#its a very weird trope to be so common from my perspective because like. why not just. break up the couple you dont want. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shimzus · 1 year

Text

【直接的性格】 BLUNTNESS AND DIRECTNESS

kiyoko is one of the more blunt characters in haikyuu , evident by the way she refuses second-year tanaka’s proposal , humbles the third years during their shrine visit by informing them that a prayer to the gods won’t grant them a victory at nationals , explains to sugawara that she has no intentions of marrying him when she tries to steady his hands with her own , and constantly rebukes tanaka and nishinoya’s outlandish requests to be spanked/scolded.

this blunt character is unique , not only as a character trope , but also in cultural context. directness is viewed as a negative attribute in japan since it can be conceived as abrasive and self-centered—— and it’s especially considered a negative trait for women. in a lot of ways , japan is still conservative about femininity , and women’s behavior is certainly not exempt from scrutiny. most women in media and in trends exemplify youthful cute charms ( girlish femininity , innocence , kindness , etc. ).

it is rarer to see mature and “sexy” styles , especially those that also involve blunt and direct personality types. part of the reason that kiyoko isn’t criticized for being blunt is because she’s attractive and able to suit this style. other haikyuu characters who go against the natural grain like ushijima and tendou don’t have the same sort of social “clout” that a beautiful high school girl does , so their directness is considered a fault. tendou isn’t conventionally attractive and he’s a bit of an otaku nerd ( which isn’t a problem in today’s high schools , but in a private high school 10 years ago could easily have been an isolating factor ) , and ushijima is attractive but a jock-type who doesn’t have the same social fluency as other students ( since he focuses mostly on volleyball and might produce very one-note conversations ). kiyoko may be blunt , but comparatively she doesn’t have anything that ostracizes her from fitting in. she simply chooses not to engage with people at times.

of course , if she weren’t attractive , her bluntness would be considered a fault. it’s simply because she was lucky enough to be beautiful that her direct personality isn’t considered “abrasive.” instead , it lends her character to the onee-san trope ( a mature , no-nonsense , cold woman type ). being beautiful and blunt effectively elevates a woman to some goddess-like level. it may be because onee-san types are somewhat “rarer” to find—— not only is beauty “rare,” but a woman who isn’t the average girly/cutesy type is also “rare.”

however , i think it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that kiyoko isn’t completely cold-blooded and unfeeling. her behavior with the team may make her an onee-san type , but with other characters and other teams , she’s not quite the same. rather than directly refusing others , she adopts a technique of disregard or avoidance. she ignores oikawa who tries to talk to her , rather than confront him—— a person she doesn’t know—— by saying she has no interest in him. she also avoids talking to the players on other teams at the training camp in tokyo who are ushering to try saying hello to her , by instead chatting with the female managers she’s more comfortable with.

when she does have to interact directly with someone , she’s polite and indirect. terushima stops her in the hallway at the spring interhigh and rather than be blunt or ignore him , she uses the typical japanese style of deflecting ( which is considered more polite ) and explains that she has people waiting for her. in japan , people understand an excuse like this to mean that she’s not interested and to signal that she’d like to break away.

also , the way that she interacts with yachi and the other female managers completely contradicts the notion that she’s cold and blunt. tanaka and nishinoya even ogle that she’s chatting a lot , smiling , and having lots of “girl talk” with the other managers , which means that she’s not the sort of solitary person who blocks everyone out.

at face value , an outsider would see kiyoko’s behavior of being quiet , enjoying time to herself , and avoiding/ignoring interactions with people she doesn’t know as being very onee-san-esque. it’s easy to label her as an onee-san because of her outwardly expressed behaviors , in conjunction with the fact that she also doesn’t fit neatly into the cutesy girly trope. from my experience , most japanese women are sorted into these two categories ( the third might be somewhere in the middle , like the “girl next door” type , though that tends to lean youthful and girly too ). but this trope is , of course , just a shallow label and doesn’t hold any weight when considering the spectrum of kiyoko’s social styles. it may just be because most people don’t end up talking to her that they view her this way.

in my portrayal i try to emphasize depth in her personality—— her humor , her tendency to take care of others without being asked , and her thoughtfulness that may not fully manifest as words or actions beyond simply her own ideas. i do think that she’s more blunt and direct than most people. i think she’s not afraid to speak her mind , and to do so concisely—— which isn’t common in japan. i think it makes her a unique character when compared with others in the series. however , i don’t think it’s the one and only aspect of her personality , nor do i think it should be emphasized as the encapsulation of her personality. it’s just one element , and clearly one that she disproves by her proclivity for disregard and avoidance , and her ability to have friendly , sensitive , and supportive conversations with other characters.

#headcanon tag tba.#anyways i just think the onee-san trope is really interesting #because from my experience like 90% of the japanese women i meet are all very cutesy girly and feminine #(obviously from a western perspective theyre much more feminine than me or american women)#so i'm often called an onee-san bc i'm not 'cute' .... like i'm very ambitious and focused and my coworkers have said its very 'sexy'#and i think a lot of people think onee-sans are very refreshing because they're not the trendy norm in terms of style or attitude #but like all tropes saying kiyoko is onee-san type is very shallow because she's actually quite normal and she can have warm conversations #she's a normal high school girl it's just that she doesn't really fit in the cutesy trope box that well and her attitude is more...#'i enjoy being alone too' and 'i'm focused and serious about things that matter to me' and 'i don't always care to humor weird requests'#so on the outside that would make her seem like an onee-san type. and for a lot of people that means she's EXTRA beautiful #i dont wanna unpack het mens psychology and why onee-sans are so attractive but honestly #i think kiyoko gets more attention than a cutesy beautiful girl would... even though theyre both beautiful #her personality SOMEHOW makes her more attractive and i can only think its because its not really common here #and it definitely makes women seem untouchable and elevated to be a bit colder and mature-like #one of my coworkers is quite beautiful and serious about her work... and our other coworkers are in awe of here #her*#even though there are other teachers who are equally as attractive but not as diligent; and some who are diligent but not beautiful #it's really interesting jgksj anyways #i do want to explore more... nonblunt kiyoko stuff.... kiyoko with friends being warm

6 notes · View notes

ohgaylor · 2 years

Text

i have many thoughts on the lavender haze discourse that i won’t get into here. i simply want to analyze some thoughts about her quote. but i first want to emphasize that it’s worth recognizing we haven’t heard the song yet so we don’t entirely know how she’ll explore the topic. and as such, i think it’s too early to be frustrated with the situation or to point fingers at anyone (on any side of the debate) because we simply haven’t heard the song yet, so we can’t be sure what it will be about, particularly given her quote about it. and i’ll get into why.

first of all, as is often the case with Taylor, she may likely be saying one thing publicly (referencing her 6yr relationship, rumors, etc) only to have the lyrics point in an entirely different direction. (as was sort of the reverse case with Betty, where many people instantly interpreted the song through a queer lens before she suggested it was written from a male-James’ perspective.) i’d argue that Taylor often allows for this ambiguity and even encourages it surrounding her art (is pronouns, tropes, etc) it’s something she has long done throughout her career.

so with that said, before i address her quote about the song, it’s important to note two key definitions that have to do specifically with lavender and relationships:

lavender haze — a slang term coined during the '50s, referring to being in love.

lavender marriage — a male–female mixed-orientation marriage, undertaken as a marriage of convenience to conceal the socially stigmatised sexual orientation of one or both partners.

note the first definition, which Taylor has explicitly referenced, is purely positive in its description of the status of said relationship. it’s a time of joy and optimism. Taylor alludes to as much in this first half of her quote…

Lavender Haze is track one on Midnights, and I happened upon the phrase “Lavender Haze” when I was watching Mad Men and I looked it up because I thought it sounded cool, and it turns out that it’s a common phrase used in the 50s where they would just describe being in love, like if you were in a lavender haze then that mean that you were in that all encompassing love glow and I thought that was really beautiful.

again, a very positive description of said love. not a care in the world. just pure love.

well, then things shift in her quote. she takes a deliberately different direction by suggesting that the lavender haze is state of one’s relationship that is fragile and is worth protecting. she says that if this love is found out, that people will weigh in on it and ultimately bring it down. so she must do what she can to protect the real stuff.

that’s not only extremely queer coded if you ask me, but also this shift instantly caught my attention because it doesn’t necessarily have to do with lavender haze whatsoever. but more so with the definition lavender marriage, as you’ll recall from above. here is exactly what Taylor said in this second half of her quote…

And I guess theoretically when you’re in the lavender haze, you’ll do anything to stay there, and not let people bring you down off of that cloud and I think a lot of people have to deal with this now, not just like quote unquote “public figures” because we live in the era of social media and if the world finds out that you’re in love with somebody they’re gonna weigh in on it, like my relationship for 6 years we’ve had to dodge weird rumors, tabloid stuff and we just ignore it and so this song is sort of about the act of ignoring that stuff to protect the real stuff.

quite a specific perspective wouldn’t you say? again, it has nothing to do with the simple definition of lavender haze, of blissfully being in love.

but rather, i interpret this as her articulating a much more nuanced closeted relationship, where dodging rumors is a reality (skeletons in both our closets plotted hard to f*** this up), where this relationship is worth protecting in every possible way because if people we to discover it, they would bring it down (something happens when everybody finds out, see the vultures circling, dark clouds, love's a fragile little flame, it could burn out, whispers turned to talking and talking turned to screams, our secret moments in a crowded room, cynical clones, hunters with cellphones)

i simply think it’s fascinating this secret love motif is ever present in her work.

we know Taylor loves to take a common phrase and give it a new meaning, or simply to twist its meaning with a sense of literary license she proudly holds as a songwriter. perhaps this is a case of that, where she is aligning herself with lavender-esq relationship terminology deliberately, by using a decoy of lavender haze for a lavender love that is far more secret.

because afterall, every bait and switch was a work of art.

for reference: all my analyses; mad men dialogue / scene / overall context

ps. i think it’s worth navigating these spaces with delicacy. we can’t assume what exactly it is she meant by “weird rumors”. because seconds later she mentions “tabloid stuff”. we simply don’t know much yet. i think it would be beneficial for everyone involved on any side of the debate to refrain from going at others and instead wait until we hear the song before we judge the situation.

pps. i’m not suggesting that concealing one’s relationship is an exclusively queer experience. certainly many celebrities encounter that. however, it absolutely is a reality within the queer many face. and given her track record and the continuous themes of her music, it speaks for itself. i am simply pointing out themes i see and addressing them through my lens.

#myanalysis #i haven’t even really gotten into the details of certain implications people are throwing around #it’s just interesting the way she starts talking about a love worth protecting #like out of nowhere??#i simply think there may be more to the song and her intentions than people are catching on #because coming out is in fact a very delicate thing #queer*discourse #lavender haze #taylor swift #taylor's authenticity problem #lgbtqia #gaylor #mine #analysis #midnights

25 notes · View notes

692blog · 7 months

Text

mcu tiktok: finding your super-family

the marvel cinematic universe, or the MCU, is the universe that most marvel movies inhabit; begining with iron man in 2008 stretching to the most recent guardians of the galaxy movie in 2023.

what this means is that every movie, no matter whom it is about, takes place in the same reality as the other superhero films. the first avengers film is the capstone of this concept, with all of our favorite heroes uniting to fight together.

the avengers, 2012, marvel studios. photo: handout/reuters

the mcu fandom is massive, with the 'marvel cinematic universe' tag on fanfiction website archive of our own hosting almost 500,000 pieces of writing. (the most popular fic, with over a million hits, is an 'extremely nsfw fic' from the perspective of a character named groot, who only says 'i am groot' in varying cadences and is also a tree.)

technicalities aside, what the mcu has done to fandom at large is immense. the sheer amount of characters, relationships, and fantastical superpowers are fertile grounds for fans to stretch their creative muscles.

because of these characteristics, the mcu community on tiktok is huge. what makes this chapter of fans unique not only to its platform but also to its fandom is the presence of short, video povs.

these mcu tiktoks are very similar to the dracotok videos previously discussed - muted audio, captions, superimposing into movie scenes, etc. dracotok and mcutok, because they are both based in popular films, require the watcher to self-insert themselves into the story.

something distinctive to marvel povs is that while they do oftentimes encapsulate romantic relationships, what they highlight the most is the use of a trope called found family.

a found family is, at its simplest, a family that you’ve created yourself that isn’t blood related to you. think close friends, spouses, mentors. the concept of ‘found families’ has its roots in the LGBTQ+ movement, where people found their own families that love and support them, because their blood-related ones might not.

when it comes to the mcu, the found family trope is usually applied to the avengers cast. iron man, captain america, black widow, the winter solider, spiderman, the list goes on. with the amount of trauma that these superheroes go through, they are irrevocably bonded and thus a found family is born.

the avengers found family concept originated in the copious amounts of fanfiction written after the initial 2012 release of the film, and has evolved to fit new fandom spaces, like long-lasting media always does. common tropes included hawkeye (clint barton) working his way through the vents of the avengers tower like a hamster, thor (thor) having an obsession for poptarts, and steve rogers (captain america) being a secret artist.

i reached out to one of my former roommates, a former avid marvel fanfiction reader and someone who would like to remain anonymous, to ask why exactly some of these tropes existed. they responded to my inquiry with:

the idea of domesticated avengers was super big... there are so many stories of them living together and being roomies. and then in 2013 the humor was a weird mix of like just general internet mustache humor but also the general trend of making like tough scary characters seem like big softies.

in the modern day, a lot of the mcu pov tiktoks focus on these fabricated domestic relationships. while romance is there as well (you would be hard pressed to find a fandom space that does not revolve around it), there’s a substantial population of family-focused content (content about families, not content that is family-friendly).

these videos tend to play out a situation wherein y/n (your/name, the ubiquitous protagonist of all fan content) is the focus of a problem or joke, and the mcu cast around her (it’s always a girl) reacts accordingly.

like dracotok before it, these tiktoks do not usually have audio dialogue. there’s text up on the screen overlaying clips from the movies, with a trending audio backing.

for the mcu, these audios tend to be in one of two categories: badass montage music, or a hilarious dialogue snippit to emphasize the sarcastic nature of y/n’s relationship to the avengers. some newer tiktoks use AI voice generators, but they’re not very popular as they balance the precarious line of what content is deemed 'canon' and what can be manipulated.*

popular mcutok tropes include:

1. tony stark (iron man) as a father figure

notice the call out: "for all my daddy issues peeps out there" - an accurate callout, as most desire for a found family comes from the lack of a foundational accepting one. being accepted despite being 'too much' is attractive to a lot of watchers, as extreme fans (of anything) tend to be condemned as 'too much'. also, if the line "your beauty never ever scared me" seems out of place for a marvel movie, it's because the line is from mary on a cross, a song by heavy metal band ghost. it's also the audio playing in the background of the tiktok, so, instead of whatever he was originally saying, tony now comforts someone who previously thought they weren't worth the trouble.

2. y/n is injured/suffering/otherwise hurt and hiding it

the caption summarizes another popular trope: y/n not wanting to 'worry anyone'. pretending to be fine but actually being the opposite is commonplace for heroes (and traumatized young adults), so imagining someone, especially your favorite character, taking notice and worrying over you, fills a gap of previous neglect the watcher may have.

3. an avenger (in this case, captain america), as a concerned older sibling

the use of movie clips shows the round robin of characters (minus, thankfully, captain america) taking a drink to admit they've kissed y/n. this tiktok hints at a promiscuous, but fun, adult life with the avengers. one that includes kissing and drinking games - a y/n life filled with respect, and more importantly with a found family trope, familiarity.

3. y/n is a badass superhero

this tiktok includes non-marvel movie clip (scandalously, it's a clip from DC's suicide squad) - to showcase y/n's super abilities. again, with emphasis on power and respect, y/n initially seems like a normal girl, but has backing by captain america and is obviously important enough to be interviewed by some sort of nondescript agent. it gives an air of effortless power, something the avengers embody and y/n tends to perpetuate. per usual for tiktok, there's a dramatic song playing in the background. this time it's all the good girls go to hell by billie eilish, which includes the lyric "don't say i didn't warn you". a lot of these tiktoks have dialogue following the lyrics of songs playing in the background, even if it makes the whole piece sound stilted and awkward. the untouchable cool that comes with your own backing track is one of the hallmarks of marvel movies that permeates even the micro-media of tiktok.

4. an even more do-it-yourself trope; the creator posits a situation and doesn't tell you who the watcher is supposed to be. in the comments, the watchers guess at their own pov - almost like a community suggestion board.

in this tiktok, tony, while hanging out with the other avengers, hears an enrapturing voice coming from inside his house.

notice the description: #POV: ??? - the woman's face is never revealed, all you see is a cunning smile with perfect teeth.

and the comments:

people are writing multiple sentences to set up this situation, ending comments with numbers, indicating is more written as a reply. these watchers are almost micro-dosing fanfiction, quickly typing out a pov for others to enjoy before scrolling on. casual watchers who might not normally comment can read these situations while the tiktok plays over and over again in the background. this not only creates more engagement, but allows the watcher to think of the video from multiple povs as they listen to the audio repeat itself.

overall, these tiktoks are a symptom of the very basic human desire to belong. while the avengers are superheroes, the heart of these povs are love and support - your dad comforting you, your older brother worrying about your love life - the super strength and flying robots are just added bonuses.

*one of my favorite pieces of academic writing ever, "Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author" by Lesley Goodman for the Journal of Popular Culture, expands more on this concept.

#tiktok #mcu #marveltok #mcutok #povs

1 note · View note

weirdmarioenemies · 3 years

Photo

Name: Third Research Scientist of Love Lab

Debut: Rhythm Heaven (DS)

Another post about a Rhythm Heaven character! There are so many Wacky Rhythm Heaven characters we can talk about. But it’s not every day we get to talk about Rhythm Heaven. It’s loosely attached to Mario, through WarioWare, but it’s just enough of its own thing that it is out of our field of view. This is not Super Mario’s Super Mario World. Getting to talk about Rhythm Heaven is a major event. We must savor the Funky Fridays we get to spend our elusive Rhythm Heaven points.

