find out they weren’t that bad. But they’re too mean to do that.

The modern caution around Native and colonizer culture mixing is, as the term implies, modern. Natives didn’t necessarily shun outsiders, and as evident by how colonizers needed us to survive for awhile, they were relatively welcoming early on. In Canada, we even have a whole group of people who were born out of intermarriage between traders and Native people: the Metis.

But non-Natives tend to take this caution as an insult, because they assume they should be welcomed with open arms despite the atrocities committed. Colonizers have far, far, far exceeded the threshold for “general mistrust”, but they don’t realize it. They think everything should be fine, because schools teach only that Natives used to be welcoming, but then turned mean and jealous without saying why.

For example, when I was in my teens, my grandma went on a probably 15-30 minute rant about how my (white) cousin wasn’t allowed to work horticulture on the local reserve because it was taking jobs away from Native people. My whole family spent the next hour agreeing with her, how they really were just so closed off and mean, he was just trying to help.

Now factor in how the largest group of unemployed people in Canada is Native people, because they lack job skills from a lack of opportunity. Now consider how horticulture was actually one of our specialties and there’s still a lot of tradition around how to take care of the land. And how a white person fresh out of college with a degree was being brought in as the “expert.” And how he was doing the work, instead of helping people on the reserve do the work (which would allow them to put landscaping skills on their resume, giving them a foot in the door)

Suddenly that “unnecessary shunning” makes a whole lot more sense, doesn’t it?

I want to know why the Ojibwe sealed them off. Because I highly doubt such a drastic action would’ve been taken if they were truly a benevolent group. 

Native American Monsters

And this is where things get touchier.

I want to ask all writers who want Indigenous monsters to ask themselves one question: why do you want to tie Indigenous identity to “monster” so strongly?

It’s a fixation I see time and again: the concept of Indigenous people as inhuman, as having ties to the inhuman, as having ties to creatures who could be feared. 

If these monsters are a complex society, are intelligent, are generally… people, then you’ve fallen more heavily into the first point I mentioned (which I’m uncomfortable with) but mitigate this part. They’re shown as people-like and worthy of respect, then it might work as showing Indigenous people aren’t inhuman.

Or it might further reinforce the concept that all Indigenous people are monsters.

Which one it does depends on the writing. Either way, it’s something I’m deeply uncomfortable with, just from sheer exposure. A lot of the questions I receive are about dark, twisted, criminal, or otherwise monstrous Indigenous people. Like, about half the questions. It’s a lot.

Why are we tied so strongly to monsters? What about Native identity makes this such an easy connection? Why just the monsters and none of our healing from them?

Why?

Imposing Monsters Where None Exist

Further, it’s honestly a bit weird to me that they don’t come Ojibwe/Great Lakes legends. Because I’d assume sealing away a whole population of monsters would merit some oral legends and teachings for how to seal them back away should they return. And these monsters would bleed into other peoples’ legends, with how each creature as a concept spread across such a wide landmass and across so many peoples. So everywhere these monsters touched, there’d be some version of the story.

It’s a little too close to playing god with real religions for me. Indigenous oral legends around the globe are meticulous, and when analyzed are as solid as written history. Creating a group of monsters that are not based in our stories, that have no oral histories and legends, just has me wondering how this impacted society. 

Monsters have a place in Indigenous society. They are cautions, they are warnings, they are sickness, they teach lessons about how to care for the earth and/or yourself to starve off the monster’s approach. 

(And no, this doesn’t contradict the fixation on Monstrous Natives. Why do you fixate on the monsters and not how we heal from them? I specify “we” because there’s a tendency to make the antithesis of Native monsters Christian, which further colonizers the narrative. We had our own ways of healing)

Indigenous people, in general, have history from around the Ice Age (Australian Aboriginals have from during if not before). Two millennia is nothing for the oral history, even if you brought in the angle that the stories were genocided out in the residential school system (Which would be a very touchy subject as well). Because something that big would be spread among a dozen tribes, and would have threads that survived in whispers.

Indigenous religions aren’t a mythology playground where you can free-reign insert or remove whole concepts like sealing away monsters willy-nilly. 

I’d run this concept by somebody Ojibwe before proceeding. They might find a way to make it work, or they might tell you that there’d be a much deeper cultural impact than can be handled by an outsider.

What Makes Someone Native

Here’s the thing: being Native isn’t just about how we were here first.

There’s taking care of the land. There’s our language. There’s our unity to each other. There’s our religion. There’s so much nuance to what makes somebody Native that goes beyond just time spent on the continent. 

Each tribe has its own definition of what it means to be part of the tribe. The government doesn’t always line up with who we are, but we have our own definition. A lot of basic principles are similar (sustainability, for one), but the nuance for each people will be different.

And the government still doesn’t recognize all the tribes that were self-governing peoples before colonizers got here. That fact alone makes it a stretch to believe these monsters could successfully argue to the government they belong as Native. The only reason I could see it as successful is the government rather overtly assuming Native people are monsters, which codifies the above.

You’ve got to keep in mind that the government wants as few Natives to exist as possible. Because the more Natives exist, the more political power we have, the more resources the government has to allocate towards us, and we are seen as an inconvenience. 

Getting off the registry of Native people is laughably easy. Getting back on is notoriously hard. This isn’t a case of “have a hearing and the government gives you full status rights.” It’s “we have petitioned the government to have our claim to this land recognized for literally hundreds of years and now they’re about to bulldoze our sacred land so we have to protest to put a stop to it and suffer the arrests and deaths required to keep our land safe and hope that this protest gets enough pressure on the government to have them back off.”

(True story. The latter describes the Oka Crisis, which thankfully did have the land restored, but not until 1 death on each side, and 75 Mohawk and allies injured. And it was a long, long, long drawn out process).

Natives are, technically, wards of the state. The more Natives exist, the more people the state has to take care of. And history proves the state absolutely hates taking care of Native people.

Overall

This feels off in multiple ways, for me. It’s treating our legends as if they’re just frilly decorations that don’t deeply inform our culture, for starters, then there’s how no matter which way it’s sliced it’s reinforcing some sort of racist idea about Natives: either we shun “good” groups for no reason, or we’re tied to monsters. Then there’s the assumption our identity can be easily expanded to include a nonhuman group when it’s more complicated than that. There’s also the assumption the government would actually work to add more people it has to take care of.

You’re going to need to do a lot more research and reach out to a lot more sensitivity readers. It’s so far removed from who we are and our cultural identity I’d take a good hard look at the concept before continuing.

~ Mod Lesya

COMMENTARY:

@octopodesinmybutt

So the concept of "indigenous monsters sealed away" would actually work really well with Irish mythology about the Fae/Tuatha de Danon. They're considered the real indigenous ppl of Ireland. It's a bit more complex than that, but you could look into it.

what is art?

Art is something I have always found an easy appreciation for. Aesthetically, visually, physically, all avenues of art have something specific and special to offer to its viewer, and that interaction has always fascinated me. I think that I have always leaned towards appreciation, especially when it comes to art, mostly because I’m terrible at it. Art is a constant battle, while writing, something I have practiced far more often for a far longer period of time, comes easier. So maybe it is in this inexperience that boosts my appreciation for art because at the moment, the skill and talents and styles of all artists feels so out of replication’s reach for me. Or maybe it’s all emotion, how art can change you. Maybe it’s both, or in everything we’ve learned about in this course about the world of art, all communicating with one another.

Through this class, my perspectives have shifted. Art is something within us that we can’t name, but only feel. Blind light. Like the lexicon of art, we are all trying to speak to the same thing. When considering the most important thing I learned in this course, I believe it’s that it has helped me come to the conclusion that art could go on forever. Even when we feel like there is nowhere else to go, or that everything has already been made, everything has already been said, the glass breaks, and a new color bursts forwards, and makes the whole room bright. Art is a place for the things that are not sayable in just one way. It’s the perfect place to express the things that are hungry, or empty, within us that we don’t like to talk about, because it makes us vulnerable. People come to art with a different mindset, approach, and appreciation. Viewing a piece is never the same twice.

In Advance of the Broken Arm, Marcel Duchamp. 1964. The Museum of Modern Art.

Perspective is the biggest component of art that I learned more of through this class. We spent a lot of time going over what makes art different from everything else, domesticity versus the prestige that comes with pieces hung on gallery walls. In the Art Assignment’s Art or Prank video speaking about the inclusion of everyday objects, to take legitimacy into what is perceived as to be art, and what it can become: “We take simple, everyday materials and subject them to transformations large and small, as large as making a blank piece of fabric into a painting, or as small as positioning an object in an art gallery. These transformations ennoble these materials, making them into something more than the sum of their parts.” (Art or Prank) This can be directly seen through Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades – pieces of mass-quantity produced objects that became art because of the artist’s intent. This highlights my favorite component in art: that it exists everywhere. That as overstated and oversaturated as it is, the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” actually has somewhat of a legitimate basis, a standing in art. That the fact of a viewer’s opinion in this question being “what makes art, art” – is actually an incredibly influential and important part of the answer when questioning society as a whole.

Learning this validation of subjectivity and participation within art, changed me. Like new ways of seeing a piece brought new ways of being. I was seeing meaning, everywhere. In color, in form, in origin. Like art was, is, something crafted out of the quiet, the loud. Each stroke, each layer accumulates into a symphony, with unique voices, each with their own message, their own ways of existing. Like a speech after a long silence. Even when visiting the Art Institute halfway through this course, art had already started to shift in my head. I wanted to ask questions about what is the piece trying to say, and how do I feel about it, aesthetically, meaningfully, structurally? It still feels like I walked in with questions and came out with hundreds more.

We’ve spent eight weeks speaking and learning about all of these aspects about art, and I still have questions. That’s something I learned for certain in this course: there will always be more to ask, more to know, there is always the presence of curiosity. To abate that curiosity, we spent a majority of our time researching, always alongside every piece we did. In reading all about the art of non-western cultures, beauty, craft, history, modern day artists, among many other topics, it all accumulated into this eight week crash course into what felt like every nook and cranny of the art world. The best part: whatever I didn’t research and look into, someone else did, and I got to see it through their eyes, what they found, what they felt about it. It felt multi-perspective, which is my favorite way to view art: from all angles.  

Parthenon, Athens Greece. 1978. Wikipedia.

One of the most intriguing things I learned was after we’d done both the comparison of Arts and Crafts, as well as the Prehistoric and Ancient Art Forms discussion, where I studied Ancient Greece’s Hellenistic Art. The study of these in close affinity of one another brought up realizations I hadn’t seen coming: I love the look of old historic objects and art pieces, but especially ruins. This wasn’t the surprising part, though, the suprise was in the fact that the impact of time is utterly unavoidable, and we see it upon so many objects from places all around the world. I love the fact that we still celebrate them despite them being worn away, that even in whatever shape they’re in now, broken, missing pieces, weathered away, they’re still considered art. From domestic objects to commissioned pieces and everything in between, they’re put behind glass cases and shown to the world under the name of art.

