man. now that i think about it. crisis core sure did do that to zack's potential as a character huh

I’ll be by your side - Remus LupinxDaughter!Reader

Hi!! Wooow I’m a slow writer XD To be fair though, I am graduating in June, so there’s...quite a lot to do. Anyhow, this is part 3 of my imagine deal? so I’d recommend reading that one and part 2 first. Remus is my favourite HP character, so this mainly focuses on the relationship between him and his daughter, but I guess it’s slight HarryxReader as well ;)

Deal? (Part 1) | Oh, darling... (Part 2) | I’ll be by your side (Part 3)

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Please note:

1: I don’t own any of the gifs used, nor any already established characters, so credit to the authors and original creators - You have done a phenomenal job :)

2: English is not my native language, as I was born and raised in Sweden. I have, however, studied English for almost a decade, so I don’t think it’ll be a problem, I just thought I’d let you know ;)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You probably already know this, but still:

Y/N - Your name

Y/N/N - Your nickname

Y/H - Your house

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Word count: ≈ 2200

Warnings: Battle of Hogwarts, Angst, Blood, Death :(

Enjoy! :)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“But, dad! You can’t go yourself and then expect me not to come along!”

“Yes, (Y/N/N), I can, and I will!”

He was desperate to go join the rest of the Order, and searched frantically for his old coat.

“Bu-”

“Darling, listen, this is not your fight, okay? You’re staying with Tonks and Teddy this time, and I’ll-”

She had grabbed his coat and was holding it behind her back, out of her father’s reach.

“DAD!!”

Remus stopped for a moment and took a proper look at his daughter for the first time since receiving the message about the upcoming battle.

“Look, I’m seventeen years old. I’m an adult now, and most of my younger friends are fighting. There’s literally no reason for me not to!”

“There is a perfectly good reason and you know that! Besides, your age is completely irrelevant! It wouldn’t matter if you were fifteen or seventeen, twenty or thirty, I don’t want you fighting!”

His voice was stern, which admittedly wasn’t too uncommon, but it lacked the normal comedic undertone and not even a ghost of a smile could be seen on his face. This did make (Y/N) feel quite uncomfortable, but she was not giving up. She couldn’t leave everyone else and just sit quietly on the sidelines. Surely he understood that, right?

“Well, I’m sorry, but it’s not your choice to make. I know you don’t like it, but I’m going.” 

She gave her father his coat and picked a jumper for herself, but stopped abruptly when approaching the front door. Remus had stepped in front of her, and pulled her into a tight hug.

“Please, darling… I can’t have you injured again - or worse! Stay.”

“Dad, I promised you two years ago that I would pick my fights more wisely. We made a deal. And I am choosing this one.”

“(Y/N), it’s not the same! Seeing you hurt back then caused me more pain than you could possibly imagine, but this will be worse. Far worse. An-”

“Don’t you think I know that?” It wasn’t her intention to snap at him, but they didn’t have time for this argument. People were waiting. “I know it’s for real this time, it most definitely was two weeks ago, but I honestly thought you would have more faith in me. I’m not five, okay?!”

“(Y/N/N), don-”

She pulled out of his embrace, tied her shoes and apparated. Leaving him in the middle of an argument like that broke her heart. She knew the chances of them both making it out alive were low, unharmed close to none. They did, however, not have a choice. There was no time to waste. Voldemort could be attacking the castle this very moment, and Harry, Dumbledore’s army and the rest of the Order would need all the help they could get…

~~~

(Y/N) ran down the stairs, desperately searching for any familiar faces, and eventually spotted one she had really longed to see.

“Harry!!”

He turned at the sound of his name and smiled - really smiled - when their eyes met. They weren’t more than a few feet away from each other, and it didn’t take long before they met in the middle.

“(Y/N/N)! You alright?” They hugged each other tightly and enjoyed the feeling of safety, if only for a few seconds. “What happened to your arm?”

She followed his gaze and found her sleeve torn and shoulder covered in blood. It wasn’t too bad though, she hadn’t even noticed it before Harry pointed it out.

“I-I don’t know, it’s fine. How are you feeling?”

He looked down at her and used a bloodied and scarred hand to push some of her hair behind her ear. He wanted to say “fine”, but it would have been a lie.

“Scared”, he admitted, “But also ready. Let’s finish this, once and for all?”

She nodded. “You’re right! How can I help?”

“Well, some people are trying to evacuate all the younger students through the room of requirement, think you could lend them a hand?”

“Sure! Good luck Harold, see you!”

He shook his head at the nickname, but smiled nonetheless.

“Right, good luck. And (Y/N/N)?”

“Yeah?”

“Stay alive, will you?”

“I’ll do my best on one condition.”

“Hmm?”

“You do the same”

He gave her a nod before continuing up the stairs.

“And Harry, we don’t have time for the full story, but if you run into my dad, let him know I’m sorry, will you?”