We’re using this Friday to talk about some dude in a squirrel suit.

youtube

He appears in Rhythm Heaven in the minigame Love Lab, which is actually one of my favorite games in the series! That’s right! I managed to get invested in a guy and a girl falling in love, something unexpected from my usual lesbian self. I can’t help it! I just love scientists. “Weird scientist” was like, my whole online persona way back in the day. (And besides, these two are both obviously bi. Look at them.)

Anyway that’s enough time talking about those two, they’re both regular humans and while I respect them and their relationship, they aren’t nearly as interesting as the third guy who is also there.

What, you didn’t notice him? Well, it makes sense, I suppose. (iiiiiii suppose, yeah!) He’s just off-screen, catching the flasks You’re throwing. They realized it would be dangerous if you were throwing around chemicals and no one was catching them, as if throwing around chemicals isn’t dangerous in its own right, so they added this guy, and since he’s barely visible, why not make him Wacky? You’ll be so busy paying attention to the cute scientists and good tunes that you won’t even notice him.

The guy’s fully-sprited, but is tough to notice in-game considering how off-screen he is. He is so dang off-screen. Fortunately, you can get a better look at him if you get the Try Again screen!

Yeah! Good job sucking at Love Lab! Your reward is Squirrel Man face reveal!

Or if you don’t want to ruin their relationship, you can just wait for the end credits where he also pops in during the cast call.

Hello!

We know very little about Squirrel Man, but I think that’s kind of the point. They hid the guy off-screen, he doesn’t have much lore, I think his entire purpose is just to exist and be weird, which I think is delightful. I like the philosophy of whoever decided this minigame about scientists falling in love needed some guy who always wears a squirrel suit.

At least, that’s assuming this is a squirrel. Could be a chipmunk. (though scientifically speaking, chipmunks are a type of squirrel)

The main reason I say squirrel is because “Science Squirrel” is apparently a common trope in Japanese media? At least according to Mod Chikako, I know Risukuma from Puyo Puyo and Himari from Precure as a couple examples. And Sandy Cheeks from SpongeBob, though that’s probably a coincidence, given that all the other examples have Japanese origins. If we’re to go with this, then that gives a little more explanation to this guy, but not too much. I think there’s still plenty of room to theorize what the heck this guy’s deal is.

And that is EXACTLY what I’m here to do! It’s half the reason I’m writing this post in the first place! Below the cut, is various theories about what this dude’s deal is.

1. He’s a furry, that’s his fursona.

Let’s get the obvious (and boring) one out of the way first, which is that this guy is a furry, that’s his fursona, and he always wears a fursuit for some reason. I mean, it makes some amount of sense, if we assume he’s that dedicated to the whole furry thing, then sure, why not wear his fursuit to the laboratory? The thing is, this theory is just such low-hanging fruit. It’s too obvious. Look at the guy. The explanation I think obviously has to be something weirder.

2. Genetically engineered Squirrel Man

This is probably the most obvious “more interesting” direction, and it’s not like it doesn’t make sense. The whole minigame is set in a laboratory, and if we take into account the characters’ blatant lack of lab safety, this isn’t your ordinary laboratory... Who’s to say there isn’t a bunch of weird science going on behind the scenes? I mean, one day they’re trying to figure out what love is, the next day they’re building a squirrel guy. Just your average laboratory shenanigans.

While it is stated in-game in the Lab Journal that he wears a suit, this is purely from the perspective of the green-haired girl, who is said to be new to the lab. Maybe she just thinks he’s wearing a squirrel suit. Maybe she doesn’t know the full truth.

Of course, I don’t think he HAS to be a squirrel man to be interesting...

3. Back on that comment about lab safety,

Full-body protection. While these other two are throwing around flasks full of chemicals without even wearing GOGGLES, this guy is making sure to protect every last inch of his body by wearing a squirrel suit. And maybe he’s wearing goggles under the suit, just for good measure!

Maybe this whole experiment wasn’t even about love, maybe it was about lab safety. Maybe this guy noticed how much his lab partners were smitten with one another, and were too distracted to pay attention to things like wearing proper gear in the lab. He theorized that their relationship had something to do with their total disregard for safety and he was right.

4. School mascot gone rogue

His uncanny full-body uniform is weird for a scientist, but perfectly normal for a school mascot. Maybe he was originally cheering on the university sports team, but eventually got tired of sports and decided to pursue a life of high science instead. Why doesn’t he take the suit off? Tough to say. Might loop back around to the lab safety thing.

Alternatively, in the Rhythm Heaven universe, maybe schools just have mascots for their labs alongside their sports. You know! To... help keep the science fair going?

5. He’s the one dude’s ex

The idea is that he’s simply the first scientist’s ex, they broke up on good terms, and so he still gets to stick around in the Love Lab. Does this do anything to explain why he’s wearing the squirrel suit? No, not really. Maybe the first guy just fell in love with the school mascot (see theory 4) and the squirrel guy just wanted to take interest in his boyfriend’s passions and so he signed up for a job at the Love Lab. And eventually they broke up but he decided to stay around the lab because now he was invested in learning about love. Something like that.

6. He’s lonely

Do you realize how tough it is to stand out in this world? And in a lab where everyone’s researching love all the time, how heartbreaking it can feel when you see everyone around you falling in love while you remain alone? He wanted to make sure everyone would notice him, so bam! Squirrel suit!

But that isn’t to say it was effective. If we go back to the Lab Journal, it took the green-haired girl three days to notice him at all, and he spends the entire minigame off-screen! Not even the CAMERA felt like keeping him in focus. Maybe if you see the squirrel guy at the Love Lab any time soon, you should give him a hug. Maybe he deserves it.

7. He Just Looks Like That

Some people just look like squirrels. It’s rude to stare.

Maybe none of these theories are true, maybe multiple of them are. We don’t know. We’ve never gotten much lore for this guy, but I’m kind of glad about that. This sort of intrigue breeds curiosity, and honestly the more wacky theories that can be proposed surrounding this guy’s existence, the better! It’s part of the reason I fall so in love with minor and obscure characters. You’re given just enough information to get an idea of what the character is, but are given a lot of room to let the creative juices flowing. That’s why I think Third Research Scientist of Love Lab is one of my favorite Rhythm Heaven characters. Congratulations!

#rhythm heaven #rhythm heaven ds #love lab #research scientist of love lab #mod hooligon #funky friday

388 notes · View notes

duchezss · 3 years

Text

Buckle in folks cause I’m about to put more effort into this than an english assignment Presenting Why Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous is actually an amazing show

Now what defines the term amazing you might ask? I’m talking about a show that goes above and beyond in plot, characters, storytelling, and overall experience. Nowadays most adult shows don’t meet my standards much less a kids show so if that gives you an idea how good this show is stop right now and go watch it if you haven’t. Spoilers ahead ofc but as an aspiring film major I will be diving into just about everything I love and this is gonna get long.

For your convince I will start with a simple bullet point list and then extend on them below, so if you only wanna see the big points and not my thoughts behind them this first parts for you.

Black mc

Diverse main cast (4/6 are poc)

Actual plot lines and a lot of suspense

Very dark for a kids show

Complex characters that develop

Fits in with the main Jurassic World series beautifully

Body language and facial expressions are top tier

Have genuine relationships (platonically and/or romantically) between all of the main 6

Phenomenal camera angles and use of special effects

Great with details

Amazing VA’s

Continuity

So the nose dives begins

Black mc: To some people this might not matter that much but holy cow this is so important and such a big step. The people complaining are just weird middle aged white people, like do you know how big of an impact a black mc can have on young black children. It’s so important and it makes them feel happy because someone actually looks like them. Clear evidence of this was Into The Spider Verse (which is also an amazing movie oml). Come to think of it the only black mc I think I’ve ever seen in an animated kids show is probably Static Shock (also an amazing show ily). Somehow representation has got swept under the rug in this day and age which is ironic really, but this show does an amazing job with tackling that and I love it.

Diverse main cast: I can’t think of any recent kids movies/tv shows, live action or animated, that have this much representation. In animation is also very easy for the show runners to make a character poc and then have a white VA, but jwcc is quite the opposite. Honestly the characters look so much like their VA’s that something tells me the animation team based the characters off them and not the other way around. Not only that but their names actually match with their ethnicities. So for reference or just anyone that doesn’t know, Ben and Brooklynn are white, Sammy is hispanic, Darius is black, Kenji is asian, and Yazmina is middle eastern. Sammy’s last name is Gutierrez, Yazmina’s is Fadoula, Kenji’s is Kon and Darius’s Bowman. Gutierrez is a common last name in Mexico and Latin America in general. Fadoula is found throughout upper Africa and the Middle East, Kon is rare name of Japense origin, and Bowman is a common last name among black folks in the US. So not only do they have a poc cast, voiced by poc people, but all the characters have realistic names. Not to mention they are very good on skin tone in the show, personally I think Yaz should’ve been just a bit darker but hey I’ll take it and run.

Actual plot lines: This seem like stating the obvious but work with me here. Most kids and even adult shows have a very episodic format, there’s nothing wrong with that per say but having a plot and conflict build up and having little things matter is much more satisfying in my opinion. Most kids shows have some conflict but its very PG which is also fine that’s what it’s meant for. But every once in a while you’ll find a show that had plot wise beyond it’s years and those are the golden ones. Easily and rightfully the most famous is Avatar the Last Airbender or ATLA. This show to this day is still one my favorites and truly nothing will ever top it, but in my years of watching kids shows after it jwcc might just be second. We can argue all day about what’s the best and it’s truly a matter of opinion, but to me atla and jwcc just achieve such a level of complexity that 99% of kids and even adult shows don’t reach.

Very dark: While this might not be exactly the best for kids it’s great for an olderish audience. Honestly it having a much darker element makes the show enjoyable for all ages while still keeping it chill enough so that children may watch. But come to think of it it’s hard not to make a show about dinosaurs dark, the show runners do a wonderful job at keeping it intense and exciting, but still kid friendly, and to me thats incredibly impressive. Not to mention since the show isn’t afraid to go dark they can do more (such as ben’s “death”, the hunters etc) which makes it go from good to great. Reminds me a lot of atla and I know I keep mentioning atla but know that is the biggest compliment ever. atla is easily the best animated/kids show of all time so the fact that a bring it up so much is huge. There have been shows in the past that have tried to replicate what atla (such as voltron..) and it just hasn’t worked. I think this show nails the boundary between too dark and not dark enough.

Complex characters: Oh yes. If there’s one thing I love more than an ensemble cast it’s a cast that grows and develops as the series progresses. Sure the main 6 might start off as typical character tropes (Darius the super fan, Yaz the loner, Sammy the extrovert, Ben the underdog, Kenji the arrogant, and Brooklynn the influencer.) but they become so much more than that. I’d say at least half of them are completely different people between the 1st episode and the latest one. An easy example being Ben and Kenji. Ben started off as a naive, timid, and terrified person and has become confident, independent, and brave. Kenji started off as arrogant, selfish, and apathetic person and became compassionate, driven, and concerned. All of them have had some sort of change even if it’s not super dramatic and that’s important. It makes the storytelling better because they grow as they go.

Fits in with JP/JW beautifully: In terms of shows connecting to movies this has gotta be some clone wars level s-tier stuff. Personally I have never watched clone wars but my sister has and she always raves about how well this show connects to the movies, and from what I’ve seen I completely agree. A youtube channel by the name of Silverscreen Edits actually put together the scenes from every time they overlap, mainly in S1 but also the cold open from Fallen Kingdom. I’d advise you to watch it because it’s just incredible. The show runners nail ever detail of these scenes and it truly feels like you’re watching the same scene from a different perspective. The set up is beautiful and I cannot rave enough about how amazing it is, my favorite easily being the dome scene because of all the small details. Not to mention this show actually connect JW and FK because it shows us that the cold open was 6 months later while the rest was 3 years later. Quite honestly I had no idea these two scenes were that far apart from each other, I thought the opening was from a years or two later not 6 months, so this show really connected the dots between these two movies and made them flow together much nicer. And I love all the countless references too old and new JP/JW movies. Overall this show is a great addition to the franchise.

Body language and facial expressions: You might be thinking to yourself, hmph that is a really odd point to make, let me tell you it’s not and I’ll explain why. When analyzing films I usually tend to stick to live action because one of my favorite parts of films is how characters react to things, and we animation we really don’t get that. Most of the time even if shows get this complex they won’t use both the way jwcc. What impressed me so much was how amazing they are at this, the animation team seriously needs more praise. Jwcc is great at facial expressions which I will say other animated shows know how to do as well, but they are also so amazing at body language which is rare rare when it comes to animation. It’s because it’s so hard and often times it just doesn’t fit, but they do an amazing job with this and it makes the characters feel so life-like. When a character is sad or closed off their shoulders hunch, when they feel scared they stiffen up and cover their ears (which is another detail I love so much, I never realized till this show that hardly anyone ever covers their ears and it makes a lot of sense because these dinos are very loud) and when they feel hopeless their shoulder sag and their head drops, do you see what I mean? You can quite literally tell what these kids are feeling and thinking without them saying anything that is so impressive and it makes the show that much better. It makes it easy to analyze and if it wasn’t clear around I love to do so.

Genuine relationships between all of main cast: I will not budge at this point at all, gonna say it right now if you disagree argue with the wall. I might have some bias on this but one, if not my favorite, part of any media is an ensemble cast. It’s something I actively seek out, and when I say ensemble cast I don’t mean a trio, I mean a full cast, my favorite being 6 but 4 or 5 will do. So when I found out this show had 6 main characters I was immediately interested. Not only because I love ensemble casts but I also wanted to see how they handled it. Ensemble cast are so rare because they are extremely hard to do and do well. I will even criticize atla on this. At one point they had 6 main characters and they never elaborated on more than a handful of the duos and just focused on the group as whole. But this is typical and easiest to do without giving up individual character development so I get that. But jesus christ jwcc does a phenomenal job with this, and I mean phenomenal. Out of the 15 different duos you can get between 6 characters then have elaborated on 11 of them, and it could easily be more this is just from memory. I might make a post elaborating on this specifically because it’s just amazing. This time they take to flesh out these relationships truly makes them feel like a unit and a family, instead of just a group of people all working towards the same goal. This is easily the most impressive and rewarding of any of the points on this list in my opinion. (coming from #1 squad lover right here)

Camera angles and special effects: This shows downfall for some was that it had strange animation, honestly it never bothered me and since I’ve watched dragon prince and rwby, it’s clear that bad animation never stops me from watching a show. But I think people just won’t give it a chance, because when you do you’ll see it’s actually very good. To me the coolest part of the animation is the dinos. They look incredible and so so similar to the cgi used in JW. That’s hard to do so more claps for the animation team I love y’all. They also have to work around the PG side of this show and do a great job at implying what happens but never actually showing what happens. This is all angles, not to mention they do a great job at showcasing the park and the scenery so that magic from the movies really translates to the show. Finally my favorite scene of the show from an avid slow mo lover has got to me when Ben falls of the monorail (idk why it is cause he’s literally my fav and I was so upset) The scene is just beautiful and the set up before hand makes it that much more heart breaking. The use of slow mo is amazing I literally cannot rave about this scene enough. It builds so much suspense and they used just the right amount, to much and the scene would move to slow, and to little the scene would be to fast. I need more great scenes like this in S4 (idk if I want the angst that comes with it too I’ll get back to you)

Details: To me details, in any show in general, is what makes it go from great to fantastic. An example of this is Harry Potter, something that hooked me into this franchise was how much small details mattered and it’s the same with jwcc. There are so many throw away lines that end up coming back and all us are hitting ourselves for missing it. Such as Ben saying early on he knows where the tracker beam is and when he “dies” and the crew can’t find it it shows how important he was. Those are details I love to see. Or the three dinos, one of which Sammy released, coming back all season. Of course toro as well and he always kept his burns. Not to mention the animation team always kept Ben’s scar in and I think that’s an important detail because he shaped who he is. Keep up the good work animation and writing team because I love what you’re doing with this (also I’m 90% sure the compass is another one of these details I’m calling it rn)

Amazing VA’s: Honestly VA’s in general do not get enough credit and they really should. But these 6 are pretty amazing let me tell you. If I’m not mistaken Ryan Potter (Kenji’s VA) is the only one with a notable history of voice acting as he played the title character in Big Hero 6. (fun fact I had no idea and when I found this out I quite literally screamed). But the others have also done things as well, most of it being live action though, and voice acting is much different. Honestly I just need to make a post about the various roles they’ve had cause looking into this has been an experience. Anyway all of them do such an incredible job with this ahh. I think the times where you can really tell how different they all are is when they lash out. This happens quite often and honestly it’s expected, I mean they’re 6 teenagers in a stressful environment of course they’ll last out. But all of them have such a different way of doing it, Darius is hopeless, Kenji is nervous, Yaz is emotional, Ben is harsh, Brooklynn is stern, and Sammy is level headed. Usually everyone lashes out the same way so the fact that they’re so different in just one aspect shows you how good they are. Each character is so individual and all of them have different goals and morals which is not only realistic but it makes way for conflict which is always interesting.