But ruins are something else entirely, aren’t they? Ruins are hard to put behind glass cases. They’re hard to move, to bring home in our pockets and showcase. They’re not portable, and they’re not what they once were made to be shown as,. They’re ghost stories in the shape of puzzle pieces, where we take stories to fill in the blanks. Ruins may be different from their original forms, but they’re still art. They’re accidental aesthetics, echoes of what they used to be. This distinction comes in the aftermath, of what they look like now, the fact that they are not seen as the original intention. But are they still art, in the same way? Is it the memory that makes them art, the comparison? The before and the after? Or is it the inspiration, the way that so many styles of architecture can still be seen in modern structures today? Or that people still go and visit these places, half-gone? What is art then: the pieces that are missing, or the way we fill them in, or the pieces that are still there?

Replica of the Parthenon, in Nashville, Tennessee.

In asking these questions, the Parthenon is one of the most interesting ruins to think about in this way, because we have the original, what it looks like today, time-weathered, but we also have a replica that’s been recreated. The version of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, is what the structure may have originally looked like at its prime. We have the direct before and after, present and open, and are free to compare the two. To have this direct comparison, we are able to ask questions, some along the lines of how time affects the meaning of the piece, and if the face-value of the image of a piece impacts how we see art at different points in our lives, or even different points in our history? And what do we do when we have two pieces of weathered ruins, neither looking like what may have been the original? What then?

If you’d asked me anything about Institutional Critique before we researched it for last week’s discussion, I wouldn’t have assumed it to be so prominent and active in the art world. Academia, maybe, politics, absolutely, but not so much art. Not to the intense details that art’s Institutional Critique does. But as with all money-headed empires, it’s easy to assume that there is institutional disconnect between groups within, but work that contributes to the theme of Institutional Critique in art goes farther, tying in meaning, place, and time. It includes all members of interaction with a piece: the artist, the audience, and the owners of the place showing the art itself. It is all-inclusive in its assessment of the current state of art.

I’m always asking questions, now, when I try to look at art in this new distinctive way given by the designated sections of Institutional Critique. What is it trying to say, what isn’t it saying, what are the ways I could see it differently, or similarly, or completely off the rails in a way that wasn’t the intention at all? But also broader questions, as well, for example, should artwork be read in any kind of sequence? If there is a way that galleries are organized to have a pre-set path for visitors to follow, and even if this is something that artists do as well, in their pieces? Should we categorize art in a way that confines its meaning, its impact? Is there any way to speak about art that doesn’t do this in some way?

Art changes depending on – everything. Who you are, as the audience, the artist, your experiences, your values, your world-views. The way you approach art and the way you let it affect you. Art, in this way, is immensely subjective. It comes in the door one day, built by the artist, and left to be morphed and changed with each pair of eyes set upon it. In this way, art can change people. It can change places. It can change everything, even if by just a little. I never realized how much the simple action of looking at art in a space could impact a piece so heavily. Sometimes the subjects are nearly unrecognizable in the way we look at them, compared to the artist’s vision, or even another person’s view of the same object.

Pieces that have political or societal implications can comment and voice opinions in a way that may have otherwise been routinely silenced. It is within these new ways of making art, and new ways for art to provide a commentary on our lives, that art continues to expand. By this, art can be so much more than pieces in a gallery. Art can be influential, political, changing. In this way, in the words of Suzanne Lacy on her 1977 performance piece that highlights public gender-based sexual violence in Los Angeles, Three Weeks in May, “We are making an art that’s not just for art’s sake, or an art that’s about personal expression, but an art that’s about changing the world, and we believe – I do believe that art can change the world.” (Three Weeks in May)

But changing the world is a difficult thing to do, especially if powerful ideas within the world are working against you. To combat this, art becomes political. Art becomes action. Erich Fromm’s 1963 essay “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem” attests to this. Fromm speaks about the conviction or principles that revolutionaries follow when being disobedient to the order of things, that it is the presence of those principals or values that are absolutely necessary for their actions, to distinguish them from rebels. (Fromm)

Fromm cements this way of thinking with commenting on the stagnation of emotional progression lacking behind progression of the material, saying: “If mankind commits suicide it will be because people will obey those who command them to push the deadly buttons; because they will obey the archaic passions of fear, hate, and greed; because they will obey obsolete clichés of State sovereignty and national honor.” (Fromm 1)  This directly coincides with a later piece, Andrea Fraser’s “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” where she speaks about the inability to separate the art from the art world: “But just as art cannot exist outside the field of art, we cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators, etc. And what we do outside the field, to the extent that it remains outside, can have no effect within it. So if there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a "totally administered society," or has grown all-encompassing in size and scope. It is because the institution is inside of us, and we can't get outside of ourselves.” (Fraser)

How Fraser phrases that last piece, “the institution is inside of us, and we can't get outside of ourselves” (Fraser), is the perfect phrasing of the problem. If art is an expansion, expression of ourselves, how to we display that without including the pieces of ourselves that others take issue with? The original meaning behind it, whatever that may be? A piece can be rewritten by location or surrounding pieces, but the original creation’s purpose will always be the same. What do we do, when suddenly that becomes a problem? How are we supposed to respond?

Sunflower Seeds, Ai Weiwei. 2010. The Tate Modern.

Revolutionary art can be made in many ways. Physically, within art that is illegally installed, art that exists to question the way that things are, art that raises questions about art itself. Banksy’s work of shredding his painting after it’d been sold, Ai Weiwei’s pieces of combining both political and cultural sentimentalities in works like Sunflower Seeds, Jenny Holzer’s Truisms pasted up like anonymous street posters questioning the state of society, among many others, have merit in being revolutionary pieces. Some of the other works we’ve discussed this semester, especially pieces like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, exist and were made specifically in the action to challenge preconceived notions of art. 

After everything we’ve learned this semester, art is more than what I thought it was at the beginning. Then, I believed that art was an awareness, a way to reshape our consciousnesses into concepts, to give it tangibility and perspective, specifically saying: “[art] gives way to different forms of thinking, of approaching media, of going about our everyday lives. Art, in this way, changes us. It snaps us awake.” (Berg) Art is that – but it’s also so much more. It’s the key to connection, to history, in every narrative, worldwide. Art can influence, widen perspectives, bring finality, or even, usually, mountains of more questions to answer. 

Being an artist is an increasingly paradoxical profession as time continues. It is both as powerful as it is vulnerable. Artists are standardized by society in the near-same way it has standardized craftspeople, in the way that their work is open to being over-simplified, alongside the popularized gate-keeping notion that if you don’t understand the way you’re supposed to look at,  or appreciate, art the very first time you lay eyes on a piece, you won’t ever understand; which is the farthest thing from the actual truth. Art is a learning process. Art changes with you, whenever you come again and see with fresh eyes. Art lives alongside humanity. We create when we have something to say, or something to hide, or even if we just want to capture a color, a feeling, in a new way. Art, in society, is something that changes with us, and can tell us about what we used to value or what we used to prioritize, even within our own domesticated everyday objects, even within ourselves. 

We live our whole lives looking for something. Everywhere, we are always searching. Sometimes we call that something love, or fulfillment, or contentedness, and other times we have a laundry list of other epithets for it. In this search, we try to find parts of ourselves in everything: names, connections, but especially within art, because there is no greater expression than that of what shakes and deforms and ripples with every perspective. In creation, we put pieces of ourselves on display, our dreams, our despair. There is intention, in this, to art. There is meaning, purpose, story, narrative. It is the human effort, in a way, that we come to art to give pieces of ourselves to a name. That we try to share, in this way. Art is telling. Art is there, and maybe it holds within it what we’re looking for, and maybe it doesn’t – but art knows us well enough to still be this extension, because it is us, it came from us, it continues to become us – but art is always there. It has always been there, from the very, very early days to right now, right this second, in this word, this syllable being written and being read. Art exists everywhere, because we know, that even when we look away, we are still looking, and in having art and beauty everywhere, in everything, it becomes a constant. Whether it is in the world of prestigious galleries, or even in our domestic everyday lives, art is always there, looking back.

Works Cited

“Art or Prank? | The Art Assignment | PBS Digital Studios.” YouTube, uploaded by The Art Assignment, 27 Jul., 2017. URL.

“Three Weeks in May by: Suzanne Lacy (1977).” YouTube, uploaded by LACE, 5 Feb. 2016. URL. 

Berg, Beth. “Expanding Our Ideas of Art.” BlackBoard, 28 Aug. 2019. 

Fraser, Andrea. “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” New York: Sep 2005. Vol. 44, Iss. 1; pg. 278. URL.

Fromm, Erich. “Disobedience as a Phycological and Moral Problem.” On Disobedience and Other Essays, Harper & Row, 1981.

Art Cited

Parthenon, Athens Greece. 1978. Wikipedia. URL.

Duchamp, Marcel. In Advance of the Broken Arm. 1964. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. URL.

Weiwei, Ai. Sunflower Seeds. 2010. The Tate Modern, London. URL.

When I'm Miserable

Loki x Reader

Chapter One - All Other Chapters

Summary: Loki abandons his attempt to rebuild his relationship with Thor after realizing his brother will never fully trust or understand him. He finds himself drawn to a girl, now guardian of her little sister after their mother's sudden death, and tries to teach her the lessons of love, forgiveness, and acceptance before their differences tear them apart.

Salem, Indiana. When you first moved away from the small city and its six thousand residents you hated telling people where you were from.

"Oh, Massachusetts." They would say.

"No, Indiana." You would correct.

"I didnt know there was a Salem in Indiana." They would finish with a confused look on their face before going back to their more interesting California lives.

Now you were back and those conversations ceased to be a staple of introduction, but so many things had also ceased to be discussed. Food, art, culture, current events, all subjects thrown aside in the face of everyone's new favorite topic: what are you going to do?

"How are you going to handle raising your little sister?" They would ask.

"Did your mom leave you anything?" Inquired the snoopers.

"Are you okay?"

And were you okay? What a dumb question. Who would be okay being torn from the beginnings of a life they were building for themselves and coming back to a home without a mother? Who would be ready and to accept guardianship over their little sister and step into a parenting role no one had ever prepared them for?

You took a large sip of your beer, letting the carbonation tickle the roof of your mouth before swallowing around the bitter lump in your throat. It was 4pm on a Monday and you were on your second drink. Your bleary eyes glanced around the room, practically empty save for two older men further down the bar.