~~~

Sure, (Y/N) loved Hogwarts, it was her second home, but this was proper chaos! Most of the younger kids were finally safe, but the battle was far from won. There were death eaters everywhere. She stumbled behind suit of armor, narrowly avoiding a flash of red light, and suddenly remembered something her dad had said the other night: 

“It is the quality of one's convictions that determines success, not the number of followers” 

She knew it was meant to work as motivation, but thinking about it now just made her feel sad. How could she be so stupid? She fought her way through the corridors, but after turning a corner, she found herself facing an empty hallway? A chill went down her spine as the booming voice of Lord Voldemort could be heard all throughout the grounds. He was ordering his followers to back down, hoping to get Harry to come directly to him. Great! Now she had two people to find before it was too late...

~~

Entering the great hall this time felt nothing like it had almost seven years ago. There were people everywhere. Students, teachers, children, former graduates and parents - all in this together, mourning, comforting and healing.

(Y/N) would have noticed Fred Weasley surrounded by the rest of his family. Neville and Oliver Wood carefully moving Colin Creevey out of the way. She would have seen all of them, had it not been for a certain old, brown coat in her peripheral vision. 

Her world fell apart, she found herself unable to breathe and didn’t realize she had sprinted towards her father before she felt two, strong arms wrap around her. (Y/N) struggled and tried to push them away, but didn’t have enough strength to do so. She crumpled to the ground and was pulled into a tight embrace.

“(Y/N/N)…”, a soft voice mumbled. “I’m so sorry. Can you try to breathe slower, please? Deep and easy, alright.”

She realized that someone was speaking to her, but she didn’t recognize the words. They held no meaning, almost as if he spoke a different language, or stood very far away. (Y/N) eventually stopped hyperventilating and tried to ease the shaking as she slowly turned to check who it was, sitting with his arms around her. Her eyes met a pair of emerald green ones.

“Harry.” she whispered, still crying but trying to keep her focus on him. There was so much more she would have wanted to say, but she was unable to find the right words. “Please tell me.... Tell me he’s no-...”

“‘m sorry”

They sat for a few minutes before Harry picked a small vial from his pocket and asked if she’d be okay.

“(Y/N/N), I’m sorry, but I have to go. It’s not over yet.”

She took a deep breath.

“It’s fine, I get it. Go. I’d love a moment alone anyways.”

~~~

She sat by her father’s side for a while, but felt unable to look at him, not wanting to fully accept the reality of the situation. It was when the fifth person came up to her to give their condolences that she got up and left the great hall. She couldn’t take it, and besides, it should be fine. The death eaters had left.

She walked the familiar path towards the (Y/H) common room, but nothing seemed... real. It felt like a nightmare, only this time she couldn’t talk it through with her dad over a cup of tea. This time, nobody would be there to convince her it was just a bad dream. 

This time, no one would wake her up…  

The very moment that thought crossed her mind, a dark chuckle shattered the otherwise eerie silence.

“Avada kedavra”

She barely had time to register Antonin Dolohov with his wand pointed in her direction before an intense flash of green light caused her world to go dark.

This time, she wouldn’t wake up.