Continuity: Now this could arguable go with details but it’s slightly different so I’m making this a separate point. Continuity to put it simple it basically not have the show be episodic. Honestly that completely what I expected from this show because that how most kids shows are. In this show the plot not only progress each episode but so do the characters and their trauma. Most of the time the plot will progress but anything bad that has happened to the characters will not show and is hardly talked about (COUGH VOLTRON). To me it’s something that has to be addressed because if the characters don’t grow what was the point of it. And they’ve shown that characters grow based on the events that happen and I love that. Another thing about continuity is when show runners stick a pin in something and actually go back to it (COUGH RWBY). Jwcc is amazing at this and make a point to bring back just about everything that gets sidelined in the first place. It’s so impressive and make the show that much more enjoyable. There have been countless times where I get so caught up with the pins that shows just leave there and it makes me so mad, but jwcc is good at for the most part because of course some things will slip through. But they always get back to the important things.

The conclusion: Overall this show is phenomenal and if my essay hasn’t convinced you I’m not sure what will. The show is amazing at storytelling and plot and the lovable main cast makes it that much better. It is so much better than a good chunk of kids shows and honestly part of me wishes it was rated PG-13 cause I really wanna see that. But they do an amazing job and keep it kid friendly enough while still discussing mature topics. It’s the next atla to me and something that many kids shows now days try to be and fail. It’s impressive and complex and truly one of the best shows I’ve ever watched. Film major mara out, and if you actually read all of this ily mwah.

#jwcc #jurassic world camp cretaceous #jurassic world #jurassic park #jesus why did I write so much lmao #I have issues I spend more than 2 hours on this..#hyperfixations go hard ig

40 notes · View notes

mallowstep · 3 years

Note

What are your opinions on forbidden relationships in Warriors? I've seen people label it as a "trope" because of how common this is. Some find the forbidden romance aspect intriguing, though others find it extremely repetitive and old

I'd like to know your thoughts!

hm. well, it is a trope. i mean, there's an average of one major one a series, right? greysilver, leafcrow (and others, but that's the big one), heatherlion (and implied others), tigerdove, idk i don't remember anything from avos but violetshine luv her but there's probably something, bristleroot. dotc doesn't count bc well it's dotc.

anyway.

definitely a trope.

but that's not a bad thing.

what i think people don't give warriors enough credit for is that these are not all the same forbidden romance. most of them are handled in different ways and bring up different conflicts. i understand why people are tired of them, but let's not discredit one of the only good things in warriors romance: that they make forbidden relationships different.

like, with grey and silver, it's about loyalty and responsibility. leafcrow is just bad idea central, both heatherlion and tigerdove are about responsibilities and young cats, and they have two different answers, and bristleroot is challenging the whole idea from the start.

so like. give credit where credit is due: we're not doing the same (forbidden) relationships again and again. i don't see enough people talk about that.

okay so it turns out i have um. a lot of thoughts about this. idk i just kept writing and now it's over 2k words. so you know. under the cut: matthew does half-baked media analysis to talk about why the code and cats' relationships to it are misunderstood. while actually staying on topic.

anyway from here on i'm just going to say relationship/romance, and understand that i'm generally talking about the forbidden kind. also i'm talking exclusively within the realm of warriors romance, which is, on average, bad. so when i say "X is good," i don't mean "X is good in general," i mean "given what we have, X is good." just to be clear.

right! basically, this is a tool. it creates tension and drama, and that's fine. warriors is a soap opera, remember. soap operas use secrets and relationships and all sorts of plot devices over and over again. warriors is not Serious. it can be dark. it has serious moments. but it is not a Serious Book Series for Serious Kids. it is a soap opera for Future Theatre Kids. yeah?

from that perspective, i'm a-ok with forbidden romance. (also, as a mini-aside, it creates some much-needed genetic diversity when kits are involved.) and again: all of the major relationships are different, so i think that's better than a lot of people give it credit for.

yeah, heatherlion and greysilver and tigerdove are all about the same general idea (loyalty and responsibility), but they all have different circumstances and different resolutions.

so like? yeah. sure. why not?

plus, like, who's reading warriors for the romance? i separate the concept of "romance" from a "relationship" here: i like the relationships in warriors (ivy and dove tension my beloved), but i'm not here to read about tigerheart wooing dovewing. (yes, i do love the tigerdove scenes in oots. no, that's not because i think they're very good at being romantic.)

but i digress.

if warriors was a Serious Book Series for Serious Kids, i'd have a different take here. having been in an IRL forbidden relationship, i have the Personal Insight and Experience to say they're this weird mash of "very much how it feels" and "not at all how it feels."

tigerdove is probably my favourite bc it's the closest to my circumstances, and i think dovewing is a good pov. i like how she breaks up with him because it's a bad idea, but that's not the same thing as not feeling for him.

(heh. twelve-year-old me reading oots like "this will never apply to my life" what did you know)

but to the point, if warriors was serious, i'd point out that the consequences always seem to be internal. we haven't seen characters be punished for their actions. and so on.

but warriors is a soap opera.

and here's my actual thesis: we haven't seen characters be punished for their actions, because "forbidden relationships" are a normal and expected part of clan society.

like no, fandom-at-large, you're kind of missing the point. okay, you know how like. people complain about. idk. ivypool and fernsong being distantly related?

(third aside/very long ivyfern rant, i put a nice big "rant over" after it if you want to skip past it: they're third cousins. they share, max, 2.2% of their genetics. they are fine. do you know your third cousins? do you? yeah. and like. they live in a closed society. there is no one new.

i've never seen someone complain about forbidden romance and ivyfern at the same time, and i do generally agree we should have more mystery fathers, altho for a different reason, but like. idk. this bothers me.

their last shared relative was nutmeg. that's so far back. god. i get it, there was a prophecy saying they're related, but if you remember my rant about how dovewing shouldn't be a part of the prophecy because of how distantly related to firestar is, you know how i feel about that already.

complaining they're related and that's a problem is. deep breath here. it requires demonstrating that warriors has kept track of kinship all the way back to firestar's mother. and even if you wave that requirement, you still have to convince me they would care about that. this isn't a "they're cats, harold" situation, this is a "you would not know your third cousin even if you lived in the same town" situation.

i mean maybe you would. some people do. but my hometown has generations of people who married within its borders. you get as far as "cousin," maybe "second cousin" if you're feeling fancy. i'm not trying to make an always true statement, i just. every time i see someone complain about ivyfern being related, it strikes me as not understanding how extended families work?

i know third cousins isn't technically classified as a distant relative, but you have, on average, 190 third cousins. i feel so strongly about this i looked it up.

like i'm not. okay if you say, "I don't ship ivyfern because they are third cousins and that makes me uncomfortable" you are Valid. in general, you are all valid. i do not think you have to, on a personal level, be okay with ivyfern. you are free to do as you wish.

but. if you want to argue "ivyfern is a Bad Ship because they are third cousins" you have a hell of a burden of proof. simply saying "they share a great-great-grandmother" does not meet that, because like. yeah. we're all pretty damn related.)

(ivyfern rant over)

IVYFERN RANT OVER

right so. anyway. if you remove forbidden romance? you're forcing a lot more of those situations.

i've been messing around with modelling some small-scale fan clan-adjacent stuff to double-check the ratios for wbcd, and it's. it quickly becomes a necessity, is what i'm saying.

but i got distracted like. researching how related third cousins are. my point is not about that, that's like. a different topic. that i crammed into here because i have no self-control.

no, no, what i was trying to get to is: oakheart straight up tells us that cats have half-clan kits all the time, it's not a problem, no one talks about it. and that? that is exactly what we see modelled by warriors.

the only reason greystripe and silverstream have a problem is that silverstream dies and greystripe claims the kits. i feel very strongly that if she had lived, the kits would have been born and raised riverclan kits, that might, maybe, one day, guess who their father is.

we haven't had any half clan kits in a while, which yes! i think is a problem, but like. the fact that the three are medicine cat kits seems to be a bigger issue. which feels right.

and i'm not trying to argue what i think should be, i legitimately believe the text of warriors defends this, even in newer books which throw out a lot of the older world building in favour of more human-like conflict.

as readers, we are naturally following protagonists. we are following the interesting story. but imagine you're just a background riverclan cat. minnowtail, if you will. do you think, do you honestly think, anyone cares about minnowtail?

not in a bad way, just. if she's meeting up with mousewhisker at night, do you think anyone cares? of course not! no one cares. she's not a Protagonist. her kits aren't going to be prophesized about.

heck, finleap switches clans! and it's barely a big deal. it feels like one, but when's the last time anyone bothered dealing with it? that's what i thought.

(also i forgot like all of avos so that very last point might be a bad one if it is my argument stands i just literally do not remember anything in avos but violetshine. none. zero.)

but it's easy to get caught up with characters like hollyleaf and bristlefrost and forget that like. not everyone cares about the code. most of our protagonists do, because it's become mostly equivalent with being moral. and i have an essay draft titled "the code as religion vs the code as law" where i want to expand on this more, but i think like. that idea, that we as readers should use the code as a way of evaluating cats' behaviour, is flawed.

like, i'm not talking about being inconsistent with how that is applied. if you want to say, "the trial leafpool goes through for having half-clan kits is legitimate because of the code," i still think your approach is flawed.

because the cats themselves don't seem to think that way.

the code doesn't, to me, feel like the ten commandments. it does not feel like "you must do this to be a good cat."

rather, it feels like aesop's parables. "here are mistakes cats made and what we do instead of that."

i don't think the cats know the code the way we do. i do not think they memorize a list of rules as kits. i think they know what is and is not part of it, but i imagine they know the stories far more than the rules.

(i'm working on my lore stories to replace code of the clans.)

and even if that's my thoughts, i do think this is supported by the text. no one ever teaches the warrior code, cats just learn it in pieces. "don't waste food because we don't have enough to spare" is taught, not "there's a rule about food and starclan on the code."

that's why the whole arc of the broken code even works: the reason the imposter is able to manipulate things is because cats don't treat the code as a rigid set of rules and commandments, but guiding principles.

the parts of the code that we tend to focus on the most are relationships, apprentices, and battle. or that's my perception. i didn't do a poll to obtain that. there's also the leader's word, but readers don't usually think of that as a good rule, so i'm not including it.

but the parts the cats focus on most are food, territory, and the leader's word. which makes sense: those are basic needs: food, security, and...i don't want to say authority so much as some kind of social system. explaining it would be a whole thing. just trust with me, if you don't mind.

i don't think we have any real reason to believe cats care about half-clan relationships half as much as we do. yes, apprentices are chastized about it, but that's not really the same thing as being punished.

and it's hard to tell, because apprentices being punished has really fallen off, and that's kind of the problem with any argument i try to make about warriors, but.

wow.

i'm actually still on topic? i'm 2k words in and i'm still on topic? a day i never thought would come.

let's wrap this up. cats seem to care about half clan relationships in that: a) they lead to conflicted loyalties, b) they mess with borders and prey, and c) they are in the code as bad. in that order.

and again, if the code was some high and holy religious doctrine, we couldn't have the broken code as an arc. it does not work if the cats are already following it to a t, and know it word for word, because it's signfiicantly harder to manipulate people if they do.

not to the level the imposter does, at the speed he does.

and yes, you could argue that it's more bad writing, but. i think that discredits warriors. yeah, it sure has its fair share of bad writing, but i don't think that's in the way the imposter works. instead, he seizes on a big important doctrine that's nebulous, and uses that to control people.

and that? that feels much more interesting.

so with that in mind, i don't think the cats would care about your typical, non-protagonist forbidden relationship, and i don't think we should, either.

as far as a plot device, i think we're okay with what we have. don't get me wrong, i understand why people are tired of it, but i think we also should remember that warriors is not repeating itself. having multiple forbidden relationships is not repetitive. now, if medicine cats were having half-clan kits every series, i'd make a different argument.

but all of the major forbidden relationships have different outcomes, lessons, and circumstances, and for me, i think that's signficantly interesting.

i didn't really check sources and quotes for this, so like, if you spotted something wrong, feel free to correct me. my overall point stands, but there's a lot of warriors and i have a bad memory, so i could have missed somthing major.

#ask #anon #essay #mine #discourse #not really but you know

36 notes · View notes

dwellordream · 3 years

Text

A Six of Crows Review: Joost and Inej I

This marks the beginning of my review of Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. Before I go any further, I want to provide context for my experience/knowledge of the book and its fandom. Six of Crows was published in 2015 when I was 16. I picked it up in a bookstore and read the first few chapters idly while shopping, before putting it back down.

At the time, my dislike of what I’d read was probably primarily fueled by the realization that it was by the same author as Shadow and Bone, which I had tried to read a few years before and disliked, and because at the time I was aging out of the YA genre in general and had very little patience for many of its familiar tropes.

In recent years, Six of Crows and its companion and predecessor series, the Grisha Trilogy, have become one of the most popular YA series online. The avid fan response and promotion of it on social media no doubt led to the Netflix series being greenlit and it is obviously trending at present due to the success of the series. With all that in mind, I’ve decided to try Six of Crows again and see for myself what all the hype is about.

Some more caveats: I am 22 years old. I am aware Six of Crows is YA literature intended for a middle and high school audience. I will not be holding it to the standards I would hold an adult grade fantasy book, in terms of prose, themes, or content. I am aware that I am not necessarily the target audience for the book and these reviews are in no way intended to shame or disparage anyone who enjoys the book.

Criticism is a healthy part of any fandom and does not necessarily constitute hate. I will likely critique elements of the book in my write up. That does not mean I have a personal vendetta against the author, publishers, or the TV show. Please do not take this as a personal attack if you’ve enjoyed the book. This is just intended to promote discussion and to gather my own thoughts.

If you follow me, I am tagging this as ‘in review’ so you know what to block if you don’t want to see my posts on your dash. I will be going through 1-2 chapters per weekend. This weekend I will be looking at the prologue, aka Joost, and the first Inej chapter.

Jumping into things, here is Joost:

The prologue is our introduction to Ketterdam, the setting of Six of Crows. It’s been a very long time since I read Shadow and Bone and so all I really know is that Ketterdam is a city in an island known as Kerch, based off the map. The major countries or kingdoms of the mainland to the east appear to be Fjerda, Ravka, and Shu Han, though it is unclear how they differ from one another at this point.

Ketterdam through Joost’s eyes is a sinister and dreary place, a city under a grimy night sky and full of dangers. Joost works as a hired guard for a very wealthy man named Hoede, who keeps grishas, powerful magic users, as indentured servants. Joost is infatuated with one of them, Anya, a healer, though he knows she is not likely to return his affections and furthermore cannot wed without the permission of her owner. We also learn that grishas are at risk for being kidnapped and sold by slavers due to their value. However, the indentured servant system of Ketterdam thus far doesn’t seem to be much better than slavery, given how little freedom the grisha have.

Overall, the prologue is supposed to give us a sense for the setting of Ketterdam and interest us in the main hook of the novel, which seems to be a mysterious substance that grisha can ingest to heighten their powers for the benefit of their masters, though it has the risks of making them uncontrollable. How well is this done?

Through Joost’s perspective we can glean several things; Ketterdam is a dirty city with rampant income inequality, full of crime and corruption. Magic is an established system within Ketterdam, but the magic users do not seem to be at the type of the hierarchy despite their powers, which suggests they are a minority to the extent of which they can still be controlled by the elite class of non magic users, if they have enough money and power.

It is also very obvious through the references in the prologue that Ketterdam is heavily based off the Netherlands during the Golden Age, which was Amsterdam’s (Ketterdam… Amsterdam… not subtle) economic and cultural boom during the 17th century, aka the 1600s. Notably the world’s first stock exchange began in Amsterdam in 1602, and it was a major port and trading hub for the Dutch East and Dutch West India Companies.

It is not clear if Ketterdam is also intended to be a 1600s-esque society, timeline wise, but we know that rifles are common place and there is a thriving merchant class who rule as opposed to old aristocracy, which seems to indicate a Renaissance style setting, as well as the urban environment in general. (That said, from the advertisements for the Netflix show, they seem to have updated it to a more Victorian-era 1800s society, in terms of fashion and general aesthetics).

Overall, the prologue does its job. It gives us a vague idea of what Ketterdam is like, how the society is structured, and who holds the power. It also ends on a suspenseful cliffhanger, leaving Joost’s fate unclear. Where it falls flat is that I think a little more time could have been spent fleshing out Joost as a narrator, even if this is his only showing in the book.

His internal monologue comes across as a bit dry and mechanical, as if the author is aware he is just a means to an end to start the book off with a bang, and he quickly turns into a walking camera (just there to report events to the reader, with no internal input from him), for the second half of the prologue, as we switch to just watching Anya and Hoede through his eyes. That said, it’s not a major problem, as Joost is clearly not intended to be a main character, and his narration still effectively conveys what is happening and sets the dark tone of the novel.

What I would have liked to see from the prologue is perhaps the POV of Anya herself, or the small child she is being forced to experiment on, as that might have been a more compelling and immerse introduction to Ketterdam and its dangers rather than the fairly bland and neutral Joost, who doesn’t really feel like a character so much as a bland stand-in for the reader. If we were put in the shoes of Anya, suddenly called upon by her power hungry employer to participate in this unethical test, or in the shoes of the small boy caught up in the middle of this, it might have been both more thrilling to read and given a more gritty sense of what it’s like to be on the lowest rungs of Ketterdam’s society, at the mercy of the most powerful.

Moving onto Inej, we run into some similar problems. After Inej’s first chapter, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about her, other than that she was an acrobat as a child, that she is part of the street gang known as the Dregs, and that she intensely values loyalty. This isn’t a problem, per say, but while that’s all good to know, it doesn’t give me any sense of Inej’s actual personality, which doesn’t exactly bode well. Like Joost, she comes across more as a walking camera and occasional tourist guide as opposed to a human character with her own worries, hopes, and fears.

I think this may become a recurring problem with Bardugo’s writing - ie all tell, no show. Inej is good at telling things. She tells us where we are as we follow her to the location of a stand-off between rival gangs, she tells us that Kaz, their leader ‘doesn’t need a reason’, though she never exactly explains what that means other than that he is widely feared, she tells us that she is very fond of her knives.