You hadn't been old enough to even enter a bar when you last lived in Salem. It felt odd to sit on the rickety wooden stool and think back to a time you desired this, the ability to legally drink in the O'Haimes Tavern and enjoy a Friday night with friends while listing to the live band. Had you been able to tell your teenage self you would end up here on a Monday afternoon to drown your sorrows all alone...

"Thanks for covering for me Rach." A frazzled looking women strolled quickly to your side of the bar, from the back room still trying up her long blonde hair. The other bartender, Rachel, you assumed, nodded sympathetically as she poured a set of double whiskeys for the men down the bar.

"No problem, I know how hard it is to adjust to Jason going back to school."

Your glass had only been a few centimeters off the bar top, which was lucky for you as your grip loosened and it wobbled dangerously before settling in its upright position. The noise brought the two bartenders' attention to you but you couldn't be bothered to care. You fumbled through your buzzed, sluggish movements into the purse thrown haphazardly into the seat next to you. You grasped your phone tightly and brought it to your face, throat seizing up fully as your sedated mind took in the unread texts and missed phone calls.

Where are you?

Did you forget about me?

Are you okay?!

You tried to keep an air of calm about you as you paid your bill and exited O'Haimes but you could tell by your slight imbalance that you probably didn't fool anyone. You hurried along the sidewalk as fast as your wobbly ankles would carry you, the edge of Salem High School's property revealing itself a few blocks later. You couldn't help but mumble to yourself as you made your way around the wide chain-link fence to the school entrance.

"Please be there. Please be there. Please be there."

And there she was, looking put out and pouty sitting on the blue bench just to the left of the front doors. She was on her phone and hadn't yet noticed you so you slowed down and straightened your spine. The walk had sobered you enough to put on that mask of calm you couldn't conjure at the bar.

As you got closer she still didnt notice you, too absorbed in her phone to look up. You shook your head and smiled. Her generation was so lucky to have cell phones to entertain them while they wait, all you had was-

Your thoughts stuttered to a stop as a tall man appeared from around the corner and sat next to your sister. He was close to her, his head bent towards her, and she looked up at him and smiled. He smiled back and you could feel a wave of protective instinct wash over you like a cold shower. Your pace quickened until you were in a full on sprint.

"Amanda." You said so loudly and forcefully you practically barked your sister's name like an order. Both your sister and the man next to her looked up in surprise. You raced up the steps, your once unreliable equilibrium steadied by an alert, on-edge version of soberness.

"Finally!" She exhaled dramatically, like your tardiness was exhausting. She tucked her phone into her back pocket as she rose from the bench.

The man next to her stood as well. He looked impossibly tall next to your little sister, all short and fragile looking. You took a step closer to the man and squared your shoulders. While you still had to tilt your chin to look him in the eye you were not at the same height disadvantage as your sister.

"Hello there-" he began before you cut him off with a solid, clear tone.

"Stay away from her."

"I beg your pardon?" He asked. His accent startled you for a moment, so unlike all the midwestern accents wriggling in your ears since coming home last month. You blinked twice to regain your focus and your resolve.

"Stay away from my sister. She's under age. Did you know that, pervert?"

"I'm well aware-" he started, adjusting his glasses, but this time his words were interrupted by Amanda's profuse apologies, her hand on your arm pulling you back down the stairs and away from the well dressed, bespectacled threat before you. You maintained eye contact, harsh and defiant, until you reached the first step down and were forced to turn or risk falling down the four concrete steps and make a fool of yourself.

"What were you thinking?!" Amanda shrieked as she continued to pull you by the arm. You turned back to catch a glimpse of the man as you turned the corner but he was gone.

"A grown man should not be hanging around a high school preying on teenage girls." You stumbled slightly but caught your footing. Looking back you found the block of sidewalk slightly raised. It had snagged the tip of your shoe as you took a step. You sent your glare down, ready to take a larger step upon arrival of the next uneven slab.

"He's the librarian. Hanging around the school is kind of his job. You would have known that if you weren't drunk."

You stumbled despite the level ground beneath you at your sister's words. She slowed down and finally let go of your arm, only to fold hers across her chest and glare at you with a disgusting amount of judgement.

"Is that why you were late? You were drinking in the middle of the day again?" She wasn't expecting an answer because she already knew what she was saying was true. You knew what would come next as well, it was the same argument as last time and the time before that.

"You're going to die on me too if you don't cut it out. You'll get in an accident or drown in your own vomit or destroy your liver and-"

"I know Amanda," you sigh heavily and pinch the bridge of your nose, eyes closed so you didn't have to see her face. "I know."

"And now you're ruining my life. Mr Loki is really nice and now he's going to look at me like everyone else does." While her voice began loudly and passionately it trailed off into quiet uncertainty. Your ears pricked up and your vision sharpened, a different kind of safeguard mindset than the one you had earlier against this Mr Loki. You had to protect her from herself now, those thought of self doubt that consume and devour from the inside.

"How does everyone look at you?"

"They look at me like my mom just died. Like I'm helpless. They all pity me." A sob bubbled out like a punctuation at end her statement. You reached for your sister, so young and fragile and in no way undeserving of the looks and the glances she must be catching, and pulled her into a tight hug. You rocked her back and forth so severely her feet had to lift and fall in time to your swings to keep you both from toppling to the ground.

"I'm sorry." You murmured into her hair, "I'm sorry for a lot of things."

She said nothing but held on to the back of your shirt like her life depended on it. You pulled her back by her shoulders so she could see your face with its reassuring smile and kind eyes.

"Tomorrow I will come pick you up on time and apologize to Mr Loki."

"Sober?"

"As sober as a judge." You promised. She reached her fist between your chests and extended her pinky. You wrapped your own around it and kissed your thumb. She did the same. Your journey home continued after that, side by side you strode leisurely and your mind wandered back to the front steps of Salem High School and its librarian.

"Amanda?" You started. She hummed in response to show she was listening.

"What kind of name is Mr Loki?"

She laughed loudly and it reminded you of your mom's laugh when she found something surprisingly amusing. Your stomach flipped at the similarity and at the fact that you would never hear them laugh at the same time like that ever again.

"Apparently he was named after some Norse god or something. It's a weird name right?"

You both giggled and ducked your heads against a gust of wind then walked the rest of the way home in companionable silence.

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Let’s Fix Bright

Not the movie, because god knows that’s far beyond salvation, just the underlying setting.

Let’s start with the backstory of Jirak and the Dark Lord. What is clear in the movie is that two thousand years ago, an elf became went Sauron and, presumably, started trying to rule the world with the aid of an army of orcs who allied with him. An unblooded orc farmer named Jirak did something and united nine armies who ultimately (whether led by Jirak or not) overthrew and slew the Dark Lord. It’s pretty clear that Jirak went down in myth for the orcs but the other races (humans at minimum) took the orc alliance as reason enough to distrust them forever (completely overlooking the Dark Lord’s elven origins in the process).

Right, that’s our story, let’s get to work.

Two thousand years ago (I’m assuming some rounding here so we’re just gonna assume functional year zero) is the initial days of Christendom, and also a time shared by the Roman and Chinese empires. In China, the ruler at the time is Ping of the Han Dynasty, whilst in Rome the emperor is Augustus.

Let’s fill out our lineup of races. We know elves, humans, and orcs exist, and we spot a single centaur in the course of Bright as well. We can try and presume that trolls/ogres/etc also exist but we lack the meaningful foundation given that the only other non-mundane race we see is fairies who are treated exactly like most household pests. Let’s assume the list is pretty short at elves, humans, dwarves (whom we never see and have no information on from the film), orcs, and centaurs. From there, we can presume given their modern abundance in society that humans were more than one army amongst the nine. I’d even go so far as to wager that human forces accounted for at least half of the nine armies, but that brings up another topic we need to consider.

We have two examples of individuals defecting against the greater social expectations of their race. Both the Dark Lord against the elves, and Jirak against the orcs. This alone tells us that races do not have a rigid and universal structure, which means that quite probably there were several different factions at work within the different races. Assuming the Fogteeth clan takes its name from a group of significance in the period, that’s one clan that signed up to run with the Dark Lord.

So let’s say that only the Fogteeth clan turned against everyone else, that’s not really enough basis to say that all of them did. However, if the Dark Lord is such a danger that resurrecting him in modern times is still a problem big enough to warrant a government task force, it’s probable that it gave the Fogteeth some substantial military clout. Perhaps from the outside, this looked like orcs just getting really violent, but internally it’d be the Fogteeth crushing and overrunning other clans until people had sufficient reason to just assume (foolishly) that all orcs were Dark Lord allies. This gives Jirak a lot more foundation as well, because from his perspective a bunch of rowdy countrymen are causing a ton of trouble and he’s starting out on the periphery watching it happen.

We also know in the modern time that there’s at least one faction of elves that are pro-Dark Lord, the Inferni. So it seems pretty likely that, no matter how unified one region might seem, there are a lot of factions and viewpoints at work both under the surface and on a grander scale.

Jakoby’s surname is Greek in origin, so let’s propose that everything went down in the eastern European area in the first century. This would put the conflict in the crosshairs between the the Roman Empire, the Scythians (their kingdom being chiefly part of what we now consider to be the Crimean), potentially several parties in Europe, as well as parts of Egypt and Africa depending on how it developed and how much land it covered (which, seeing the above Fogteeth conquest, we’ll assume was a LOT).

The centaurs might have been Scythian allies at the time, as they were known for their mastery of mounted combat, but they also might have considered that an insulting practice. Since the Scythians ostensibly earned a lot from the Greek slave trade in their history, it might also have been that the centaurs weren’t given much choice in the matter. Either way, their proximity to the flashpoint pretty much guarantees some kind of involvement in the Dark Conflict (totally a reasonable academic name for it, shut up).

I’m going to suggest that the elves were several nations, possibly a few of them subsumed by the expansion of the Roman Empire, which puts them in the line of having Greek origins and trade opportunities through Europe.

Okay, so we’ve now established how the orcs weren’t a unified people but could have come to be seen as one, the region of the world the Dark Conflict took place in, and how a group of different armies could have rose up against it in roughly the same period of time.

Where does Jirak fit in? We don’t really need to know, because what we know of the present is that orcs are stigmatised (at least in modern North American society), which strongly suggests that Jirak wasn’t able to reform the view of his people after the conflict or at the very least that his reforms didn’t go very far. Maybe there’s even something to be said for sheer distance and cultural mutation that puts the American social climate in a less favourable position for the orcs, but the orcs are here anyway.