But in terms of writing, we shouldn’t have to be force fed all this information via her internal monologue, which, again, entirely cuts out once the action picks up, just like Joost’s. While I don’t need her thoughts on every threat or gunshot, it would be nice to feel as if she hadn’t just vanished from the story completely as soon as the dialogue starts.

We also meet Kaz and Jesper, though I couldn’t tell you much about them utter than that Inej clearly admires, even venerates Kaz as an accomplished intimidator and chess master, and that Jesper is clearly the joker of the group.

It also feels incredibly weird that this parley between gangs in happening in front of the city’s stock exchange. Inej tells us this is because the Exchange is one of the few remaining neutral territories, but it’s also heavily guarded, which means every time a gang wants to parley, they have to pay out the cash to bribe all the guards to very pointedly ignore a meeting between rambunctious and trigger happy street gangsters on their literal doorstep.

I understand why Bardugo chose this location, wanting to contrast the violence of the gang members with the economic injustice that the Exchange and its merchant rulers represents, but it just seems a bit silly. They couldn’t meet at the docks? In an alley way? This is like picturing the American Mafia hosting a public meeting at the New York Stock Exchange with a bunch of cops twiddling their thumbs nearby.

The foreshadowing that Bollinger is the traitor (‘I’m not going to bet on my own death’) also seems very heavy handed and a little much, but I’ll let it slide.

It’s also not really clear while Inej is present at this meeting in the first place. Kaz commands her to keep watch from above, but he has also put a contingency plan in place that doesn’t even involve her, having bought out some of Geels’ men from under him. Why put Inej looking down from above if you’re not involving her in this plan? Her only role seems to be to watch, and she doesn’t even have a gun she could play sniper with. It just seems like a hamfisted way of getting Inej out of the danger zone so the author can have her as a passive spectator to the violence that follows.

This is my main problem with this chapter. It’s supposed to introduce us to Inej, but really, it’s introducing us to Kaz. Which is fine, but as he also has a POV in this book, it seems a bit lame that her own chapter is completely overtaken by showing off A. his smarts and B. how dangerous he is, despite being dismissed as a young ‘cripple’ by the likes of Geels.

Geels is also… not a greatly done villain. I get that he’s supposed to be small fry and is just a precursor to much more threatening opponents, but his every line of dialogue feels designed to show off how cool and Machiavellian Kaz is in comparison. He doesn’t seem like an actual hardened criminal who has underestimated his opponent, but a somewhat cheesy cartoon thug who unironically says things like “How are you going to wriggle your way out of this one?” with his full chest. The effect is comical, and not in a good way.

This chapter also shows off Kaz’s sadistic side in full display, which is probably one of the only interesting things about it, though it would be nice if we got any input at all from Inej on this… instead she completely vanishes from her own narration, to the point where she might as well not be present at all. Kaz has no qualms about tracking down his enemies’ weakness, such as lovers and family, and threatening them.

But the open horror and shock Geels reacts with seems incongruent, as if Kaz were the first up and coming gangster to actually consider threatening someone’s family or girlfriend. That seems pretty par for the course for violent criminals trying to claim territory and unnerve their rivals, yet Inej and Geels himself react as if no one had ever thought of sinking to the level of ‘do what I want or I’ll kill your loved ones’ until Kaz invented it. It just feels a bit silly and on the nose.

Really, my overarching issue with this chapter is that it’s not about Inej at all, it’s just an introduction to the Kaz Brekker fan club. I don’t automatically hate Kaz as a character, but his introduction is heavyhanded and comes at the cost of any establishing character moments for Inej. The most we get out of her is her brief pangs of sympathy for Bollinger despite his treachery, and her brief reference to her childhood. Maybe future Inej chapters will totally change this, but right now, it’s not a great sign of what’s to come.

I can think of about a hundred things Inej could have done or said this chapter to develop or establish her personality at all, but all we got was her briefly holding a knife to someone, and her briefly saying a prayer for Bollinger. I think it would have worked much better had this plan to catch Geels with his pants down been Inej’s invention or at least worked out between her and Kaz, rather than her just there to play lookout and admire how cool Kaz is.

Or at the very least, we could have seen the scene referenced where she searches the crime scene of the assassination, instead of that getting two lines and an entire chapter being devoted to what boils down to a pissing contest over which gangs gets rights to a certain neighborhood.

Next week, we will look at Kaz I.

#in review #six of crows #ya lit #inej ghafa

12 notes · View notes

absynthe--minded · 4 years

Note

opinions on the recent russingon meta? tbh i love russingon, i love black fingon headcanons, but i do agree that it's a little weird when fingon gets totally sidelined in fics as just Maedhros' Emotional Growth or the Black Nanny. i mean, russingon really lends itself to hurt/comfort, which is fine, but i think ppl sometimes neglect fingon's arc. thoughts as a russingon writer? (no accusations, love your work, but wanted your perspective on other ppls russingon works)

(Wow this got long, lol.

Full disclosure - I haven’t read the recent Russingon meta, or offered any substantial response to it. Quite a lot of people I know have, but I’ve not had the time and my brain hasn’t been cooperating with me to read large chunks of text over the last couple of days. I have opinions on your ask as I’m seeing it now, and that’s what I’ll be responding to. I’m also not black, though I’m not white either - my ethnic group is one that has troubling stereotypes associated with it of caring for white people/acting as sage dispensers of advice/etc, but I can’t speak to the breadth and depth of the black experience when it comes to being a ‘black nanny’ in fiction, and I’m not going to try to.)

So, Fingon being a cardboard cutout/emotional support animal for Maedhros and Fingon being perceived as black by large portions of the fandom are two things that arose completely independently of one another. Fingon being Maedhros’s support animal is a trope as old as Russingon itself, and possibly is as old as the published Silm itself. I’ve read Russingon fics that were almost as old as I am, Russingon fics published last week, Russingon fics that vilified the Nolofinwëans, and Russingon fics from the turn of the 21st century when the Fëanorians were seen as uncomplicated villains. Fingon being a cardboard cutout is ubiquitous through all of them. It doesn’t matter how old the fic is, it’s basically guaranteed.

The reason for this is that Maedhros is far and away the most popular character in the Silmarillion, and his pain and angst and mental strife and trauma are front and center in many writers’ lists of priorities. If it’s not Fingon propping him up, it’s Maglor, or another brother, or an OC - this is a very common genre of Silm fic and it’s not limited to Russingon.

But.

This is my least favorite Russingon trope and it’s the entire reason I’m writing Blessed Hands and why all my Russingon fics are at least majority-Fingon POV. I can’t fucking stand it, and it completely kills my interest in a story. I’m super picky with my Russingon fics because of this trope, and because of its ubiquity, and I’ve talked about it on my blog many times before. For me to love a Russingon fic, it has to be about how they anchor and support one another, and how their mutual and equal investment in their relationship is the foundation of their lives. This trope’s not nearly as common as it used to be, thank Eru, but it’s still around, and I cannot talk enough about how I Hate It, lol. It’s also old enough and omnipresent enough that the majority of fics feature it, and - interestingly - the majority of fics also feature white Fingon.

Alongside this, Black Fingon arose out of a non-Russingon intracommunity discussion among the artists of the Silm fandom, in about 2013. I saw this play out in real time on my dash, and so while I can’t source posts reliably, I can promise this is as accurate as I can make it.

The paradigm shift came as a result of content creators realizing that several of their number weren’t white, and quite a few people in the fandom weren’t white, and yet 100% of art and fics featured white elves with zero real diversity (and a number of very troubling, somewhat stereotypical older illustrations of Men as the only significant examples of people of color in Middle-Earth). There was concern as to why this was being accepted as the norm when there was ample opportunity for representing both one’s own ethnicity and other people of color (and a lot of concern about unexamined racism in white artists who found themselves unable, for various reasons, to picture heroic elves as anything but fair-skinned) and the general consensus was that we had more consistent information from HoME draft to HoME draft about hair color than skin tone, so why were we all picturing our heroes as white?

Fingon in particular was headcanoned as black due to a discovery by a fan (whose URL escapes me, sadly) who I’m certain was black themself. There’s a passage in The Peoples of Middle-Earth describing Fingon as wearing his hair in plaits braided through with gold, and this fan made the comparison to hairstyles worn by IRL black people. The idea was that he was the most uncomplicatedly brave, heroic, and noble person in the Silm, and look, he could be a man of color! There was also a sort of gentleman’s agreement to refrain from making explicit connections beyond that to real human ethnic groups/cultures/races. The logic behind this was that if the generic Eurofantasy aesthetic was kept, white artists would be encouraged to draw diverse elves without concern for cultural appropriation, as well as steering racists away from caricature and the ability to twist a well-meaning effort into a stereotypical attack.

When these ideas first emerged, there was a lot of resistance. Arguments were made that those of us who advocated for diverse elves and specifically black Fingon were discreetly accusing other artists of being racist, or were acting purposefully holier-than-thou, or just wanted to start drama. There were some people who claimed we’d attack anyone who didn’t agree with us that elves were brown. This was an exhausting mess to deal with and it was a major part of my disillusionment with discussing racism in the Tolkien fandom - the majority of voices were reasonable people but the minority was loud and obnoxious. I bring this up to say that diverse elves were genuinely progressive and forward-looking in 2013, even when it was more or less explicitly stated that they had no real ties to existing human races and they had no change to their characters.

Black Fingon, agreed upon outside the Russingon fandom, and Fingon the cardboard cutout, the most reliably present version of Fingon in Russingon fic, sort of ran into one another. No real change was ever made to Finno’s character upon making him black - this would have been seen at the time as unnecessary because his character was just fine as-is, and the whole point was that he could be exactly as he’d been before and be black or brown, that men of color had the exact same range of emotion and depth of character that he did when he was perceived as white.

The problem is that there hasn’t been much examination of the idea that Fingon being a black man who exists to prop up a white man is uh. Really racist and kind of fraught.

All I have to say really is that this wasn’t a conscious decision by anyone to be racist - the opposite, actually. As I mentioned above I can’t speak for black people, or for other BIPOC, but my opinion is that it’s an unfortunate and unconscious choice that has nothing to do with Fingon’s race and everything to do with the fact that his character has been seriously neglected for decades now. It opens the door to a lot of really frustrating tropes and plotlines that smack fans of color in the face with how bigoted they are, and it’s something that I’m glad is being discussed, if only because I’ve been trying to push for a reevaluation of Fingon’s personality and general role for a long time now (though of course I’m also glad that this is actually getting acknowledged as a harmful thing real people now are at risk of doing).

My solution? Same as ever - “write Fingon like a real person with interests and desires and goals of his own, and treat his family like they matter, and flesh out the world he lives in. Listen to people of color if you’re white, educate yourself regardless, and learn to avoid harmful tropes.” If that becomes the fandom norm? I’ll be a happy Absynthe.

#replies #anon replies #RUSSINGON #absynthe's meta

64 notes · View notes

spaceseinensam · 4 years

Text

Denki Kaminari is the traitor and I can prove this through his character design

I actually wanted to analyze all of the character designs of class 1-A, but this theory has been burning in the back of my head for weeks, so now I’m doing the shortened version with just looking at Denki’s part. Hey-ho let’s go.

1. Lists

First off, we have to create an analytical basis. In my opinion, the students of class 1-A can be separated into 4 different categories in regard to their overall “importance” to the story (I know that sounds rude and I personally hold all the kids very close and dear to my heart, but from a storytelling perspective you got to admit that there are some characters given less screen time or story beats than others and as a result tend to be less important than characters who have lots of flashbacks etc.). The categorization is based on an objective view of the series and I will try to explain why I put certain characters in certain categories along with naming the categories.

1) prime primary characters (100% not the traitor)

Deku, Bakugou, Shouto

These three are the main focus of the series, the protagonists if you will. They get the most screen time, the most flashbacks, and the most backstory information and are untouchable pillars of the story’s groundwork. All two (or three) of them have their own personal character arcs that span longer than just one story arc (see Bakugou slowly learning not to be an absolute gremlin, Deku’s long journey of becoming the hero he wants to be, Shouto learning to deal with his father’s abuse and family situation). Even if you’d say that i.e. Shouto is not important enough to be counted as one of the protagonists, he is still one of the most recognizable characters of the series and definitely on the forefront when it comes to fleshed out characterization.

2) primary characters (70% not the traitor)

Ochako, Tsuyu, Iida, Kirishima

These four characters are the main group surrounding the protagonists and are fundamental as the supporting cast. These include the first two real friends Deku made at UA, Ochako and Iida, as well as Tsuyu and Kirishima. Ochako is here because of her connection with two characters from the prime primary category: she is one of Deku’s closest friends in addition to being clearly framed as his main love interest, as well as being in one of the more important fights from the Sports Festival against Bakugou. Iida is connected to two characters from prime primary as well: like Ochako he’s close friends with Deku, but also shared a lot of spotlight with Shouto during the Stain storyline. Kirishima seems to be only connected to Bakugou at first (being the first one to try to befriend him, reaching out to him during Kamino, being reminded of his strength through Bakugou during his own backstory flashback), but with the recently finished Overhaul arc in the anime he also had his time to shine alongside Deku during that arc. Tsuyu was a bit of a tough case to categorize as she did not have any flashbacks or bigger story arcs for her own (yet), but she is also one of those closest to Deku and did share an emotional moment with him and Shouto after the Bakugou rescue mission. She is also a very recognizable face for the series (so much that my friends who have never touched a piece of BNHA media named her as one of the characters they think are in the series “there’s the protagonist, then this boy with the split hair colours and...That weird frog girl, right?”). Characters in this category have backstory and flashbacks like those from the prime primary category, though these are dealt with and then accepted as a staple in the story, and not ongoing plot structures. Examples for this are the mention of Ochako’s motive for becoming a hero, Iida’s revenge plot and Kirishima’s backstory during the Overhaul arc. These are important story beats that flesh out their characters, but once the arc reaches its end the character growth for the character in question slows down a lot or comes to a halt entirely. Counter example is Bakugou’s ongoing character growth throughout the series, which will remain as an arc throughout the whole thing because of his status as prime primary character. If one of these characters were to be the traitor it would not be a series destroying move, though in my opinion it’s still very unlikely, since these all have proven themselves to be close friends with the prime primary characters, shared emotional moments with them and gave us all a look into their motivations and backstory to a point, where I just think it’d be highly unlikely for one of them to do a 180 and turn out to be ‘evil’. For those already typing that that’s the point, that we should think the traitor is not this close to the protagonists to then be surprised by the reveal, I have to tell you that that is not how story-telling works. If you put a character in a story, make them best or very good friends with the protagonists, make them save and/or help them during tough situations, make them have flashbacks to their own childhood or develop backstory with the prime primary characters by their side, and then reveal them to have betrayed them the entire time without setting it up beforehand, you are not a good writer. Neither Iida nor Ochako nor Kirishima nor Tsuyu have had a situation in which they did or said questionable things or acted in a way that would make one stop for a moment and think about what just happened. They also all have a very high recognisability for the series and turning one of them ‘bad’ would be way too ground breaking for BNHA. (I know that Hori likes to subvert shounen tropes and such, and I admit that he manages to surprise me a lot, but he still largely follows the main story beats, plot structures and character functions other shounen writers before him did, so I assume that he won’t pull the reverse Uno card and make for example Tsuyu the traitor, because that simply goes too much against the current of shounen and other media of the type).

3) secondary/support characters (very likely to be the traitor)

Mina, Kaminari, Aoyama, Tokoyami, Jirou, Momo, Sero

These characters are sort of there to fill the classroom, but are designed and set up in a way to potentially have backstory and character growth. These are characters that have had small arcs mostly connected to the prime primary and primary characters that weren’t really that in depth or emotional, but are a great set up for more growth. One of them is most likely to be the traitor in my opinion because they kind of stand in the middle: they are recognizable for the series (see for example Mina, Tokoyami, Jirou) and have had short touches with backstory (see Aoyama talking with Deku about him not being compatible with his quirk, Mina having a small part in Kirishima’s backstory), or character development (see Momo showcasing her skills during Joint Training, the current small arc in the anime of Jirou learning to save people through music), but are ultimately kept in the background. To sum it up, they are very clearly meant and designed to be secondary to the main cast of prime and primary characters.

4) full-picture characters (too unimportant to be the traitor)

Hagakure, Koda, Shouji, Ojiro, Sato, Mineta

These are characters which are in my opinion very clearly designed to “just” be background characters, or as I call them “full-picture” characters (in the sense of them filling empty spaces in a class picture). This does not mean they will never get any development, though they are very likely to stay in the background and act as very minor supporting characters to prime and secondary characters. These characters are designed to be very simple and often have a constant joke that goes with them (see Mineta being a pervert, Ojiro being plain) and are meant to create a basis for interactions between prime and secondary characters. They are literally too unimportant to be the traitor, meaning if it was suddenly revealed to be one of them, there’d be no screen time, no real dialogue and no backstory to back it up (up to now). Characters can move from this category to the secondary character category, though this is currently still unlikely.

Possible spoilers from here on out!