With as polarising a force as the Dark Lord, I’m gonna say that orcs after the conflict were heavily stigmatised. Maybe their clan specifically didn’t sign up with the losing side, but for the bulk of the world that doesn’t matter enough to be significant in their opinions. We’d probably see a bit of history about discrimination, enslavement, persecution, and quite possibly even some violent purges. Whilst horrible, that does give us a modern orc history that lands a little closer to what we already have: “orcs are monsters and it’s fine to slaughter them” becomes commonplace reasoning in fables and legends.

The myriad factors that go into the settlement of North America are incredibly numerous and tangled, so we absolutely would see changes as a consequence of incorporating both the Dark Conflict and the additional races. Los Angeles might have an elven name, the Cherokee nation might have shared space with centaur tribes of similar viewpoints, and orcs may have tried to settle space in different places just to escape European persecution. Maybe that’s why we have the Alamo line in Bright, maybe the orc presence made it a more bitter engagement, we don’t know.

What we can fathom though is that the elves probably had some involvement. After the conflict, the elves seem to have suffered little if any negative backlash as a result of the Dark Lord’s lineage. This suggests that whilst the orcs were the public face of his army, and unable to overturn the grudges that caused, the elves were able to come out on top and make amends as needed. Having united to overthrow the great evil of the Dark Lord, the elves would have a political bargaining chip to do a great deal more. They can use magic far more commonly than humans or other races, the abilities of the Inferni would suggest they’re far more capable than humans, and they now have a door into international and inter-racial negotiations.

The elves might have stood to gain a lot as industry chugged forward and the orcs were easier to oppress. Human slaves almost certainly still existed, but I’ll wager orcs were statistically greater in the casualty list because it’s a lot easier to subjugate someone when they are literally not human. Over time, elves find their way into all the higher echelons of any unified undertaking after the Dark Conflict, and orcs are shoved to the bottom below even the intra-racial prejudices we already deal with.

We’d expect a few distinct changes in the modern world compared to what’s going on in Bright. The first and most obvious is location names: More races and more languages and more religions would make naming places a lot different in modern US. Los Angeles might still exist as a city, but it wouldn’t have an elven district cordoned off and it probably wouldn’t even call it that.

Instead, we’d expect the elves to simply occupy the more affluent areas whilst orcs probably dominate the demographics closer to the cheaper and industrial areas. We’d expect to see elves in many CEO positions whilst orcs dominate in the blue collar positions. Centaurs probably have a lot of problems as a minority group with significant differences in accessibility, likely having to take labour jobs close to the orcs and such. These areas wouldn’t be specific racial districts but would instead be integrated into the larger city with economic and other pressures keeping the demographics skewed but not absolute. Ward might even have orc and elf neighbours in the same area, and have very different viewpoints about what their presence does to the property values.

Would the orcs have gangs? They’d certainly experience a lot of the same social pressures, so it could be expected that a few groups among them would form recognisable gang structures, possibly taking inspiration from the clans that inspired those prejudices in the first place. However, it’s more likely they’d want to form their own social structures rather than emulating those of the asshole humans around them.

Some would undoubtedly try to integrate better (like Jakoby) but others would want to dig back into their roots pre-Dark Lord and honour their proper heritage. Quite probably those putting the Dark Conflict era on a pedestal would be a gross outlier and would likely have the same dismay from other orcs as black gangs do from law-abiding black communities.

We hear that orcs fill out a lot of American football teams due to physical advantages of their race, and that might statistically be true in some cases, but would overlook the advantage of variety in sports teams. Everyone would be wearing the same uniforms and armour, but you’d see a proportion of orcs in forward positions, humans in midpoints, possibly dwarves and elves in other placements. Still others would exist in those positions, there just might be a statistical dominance by one race over another for a variety of reasons.

Jakoby probably wouldn’t be the first orc police officer, quite probably orcs would be involved far closer to the ground floor of police enforcement than this would require. If people think orcs make great line-backers, they should also expect them to be useful when holding riot shields. They might think that orcs are slow and dumb, but that would more likely be displayed by a minority of orcs in leadership roles. It might be fairly common to see elves as attorneys and judges, but they’d also turn up in other management positions even if most might consider law enforcement too close to the muck for an elf. Likewise, you’d probably have orc lieutenants and possibly even one or two captains, but you would be pretty surprised to see someone with an orc attorney and utterly bewildered to see an orc judge. Elves would be considered the “obvious superior” choice in politics, orcs would be considered a joke, but you’d expect to see politicians trying to curry favour with all sides anyway for votes.

To summarise this VERY long stream of consciousness, we’d probably see a lot of familiar things in an actual post-fantasy fantasy world, but all the differences we would actually notice would have been front-and-centre in Bright and a few would even have dismantled its plot completely.

What other anime do you recommend?

hey so this took me a while to get to because i’m whack and lazy. sorry.

so I suggest a lot of anime but depending on your kinda genre then my taste might differ (slightly?) from yours?

I have many favorites and I wanna suggest a million but I’ll just do my personal favorites.

Disastrous Life of Saiki K -So this series made me laugh until I was crying. It’s really entertaining. Basically if you’ve seen One Punch Man it kind of has that same feeling to it. Saiki K was born with every single power in the universe that you could possibly imagine. However in this anime it’s all about him trying to be as normal and noticed as little as possible. I’d say you can binge watch this series in one sitting (not that I did that or anything…) and it wouldn’t ever get old. The humor is 10/10, it’s not overly done and by the end of the episode you’re kinda like “that’s it?!” because it feels like it could go on and on. The characters were introduced in such amazing ways, like Saiki has mainly internal dialogue so you learn about other characters through his personal outlook of them however when they are introduced it’s like they have been there the whole time honestly. It’s also episodic, only maybe three episodes continue from one another but other than that the series itself is each episode something different happens but Saiki stays the same from previous episodes. There’s one character in this anime that at first I thought I was going to loathe but by the end I had a sort of Kurabawa feel from him (Kurabawa is from Yu Yu Hakusho and no fan ever can say they liked him upon first introduction) meaning by the end of the series he grew on me. If that’s your feel this anime is just right for you.

Steins;Gate -So maybe you’re into time travel or space dimension kind of things. This anime would be perfect for you. I have to say that while watching this anime it felt surreal. I didn’t think I would enjoy it because when I first watched the anime it was background noise. But then I started paying attention and it hooked me. It started with the introduction of its cast. There are very few animes that can introduce characters in subtle or subliminal ways and can also pull off incorporating them into the show without all of the attention being focused on them and learning about them. SG is an anime that when characters come in it’s almost like they’ve been there since the beginning. It’s a very natural and easy flow of them all. Another brilliant thing SG manages to do that other animes also don’t do well is portraying the personalities of its characters while not flat out telling you what they are like. Example being the dialogue exchanged between characters. Within the first scene and episode of the anime you hear the main character speaking to a girl at a vending machine and very short dialogue between them is exchanged but within those few short minutes you learn that her character is childish and his character is protective and also childish. It’s subtle scenes like those that make this anime brilliant and also..heart wrenching. Another key thing I loved about this series too is the lighting. During certain scenes pay attention to what is lit and what isn’t. This is one of the few animes I’ve watched or even seen that takes full advantage of laying out scenes with its camera angles and lighting. It’s mesmerizing. However I do admit this anime isn’t for everyone. It’s been told to be boring to some people, but I still recommend at least the first six episodes.

Clannad / After Story -Another heart wrenching anime would be Clannad and Clannad After Story. So I do realize it’s very likely that you’ve seen this anime already but let’s assume in a fair chance that you haven’t. Clannad is one of those stories that sticks with you, even when you don’t want it to. I watched this anime early of 2015 and I didn’t watch After Story until 2017. Its basically a romance series and while that’s not my style and perhaps yours neither, I recommend this anime for its sheer brilliance. I accidentally spoiled it for myself because I wasn’t aware of After Story after I finished Clannad. I like to research characters of anime I enjoy and I did that with this series and Clannad has a very different ending than After Story. That being said though, when people ask if they should watch Clannad at all over just jumping into After Story I always tell them to treat it like a season 1 and 2. You wouldn’t watch season 2 before season 1, would you? Exactly. However the biggest difference from the two is the plot and characters. In Clannad you meet the characters and you’re aware of the struggles and internal things going on, where as in After Story the show assumes you know them. Also in Clannad there are some of my absolute favorite by far of any anime ever favorite moments and After Story only makes them better. I recommend you watch both (Clannad FIRST) because you wouldn’t regret it. And this anime moves at a mediocre, aggravating pace in the beginning but trust me, once you stick through it you’ll be like “I wish I could’ve enjoyed those moments longer” towards the end.

Danganronpa 1, 2 and 3 -So this series very quickly became one of my top animes to watch, ever. To put it simple it’s basically a high school where kids are penned against killing one another to graduate. It has a very sadistic feel to it and the anime, art style and portrayal makes this one a kind. No other anime (except assassination classroom) could pull off any of the script or characters. I loved every moment of this anime. Also it’s not cliche. Well, maybe the one main character, as you’d assume but in general it keeps your guessing and it actually surprises you. Don’t do like me and watch the series out of order, thank goodness I realized something wasn’t making sense when I went to watch season 2 and it was actually season 3. Needless to say I didn’t spoil MUCH for myself but the ending was kind of a “fuck me” because season 3 picked up from it. Which season 2 didn’t pick up from season 1, in fact it goes back in time to HOW everything happened and like a dumb ass I nearly ruined it for myself. This anime is fast paced and action around every turn. Not too long, no filler and it’s really interesting. Has my favorite antagonist ever in this series too.

Terror In Resonace -So if you have ever seen No.6 I would likely suggest this anime to be something you’d enjoy (if you enjoyed no.6, or if you are even familiar with no.6 in general) first off it starts off with its obvious “this is what’s happening” episode and it’s gripping. I finished this series in two days because I was thoroughly intrigued. Something interesting to note of from this series is that it heavily appeals to Icelandic culture and Greek Mythology which I found to be intriguing twists considering the anime world doesn’t venture into those kinds of things often. One of my favorite things about this anime is the art style and scenery. Very realistic and breathtaking. I’m surprised this anime hasn’t won some kind of academy award, it should be up there with Your Name for animation style alone honestly. I haven’t told you what it’s about have I? It’s about two boys who go by Nine and Twelve. What’s interesting about them is how realistic they come off towards the end. The beginning they are a bit “this is definitely an anime” feeling but towards the end you could argue that they are most definitely human..real humans. I think you’d enjoy it perhaps.

Maybe you could check those out, and get back to me on what you think?

Kissing Cassandra Pentaghast  ||| Chapter 7: Surprises

\\ Archive Of Our Own \\

Summary: She was searching for the perfect man, but instead, found the perfect woman.

Cassandra is a single, straight, successful newspaper editor who finds herself questioning just how straight she is when she meets the grounded but scintillating Amala Lavellan.

“You don’t believe in the Maker?”

Cassandra had received two differing opinions on bringing up religion on first dates. Her friends told her it was inappropriate. While her parents adamantly felt that no date should even be set without a full detailing on one’s interactions with the church.

She could almost hear her parent’s anxious questioning. Where were they baptized? What denomination? Does he follow the white divine or the black divine? How often do they attend service?

Lavellan, the one who started the conversation in the first place, innocently shrugged. “I don’t NOT believe in the Maker.”

Cassandra grabbed an olive to pop it in her mouth while narrowing her eyes.

Lavellan put a hand up in defeat. “I’ll stop toying with you. If I must give myself a label then I identify as spiritual with values heavily informed by Dalish heritage and culture.”

“What does that mean exactly? I am not trying to be superfluous.”

Lavellan smirked. “You like things to be clear...I can get that. I grew up on a Dalish reservation, and had a Keeper, observed Dalish holidays, and was surrounded by our Gods, stories, and everything everywhere.  But, not everyone in a clan is a hundred percent ‘I believe in all the old ways.’ It’s not too different from how folks here can grow up in an Andrastian society, and may not be devout or even following, but they still have all those messages and holidays that shape their life.”

Cassandra’s face reflected understanding. “What was your family like?”

“My Grandmother was our Keeper most of my life,” she said, sounding wistful. “My family was more serious about upholding tradition, but it made sense, we’ve lost so much and my family has always been a strong pillar of the community. They let me decide for myself though, freedom of thought is big for my clan.”

“I can appreciate that,” Cassandra began, snickering lightly. “Freedom of thought is not a phrase my parents entertained about most things.”

Lavellan laughed softly but her eyes turned serious. “I love and cherish traditional elhven religion, but I just don’t believe in one religion over the other. I believe there is a life force, something bigger than us all, where we all come from and go back to. It’s complicated. I might need more time and less wine to explain.”

“I understand, it makes sense to me,” Cassandra replied quickly to assure Lavellan.

Lavellan snorted. “You don’t have to lie! That was rambling.”

She put her hands up in defense. “It does! The confusion on my face comes from how different my household was.”

“You did mention that. How did that play out? You don’t come off as someone who would be subservient to their parents.” Lavellan asked, eyebrows raised mischievously.

Cassandra smiled knowingly. “Yes, that must be obvious. I had many a disagreement with my parents. They wanted to raise me as a traditional Nevarran woman of a higher station. That kind of woman is demure, dependent, and a symbol of tradition. My parents have little left of their homeland but memories and tradition...I try to tread lightly where I can.”

Lavellan’s voice softened, “Did you parents come after the war?”

Cassandra did not typically talk with anyone abot her family’s escape from Nevarran, but Lavellan made it easier to speak about. “They actually fled during the war. They thought the President would peacefully concede power. It was a shock to them when he didn’t; they realized quickly anyone who had supported the opposing candidate would be in danger.”

Lavellan’s eyes softened. “I’m sorry, I know that phrase is empty sometimes, but I do mean it.”

Cassandra shook her head, she was not ready to go deep into her family history. “Thank you. I understand, but we had more than most. We had a Nevarran community to embrace us here. My father was back practicing law in two years’ time. We had privileges of class that many others did not.”

Lavellan nodded. “That is amazing perspective; good looks and wisdom, why do you have trouble finding a good date again?”

Cassandra shook her dismissively. “Because I bring up religion and civil war in polite dinner conversations”

“No, that was all me. Thank you for not playing by the rules of social etiquette,” Lavellan said. She grabbed the bill on the table and put down cash.

She passed the bill to Cassandra who put down her half of the bill.  “I have never been one for them. It drives my mother mad.”

Lavellan rubbed her hands together excitedly. “You’ve got the momma drama! I usually have the rows with my father. And by rows, I mean heated discussions with no hurtful language but plenty of hurt feelings.”

“But,” Lavellan continued, finishing the wine in her glass with a flourish of her hand. “that is enough talk of family.”

Cassandra got up from her seat. “Thank you for taking me here. I have heard such good things but always forget to come. Would you like to go to the park down the street? Get some ice-cream?” She wasn’t ready for the night to end.

Lavellan looked surprised but pleased at the invitation. “I can never say no to ice cream on a nice night like this. But, the ultimate question, Toscanini’s or Mr. Freezies?”

Lavellan handed Cassandra a strawberry cone. She was surprised that Cassandra even ate ice-cream, her body was so toned and the woman had somehow resisted the second helping of bread on their table at dinner. She had assumed no unnecessary carbs or sugar entered that body.

They had playfully argued during the ten-minute walk over where to go. There was Toscanini’s, the fancy micro-creamery, or the neighborhood relic known as Mr. Freezy’s ice-cream truck. Toscanini’s was good, there was no denying it, but soft serve out of an old timey truck was a magic all its own.  

Cassandra argued that her newspaper had covered several health violations at Mr. Freezy’s. She had countered that these food inspectors likely had their pockets lined with urban developer cash bribes. Cassandra had easily conceded after seeing the line out the door for Toscanini’s. Lavellan deduced Cassandra was more opposed to gentrification and long lines than food poisoning.

“I would not have initially taken you for a strawberry fan,” Lavellan said, slowly licking where the ice cream dripped on her hand. She noted that Cassandra somehow kept her ice-cream from dripping on herself. She felt a complete mess beside her.

“I tend to surprise people with my tastes.”

“Oh, really,” Lavellan sang, eyeing Cassandra impishly. “This sounds interesting, please tell me more.”

Lavellan could feel Cassandra’s hand brushing next to her own as they walked. This would be the perfect moment to hold her hand. They were in the third part of their outing and walking around a park with ice-cream. Could it get more picturesque?

She let her hand stop in Cassandra’s palm to give her the opportunity.  Cassandra’s fingers flitted on her palm, but they pulled back after a second.

Lavellan noted the redness on Cassandra’s neck, sighing inwardly.

Cassandra pressed forward with their conversation. “Where do I begin, alright, I have a deep love for romance novels. The good, the bad, and the very very terrible.”

Lavellan dog whistled and motioned to a bench they could sit on. “Oh, trashy romance novels? How did that start?” She could swear a twinkle appeared in Cassandra’s eye as she sat next to her.

“I found my mother’s collection when I was ten and it was right around when I was starting to have my own romantic yearnings. My family was very conservative, so these novels, they were my escape. It was the beginning of me being a romantic through and through.”

“A romantic? I figured.” Lavellan replied, taking a quick bit of her cone as she spoke. “I don’t think you’re like a gumdrops and glitter romantic. You’re like...boldness, passion, emotional rawness...that kind, right?”

“You’ve figured that out after a couple hours,” Cassandra asked softly, not looking directly at her.

Lavellan leaned forward to catch her eye. “It’s been more than couple hours. I would say we’ve spent three hours together. And to think you tried to ditch me.”

Cassandra finally looked her in the eye. “I don’t know why you came after me, but thank you. I haven’t had this much fun with someone in a long time.”

A stillness came between them, the first since they had started their evening. Lavellan leaned a bit closer. Cassandra’s eyes closed and Lavellan could feel her heart about to burst from her throat. She closed her own eyes and waited.

She heard Cassandra clear her throat, puzzled, she opened her eyes. Cassandra was sitting back against the bench staring at the park’s marble fountain. The heat of embarrassment flooded Lavellan’s face and she sat back up.

“I’m sorry,” Cassandra said. She groaned and put her head in her hand.

Lavellan stopped herself from putting a hand on her shoulder. “It’s fine. You said you weren’t sure. I understand. Do you feel more sure about, well, whether you might like women? Or a woman ever?”

Cassandra took her face from her hands. “I just don’t know and it’s not fair to you. If you were a man I would have...gone for it. That must mean something, right?”

“I think only you can know that,” Lavellan said, barely above a whisper. She felt her tear ducts activating. She was such an idiot getting emotional over a woman she just met. Why did this hurt so much?

Lavellan got up from the bench and extended her hand to Cassandra. Cassandra put her in hers and she gave it a firm shake.

“It was fantastic to meet you, really. I wish you the best.” She turned on her heel and started speed walking to the next subway entrance. She could hear Cassandra following her.

“Wait,” Cassandra called to her, catching up as they exited the park. “That’s it? We can’t be friends?”

Lavellan stopped suddenly and held the straps of her purse in a nervous death grip. “We could, but it would be terrible, because I could really fall for you. I know I am already starting to. It would only lead to me pining for you like an idiot.”

Cassandra opened her mouth to speak but Lavellan put her hand up. “I’ve been here before, waiting around for someone to feel about me the way I feel about them. I can’t do that again to myself. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to punish you.”

Cassandra ran a hand through her hair, clearly embarrassed by Lavellan’s honesty. “No, I know you’re not. I just wish we could be friends. Please call me if you change your mind.”

Lavellan walked backwards a couple steps and nodded her head. “Likewise.”

She continued briskly away from Cassandra without a second glance. The rock she carried in her stomach grew to her throat. Was she a complete fool? She could have stayed friends with Cassandra and maybe she would have changed her mind! But Lavellan only had to spend a couple moments ruminating to realize how tragic that would be. She couldn’t be someone’s second fiddle again. She couldn’t.

As she descended the subway stairs she felt the buzz of her phone. She grabbed it from her purse to see a txt from Dorian.

 D: How did it go? Is the voice as alluring in person?

She let her head rest against the subway sweat and began texting him back.

 L: Better. She was amazing. Best date I ever had. And now I will likely never see her again.

It took only a second for Dorian to respond, and in her romance gloom, she felt grateful for friendship.

  D: This calls for brunch tomorrow. You bring the OJ. I have the champagne.

Friendship and champagne.

Zenith: Chapter 22-23

Chapter 22

We’re in Androma’s POV, which is punishment in itself, but we’re also in a shitty flashback, which makes this outright hellish. 

We’re basically told everything we already knew, how Andi was “without purpose” before becoming a Spectre, how she and Kalee became “as close as sisters,” bla bla bla. 

We already kow this, Shinsay. We’re on chapter 22, can you stop repeating the same goddamn information over and over?

There’s also talk of how much Andi loves her planet, which is just ... I know that a lot of sci-fi makes the mistake of basically thinking that planets are just very big countries with a homogeneous population, but I’m so tired of it so I’m still calling it out. 

Earth alone has a bajillion different cultures, countries, customs, languages, people. Why would other planets be any different? I know it’s hard and sometimes pointless to try to develop every country on every planet when you’re writing a space opera, which might include dozens of planets, but can we at least stop treating each planet like there’s only one people and one culture on it? 