2. Look at these characters and tell me their personality

Ok, now that I’ve categorized all my precious hero kids into their story-level importance, I think it’s time to point out something that hit me yesterday at 1 AM: I noticed that the more important a character is for the series, the more ‘human’ their character design is. I’ll try to explain: in the world of BNHA it’s very common to have a sort of ‘mutated’ body, most times to accommodate for a quirk, though sometimes the mutation seems a bit random. However, the series is filled with people who have multiple body parts, highly deformed body parts or otherwise bodies that deviate from the to us normal human form. Now let’s look at our kids and their importance levels: all the prime primary characters have completely ‘normal’ human bodies (btw, single-colour colourful hair will not be counted as deviating from the normal human form, this is still an anime we’re talking about). They are all average heights for boys their age, no extra body parts, no deviation from an average anime boy face. Yes, there’s Shouto with his two-coloured hair and two-coloured eyes, but the split only applying to his hair and eyes makes him still look very much like an average human, as opposed to i.e. if his skin was also two-coloured and split in the middle. I think it’s not that surprising for the three main characters of a shounen to look like normal teenage boys, since it’s still a series meant to appeal to a widespread audience and I don’t think that could have been achieved if Deku and his two prime buddies were all heavily mutated. For now, let’s look at the primary characters: Ochako is very humanly designed, no weird mutations or crazy design elements aside from the pads on her finger tips. Iida is also very human, no deviation from the norm in face or body aside from his engine pipes in his calves. Kirishima also looks like the average anime boy, the only time he looks rather ‘inhuman’ is when he fully activates his quirk and goes into Red Riot Unbreakable. Tsuyu is the only one out of the primary characters whose body and face deviate more heavily from the normal human form (though the deviation is also not that crass or remarkable). And what did I say while categorizing her? She is tough to categorize because she hasn’t played that big of a role in the story yet, that she had a few emotional moments with the prime primary and primary here and there, but ultimately she does not have a backstory or major story elements yet. This stands in contrast to Ochako, Iida and Kirishima, who have all had major story beats, flashbacks and important interactions with the prime primary up to now, and are all very much humanly designed, aside from minor deviations that don’t affect their overall picture. Compare Tsuyu constantly standing a bit hunched over, her big feet and hands, her comically large eyes, her large and uniquely drawn mouth and her tongue sticking out to Ochako, who looks like an average anime girl except for the small pink pads on her finger tips.

Hold on. From the 7 characters in the prime primary and primary category, only one deviates a bit more from the human form and coincidentally that one is also the one character out of the 7 who has not have major character growth, backstory, flashbacks and/or the kind of specific interactions with the other characters from the categories yet? Now I’m intrigued. To me it seems the more important a character is for the series, the more human is his character design.

And now, to ask the question we’re all here for: if Hori did not scrap the traitor plotline, wouldn’t it make sense to make the traitor as human as possible? Since the possibility of a traitor was treated very serious during and after the UJ incident, as it posed a threat to the security and well-being of UA, I figured that whoever the traitor is shouldn’t look too, or be connotated with the words ‘joke’, ‘inhuman’ or ‘silly’. Not only would it make the most sense for an average, human looking student to be the least suspected, but it would also make the story-wise hit and drama from a traitor reveal that much more captivating, both for main characters and audience, since then the traitor is not someone they are completely detached from look wise, but someone who looks very close to them or someone they know. If the traitor were to be a student with blue skin, a trunk and six legs, I think it would just take away from the impact of a reveal and make you wonder why nobody noticed the questionable actions of the literal alien.

Since I think we can all agree that the kids in the prime primary category are 100% not the traitor, and the kids from the primary category are also very much not likely to be the traitor because of their major involvement with the protagonists (and the absolute bullshit it would be to make the characters who were established since page 1 to be nice and helpful turn to the bad side without beforehand character development in that direction), that leaves us with the kids from the secondary category and the kids from the full-picture category. The latter I described as being designed for the background; characters who could potentially rise in category once given character development, but who are without backstory or character growth up to now. Let’s look at them: Mineta, Sato, Ojiro, Shouji and Koda all deviate heavily from the standard human form set by the prime primary characters, either by their body size, mutated body parts or facial deviation. As much as it pains me to say this, they are all designed either too far from being ‘normal human’ to be the traitor, and/or have a joke attached to them and their character that would make a possible reveal come off as too comedic or inappropriate. Hagakure is a special case. She has deviations from the human form (having no visible body) but this is a minor deviation compared to the other five in the category. Still she has a joke attached to her (not being visible) and is also kept in the background of the series without having major story beats on her own and, like the other five, acts more as a supporting character to the secondary characters. Overall, the 6 kids in this category all have heavy deviations from the standard human form and a joke attached to their character, which makes them very unlikely traitor material.

Let’s look at the secondary characters in more detail: without revealing too much, the characters in this category are design-wise on the same level as those of the primary characters with very minor bodily deviations from the human form and only some of them have a joke attached to their character. Mina and Tokoyami have the most prominent bodily deviations with having pink skin/horns and a bird head, but let’s take a look at their role in the overall story: Mina is very much a Genki Girl, an enthusiastic bouncy girl, and acts as a support especially to Ochako and Tsuyu. She also played a semi-important role in Kirishima’s backstory, which let us have a look at her childhood/middle school self. That, plus her deviating human form makes it clear: a character like her is very unlikely to be the traitor. Tokoyami has a more severe deviation from the human form, plus he has a semi-joke attached to his character (constantly being serious or dramatic, holding speeches about darkness in archaic language). He also got captured during the Training Camp incident and is friends with Deku since the Sports Festival. Deviating human form, constant joke connotated with character, taken advantage of by the villains: in my opinion, very unlikely to be the traitor. Two characters in this category with very little deviation from the human norm are Jirou and Sero. Jirou has her earphone earlobes as the only deviation, while Sero has his elbows and almost constant big-toothed smile as his bodily and facial deviations. Jirou is one of the counterparts to Mina’s Genki Girl type and also acts as a supporting character for the rest of the girls. While Ochako, Mina and Hagakure can be characterized as enthusiastic, bouncy and happy, Momo and Tsuyu are more of the intellectual and tactical types, with slight tendencies to get bouncy when excited. Jirou is a middle part among the girls, being cool and reserved and not as bouncy as Mina, but also being slightly more brash and offensive than Momo or Tsuyu. She has no real joke attached to her character, but the fact that we have seen her parents and the recent arc in the anime is all about her realizing she can save people through her music (overall being a more light-hearted arc) add to my opinion that she is very unlikely to be the traitor. Sero has his elbows and smile as his deviations from the standard human form and as a member of the unofficial ‘Bakusquad’ he serves as a supporting character to Bakugou, Kirishima and Kaminari. There is no joke attached to his character, but sadly there is also not much more to his character up to now. He’s had minor roles in the Sports Festival and Training Camp Arcs, and often acts with Kaminari as a duo, but compared to him, Sero has had very little overall screen time, very little meaningful dialogue and almost slides off into the full-picture category. The only reason I did not put him in that category is because of his only minor human deviations, but overall he just is not prominent enough in the story to be considered for the role of the traitor. That leaves us with two characters with absolutely no deviations from the human form and one with slight facial deviations, the latter of which is Aoyama who has a very unique facial design among the class. He also has constant jokes attached to his character, one being always looking into the “camera” and breaking the fourth wall, the other being often talking about his fabulous self and acting out in bizarre ways. Another point that paints him very unlikely traitor material is his recent small arc in the anime: starting out with ominous signs towards Deku and acting more weird than usual brought many to the conclusion of Aoyama being the traitor, but as it turns out he was used as bait. The real background for his weird behaviour was him telling Deku about his own quirk, Navel Laser, not being compatible with his body, which is why he needs his support belt. Him and Deku form an emotional bond after this and Deku considers Aoyama his friend from that point forward, and after this incident, Aoyama returns to his usual (though still bizarre) behaviour. If Aoyama would be the traitor character, all the character clues, small flashbacks and emotional development that led up to his scene with Deku would have to be repeated and changed to form the basis for the traitor characteristic. As this is very unlikely to be the case, and Aoyama has had his small brush with character growth, also not forgetting the jokes attached to his character, I think it’s overall given that he will not turn out to be the traitor. That leaves us with Momo and Kaminari.

Momo has no human derivation to herself, as well as no joke attached to her character. She has had small encounters with character growth during all the exam arcs as well as in Kamino, which also sort of is the breaking point for traitor theorists with her: During the attack on the training camp she created a small signal device and got Awase from 1-B to attach it to the villains. This signalling device would later help the Bakugou Rescue Team she was also a part of help to succeed on their mission. There was no need for her to create that device and/or join the rescue team if she was the traitor. I mentioned that there are no jokes attached to her character, though that is not entirely true. There is actually one joke that is sometimes applied to Momo, though it is not constant or particularly deprecating: it is her upbringing as a rich girl, which sometimes makes her detached from the monetary struggles her classmates go through, though this is more treated as a quirky characteristic than a joke. In regard to her being rich, she also invited some of her classmates to her house to study in Season 2, which gave us a look into her home. All the above mentioned facts speak against her having traitorous tendencies, despite being the only complete standard human girl.

3. The Case for Denki Kaminari

That leaves us with Kaminari Denki, the only boy in 1-A other than some of those from the prime primary and primary categories who 1) has absolutely no deviation from the standard human form, 2) has no constant joke to his character (we’ll talk about his whey in a second) and 3) has enough interaction with characters from both prime primary and primary to almost be considered a primary character. He really looks just like the standard human boy looks in BNHA; the only thing making him stand out look-wise is his hair, which is styled slightly spiky and has the black lightning bolt on his bangs (which is btw not dyed but there since his birth). His trait of ‘being flirty’ is as minor as Momo’s rich girl tendencies and also treated more as a characteristic and not as a joke. Now, I know you’re all pointing to his whey right now. Whenever Denki overuses his quirk and releases too much electricity it fries his brain and he goes dumb for about an hour, sticking up his thumbs, making a dunce face and only being able to talk very slurred. But is this really a joke? Is it not more a supposed additional characteristic of his quirk? Because if you think his whey-phase is a joke, then Tsuyu hibernating when it gets cold is also meant to be laughed at and Momo going tired after creating big things as well. Not to mention that, as many have mentioned before, his whey is something very easily fake able. But let’s jump back to his hair for a second. I know, it’s the most minor thing one can talk about, but isn’t it strange that Jirou and Denki are the only ones out of 1-A other than Shouto who have two-coloured hair? And people have been brushing this off, but the two-coloured hair is like, a major character trait for Shouto and not only represents his two sides and his two quirks, but is also symbolic for the split he feels inside of himself and the colours are representative not only of his parents’ hair, but also of the quirk each side can handle. So why can’t it be symbolic for the other two? Putting Jirou aside, what does the black lightning bolt-like strand in Denki’s hair represent? His quirk? Very plausible, since his quirk is based on electricity. But why is it black? You see, Jirou has a small ECG line in her hair, which is also representative of her quirk (and maybe of her hidden emotional and passionate side), but its colour does not deviate much from her original hair colour (her normal hair is dark purple, the line is light purple). Denki could have had a lightning bolt-like shape in any colour in his hair; he could have even had his hair completely black and the shape in yellow to emphasize it, but he doesn’t. He could have had a completely different hair style, with his hair being styled wildly in all directions away from his head to be symbolic of having an electric shock for example, or his hair having multiple small lightning bolts in it, but he doesn’t. Why is his hair completely blonde, except for the small shape symbolic of his powers in pitch black, almost lying like a dark shadow on the bangs slightly obstructing his face?

Moving away from the hair: if he is really meant to be a rather jokey secondary character with no important backstory, character development or role in the series, why is he designed so humanly and close to the protagonists? He could have had the constant whey-look on his face, be very tall and lanky to resemble a lightning rod, have the before mentioned ‘shocked’ hair-style, have lightning shaped markings on his skin, have antennas on his head that act like TV antennas; he could have had a very wild and from the norm deviating design and it would have fit perfectly for a minor full-picture character. But Denki looks the way he looks and I can’t help but point out that there has to be a reason he looks like that, because character designs have meaning in a story. Why did Hori make Denki such a pretty boy, without any bodily or facial oddities, and have it not matter up to this point? Because let’s face it: out of all the boys without any immediately noticeable deviations from the human norm (Bakugou, Deku, Shouto, Kirishima, Aoyama, Iida, Ojiro, Sero, Denki), Denki is the only one that

1) doesn’t turn out to have major deviations and/or several constant jokes attached to his character (leaving Bakugou, Deku, Shouto, Kirishima, Iida, Sero, Denki)

2) wasn’t pushed into complete irrelevancy due to his role in the class (leaving Bakugou, Deku, Shouto, Kirishima, Iida, Denki)

3) isn’t considered the main protagonists (leaving Kirishima, Iida, Denki)

4) hasn’t contributed majorly to the storyline already plus clearly showing his antipathy for anything villainous and/or helping the main characters in a major situation against said villains

If you take all the above mentioned into consideration and add it to the major points of the Denki-Traitor-Theorists, it all comes together. His ‘initial’ character design for example? Too villainous, too obvious, he needed to look more human to take on the role of someone infiltrating a school and leaking its secrets. Why is Denki designed the way he is? Why is he prominently featured in a lot of promotional art despite seemingly being such a minor secondary support character? Because the groundwork for the revelation of his character is already rooted in his design and his actions.

I’m too tired to talk about all the Traitor!Kaminari points, you gotta look those up yourself if you’re interested.

This is my take on it for now, if y’all want I’ll talk about his hero costume and brand of character some more (which only adds to him being the traitor), but now I just want to get this theory out.

#bnha #bnha shitpost #bnha theory #traitor kaminari #bnha traitor theory #shut up amy #character design #i did it #boku no hero academia #i did research for this #now i'm tired #i dare someone to prove me wrong #just kidding #pls tell me if i'm going crazy or not

268 notes · View notes

arcticdementor · 3 years

Link

There are three kinds of dissidents: (a) anons, (b) pundits who still care what people think, and (c) outsiders who DGAF. All these groups are great; real greatness can be achieved in any of them; and good friends I have in each. But each has its problems.

…

The problem with (b) is that you are always policing yourself. Not only do your readers never really know what you really believe—you never really know yourself. In practice, it is much easier to police your own thoughts than your own words. When choosing between two ideas, the temptation to prefer the safer one is almost irresistible. This is a source of cognitive distortion which the anons and outsiders do not experience. (Though anons do suffer something of the opposite, a reflex to provoke.)

As a pundit, you sense this stress in every bone of your body; you can never show it to your readers. This creates a deep dishonesty in the parasocial relationship between writer and reader—like a marriage that can never escape some foolish first-date fib. The falsity, like the blue in blue cheese, flows through and flavors every particle of your content. Neither you nor your readers can ever be sure whether you are speaking the truth, lying to them, or lying to yourself—but you are constantly doing all three. You may still be very entertaining—enlightening, even. All your work is ephemeral, and once you die only your relatives will remember you. And it’s not even your fault.

…

From my perspective, both the anonymous and official dissidents exhibit a kind of unserious frivolity, but a very different kind. The frivolity of the anon is imaginative, surreal and playful at best, merely puerile at worst. The frivolity of the pundit has no upside; in every paragraph he is breaking Koestler’s rule, and he knows it; the best he can do is to shut up selectively about the things he cannot write about.

And his mens rea, too, is awful. He is selling hope. He is selling answers. Pity the man whose life has brought him to the position of selling answers in which he does not believe, or which he is forced to believe, or which he must force himself to believe. However sophisticated and erudite he may be, he is just a high-end grifter. His little magazine is a Macedonian troll-farm with a PhD. He is lucky if his eloquent essays about the common good don’t appear above a popup bar peddling penis pills—and in fact, I know more than one brilliant scholar in precisely this bathetic position. The frame defines the picture; the context sets the price of the text. Sad!

Worst still must be the reality that bad punditry is worse than useless—since useless strategies for escaping from a real problem are traps. When you lead your readers toward an attractive but ineffective solution, you lead them away from the opposite.

You got into this business to change the world for the better. You cannot avoid the realization that you are changing it for the worse—because your objective function is that of Chaim Rumkowski, the Lodz Ghetto’s “King of the Jews.”

You exist to convince your own followers that they neither can nor should do anything effective. The easiest way to do this is to convince them that ineffective strategies are effective. And this, as we’ll see, is exactly what you cannot avoid doing, dear pundit.

Moreover, from our present position of profound unreality, where the official narrative shared and studied by all normal intelligent people and all prestigious institutions can only be described as a state of venomous delirium, the opportunities to play Judas goat are almost unlimited. Cows, remember: there does not have to be only one Judas goat.

…

A particular favorite of the pundit is the error that AI philosophers call the “first-step fallacy.” It turns out that the first monkey to climb to the top of a tree was taking the first step toward landing on the moon:

First-step thinking has the idea of a successful last step built in. Limited early success, however, is not a valid basis for predicting the ultimate success of one’s project. Climbing a hill should not give one any assurance that if he keeps going he will reach the sky.

When a vendor sells you the moon and ships you a rope-ladder, you’ve been defrauded. Time for that one-star review.

…

Today we’ll chart the edges of the legitimate possible by looking at three recent pundit essays which have done a fine job of exploring those edges, and maybe even expanding them: Richard Hanania’s “Why is Everything Liberal?”, Scott Alexander’s “The New Sultan”, and Tanner Greer’s “The Problem of the New Right.”

…

After reading Hanania’s essay, a fourth pundit (who is out as a radical conservative) asked me: why does the right always lose? “Narcissistic delusions,” I replied.

Which was far from what he expected to hear, or what most readers will take from the essay. All three of these essays are good and true; but their inability to go far enough leaves them pointing their audience in precisely the wrong direction.

Most readers will emerge feeling that conservatives need more and better narcissistic delusions. Indeed, both pundit and politician are right there with just such a product. This meretricious frivolity, posing as seriousness, is too egregious to leave unmocked; yet the right reason to mock it is to challenge it to assume its final, truly-serious form.

Richard Hanania and the loser right

Hanania’s true point—backed up with a ream of unnecessary, PhD-worthy evidence—is that the libs always win because they just care more:

…

Since the rebirth of conservatism after the revolutionary monoculture of World War II, all conservative punditry has consisted of attempts to create more excitement around policies and values which effectively resist the power of the prestigious institutions—giving “normal people” as much to care about as their fanatical, aristocratic enemies.