Thanks. 

Anywho, the flashback is basically Kalee and Andi sneaking through their big fancy estate (passing Valen’s room) and Kalee convincing Andi to take her dad’s ship and have a little nighttime ride around the mountains.

And as usual, Shinsay just can’t keep away from writing dumb shit:

Kalee nodded, then grabbed Andi’s hand and tugged her down the hall, toward the stairs. “It’s going to be the best night of your life, Androma Racella,” she said as they reached the steps. “It’s not like it’s going to kill you.”

Shinsay, we already know Kalee is dead. (We also know what Andi’s name is, and so does Andi and Kalee.) Are you trying to do some sort of reverse foreshadowing? Aftershadowing? Do you think this little wink to the audience will somehow make this more dramatic? Are you trying to make this seem like “cruel irony?” What exactly is the purpose of this line?

The flashback ends on that stupid note and we’re back in the present as Andi wakes up in a ship next to Dex, who’s passed out and snoring. 

The kiss that left her feeling momentarily like putty as their lips met, like they had so many times before—until her fury took over.

Why was she thinking about that damned kiss? She hated that kiss. She hated Dex’s stupid lips.

Listen, I’m all about using italics to emphasize things ... But this is too much. Can you please not? What’s even the point of either of these? Use italics when the meaning in a sentence is changed depending on which word is emphasized.

Here, it’s used to reinforce a meaning we already know and can assume for ourselves. 

The tranq still in her system called to her and, willing or not, she closed her eyes and sank back into the shadowy depths of sleep.

SHADOWY DEPTHS OF SLEEP

Anyway, yeah, that’s the whole chapter. She’s still tranquilized but conveniently had to wake up to update the reader on where she was, because we’re all stupid and can’t figure it out for ourselves. I mean, if we don’t make sure she and Dex were transported via spaceship to the prison, like they’d planned to do and something we’d assume would happen because we’re reading a space opera, then how can we be sure they didn’t just teleport to the prison, hmm?

Chapter 23

VALEN WAS A man made of regrets.

Me too, bud.

We don’t get an update on Valen’s state or the whole Nor business. Instead, it’s just more angst about how he could’ve prevented Kalee’s death and how much he hates Andi for murdering her, which, OK, she didn’t actually, but whatever.

Then we get a scene break and even more flashbacks. 

Valen is staring at a portrait of Andi, one month after Kalee’s death. Or sorry, one “full moon” ago, because fuck you. He thinks about how much he loves to be a painter. 

He loved the way the paint on his brushes dried when he didn’t wash them, deepening from a royal, cloudless sky blue to a nighttime, starless black.

Fuck you. 

Out of all the dumb shit this book has thrown at me, a painter loving it when his brushes get practically destroyed/heavily damaged is probably the dumbest.

And paint changing color when it dries is a sign of bad quality. All paint changes color, but that shit takes decades, and Valen is what, an older teen? Does it somehow not change color when put on a canvas, or does Valen just like the surprise of his paintings changing color shortly after he finishes them?

Valen thinks about how hot Andi is, because of course, and the portrait he made of her was of course his magnum opus, and by the time he’d finished it and walked out of the room, he saw Andi and Kalee leave for a joyride. 

Another scene break, and we’re back in the present. He thinks about how he shold’ve saved Kalee and it makes him fall asleep again (relatable). 

Scene break, another flashback, to after Kalee’s death. His mother is asking him to attend her funeral and says that Kalee would want him to be there, but Valen is like “nah bitch.”

If he cried, the chasm in his chest would open wide, and he’d fall, and he’d keep falling until he reached the end.

I know this is supposed to be deep, but I’m just picturing him imploding. 

His mother leaves and Valen stares angstily at the portrait of Andi, before reluctantly deciding to make some changes to it. And I’ll just post the entire description, because it’s too fucking good:

When he was done, he realized he’d been wrong before.

The old painting was child’s play. Now he’d finally created a masterpiece.

He hung it up to dry and left the room, casting only one glance back over his shoulder.

Androma Racella stared at him from the wall.

Half of her, the moonlit side, he’d left untouched. But the other he’d taken his time with, her face coated in splatters of crimson, in shades of purple so dark they looked nearly black against her pale, smooth skin.

Wet red paint trickled down her cheeks and slipped from the canvas onto the floor. A soft drip, drip, drip that reminded him not of tears, but of his sister’s blood.

A masterpiece indeed, as if Andi had ripped off the mask she’d been wearing and revealed to the world her second self, the one she’d been hiding just beneath the surface for so long.

Hey guys, I know that uuh it’s very tempting to blame others when you experience bad stuff like this, but can we just take a moment to acknowledge that ANDI DIDN’T KILL KALEE. SHE DIDN’T MURDER HER. SHE WAS JUST AS TRAUMATIZED BY KALEE’S DEATH AS THE REST OF YOU.

If Andi was such a huge part of the family, why are they blaming her without reason? The only way I could see them reacting like this would be if Andi straight up bragged about having killed Kalee and taken the credit for doing it. Which makes no sense. I can see Andi blaming herself, yes, but it’s evident that she cared about Kalee. 

Whatever, man. This is what happens when you want your heroine to both be a BADASS RUTHLESS KILLER and a sad woobie who did nothing wrong. 

Also, doesn’t this HYPERTECH FUTURE have like ... I dunno ... security cameras? They’d see that Kalee was the one who convinced Andi and that Andi didn’t maliciously try to murder Kalee? I know Andi was Kalee’s protector, but was she her babysitter as well? And if she was, isn’t it only fair to blame Kalee’s parents for putting a teenager in charge of another teenager? Why didn’t you put an experienced adult in the role of Kalee’s Spectre? 

All of this is so extremely dumb.

I also want to say that as a tortured artist, I know that people express their pain in different ways, but usually, we artsy folks tend to be more abstract. We don’t usually paint our worst enemy’s face and make them super fucked up and ugly like some sort of childish insult or expression of their TRUE NATURE. I’m also not sure how this is supposed to represent Andi’s true nature when he seems to be painting wounds? I’m ...??? Usually, painting real people you know and giving them gruesome wounds just because you hate them means you need quite a bit of help and has nothing to do with how much of an Artiste you are.

And what type of paint is he using if it’s literally dripping off the canvas? That’s not ... That’s not what any paint I’ve encountered does, unless you mix it with an entire ocean of water, and in that case the pigment will be very faded so it wouldn’t even look like blood.

And here’s the portrait, btw:

A masterpiece indeed.

Very hashtag deep.

Valen leaves, thinking about how Andi’s waiting for her trial and how she’ll be sentenced to death, and walks past Kalee’s room.

When he passed by his sister’s room, he caught the slightest hint of her summertime scent.

It lingered like a distant breeze, quickly swept away when reality took its place.

The chasm in him broken, Valen Cortas fell to his knees in Kalee’s doorway and wept.

The drama. 

Another two chapters where nothing happened. Yaay! 

Audience Studies (3P18) Blog Post #2 - Ethan Limsana

Although I spoke a lot about how mass media power and advertising has made rap music an important part of my life, it is one of hundreds of different medias I use to gratify my individual wants and needs for a variety of constantly evolving reasons. After all, modern advertising relies on understanding what I want before I ask for it. Through self-examination, I use movies, tv shows, video games, multiple social medias, and books for all different reasons depending on genre, length of time, level of engagement, etc. This week, for example, I bought a new phone online that I’m very excited for. To deal with my higher than usual amounts of hyperactivity and lack of attention span, I’ve watched countless amounts of YouTube videos about the products in comparison videos, unboxing videos, and reviews. Also, to deal with my energy, I’ve stopped playing slower role-playing video games, and I’ve spent more time playing fighting games where all my thoughts are in the moment and fast paced, where most other times these games are too intense for me to feel comfortable. This also effects my music listening to be faster paced EDM, or rap music as an interesting side-effect. In this way, I’ve used media to gratify my individual, particular needs as an active user. Deeper, is looking at what specific needs each of the medias I used gratified. The comparison and review YouTube videos gratified my cognitive needs by giving me more knowledge about the phone before and after purchasing the product; how to use it and how it performs in comparison to other popular phones people are buying. My affective needs are met by listening to music that accompanies my emotions, making my overall experience more pleasurable. Advertisements of the product make it look extremely clean, and expensive which meets my integrative needs that give me the feeling of higher status for owning this new piece of technology. My social needs are not particularly met by any of these actions, but the phone itself represents the media platforms I will use to become even more social which is at the height of my excitement. Also, my escape needs are met by video games, being able to put off the thoughts of homework, chores, and other responsibilities to allow my mind stay at its’ preferred state.

In these instances, I often have with the media as a tech enthusiast, I act as both a ritualized audience member and an instrumental audience member depending on the context. In this scenario, I am seeking for these specific types of content to fit my needs, but overall, accessing each of these mediums for media is performed most days anyway. The cycle of consumption of media for myself is highly ritualized while the specific motive for interest changes daily. If it were not the excitement of buying a new phone, it may have been the excitement of a new video game, album, movie. The best way to understand why I act in a cycle like this would be to understand the “expectancy value approach”. This looks closely at what my gratifications sought in relation to my gratifications obtained; the higher success of my gratifications obtained over time will increase my dependency on the place (media) that I sought for gratification. Going back as far as I can remember, my gratifications for media were first met with video games by my family. My uncle was extremely influential in my childhood as I grew up without a father and no other siblings, his interests were passed onto me as I spent time with him. He valued video games at that time, and they quickly became a source of family bonding for us and served as a learning space for me when I started playing at around 3 years old. Since then, they were rooted into my childhood, meeting my emotional needs and my proficiency over time has met my own personal fulfillment. Since technology for us today has been evolving and improving at such a rapid pace, video games have always obtained my gratifications and my dependency on them today is very high. As video games have improved, viewing them on online sources like YouTube have become incredibly popular while the medium of television has not aged like this. Most of the online influencers on YouTube who are interested in video games are also interested in tech, and through the grapevine of gratifications obtained, my tech interests have shaped my job choice to Best Buy and opening the opportunity for working in mobility and smartphone enthusiasm. This observation of my life with video games and technology also show me that my individual needs are not static, but constantly shifting and developing over the course of my life. It also shows me that my uses of media are reflected by my society, being influenced and shaped by the people around me who I grew up with and who I currently interact with.