Sensibly, this tends to involve raising “issues” which actually seem to affect their lives, but which also run counter to aristocratic power. Over decades, the substance of these issues changes and even reverses; the opposite stance becomes the useful stance; and “conservative values” have no choice but to change to reflect this. (If this seems like a liberal way to rag on conservatives—the cons learned it from the libs.)

…

“New Right” is not Greer’s term, but as a label I can barely imagine a worse self-own. It promises something ephemeral and irrelevant. So far as I can tell, this same cursed label has been used in every generation of conservatism to mean something different. When it inevitably fails and dies, people forget about it, and the next generation, stuck in the eternal present of a Korsakoff-syndrome movement, can reinvent it.

Who reads the conservative pundits of the ‘80s? Even those who remember them have to throw them under the bus. Every generation of National Review twinks, solemnly intoning what they conceive to be the immortal philosophy of our hallowed founders, is horrified by its predecessor, and horrifies its successor—a truly bathetic spectacle. And of course, each such generation would utterly horrify the actual founders.

…

Greer then goes deep into David Hackett Fischer territory to explain the obvious, yet important, fact that this “New Right” consists of upper-class intellectuals (inherently the heirs of the Puritans, since America’s upper-class tradition is the Puritan tradition) trying to lead middle-class yokels (the heirs of the Scotch-Irish crackers, and (though Greer does not mention this) Irish, Slavs, and other post-Albionic “white ethnic” trash, today even including many Hispanics. He even gives us a clever historical bon mot:

Pity the Whig who wishes to lead the Jackson masses!

Uh, yeah, dude, that would be called “Abraham Lincoln.”

But the point stands. Not just the “New Right” with its new statist ideology, but the whole postwar American Right, is a weird army with a general staff of philosophers and a fighting infantry of ignorant yokels. How can this stay together? How can the philosophers bring forth a mythology that creates passionate intensity in the yokels?

…

There is wisdom in this madness, of course—the problem is caused by aristocrats whose minds are wholly given over to narcissistic delusions. Doesn’t it take fire to fight fire? Doesn’t it take passionate intensity? Isn’t passionate intensity generated only by myths, dreams, poems and religions, not autistic formulas for tax policy? So the answer is clear: we need more and better narcissistic delusions. Ie, shams.

After all, any “founding mythology” is a narcissistic delusion. The flintlock farmers and mechanic mobs of the 1770s, and the Plymouth Puritans of the 1620s, have one thing in common: none of these people even remotely resembles the megachurch grill-and-minivan conservative of the 2020s. None of them even remotely resembles you.

They did live in the same places, and speak sort of the same language. Otherwise you probably have more in common with the average Indonesian housewife—at least she watches the same superhero movies.

To Narcissus, everything is a mirror; in everything and everyone, he sees himself. No field is riper for narcissism than history, since the dead past cannot even laugh at the present’s appropriations of a human reality it could not even start to comprehend.

And fighting fire with fire is one thing, but fighting the shark in the water is another. For the aristocrat, transcending reality is a core competence. The essence of leftism—always and everywhere an aristocratic trope, however vast its ignorant serf-armies—is James Spader in Pretty in Pink: “If I cared about money, would I treat my father’s house this way?” Mere peasants can never develop this kind of wild energy: that’s the point.

Yet Hanania remains right about the amount of energy that a rational, Kantian agenda for productive collective action motivated by collective self-interest, or even collective self-defense, can generate. The grill-American suburbicon is like Maistre’s Frenchman under the late Jacobins: he has defined deviancy down to rock-bottom. “He feels that he is well-governed, so long as he himself is not being killed.”

O, what to do? When you are solving an engineering problem and see the answer at last, it hits you like a thunderbolt. The conservatives, the normal people, the grill-Americans, must accept their own low energy. They must cease their futile reaching for passionate intensity, whether achieved through Kantian collective realism or Jaffaite founding mythology. They must fight the shark on land.

Conservatives don’t care—at least not enough. Yet they want to matter. Yet they live in a political system where mattering is a function of caring—not just voting. Therefore, there are two potential solutions: (a) make them care more; (b) make systems that let them matter more, without caring more.

Conservatives have low energy. They want high impact—at this point, they need high impact. After all, once you yourself are being killed, it’s kind of too late. Any engineer would tell you that there are two paths to high impact: more energy, or more efficiency.

Conservatives vote but don’t care. If we don’t have a viable way to make conservatives care more—meaning orders of magnitude more—effective strategies and structures must generate power by voting, not caring. They must maximize power per vote.

…

Interference means voters who are on the same team are working against each other. Impedance means voters resist delegating their complete consent to the team.

Interference is like a bunch of ants pulling the breadcrumb in different directions. To eliminate interference, point all your votes at one structurally cohesive entity which never works against itself.

Impedance is like getting married for a limited trial period, so long as your wife stays hot and keeps liking the stuff you like. As Burke pointed out in his famous speech to the electors of Bristol, the fundamental nature of electoral consent is unconditional:

To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men; that of Constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a Representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought always most seriously to consider.

But authoritative Instructions; Mandates issued, which the Member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgement and conscience; these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental Mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution.

The cause of electoral impedance in the modern world is the conventional concept of “agendas” or “platforms” or “issues.” When you vote not for a cohesive entity, but for a list of instructions you are giving to that entity, you are not voting your full power. You are voting for Burke’s opponent, who felt “his Will ought to be subservient to yours.” In effect, you are voting for yourself. Narcissism once again rears its ugly head.

When you vote an agenda, you are granting limited consent to your representative. You say: I vote for you, for a limited time, so long as you stay fit and cook tasty dinners. I am actually not voting for you! I am voting for “reforms for conservatives” (Hanania). I am voting for “a broad set of shared attitudes and policy prescriptions” (Greer). Dear, I am not marrying you. I am marrying hot sex, regular cleaning and delicious meals—till ten extra pounds, or maybe at most fifteen, do us part.

You implicitly withhold your consent for anything not on your jejune list of bullet points. Then, you wonder why your representatives have no power and are constantly mocked, disobeyed, tricked and destroyed by people who are legally their employees. This is not political sex. This is political masturbation. You voted for yourself. And instead of a baby, all you got was a wad of tissues. Nice way to “drain the swamp.”

Your vote does not work because you are not voting, delegating, or granting consent. You are like an archer with one arrow who, afraid of losing it, refuses to let go of it. Without releasing his dart, all he can do is run up to the enemy and try to stab.

So if conservatives want to maximize the impact of their votes, all they have to do is the opposite of what they’re doing. Instead of voting for the okonomi a-la-carte stupid little political menus of hundreds of unconnected candidates and their staffs, they can all vote for the omakase prix-fixe chef’s-choice of a single cohesive governing entity.

Such a power, elected, has the voters’ mandate not just to “govern,” but to rule. When no other private or public force enjoys any such consent, no other force can resist. We are certainly well beyond “rule of law” at this point! On the inaugural podium, the new President announces a state of emergency. He declares himself the Living Constitution. In six months no one will even remember “the swamp.”

Wow! What a simple, clear idea! The engineer, when he comes across so compelling and obvious a design, knows there’s a catch: he won’t get the patent. Someone else must have invented it before. People may be stupid—but they’re not that stupid.

Indeed we have just reasoned our way to reinventing the oldest, most common, and most successful form of government: monarchy. And we are setting it against the second most common form, the institutional rule of power-obsessed elites: oligarchy. And to install our monarchy, we are using the collective action of a large number of people who each perform one small act: democracy.

The alliance of monarchy and democracy (king and people) against oligarchy (church and/or nobles) is the oldest political strategy in the book. The suburban conservative, who just wants to grill, either has no idea this ancient and trivial solution exists, or regards it as the worst thing in the world—even worse, possibly, than his sixth-grader’s mandatory sex change.

And why? Ask your friendly local Judas goat, the pundit. Even the “new right” pundit—who only differs in his policies and issues. Which are, true, slightly less useless. As the top of the tree is slightly closer to the moon.

The 20th century even came up with a handy pejorative for a newborn monarchy. We call it fascism. No word on whether Cromwell, Caesar, or Charlemagne, let alone Louis XIV, Frederick II and Elizabeth I, were fascists.

But, to borrow Scott Alexander’s charming term, also not his own invention, they were certainly strongmen. TLDR: if you want to be strong, elect one strongman. If you prefer to be weak, elect a whole bunch of weakmen. Do you prefer to be weak? “If the rule you followed brought you to this place—of what use was the rule?”

The pundit reassures you that you don’t need a strongman to be strong—you’ll do fine with weakmen—so long as those weakmen have the right “shared attitudes and policy prescriptions.” By the way, here are some attitudes I’m happy to share with you. Click now to accept cookies. Did I mention that I have policy prescriptions, too? Skip ad in 5 seconds. Congratulations, you’ve been automatically subscribed! Check the box to opt out of most emails—void where prohibited by law—terms and conditions may apply…

…

An odd sort of pundit, who remains only nominally anonymous but has always very much GAF, Scott Alexander does not have Hanania’s cagey diplomatic noncommittal. As a “rationalist,” he is deeply committed to his own class status, and to oligarchy itself—which, like most, he misidentifies as “democracy.”

While the whole raison d’etre of the rationalist is the irrationality of our oligarchy, as displayed in genius moves like refusing to cancel regularly-scheduled airline flights to stop a Holocaust-tier pandemic, the rationalist’s dream is a rational oligarchy—using Bayes’ rule, which given infinite computing power will become infinitely intelligent—in Carlyle’s immortal phrase, “a government carried out by steam.”

Obviously, this is not just logical—it immunizes the rationalists from the scurrilous charge of “fascism,” or worse. And they were right about stopping the flights. So was my 9-year-old. Sadly, in a world of universal delusional delirium, rationality can get quite pleased with itself by clearing quite a low bar.

My view is that no government can be or ever has been carried out by steam—only by human beings—a species the same today as in the Old Kingdom of Egypt, if possibly a little dumber on average—and this will remain the case until some computational or genetic singularity occurs. For neither of which events will I hold my breath. This is why I find it easy to picture 21st-century America under the phronetic monarchy of an experienced and capable President-CEO, and almost hilariously impossible to picture it under a Bayesian bureaucracy of polyamorous smart-contracts.

Alexander disagrees. Here is his analysis—the same text that Hanania quotes. Let’s go through it thought by thought, and see if we can’t turn it into some delicious carnitas.

…

Let’s get back to those “elites.” Alexander conflates three quite orthogonal concepts in his use of the word “elite”: biology, institutions, and culture.

Elite biology is high IQ, which is genetic. Elite institutions are any centers of organized collective power—Harvard, the Komsomol, the Mafia, etc. Elite culture is whatever ideas flourish within elite institutions.

Destroying biology is genocide—specifically, aristocide. Destroying institutions is… paperwork. Who hasn’t worked for a company that went out of business? Same deal. And if the culture is the consequence of the institutions, different institutions (with the same human biology) will inevitably nurture different ideas.

The SS was anything but a low-IQ institution, yet it propagated a very different culture than Harvard. 21st-century Germany is anything but a low-IQ country, but the ideas of Kurt Eggers do not flourish in it. It seems that high-IQ institutions can be destroyed—and the new “elite culture” will be the culture of the institutions that replace them.

So the only target is the institutions. There is nothing “nasty” about closing an office. In the worst possible scenario, the police need to clear the building, lock the doors, and impound the servers. Such tasks are well within their core competence, and can be performed with calm professionalism. They will probably not even need their zip-ties.

…

For democracy to be effective in such a situation, it must know its own limitations. It can seize the reins—but only to hand them to some effective power. This power must have one of three forms: an existing oligarchy, a new monarchy, or a foreign power.

Also, there are three classes in an advanced society, not just two: nobles, commoners, and clients. Since clients support their patrons by definition, once nobles plus clients outnumber commoners, the commoners have permanently lost the numbers game. This is why importing client voters is a recipe for either civil war or eternal tyranny—if not both.

…

Yes. This is what happened in denazification, except with monarchy and oligarchy reversed. For example, all German media firms today are descendants of institutions created, or at least certified, by AMGOT. Nothing “organic” about it.

The essential problem with Alexander’s picture of this process is that, since like most smart people today he inhabits Cicero’s great quote about history and children, he simply cannot imagine replacing one kind of elite institution with another. Nor can he imagine high-IQ elites—human beings as smart as him—which are as loyal to a new sane monarchy as today’s elites are loyal, slavishly loyal, to our old insane oligarchy. Does he think that Elizabeth’s London had no elites? Caesar’s Rome?

If Alexander was analyzing the Soviet Union in the same way, he would conclude that elites are inherently devoted to building socialism for the workers and peasants. Since the present world he lives in is all of history for him, he cannot see the general theory which predicts this special case: elites like to get ahead. To genuinely change the world, change what it takes for elites to get ahead.

If the elites are poets and their only way to get ahead is to write interminable reams of “race opera,” as my late wife liked to put it, the floodgates of race opera will open. If the elites are poets and their only way to get ahead is to write interminable reams of Stalin hagiography, Stalin will be praised to the skies in beautiful and clever rhymes.

…

There are two big strawmen here. Let’s turn them into steelmen.

First, “the populace uses the government” is non-Burkean. The populace (not all of it, just the middle class) installs the government. Then it goes back to grilling. So long as the commoners have to be in charge of the regime, and the commoners are weak, the regime will be weak. They need to “fire and forget.” Otherwise, they just lose.

Second, Alexander has clearly never heard of the atelier movement. No, this is not the same thing as your grandma in front of the TV copying Bob Ross.

What happens is this: every (oligarchic) art school and art critic no longer exists. Not that they are killed, of course. Just that their employers are liquidated (not with a bullet in the neck, just with a letter from the bank). They exist physically, not professionally. They were already bureaucrats—they had careers, not passions. Who gets fired, but keeps doing his job just for fun? Certainly not a bureaucrat.

And every (oligarchic) artist no longer exists—not that they are killed, of course. Just that the rich socialites who used to buy their stuff got letters from the bank, too. Libs sometimes talk about a wealth tax—a one-time wealth cap, perhaps at a modest level like $20 mil, will concentrate the rich man’s mind wonderfully on actual necessities.

Elites like to get ahead. The people who got ahead in the oligarchic art scene can no longer get ahead by doing shitty, bureaucratic, 20th-century conceptual art. Because there were so many of them, and because the demand for this product has dropped by at least one order of magnitude if not two, elite ambition is replaced by elite revulsion.

The enormous supply-and-demand imbalance for both art and artists in 20th-century styles leaves these styles about as fashionable as disco in 1996. “Paintings” that used to sell for eight figures will be stacked next to the dumpster. “Artists” once celebrated in the Times will be teaching kindergarten, tying trout flies, or cooking delicious dinners.

Inevitably, some of these people have real artistic talent. (The first modern artists had real talent—Picasso was an excellent draftsman.) They can go to an atelier and learn to draw. They will—because now, acquiring real artistic skill is a way to get ahead in art. And again, elites like to get ahead.

…

There is nothing “normal” or “natural” or “organic” about oligarchy. Does Alexander think “uncured” bacon is “organic” because, instead of evil chemical nitrates, it uses healthy, natural celery powder? He sure is easy to fool. But who isn’t?

Culture and academia is already yoked to the will of government in a “heavy-handed manner”—yoked not by the positive pressure of power, but the negative attraction of power. When the formal government defers to institutions that are formally outside the government, it leaks power into them and makes them de facto state agencies.

Power leakage, like a pig lagoon spilling into an alpine lake, poisons the marketplace of ideas with delicious nutrients. Ideas that make the institutions more powerful grow wildly. Eventually these ideas evolve carnivory and learn to positively repress their competitors, which is how our free press and our independent universities have turned our regime into Czechoslovakia in 1971, and our conversation into a Hutu Power after-school special. PS: Black lives matter.

The paradox of “authoritarianism” is that a regime strong enough to implement Frederick the Great’s idea of “free speech”—“they say what they want, I do what I want”—can actually create a free and unbiased marketplace of ideas, which neither represses seditious ideas nor rewards carnivorous ideas. But it takes a lot of power to reach this level of strength—and it requires liquidating all competing powers.

I have never been able to explain this simple idea to anyone, even rationalists with 150+ IQs who can grok quantum computing before breakfast, who didn’t want to understand it. Ultimately it reduces to the painful realization that sovereignty is conserved—that the power of man over man is a human universal. (Also, we all die.)

No surprise that nerds who think of power as Chad shoving them into a locker can’t handle the truth. PS: I went to a public high school as a 12-year-old sophomore, was bullied every day for three years, and graduated college as a virgin. Whoever you are, dear reader, you are not beyond hope. You can handle the truth.

…

And yet: Alexander’s post is about Erdoğan—and his description of Erdoğan is spot on. It also is a perfect description of Orban in Hungary; it applies to Putin in Russia and Xi in China; and it is even pretty accurate for Hitler, Mussolini and friends.

What all these “strongmen” have in common is that they are provincial. Turkey is not exactly the center of the world. Even 20th-century Germany was nowhere near the center of the world, though it could at least imagine becoming that center. If Turkey just disappeared tomorrow, no one would have any reason to care except the Turks. Who needs Turkey for anything? What would collapse—the dried-apricot market?

Erdoğan’s problem is that he cannot vaporize the oligarchy, because the institutions that matter are not in Turkey. The provincial strongman has no choice but to follow the “populist” playbook that Alexander describes so well.

Orban can kick Soros’s university out of Hungary; he cannot do anything at all to Soros, let alone to the global institutions of which Soros is only a small part. He is indeed “arrayed against” these institutions, to which his Hungarian elites (who speak nearly-perfect English) will always be loyal. The contest is unequal and has only one possible winner, though it can last indefinitely long. Even Xi, whose country can quite easily imagine becoming the economic center of the world, is a provincial strongman—in fact, he sent his daughter to Harvard. Sad!