         Needless to say, my life has had many times of instability and struggle whether it be for financial issues in my family, or personal emotions during high school, my integration with media has always been stable. Even to the point of having important impacts on my life like determining my interest in tech which is now a vital part to my personality. By examining the uses and dependency approach, it is understandable why I am dependent on these cycles of using multiple outlets of media based on emotion and interest. If I were to look to other sources for gratification like going out to parties, travelling, or working out; although I don’t feel I cannot do these things, I am not guaranteed the same satisfaction, so they are not as addicting as my use of media. In this way, I am acted upon by advertisers in the media, but I also act as an agent of free will. The issue is that the factors that guide my freewill may not be healthy. Even though my interests were originally guided by my family at a young age, the way it has shifted has been a product of addiction and less time spent outside of technology.

 Now that I’ve established myself as an agent over someone who is purely acted upon by advertisers, it is important to know how I decode and make meaning of these messages I’m exposed to. Interpretations of semiotics is what determines my understanding of any text I encounter. To best describe how this affects me, for this week’s blog I will closely relate my understanding to media in relation to my parents due to generational gaps changing our understandings of media texts. Since I’ve been using a personal computer daily since getting one for myself in grade 8, I’ve engaged in many different online communities including reddit, 4chan, and video game communities like Minecraft servers. These have been sites of social intertextuality which has cultured me during my developing years, my mother, in her developing years would have been restricted to physical social gatherings and more patriarchal types of media like daytime television and big budget films. To connect with her I sometimes show her funny memes I find online to hopefully make her laugh, but I’ve learned that much of my humor is not understood by her and I choose to share with her. I’ve shown her the popular icon “pepe the frog” in humorous portrayals and she has no clue what it is outside of an amateur drawing of a frog with human-like features. I see the frog as a template that anonymous users add to and alter to share their emotions, or what’s called “reaction pictures”. On the other hand, some political points of view may see the icon as in sighting terrorism or right-wing ideology which may be because of the influence of 4chan’s anonymity and history. Screen theory suggests that films include embedded ideologies from the filmmakers, and that films work to deny their existence as merely text and therefore become normalized to us. Despite each of us interpreting this one picture in different ways, the meanings we create are abstract due to our history with film and media so none of our interpretations are wrong, so each of us are right.

In the encoding/decoding structure, the creator of the version of the picture is encoding a message by his alteration of the picture, the time and place of the post, and the message via text that may accompany it. Due to my prior knowledge of the frog being used as a comedic representation, whether the frog has a birthday hat, is crying, or id holding a gun, I’m heavily influenced to decode the message as a comedic gesture. For a left-wing figure, they most likely have been the receiver pro-gun activism, or anti LGBT communities who use the frog in posts from time to time. As my mother the understanding of having little context to the figure causes her to have a neutral position.

         Here, I can see the asymmetry of meanings from the encoder to the decoder. Due to the abstract nature of memes today in our society, I can’t always be too sure of the creator’s true intention, but the fact that decoding is polysemic, means most of us have different outcomes of meaning than what was intended. For this scenario, I’m probably right due to my position in relation to the broadcaster. People posting memes online should be assumed to be within my generation because of the surrounding medias that attract my age demographic to websites like reddit and 4chan. My connotations should therefore include most of the intertextualities of the creator themselves which include video games, older posts on the website, and social media. My mother doesn’t know these same intertextualities, so her reaction is more on the denotative level, taking the message for its literal meaning which holds little value. The left-wing figure brings connotations of real-world issues the online platform, taking an oppositional position to the post.

There are three different positions audience can decode messages; these are described as dominant, negotiated, and oppositional. If the left-wing person is repurposing the encoded message to fit their preferred view that the text exists as a political message, they’re taking an oppositional view to the message. I am younger and have been influenced by this type of media in the way the creator intended with little difference, I am a dominant reader. My mother, taking the information for what it is in reality as a post that has little significance in her life, she has negotiated the meaning of the text.

         Intertextuality is what drives my interest for most of the entertainment I consume but I don’t have a strong background in music which separates my understandings of music from my friends. Take Drake’s song “mob ties” for instance. When this song came out, I thought it was enjoyable because it was repetitive and catchy, but my friend Eric liked it for an entirely different reason; the meaning behind the lyrics. Through keeping up with Drake’s social media pages and recent news, he knew that there was drama within the community and that Kanye West had been producing music for other rappers that were making fun of him in their newest music. Avid fans were waiting for Drake to acknowledge this, and to fit their preferred narrative that Drake would come back and release a great song that would solidify his position as a stronger, more influential rapper. Recently I’ve gotten a new coworker who used to be in a rock band, and now does music a hobby. When I’ve asked what he thinks about my music tastes, he usually turns his nose up; not because it is a different genre, but he cares more about the history and culture of the music which is expressed through sampling and remixing of sounds. He finds that they don’t feature enough creativity in sampling, but result to choosing an interesting sound, and repeating it which he thinks is an insult to other artists who put in more effort. Intertextuality has caused us to understand and react to music in very different ways depending on our context. I can see how simple differences of gender, race, and age these same effects with all sorts of media can have, but I have little first-hand knowledge.

Media reception theories give me some more context about uses and gratifications by taking a look at the contexts of my media consumption. In order to understand the contexts of my media viewing, I will examine the rituals of an average school or workday for myself. Studying film, I feel it is my duty to fill as much of my free time with viewing online content in order to be efficient in learning about film while enjoying my leisure activity in the domestic sphere. In the beginning of my day at 7:00am, I spend an hour of my time on YouTube to procrastinate getting up, while keeping myself from falling back asleep; watching esports highlights or tech enthusiasts. This is the least important content as I don’t want to wake up to anything intense. While I am getting ready, my visual attention strays, so I turn on podcasts until my drive to either work or school is done. These podcasts give me the experience of socializing without being present. Once I’ve arrived, I switch to music and space out, attempting to change my mood to either excited or relaxed, until I’ve stepped into my kiosk or my class. Once there, if I have free time, I know I won’t be able to devote much attention, so I either glance through online shopping to ease my mind while doing something productive by planning how to save money. After I’ve made my way back home, I do my homework and play video games simultaneously. Often, I lose my attention because I feel too energetic, so I resort to using fighting video games to temporarily put my brain through intense excitement to calm myself down and work. This process also works as a reward system that for every hour I work, I play half an hour of games. Finally, at the end of my day I try to watch either a TV show or movie depending on how tired I am.

In this examination, just about all of the types of entertainment I consume have been chosen to best fit my social and situational contexts and the amount of attention I have free to give. I am naturally introverted despite being very outgoing and talkative in sales, so my preferred leisure is done with full attention to detail and in isolation. I would way my use of video games as a reward system for homework completion is a gendered dynamic when comparing the ways my girlfriend procrastinates. She is less concerned with violence and gore, but traditional female roles, so she likes to procrastinate by watching cooking videos online. I also prefer to avoid spending time with my parents because my mother has married into very rude male which has extremely changed gender dynamics in the household. In the living room, I have lost the ability to watch my preferred content and, in my room, I’ve lost the ability to have volume on mt TV at night. Fully utilizing my smartphone as a medium for entertainment and communication is the best way for me to deal with these social contexts within the home, which affects my physical context as a result. In order to watch my daily entertainment, it is most beneficial for me to stay in my room for long periods of time, or while I’m on the go. They often get into loud verbal fights which put me out of the mood for longer content like movies, so I will instead view shorter YouTube videos that take less attention. In this examination, the media has dominated my free time by the active choices I make to fit entertainment around the structure of my day.

My generation and younger ones either have more introverts, or introverts are better enabled than ever before with the use of new smartphones and on-demand video platforms with fast internet speed. The text uses the term “time-space distanciation” which is used to explain the phenomenon that individuals are becoming increasingly able to experience social interactions without ever being physically present by the use of social media. Smartphones provide me instant links to speak directly to the most famous people in Hollywood as well as my family members who may just be in the next room. This instant feedback is even faster than walking to that next room, resulting in the technology changing the situational geography of my life; I no longer need to make appointments with people to speak with them, so I no longer need to structure my days with those restrictions in mind. I do not need to attend a seminar to receive guidance from real directors. I do not need to even walk to the Livingroom to speak with my parents.

We do still have positive rituals and interactions in the home during few occasions, one being dinner. We all use our smartphones in similar ways, meaning most of our knowledge and topics are influenced by what we have done on our phones. Often, I bring up a topic of technology, my mother talks about what her friends are doing, and my stepfather talks about prices for things he’s seen online. In this way, smartphones as a transactional system have shaped the conversations, we have with each other. We have each bought our phones from our carriers. The important part of integration has been their objectification; they fit on our persons at all times of the day which makes their incorporation into our lives easily manageable. Once they have been personalized, they serve as the conversion that brings us new information we wouldn’t otherwise have, resulting in giving us topics to speak of that avoid conflict. In the same way they can cause conflict, but we have learned to filter out topics which start conflicts.

 The text often relates to the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft when making points about the heights of audience member’s engagement with a online text, building a community and participating in a virtual society. This game was extremely dominant in a time where I would have thought the stereotypical geek would be male, socially awkward, low income, and ugly. Although these stereotypes are still around just like any other, popular opinion has shifted to appreciate fandom and subcultures and to embrace the forming of new communities through meetups, conventions, and media involvement. The most engaged I’ve ever been as a fan was during the 6 years, I played League of Legends, a game that changed the way I saw online games forever, with a peak of 27 million active players at the same time. At first, I was peer pressured to play the game when I didn’t want to, but I eventually started and was exposed to the largest, exciting online community I’d ever seen. What got me hooked initially as a consumer was the prosumers of the game. YouTubers who played were uploading comedy shorts, highlight reels, lowlight reels, professional games, and everything in between. Since these online influencers were using YouTube, the site offered me a comment section to talk with other fans. These Youtubers’ popularity was so high, communities formed around the game and each of these individual personalities which brought in a maximum number of consumers to be part of the community. In this time there were so many active members that nearly every new type of interpretation and reinterpretation of texts within the game were poached and played with: community drawings, fan fiction, sexual repurposing, music that used samples from in-game sounds, etc. The game itself seemed much smaller than the community around it as everyone was distributing their unique works, supporting each other either socially or financially, and playing with imagination gained. Within one year, I became so engaged that I became a prosumer myself, working to make good plays and post them on my own channel for people to comment and post on Reddit. I mainly played a character named ‘Wukong’, which I made guides on how to play, made my username, and criticized other players who didn’t play him the ‘right’ way. This was an act of textual poaching because I inhabited the character and learned everything about him and gained a sense of ownership of this character, I spent countless hours with, resulting in creating a prescribed way for others to play the character. This sense of accomplishment and mastery even made me feel different about my personal life; I felt I was belonging to somewhere better than others after the school bell rang.

Within two years, I enjoyed one of the social aspects by attending my first Fan Expo at the Metro Convention Centre which had huge fan meetups where many fans dressed up as ‘their favorite characters and most booths sold only League of Legends artwork and apparel.  Here, I saw the hierarchy of the subculture in person. Popular Youtubers and cosplayers sold their autographs and photos and were chased down and treated like celebrities by fans. Lesser known cosplayers, especially sexualized females, were treated second to the online influencers as many gave them tips and asked for photos. At the bottom was whoever wasn’t visually noticeable like me, not dressed up. Although I was at the bottom of the hierarchy, the culture was socially safe; I could dress like a female character and people would probably be excited about it and I would have a great time away from reality for the day.

As a huge fan by my third year, I played many more characters within the game and was challenging the institutional producers of the game. As I was highly ranked and well experienced, I decided to offer my concerns and wants on a weekly basis on the developer’s forum pages. In many occasions I would directly email them and receive feedback within a day or two. The game was updated every couple weeks and my notes would be about what items and characters I felt needed to be stronger or weaker and provided reasons why. As an activist, it was really rewarding to see how my contribution as a community member had the effect on a multibillion dollar video game company which is a crucial reason of why I was engaged for so long. Though many times I was reminded that as merely a community member, I was powerless when others decided against me. As the game matured, many of the YouTube influencers felt they were entitled to special treatment in the game for the work of creating large fanbases that played the game but again, they were a powerless elite, and one by one, most of the biggest celebrities in the community left for other games, leaving the professional esports as the last of the community and micro-celebrities.

With these big changes in the community, during my final days playing the game the community was still large because of the number of players addicted to the gameplay, but the variety of fans had diminished, leaving only the esports fans left. This showed the dark side of fan identity and group cohesion that made me leave the community. Identity shifted from a hierarchy that valued overall participation, to competitive ranking. If you weren’t in the top 1% of ranking, you didn’t have an opinion. The best players in the world were praised while community members who had been active for years weren’t valued because they weren’t good at winning. The game also became much more about money too; in order to fit these new standards of the community you needed a fast internet connection, expensive computer, and enough wealth to not have a job in order to perform at the top level and become a celebrity. As the second wave fan scholar would find, although I escaped into a virtual world for multiple years, I was not able to escape the systems of hierarchy as they were recreated by the community.

An interesting view of my experience with League of Legends is the profit of productions by the community. The reason for such a large audience, as I mentioned, is because of the online content creators, bloggers, and vloggers. While I gave my thoughts about the game to the company, I was acting as a part of crowdsourcing; an integral part to the way the game is made and its updates. I and countless others avid gamers would specifically tell Riot Games what was too strong and too weak, and they would fix the game on their terms. The community was working every day, putting in collective hours to create a cycle of media entertainment around the game for others to see and join, while the company itself did not sponsor or pay for these activities. Looking back at it, Rot Games for a long time worked to coexist with prosumers; accepting free advertising, in fact, expecting free work from people like me as the audience members became an important part to the structure of maintaining the game’s popularity. When big community members expected special treatment from the company for their free labor, they were not rewarded because they didn’t own any of the product they were remaking and mass distributing. For myself, the same is true and the time I spent contributing to the community was just free labor, giving away my intellectual property.

To examine how these online influencers brought hundreds of millions of fans to play the game, a modern look at the way we’re using technology to our advantages will explain these possibilities. There are many games made from big producers who invest much more into the creation of their games: EA, Activision, and Ubisoft. The reason League of Legends is able to have so much more success is because its style isn’t hardware intensive, allowing for nearly anyone with a computer the access of playing. It is also free to play with online currency structures; removing the only financial barrier from not playing the game. Our society is heavily digitized since tech is becoming cheaper and cheaper to the point, I could have a smartphone and a computer to play games for around $350; less money than a couple weeks of groceries for some. These two technologies allow access to all types of entertainment which transforms us into an engaged community for the game who act across a multitude of online communication mediums, create, remake, and distribute our own work. This is a form of fragmentation; although the video game only exists as one type of entertainment, fan span far and wide across the internet on YouTube, Twitter, Wikis, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, 4chan and others while I have access to each of these within any convenient context, always seconds away from either my phone, iPad, laptop, desktop, and smart TV. These technologies allow for audience autonomy where I can interact by posting a video by using my webcam, or comment on another’s user generated content. These enabling social media platforms include the means to watch the video, give feedback through likes and dislikes, and offer comment sections where the audience can interact with the producer. Early content creators were rewarded for their creativity in a new subculture and placed them higher than developers in the perceived hierarchy of the game. One of my favorite creators, ‘Videogamedunkey’ is an example of a creator who saw early success and even after his departure, is realized by the community as it’s king by many. He was a potentially dangerous figure for the publishers at the time because his content often including remixing of other online content where the game is being compared to any number of copyrighted medias, and his words engaged more fans than the official game’s accounts on social media. When he was filming a new video of him trying to win games and gain a higher rank as opposed to his usual comedy content, his internet fame stopped him. Many times, when he would play, others would recognize him and stop trying to play competitively, starstruck by seeing the youtuber in their game. Videogamedunkey became the target of trolling and in one of his games, verbally abused another player for their actions. The game has strict rules on friendly communication, and certain words and phrases result in automatic bans from playing the game. Videogamedunkey felt entitled to special treatment because of his status and free labor for the company and requested he be unbanned to finish the video. He was denied this treatment and slandered the entire company in a single update video and his departure from the community. This instance showed a crack in the participatory culture around the game; it was a visual-audio representation that community members are nothing more than consumers for the large billion-dollar company. Many who followed the YouTuber across his social medias and creators similar left the community as a sign of protest. This movement showed a new folk culture; players reflected on their efforts and revalued their time spent in order to make the cultural move of finding new games to replace League of Legends. In the “read-write” culture, gamers followed a single person who through interaction with fans, was able to change and influence and small portion of the culture within the community. In the broader context of the success of League of Legends, this instance lost them only a small percentage of fans but was soon replaced as the most popular game in North America by Overwatch, and soon, Fortnite. Videogamedunkey has also kept most of his fans at around 6 million YouTube subscribers, although has not risen in popularity since. League of Legends is still an extremely popular game and that success should be thanked by the participatory culture that is rooted in its beginnings and what still continues today through content creation of professional players across a network of fragmented audience members viewing all mediums of social media.

This effective use of transmedia production has become an expectation of modern participatory audience members. Taking a broader look at the  

To conclude what I’ve learned about media audiences and how they operate today and, in the future, I will look at my current favorite content creator Marquez Brownlee and the advertising technology of Google. I’ve explained earlier that I enjoy watching videos based on new technologies and smartphones, and that I use my own smartphone as a tool to structure entertainment viewing and media participation throughout my entire day as a constant ritual. Marquez Brownlee has gained my subscriptions across many different media platforms because of his expertise in transmedia production. My gratifications as a fan are gained through intertextuality and interactivity, rewarding me as a fan for paying attention over the course of time, understanding references and being able to interact with the creators. Marquez does this by his use of different media platforms. On his main YouTube channel, he is a very cinematic smartphone reviewer who occasionally reviews other tech like headphones, smart home products, and tesla. For me, Marquez exists as a paratext; he is able to offer me meanings about new products and I trust his opinions. Based on his review on a phone, I’ve placed it on my shopping list, sold my old phone, and bought the new phone as a discounted black Friday price, effectively making money while getting a new expensive piece of tech which gratifies my needs including my social status and entertainment with a larger screen to body ratio, making movies more vivid on the go. Due to my understanding of buying and selling applications like Kijiji and my use of paratexts, I am able to use this information to become an informed consumer and profit from trade to gratify many of my needs as a consumer.

Marquez’s content is also becoming increasingly important to my daily rituals because he makes content which is able to fit my free time due to his understanding of fragmentation as a creator. He creates content that seamlessly travels with me during my daily activities. I watch his cinematic reviews when I can give visual-audio attention to learn about my new phone. When I’m driving to work, I turn on his podcast to listen where he gives a more in depth talk about the new technologies he’s reviewed over the week. Once I’m home and I want to scroll through some social media before going to sleep, he’s active on Twitter, excited to talk about what upcoming tech he’s going to try out in the near future, so I have something to look forward to in the coming days. The structure that is being used on me is one that fully embraces fragmentation in the new media landscape. I am always seconds away from viewing his work and it offers seamless transitions of entertainment based on my own special, social, and time contexts while offering me intertextuality between the texts by ‘continuing the conversation’ among all of these different media platforms. Even in the last 10 minutes of his podcasts, he dedicates time to mention questions his community has asked and give’s shout outs to other people’s content in the community. This fills my need for interactivity as a community member, which instills the feelings of fandom I previously found in League of Legends. This utilization of medias fits what audience members like me expect and big companies are realizing this and building similar structures; having multiple social media accounts, creating videos, blogs, and interacting with fans. As an agent of my own consumption, this structure works the best for now until my needs evolve again which if anyone can guess what that is, it is Google.

I’ve been selling Google products for a few years and I need to know how they work and their business model. I own a Google smartphone, use Google software in the form of search engine and YouTube. I also own smart thermostats, speakers, TV’s, and Light bulbs. Most importantly, I heavily rely on Google’s voice assistant to perform hands free tasks. Something interesting is that physical Google products, despite dominating software, don’t include great hardware, but this is on purpose. Google’s phones are known for having the best cameras, but they are also much lower in cost to produce. This is because Google has invested in machine learning technologies across all their platforms to fix our issues as consumers. If my photo doesn’t look good, machine learning has look at billions of photos and knows what feature should stand out and offers me a DSLR quality photo without any work or production value. In other words, since I have given Google access to look at my photos, I gain the benefit of better-looking selfies. Similarly, if I give Google consent to my viewing habits, I can watch unlimited on-demand YouTube videos that are catered to me, or if I give my location, I can find the cheapest gas near me while driving if I ask the assistant. Google is an advertising company and all this information that is taken is used to give to machine learning that advertises me things based on my history as an audience member. Since it is a software, this advertising is able to track me through my accounts across the fragmentation of using different devices on different websites. No type of advertisement other than Google’s can be as successful because they have no way of tracking audience members fragmentation like Google can. To explain the cycle of my latest smartphone purchase, Google advertised Marquez’s review of the Oneplus 7 Pro on YouTube, Google gained the information that I viewed the whole video, then went online to do further research on the product, and within a week, my Google news feed that is built into my phone advertised Oneplus 7 Pro black Friday deals as the top story curated for me. As a salesperson, the informed buyer is the hardest person to sell to. Google’s software is able to become a new type of salesperson that is consistently making the right offers and denial of services means the loss of being an active member of the modern media. 

                                                     References

Sullivan, J. L. (2020). Media audiences: effects, users, institutions, and power. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.