In a global century, the only way for these provincial strongmen to develop genuine local sovereignty is to go full juche. This is simply not possible for Hungary or Turkey, both of which are firmly attached to the cultural, economic, and military teat of the Global American Empire. Indeed it is barely possible for North Korea, a marsupial nation still in China’s pouch. So Alexander is right: these “strongmen” cannot win. Their regimes will all go the way of Franco’s. It’s impressive that they even survive.

Erdoğan simply has no way to attach his best citizens to his own regime. They are citizens of the world. Elites always like to get ahead. If you’re a world-class talent in anything, why would you try to get ahead in Istanbul? Suppose you want to make a name as the world’s greatest Turkish writer. Succeed in New York, then come home. Turkey is a province; provinces are provincial.

Yet I am not a Turk or a Hungarian, and neither is Scott Alexander. The greater any empire, the more essential that its fall begin at the center. The Soviet empire did not fall from the outside in; it was not brought down from Budapest or Prague; it fell from Moscow out.

And the American empire will fall from Washington out—though that may not happen in the lives of those now living. And although nature abhors a vacuum and no empire can be replaced by nothing—and oligarchy, in the modern world, can only be replaced by monarchy—the “strongman” of this monarchy will not look anything like these mere provincial dictators.

…

The result of Alexander’s perceptive calculations, which are only wrong because their only input data is the present, is simply that our present incompetent tyranny is and must be permanent. Of course, every sovereign regime defines itself as permanent. Yet when we look at the past and not just the present, we see that no empire is forever.

Some grim things are happening in America today. These grim things have a silver lining: they expose the gleaming steel jaws of the traps that the aristocracy sets for its commoners. They remind the cattle that a goat is not a cow and a baa is not a moo.

Every pundit is a Cicero. And amidst all the greatness of his rhetoric, Cicero could not imagine a world that had no use for Ciceros—a world governed by competence, not rhetoric. By the time Caesar crossed the Rubicon, nothing had failed more completely than the whole Roman idea of governance by rhetoric—an idea many centuries old, an idea whose execution had beaten all competitors to capture the whole civilized world, but an idea that was past its sell-by date. Rome herself was no longer suited to it. The republican aristocracy of Rome no longer meant Regulus and Scipio and Cincinnatus; it meant Milo and Clodius and Catiline. Its factional conflict was the choice between Hutu Power and Das Schwarze Korps. Caesar was not a disaster; Caesar was a miracle.

In the death of the American republic, every detail is different. The story is the same. The contrast in capacity between SpaceX and the Pentagon, Moderna and the CDC, Apple and Minneapolis—between our monarchical corporations, and our oligarchical institutions—is a dead ringer for the contrast between the legions and the Senate.

The sooner we stop pretending that this isn’t happening to us, the better results we can get. Wouldn’t it be nice to get to Caesar, Augustus and Marcus Aurelius, without passing through Sulla and Marius, Crassus and Spartacus? Alas, from here and now it seems unlikely. But I can’t see why every serious person wouldn’t want to try.

#curtis yarvin #substack #long #moldbug #well worth the read #monarchy #oligarchy #scott alexander #richard hanania #tanner greer #those who just want to grill #strongman #pundits #i'm reminded at several points of jim donald's arguments about how holiness spirals are ended

3 notes · View notes

heat0death0of0the0universe · 4 years

Text

i gotta talk about Narrative Telephone

I. Fucking. Love. It.

when my extreme dislike of second-hand embarrassment takes a loud backseat i can fin so much that i love about it.

but what i love most isn't the humor. or even the continued critical role content. no, i love the allegory and the metaphor of the whole concept.

all my life i loved the concept of watching time move forward. seeing evolution, hearing language change, watching cultures rise and fall. but what i dont like is time and the fact that im along for the ride. id rather watch evolution, not be step 48801 of a process with no end. and sadly most media and general public doesn't like watching time change. no one wants too see how the English language evolves with a rise in Spanish speaking folks and pop culture creating new idioms and words. everyone would much rather watch something with the same animals with the same people walking the same cities speaking the same language, albeit maybe with a few more neon lights and holograms to make you feel like its in some vague ~future~. but narrative telephone gives me the change i like to see. i can finally feel like im watching a story going through the times and changes of a culture.

im gonna need to explain a little more. what better way than to show off all the current episodes.

episode one is simple, pumat and the big bad wolf. the sorry starts with pumat on a stroll through the woods. he finds a talking wolf and they fight. the story ends with the pumat eating a nice mushroom and wolf stew. but the changes to the story are what get to me. i love ashley, trust me i really do. but in this context, she’s basically the dark ages. everything crumbles and the story follows in the crash. this point is when the more brothers grimm tales and nonsense folklore are added in. people dont like the night, so the seen changes to match. suddenly the wolf not only speaks, but has a beak! the fighting through being somewhat vague in the original story now is lost to time and is none existent. taliesin builds off it, changing it ever so slightly from a garbled to a more of a warning story. a story that reflects a change in a cultures thoughts on the woods. when everything was all writings and giant building the woods where just a place to rule over and harvest, but after the fall now its returned to the unexplored. the place of fey and monsters that should never be explored at night. marisha adds winter and gives it just the smallest bit of added context. a man in the woods during night before might have been seen as mad or crazy, but a man scrounging for some mushrooms in a dead forest in winter isnt tempting fate, he’s struggling to live. a shift in view also makes it so that the beaked magic wolf is just as weakened by the winter, and is easily turned away by just a voice. sam is..something. if ashley is the dark ages than id say sam is like a renaissance. specifically a very drunk renaissance. the kingdom was risen and is filled with hubris and pride.its gained a very “man falls for his hubris” greek vibe to it. pumat has gone from scavenging to walking unbothered by cold dead winter. the kingdom has lost its enjoyment of strange creatures, monsters are still around in legend, but most have been replaced with magical people, with a clear rise in “person in an animals skin” tropes. the original fight has been mostly lost, now the story is that of a magic hunter who eyes the mushrooms taken by pumat and gives a chuckle and permission to continue exploring the woods unimpeded. pumat eats just the mushrooms, which now have gained the lupine taste, and the vague description of “he became something more” giving the idea of some sort of curse for his nature. Laura has added back the wolfs anger, but removed the suspicion of pumat. the curse is still in the end of the story though. this could be a change into more of a forbidden fruit trope. because pumat still trusted strange mushrooms in a dead forest with a magic guardian, he paid the price. travis is a sort of close to modernization of the story. its the point in time when its nonsensical nature and magic was viewed as weird and convoluted. similar to when we look at older myths with long intricate plans and think “nice story, but poor pacing”. liam goes for the “granddad telling stories by the fire” vibe. the tale has died down and is being co-opted for new use. now the rather dark tale has turned into more of a children's storybook with messages like not to trust strangers and to not do drugs being tagged on.

ep. 2: jesters ability to say 1000 words a second. pickadors plume is a story in a story. a story about gaining a treasure through a complex and detailed series of events with lots of loaded lore about the world with no clear description of what the treasure truly is. liam is the first few generations. the generation close enough to the original to try and remember, but not enough to keep every detail. the best example is of the ending, where the treasure should be. humans love rewards, so a story with a vague reward isnt enough for people. in liams generation transition to the griffon, travel, and fruit specifically being the treasure begins to lay its foundations. since this is already so long i will also mention that the transition from stone shaped like a heart ---to----> stone shaped like a hut could be an example of a changing dialect and language. sam, travis, and marisha are clear evidence of a shift in culture. jesters complete backstory wasnt introduced till now. and in it comes the cultures want to explain this event. humans love simplifying, but we also love to describe things. if we want to, we will add words just as much as we remove them. the dialect changes just as much. the new word of “schtupping." has either replaced or become a synonym of the word fucking, the name of the plum as even changed too. the treasure has gone from “lost to time” to “there is treasure, i just wont name it”. but fret not, for the mystery aspect is still in the story. for now everything will disappear like it never happened, or did it? though travis specifically specifies that you keep the treasure. humans love rewards, it was gonna come back eventually. matt is the sorta an enlightening moment in the society. at the very least its the point in time where people who know geography and history say “wait, that layout doesnt make any sense”. taelisan and ashley are the beginning of the end. the slow fall into the dark ages. the story becomes vague and small. slowly becoming more of a statement and less of a story. the society is forgetting large chunks and its bleeding out into other legends. there maybe a sort of thanksgiving/ christmas sort of event spawned from or because of the myth, but the story itself isnt going to live every far (hence why its ending in a dark age and not somewhen else)

Ep. 3: boy do humans enjoy rich’s, love, and drama. sam’s story comes from a society that warns against wanting what you wish for without expecting some strings attached and features a evil ruler to boot, just so they can date the legend. the story of a delivery boy who invents a pair of glasses to see through objects and uses them to win rewards and gives them all to a rich woman that only loves him for the money, and really loves the prince. matt changes the story so the two are already in love. but also changed it so that it was the greed of the prince and the wife that lead to the heartbreak rather than the delivery boys naivety. travis changes delivery boy from a clever inventor to just already owning the glasses. both matt and travis with there respective fictional cultures are showing how humans like to remember the stuff they liked in a story, so when they forget when something specifically came in, they just fill in the blank and assume its always been there. travis specificaly begins the stories slow march to a less heartbreaking story by adding a joke to help give the couple a more flushed out relationship. this is also the shift in cultural perspective. the antagonist began his life as a evil prince, but now is simply a rotten neighbor. this could mean the myth was co-opted to fit a better role, possibly after the removal of monarchy or just of a specific bloodline.the rich wife becomes just the wife, no money involved. this is also the beginning of what a full fledged re-write of the story. now the delivery man has gone from giving up to still being in love with the wife and now even standing up for himself. (possibly a mix of when the story was of a prince and used to promote the common folk to rise up against the kings, leading to the theory of a removal of the crown). ashely...oh ashely. this moment in history atleast solidifies the love between them, and even brings back delivery husbands inventor skills. liam is the slow clawing climb back up out of the collapse. he’s still very much in the collapse of the kingdom. but aleast its just before when begin to solidify into the new meta of the era. laura and taelisin’s era is a complete re-write after the collapse of the society. the focus has moved to more of a folk-hero style legend about rising above through theft and cheating (could mean that after the collapse the culture around theft changed from crime to fighting to survive. the antagonist has really changed from being the bad guy to just in the love triangle. the society seems to agree with every polyamourous person when we all say “this how drama triangle could have been avoided if you guys all just got together”. marisha’s only real change a more modernization from “specticals” to “goggles” and that the culture either wants to make half-orcs feel more inclusive or just really dont like goliaths and changed it.

ep. 4: deargodfinallyigottheneedtowritethisoutofmysystemsoletsspeedrunthisshit. liams story is an analogy for the horrors, pointlessness, and sacrifics of war. but over time the story shifts from a “we did this to ourselves” narrative to a “an outside force did this to use”. this shifts the goal from a need for peace to a need to protect everyone for the sake of the many. ill write more later but dear god i my hand might fall off soon

#cr #critical role #narrative telephone #telephone

44 notes · View notes

scripttorture · 4 years

Note

I was wondering, is there a drug that can be injected into someone that can hurt them physically? Maybe cause a burning sensation or something? If not then I just won't get that specific during that part of the story, but I try to be as accurate as possible.

Yes but as a general rule drugs are rarely used to torture people and an injected drug is particularly unlikely to be used. (For those who don’t know, part of the reason I can answer this question confidentially is because my day job is in medical drug testing. I work at a place specialising in lung diseases, we are very busy right now.)

There have been cases, I won’t say this impossible. But I would caution against suggesting that anything this rare is ‘typical’ torture and I feel like this particular idea skirts pretty close to apologist ideas about ‘advanced’ ‘scientific’ torture. And torture can not be advanced or scientific by its nature.

Here are a couple of factors that might explain why the use of drugs is rare in torture:

Expense

Difficulty forcible administering drugs to a struggling victim, especially without training

Detectability of drugs, ie they leave evidence in the victim’s body

Difficulty obtaining or justifying the presence of drugs on site, ie it makes sense for a specialist hospital to have chemotherapy agents, it does not make sense for a police station to have them

The risk posed to torturers by having drugs in a setting that doesn’t make sense: it makes abuse obvious to inspectors.

The necessity of calculating dosage for each victim or risking obvious injury and death

If you’re writing a story that’s set in the modern day and more-or-less in our world then drugs are probably not a good pick. At least not unless this particular method adds something worthwhile to your story.

I feel like you’d need to explain why torturers are putting themselves at risk of detection and going to so much extra effort for this one victim. Torturers are pretty lazy, if there’s a lower energy or simpler way of hurting someone then that is what they’re likely to do. So why would they use this compared to say, a stress position?

I could see this working in an alternate world, but I still think it wouldn’t be a common form of abuse. If torture is legal and the torturers don’t have to worry about being discovered, then perhaps this would be more likely. But that doesn’t get over the fact it would still be more difficult from the torturer’s perspective. It also doesn’t get over the fact it would be more expensive then a stick or a bucket of water.

For more typical tortures by country I have a masterpost on National Styles over here.

I’m telling you all of this to give you some background. If you feel like there are good plot reasons for using drugs/injections in your story then feel free to do so. Just be aware of the issues surrounding this particular trope and, well the reality.

If you’re dead set on using this there are some additional problems to do with- basically how difficult it is for someone with no training to safely inject a struggling person.

Injections of even small amounts of air can be lethal. Needles can break, blunt or bend.

Based on the standard disposable needles we use at work (which are also used in hospitals) I’d suggest breakages are less likely now then they were in the past, but those things can definitely bend, get blocked or come off the syringe if they’re not attached properly.

All of which can make injections of air, injections of the wrong dose or big spillages more likely.

I think overdoses would be quite likely because I don’t think torturers would bother to calculate dosage levels properly. I don’t think they’d account for changes in body weight, health or the victim being on a starvation diet.

Overdoses are not necessarily lethal, depending on the amount and the drug in question. But they can be extremely damaging. And the exact form of that damage depends on the drug.

Torturers might actually try to give victims overdoses because the effect they’re after is an unwanted side effect of the medication, not its purpose. And side effects are generally more likely with increasing doses (incidentally this is part of why drug developers are so interested in systems that deliver the drug only to a specific part of the body, it means a reduction of dose and side effects).

There’s also the uh- issue that the drug will continue to do what it’s designed to do as well as cause pain. And in a person who doesn’t have the disease the drug is meant to treat that can be a long term problem.

All of this adds up to a high chance of random death, scarring around injection sites, bruises, bleeding and damage to blood vessels. It can mean long term health problems, possibly development of disease, as a result of being given a drug.

Having said all of that, if you’re dead set on the idea and convinced it adds something useful to the story- then I think the class of drugs you’re looking for are chemotherapy agents.

I’ve not worked on cancer drugs. My knowledge of them comes from my university courses and colleagues. And errr not to get technical but they’re really fucking scary.

A lot of chemotherapy agents are designed along the principal that they will probably kill the disease before the patient.

Most of them work by attacking and destroying dividing cells. Because cancer cells divide quickly. But so do a lot of healthy cells. They destroy the gut lining, hair follicles, the inside of the mouth and a lot of cells generally involved in immune response.

The result is that this entire class of drugs often causes pain, as well as nausea, vomiting and a host of other nasty things.

The first chemotherapy agent? Mustard gas. Dissolved in a solvent and injected. It causes burns at the site of injection and a lot of pain.

It also works. It’s an awful treatment but it is still used against some forms of blood cancer.

Repeated exposure causes cancer. I don’t just mean for the victim character.

Any regular exposure to these drugs is potentially dangerous. Including for people administering them badly and without protective gear. They may also start to experience some of the side effects.

Wrapping this up, I think it’s best to weigh up the risks this scenario poses in your story and think about whether the characters would take those risks. Consider whether there’s a way you could use those risks later in the story. Perhaps this torture case is really easy to prove in court because there’s medical evidence of the damage the drugs did. Perhaps one of the heroes finds the villain’s lair because that was a really weird place to be getting shipments of these drugs.

I hope that helps. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

#writing advice #tw torture #tw scars #tw drug abuse #drugs #medical history #medical abuse #use of drugs in torture #high tech torture #writing torture #nitrogen mustard

53 notes · View notes

qqueenofhades · 4 years

Note

I'm going to start this off by apologizing for how long this is probably going to be. And please feel free to delete this if it is too dumb or annoying But to start off the story I have been building in my head and have a few pages written now started in my head as a fanfic until it grew a life and a story of its own. (Not in the same vein as 50 shades I swear) So now I have been editing around the bits of what it started as a fanfic of and trying to make it more my own original thing. 1/3

The problem now comes in when I look at the literally hundreds of books/tv shows/movies I have read and watched over the years and my big fear is that in trying to make my story more original I worry that I'm just stealing from the other books, shows, and movies that I read and watched over the years that have just been filed back in the corners of my brain. And being raised in a weird school system and being taught that plagirism is the absolute worst thing you can ever do in writing. 2/3

It is basically making me want to throw my rough draft pages into the trashcan to never look at again and it has also left it very hard for me to read or watch anything new in all of this free time of quarantine because I worry that it will just influence my own story. Or I will see a better line and be like "well they wrote this type of story better than I could so mine is pointless". So I guess what this all boils down too is, is this the imposter syndrome that I see everyone talk about? 3/3

Oh honey. First of all, deep breath.

Next of all: absolutely NOBODY ever writes anything that is truly, utterly original. Even if they put some kind of new spin on the tropes or do it from a new angle or anything like that, all of humanity is drawing on the same basic literary architecture and telling narratives that have the same essential beats and structure. (Frankly, when anyone writes anything SO AVANT GARDE ORIGINAL, it’s usually turgid, deathly dull, and unreadable, at least in my opinion). Tropes and cliches are tropes and cliches because they work: they’re all part of the same storytelling kit that we all use and are proven effective ways to create drama, advance character conflict, provoke a response/emotions in your reader. Of course, if it’s nothing BUT unreconstructed tropes, that’s less good, but on their own, archetypes are not evil! They do not mean you’re a lazy writer, and they aren’t something that should Never Ever Be Used. Tropes are fun. We like them because they work. So you don’t need to reinvent the wheel of storytelling, and you shouldn’t feel that pressure to do so.

Everyone, as I said, engages in this kind of creative commerce, and by nature, stories will have common themes with each other. When in doubt, just channel your inner Mediocre White Man: mediocre white men get paid zillions of dollars to turn out absolute turds, and nobody thinks they shouldn’t, so why shouldn’t you do that with something that is almost guaranteed to be better? You have to read other stories and expose yourself to other narratives, both because a) it’s fun, and b) it helps you learn to sense how a story works, the parts that it puts together, the dynamic and technical aspects of good writing and narrative tension and character development, and to see which parts you want to learn and emulate, and which parts you want to improve on.

Trust me: the audience out there isn’t thinking “well this one author wrote this kind of story already, so nobody can ever write this story again.” Witness the thousands of identical and derivative mass-market fiction types that get published every year; even literary fiction and genre/sci fi/fantasy/horror fiction has recognizable and classifiable subgenres. They exist so people who like one book can eagerly go out and get books that are similar to it; readers LOVE having new options to suggest (and they may amass a huge pile on their bedside table that they really do not need to add any more books to, not that I am, uh, speaking from experience here or anything). You might discover, as almost everyone does, that there are authors or books out there that you like better than others, but that doesn’t mean that those authors you don’t personally prefer should just stop writing. There’s a huge literary market precisely because people do love books and stories and if they find something they like, will read it over and over. It’s like fanfic in that sense: just because someone wrote a coffee shop AU or whatever doesn’t mean that nobody can ever write a coffee shop AU again. We all bring our own perspectives and influences and preferences, and so nothing is exactly the same.

If you’re just ripping off huge chunks of someone else’s writing verbatim, and copying character names/plot beats without giving credit: then yes, obviously, that is plagiarism. But just allowing yourself to be influenced by stories you like (and to consume those stories, especially with all your quarantine free time when you’re probably climbing the walls with boredom otherwise) is absolutely NOT plagiarism, and you should not feel guilty about doing it. If you’re stressing over it to the point where it’s making you unable to do any work on it at all: again, take a deep breath, hit pause for a bit, reorient yourself, watch or read some things you enjoy, think critically about why you enjoy them, and decide how and why you want to apply them to your own work. You already transformed a fic into an original story -- that’s great! You clearly have thoughts and ideas about what makes this particular narrative go, and why you wanted to change the characters from the models you started with. That is the essence of transformative creative work, and of all storytelling everywhere. That is a GOOD thing! I’m excited that you’re doing it! People who might read your work are excited that you’re doing it!

So all this is to say: chin up, channel your inner Mediocre White Man, remember that everyone has done the same thing, has the same anxieties, and worries about how to shape their story, and it’s really okay. Art exists to comfort us in hard times like these, to be shared, to be enjoyed, to be transformed and replicated and critiqued and remade, and that is the essence of humanity and our love for these particular kind of stories. You can do it. It’s okay.

I believe in you. Hugs.

#writing advice #anonymous #ask

20 notes · View notes

borisbubbles · 4 years

Text

28. ITALY

Diodato - “Fai Rumore”

youtube

And we’re back to our usual disconnect, where everyone pretends to love Italy and I don’t. I cannot wait for all the Italian crazies to be OUTRAGED by this ranking (28/41 is fine for an entry I don’t care about...?) and reblog this all over the tumblrverse and inflate my reader stats. 😈 but first, let’s discuss what we have on our hands here.

Song Analysis

There’s no way this post *won’t* end up offensive to every Fai Rumore fan, so I will resort to brutal honesty. I never, ever, *ever* cared about “Fai rumore”. In fact, I’d even say it’s strongly overrated by the gross of the Eurovision fandom?

Okay so here’s the deal. I will not deny that “Fai Rumore” has several things going for it. The song has emotional gravitas, Diodato has a great voice and acts very well. It’s technically precise and well produced. It is very competent at what it sets out to be, which is a very standard HQ Sanremo Power Ballad.

But here’s where I feel like I deviate from the norm: You may think “wow Fai Rumore! How brilliant, meticulous and poised”, but I think “how expected, overtly earnest and unfun?”

The problem is, this is Boris’s Bubble and Boris doesn’t enjoy songs that feel like they belong inside a trophy cupboard, and “Fai rumore” is exactly one of those songs, don’t lie. So “meticulous, poised and brilliant” you say, well *I* say “how overtly earnest, unfun and aloof”? I have a Spotify - if I wanted to listen to good music, I’d just use that? Or one of my like 15 Youtube Playlists containing non-ESC entries? Why would I watch Eurovision, or Sanremo for that matter, for the good music when there are so many other (and easier) options available for me that align better to my tastes?

The fact that “Fai Rumore” is *too* perfect for me (and therefore very hard to empathize with imo) is one thing, which leads to other thing I need to point out. I’ll let my friend Matthew take over here, who wrote this paragraph on ESCUnited right after Diodato’s selection:

That final sentences is bone-chilling because it’s so, so true. “I AM A SOPHISTICATED MUSIC FAN BECAUSE I FOLLOW ~FESTIVALE DI SANREMO~” is such a common trope of elistism (like, replace “San Remo” with any quality newspaper, nobel prize winning author or classical music composer and you’ll find to be nearly universally applicable to snobs across the globe), but I find it specifically ugly in Eurovision.

You see, would the same courtesy be extended to a country of lower prestige if they got a Fai Rumore? Would the same courtesy be extended to a person of colour? or a woman? How about others songs that, like Fai Rumore, emulate their country’s musical traditions (Fai Rumore is SO italian you can smell the basil), except those traditions fall outside of the western European bubble? See, it doesn’t bother me that Italians like Fai Rumore and are proud of it. They’re Italians. Of course they are! I don’t judge them for it. I don’t rly care if the odd introvert finds solace in a song of this calibre. But as soon as Matthew made the aforementioned post, people who had previously rated Diodato as a 5/6 already started adjusting their scores to 10s and 12s and, well...

It bothers me that the same fanbase that DEMANDS cultural diversity (Diodato) and/or MOAR ETHNOBOPS (Efendi) refuse to accept a Solovey or an Origo -which are a thousandfold more layered, sophisticated and daring- as an equal.

It bothers *even more* me that people are willing to immediately give Italy a plethora of chances (especially when they choose men! fuck institutionalised sexism!), while not doing the same for a Belarus. Belarus HAS no clear musical scene or funds to really produce good music, yet produced a ridiculously good NF (with a VERY righteous winner - yes, Chakras, but also: Chakras) I’ve seen snobs SLAM VAL, mercilessly despite being an excellent left-field pick (god imagine if Yan had won Eurofest for a sec. What a nightmare). Italy, otoh, also delivered a sterling NF, have *a VERY* rich musical tradition, tons of talent and money and production value... and they still went the lowest common denominator available, and yet they receive praise, without so much as a whisper of protest from our so-called “value seekers”. This level of hypocrisy and double standard wielding, all in the name of wishing to be taken seriously delivers *such* a toxic undercurrent to Eurovision and has absolutely soured me on Diodato. This isn’t his fault, but sadly he’s become a weapon of mass misconstruction and well just because I hate the guy who pressed the big red button more doesn’t mean I automatically like ICBMs. As we come near the songs I actually give a damn’ about, I will start calling the shitpociries out. Brace yourself for it, when I rank Solovey and Da Vidna inside my top five.

Want some examples specifically pertaining to the Diodato fandom? Sure, I’ll give you some:

EJEMPLO UNO:

Diodato fanboys openly coddling him on social media post-lockdown all “PROTECT OUR POOR MUNCHKIN FROM THE CORONAVIRUS”. Like... he’s a *thirty-eight year old adult* he can take care of himself, BACK UP OFF HIM you freaks.

EJEMPLO DOS:

The relevant media having baptized Diodato as THE SAVING GRACE OF THE LOCKDOWN, ITALIANS SINGING ‘FAI RUMORE’ FROM THEIR BALCONIES IN DEFIANCE OF COVID-19, which is such a bullshit narrative it’s turned my hair from black to brown. Yes, the Italians sang “Fai Rumore”. What they don’t tell you is that they also sang many other Italian and non-Italian songs, including humanitarian anthem “Roar” by Kety Perr (cue to Katy Perry being like “OMG I’M SO HONORED TO INSPIRE SO MANY ITALIANS ::hungarianflagemoji::” on twitter.). CNN Like, Eurovision related media LOVE portraying it as a ~life-chaning confort anthem~ - the reality is that “Fai rumore”, while playing its part, was merely a tiny spoke in a giant wheel.

EJEMPLO QUATRO:

Well take a look at how many people will reblog this post and slam it for daring to point out, what I think are really obvious truths to anyone who doesn’t suffer from musical myopia.

In the end, the song is okay and it’s okay to love it. But if you ‘love’ it because you’ve convinced yourself that you must, and not because it genuinely means something to you, I don’t think you have grounds to criticise to criticise anyone but yourself.

NF Corner

As I said, I didn’t follow San Remo live (I never do! *gasp* blasphemy, I know), but I did plan to check it for this write-up except RAI deleted every live performance? And they won’t let me embed the few remaining vids either?

Anyway, this happened so right-click-open this a new tab and then return once you’ve finished it.

Backstage feuds being fought out LIVE on the stage in front of millions of viewers 😍 Apparently Morgan and Bugo were at loggerheads for a while, and had a massive row RIGHT before their performance on the second night, which caused Morgan to stray from the script and sing all the insulting things Bugo told him *to Bugo* instead of the actual lyrics of their duet. 😍 😍 😍 Bugo IMMEDIATELY stormed off the stage to the point where Amadeus had to like... literally tell the gobsmacked audience that Bugo had left the building 😍 😍 😍. This is some god-tier pettiness and I’m completely in awe of it. DEITIES. 😍

aside from Sincerogate, I would’ve embedded vidoes that contained the DRAMA (Rancore), CAMP (Achille) and UNABASHED WEIRDNESS (Levante) of this year’s line-up, but I guess RAI really doesn’t like for people to have fun. Oh well.

Italy 2020 vs Italy 2021

Diodato is male and Italian, so yeah, guaranteed top 10 in Rotterdam, no matter what happens. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. Cynicism aside, televoters WOULD have flocked to it without thinking twice (for exactly those two reasons), passing over many better entries in the process and well... I’m tired and exhausted and I think you can guess I am not very impressed by this likely outcome.

Not sure what RAI’s strategy for 2021 is (lol it’s RAI - they don’t have a strategy. besides Italy have bigger fish to fry than the Eurovision Song Contest as you know), but I’m not very invested either way. I could imagine them internally selecting Diodato if he’s willing to do ESC in 2021, but if this was a one-off deal (which I think it was), they will probably select another plain white bloke for you to obsess over, so no worries :-) #TuttoVaPene

FREAKY! FRIDAY! FACTOR!

I’m sort of conflicted? On one hand, god Fai Ru*snore* is SO typical of “Italy in Eurovision”, not just from a musical perspective but from a point of reverence as well. On to the other hand, when are the fanbases *not* acting insane w/r/t Italy?

San Remo was really crazy this year, enough for me to award Italy a couple Senheads. However... if I wanted to see nice and inoffensive triumph over a bunch of deranged, gimmicky, ott masterpieces, I’d just rewatch #London1977? (offensive take #16: “people that like Marie Myriam the most in 1977 do not understand Eurovision”) Ehhhh whatevs.

Score: 2 Senhits out of 5.

#Eurovision #Eurovision 2020 #Eurovison Song Contest #Italy #Diodato #Fai Rumore

39 notes · View notes

rapeculturerealities · 4 years

Link

In the new “Black Christmas,” a remake of the 1974 horror film, Cary Elwes plays Professor Gelson, a priggish classics instructor who spends a lot of time with frat boys, laments the good ol’ days when men ran everything, and goes into a rage when he thinks women are trying to usurp his power.

“The Brett Kavanaugh hearings had just happened, and I think I was really struck by how emotional he was, how aggrieved he was,” said Sophia Takal, who directed the movie and co-wrote the script with April Wolfe. In the original, a foul-mouthed weirdo terrorizes and murders a group of sorority sisters during the Christmas holidays. So: the guy who may be the villain of Takal’s slasher remake is patterned after … Justice Kavanaugh? “Yeah, pretty much,” she said.

And thus, a slasher movie for the #MeToo movement is born, one where women take center stage in front of and behind the camera.

Opening on Dec. 13, “Black Christmas” is the latest release from Blumhouse Productions, the Los Angeles-based company behind Jordan Peele’s 2017 Oscar-winning hit “Get Out,” and the franchises “Insidious” and “Paranormal Activity.” After 10 years making scary movies, Blumhouse had never hired a woman to direct a theatrically released horror film — until now. “My gender was definitely part of the conversation, where they thought a woman would tell this story well,” Takal said. “But yeah, no one said, you’re the only woman we’ve ever hired.”

On a recent afternoon, Takal was having a late breakfast at Foxy’s, an old-school diner that reminds the actor/director of her native New Jersey. “I love that they have toasters on every table,” she said. Takal was discussing all things horror, from “The Exorcist,” which she considers the scariest movie ever (“I’m too scared to even say the name of the movie, or even refer to the thing that the movie is about”), to the first-look deal she recently signed with Blumhouse, to why she may not make the best horror-movie companion (“I’m the person in the theater you hear screaming like crazy”).

Takal’s tenure with Blumhouse began last year, when the producers Marci Wiseman and Jeremy Gold enlisted her to direct “New Year, New You,” a feature-length episode for the Hulu horror anthology series “Into the Dark.” Her first two features, “Green” and “Always Shine,” which had successful debuts at South by Southwest and the Tribeca Film Festival, hadn’t skimped on the tension and creepy moments. But Takal had never directed a straight horror film before. For “New Year,” she assembled an all-female cast to create a psychological thriller that explored the toxic nature of social media and the self-care movement, among other things.

In November 2018, when Takal was wrapping production on “New Year,” the Blumhouse founder and chief executive Jason Blum was asked in an interview with Polygon why his company hadn’t hired a woman to direct one of its horror films. “There are not a lot of female directors period,” he replied, “and even less who are inclined to do horror.”

When Takal found out about it, “my reaction at the time was, this was such a weird thing he said, because I’m making something for them right now! And he was developing another horror movie with Shana Feste, ‘Run Sweetheart Run.’ It just seemed like a not particularly thought-out way of articulating something that actually really resonates with me.”

Blum apologized soon after, and again, repeatedly, during a recent phone interview. “It was a stupid thing to say,” he told me. “I am guilty of saying dumb things, and this is one of the dumb things that I’ve said.”

Four months later, Blum approached Takal to direct “Black Christmas.” The 1974 original had inspired countless slasher flicks to come, from John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (the Christmastime setting; seeing the action from the perspective of the killer) to 1979’s “When a Stranger Calls” (the killer’s calls are coming from inside the house). Blumhouse had just scored big with its recent remake of “Halloween,” pulling in over $255 million on a reported $10 million budget. Why not reboot the film that inspired it?

The offer was tempting, but it came with a pretty big caveat. “They said, you can do whatever you want as long as it’s called ‘Black Christmas,’ but it has to come out this December,” she recalled. “This was in March, and there was no script.”

To prepare, Takal watched the original film (“I liked that it wasn’t just about a bunch of sorority women who were bimbos”), and ignored the 2006 reboot. She screened a clip reel of scary movies sent over by Blumhouse, and became a student of the jump scare (in a 2017 Times interview, Blum listed a number of foolproof ones, including “door swings closed, someone is now standing behind you in the room”), and the more difficult and labor-intensive “dread-building scare.”

At the end of the original film, Olivia Hussey stabs her sexist boyfriend to death with a poker, believing he’s the killer, but — surprise! — the real murderer is still very much alive, and eager to kill again. Takal was struck by how much the ending of that film mirrored what was still happening in 2019. “All of these men were being exposed for all the terrible things they had done, like Louis C.K. or Mark Halperin, but then they were coming back into the public sphere,” she said. “I was like, what’s happening? We felt like we had had a victory where women had finally found their voices, and then these men kept popping back up.”

Inspired, Takal tweaked several slasher-film traditions in this latest version, including the trope of the “final girl” (think: Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween”). “I really wasn’t interested in making a movie where men just kill a bunch of women,” she said. “It didn’t feel like the movie I wanted to make in 2019.”

Outsider takes like Takal’s are becoming more and more common at Blumhouse, whose horror films have tackled a range of social issues over the years, from racism (“Ma”) to income inequality (“The Purge”). “Jordan Peele is an excellent example of somebody who has really brought the conversation about race and racial privilege into the horror genre,” said Aviva Briefel, a professor of English and cinema studies at Bowdoin College. “‘The sunken place’ has become a phrase that people use and think about, even if they haven’t seen the movie.”

Even so, Blumhouse isn’t shying away from creating horror for horror’s sake, with sequels of franchises like “Halloween” and “The Purge” in the works. “I love movies that have bigger ideas behind them, but I also love straight scary movies,” said Blum. “With ‘Black Christmas,’ I think we’re lucky to have both.”

In the end, Takal found working on the film cathartic, particularly working alongside guys who, she said, didn’t look all that different from some of the film’s villains. “These were, superficially, the same types of men who might be characters in the movie, but they were all so supportive and engaged and encouraging,” she said. “I think it allowed me to explore this anxiety I have about misogyny, and to work through my fear that, underneath it all, men just really want us all dead.”

#MeToo #movies #entertainment #Takal #Black Christmas #toxic masculinity #misogyny #horror

36 notes · View notes