~~~

*Darkness*

*A flicker of light*

*A flicker of... hope*

*Warmth?*

~~~

It was a weird feeling. She didn’t feel happy, but rather… at peace. She sat up slowly and let her eyes adjust to the brightness as two voices simultaneously asked:

“(Y/N/N)?!”

She turned around and found herself face to face with a rather tall, red haired wizard, and a slightly older man with longer brown hair.

“Fred? Sirius?”

Fred skipped over and held out his hand, helping his younger friend to her feet. He immediately noticed her dried tears and pulled her into a tight embrace. Sirius remained a few feet away with a pained expression on his face, but was unable to stay quiet for long.

“What happened?”

(Y/N) pulled away and met her godfather’s worried gaze.

“I… It’s my fault. I thought all the Death Eaters had left the castle. They were waiting for Harry in the forbidden forest and I just needed some air...”

“Did Harry go?”

A couple (Y/N) had only seen in pictures, but knew to be James and Lily Potter, had appeared behind Sirius.

“I’m not sure. He left for Dumbledore’s office about fifteen minutes earlier. I’m sorry I didn’t even try to stop him but, with all due respect, he would have gone anyways. It’s impossible to change his mind once he decides on something.”

To her surprise, none of Harry’s parents looked very worried, but shared a smile instead.

“Don’t worry, (Y/N/N).”, said Lily gently, “He’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

“You’ve both come so far”, added James, “Things will be fine in the end, and if they’re not fine, then it’s not the end.”

“I hope you’re both right…”, she mumbled quietly, “sorry, but is dad…?”

James smiled sadly and nodded before turning to call his old friend over, however Sirius got there first.

“Oi! Moony! Get over ‘ere.”

Remus had been discussing something not too far away, and Sirius’ comment made him chuckle as he approached the other marauders. 

“Easy, Pads, you make it sound li-”

That was all he had time for, as two arms wrapped themselves tightly around his torso. He would have known who it was even without looking. He’d recognize that hug anywhere. He promised himself he wouldn’t cry, but all it took was one word.

one. single. word.

 “Dad!” 

A single word before hot, salty tears filled his eyes. It wasn’t possible!? He was completely lost for words. Didn’t know how to react, what to say or what to do. He just stood there, his arms wrapped around his only daughter, unable to process the fact that she was… dead. They both were.

“Dad, I’m so so so sorry! I shouldn’t have shouted, I shouldn’t have taken my anger or fear out on you and above all I shouldn’t have left!?! I… I..”

“(Y/N/N)”

“And now Teddy won’t have his father-”

“(Y/N/N)!!”

“And I swear I tried to find you, but I couldn’t and then it was too late and it’s all my fault a-”

“(Y/N) Lupin!!!”

She fell silent but didn’t let go.

“I’m s-”

“Darling, calm down! What’s done is done, alright. I still wish you hadn’t gone, especially given the apparent outcome, but I understand. Are you okay? Nothing broken?”

“No, I’m good, actually… Nothing hurts at all, but-”

“Good!” He pulled away and put his hands on her shoulders. “Would you mind letting me in on what happened?”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, not really wanting to talk about the last few hours, yet knowing she owed her father that much.

“I… I entered the great hall and saw… you. I don’t quite know what happened, I just… broke. Then Harry showed up and we just hugged, I guess?”

Lily and James looked at each other and smiled.

“Then we both left and Dolohov appeared out of nowhere and… well that’s that.”

Remus shook his head sadly, immediately understanding the true meaning of his daughter’s words. HE was duelling Dolohov earlier that night. HE lost that duel. Had he won then maybe, possibly, she would still be alive too. His fault... as always

“Remus? Rem?”, James mumbled, putting an arm around his friend’s shoulders, “It’s not your fault. You tried, and that’s the best either of us can do.”

~~~

Things didn’t go according to plan, but perhaps they were the way they were always meant to be.

Her body next to her fathers, as they rested peacefully in the great hall. Her soul next to her father, as they wandered through the deep valleys of Nangijala, awaiting the day lost friends and lovers would come join them. No matter in this life or in the next;

I’ll be by your side 

~ L

Masterlist

So the ATLA Movie Is... Good, Actually?

Just kidding, of course it’s not, it’s so bad it sucked the paint off my walls. But after ten years of people pointing out its glaring flaws, why would anyone bother talking about this garbage heap if not to go the other direction? So here’s a very brief and very superficial list of things the movie does get kinda... not atrociously wrong.

And they won’t be fake hipster pokes, like “It’s fun to laugh at”, “The Rifftrax for this is OK”, or “Kudos to the actress for managing to say we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs with a straight face”.

(though now that I mentioned it, it is fun to laugh at, the Rifftrax for this is OK, and massive props indeed.)

Rasta Iroh

Yes, I know it’s not exactly the aesthetic of the real Iroh or that it makes no cultural sense for him to sport this do when no one else in the racebended Indian “OMFG what were you thinking Shyamalan” Nation does but goddamn, long-haired dudes are my one mortal weakness and I will ogle the hell out of him.

Jesus is that a man bun I see that’s it mum I’ve been deaded

Yue’s hair

No.

Now we’re talking. Yue’s hair turned white when the Moon spirit gave her life, so it makes sense for it to go black again when she sacrifices herself to revive the koi fish. It’s a neat detail I find myself expecting whenever I rewatch the scene in the show. Yes, I realize it’d be a pointless hassle to animate since she, unlike in the movie, immediately goes on to become the Moon herself but still. I like.

The Blue Spirit’s mop

Zuko, hun, what’s with the dance-off?

First of all, I want to imagine that Zuko the Theatre Nerd was about to leave his ship with just the mask like in the show but then stuck his head into the cleaning cupboard and went, “Yeah, more coverage might be good, even though it do seem mighty fried to shit”.

Which makes me giggle. I like to giggle.

And secondly, the hair’s movement is what makes the static mess of the Blue Spirit’s solo fight scene appear at least bit more dynamic because God knows the cinematography isn’t doing it.

Any particular reason why it’s at the edge of the action, shot all boring-like?

Now, I get why circular shots would be reserved for Aang while he’s in the practice area and then used once the two join forces. What I don’t get is why Aang’s part of the action scene has a defined visual style while Zuko’s delegated to a few stationary wide shots from afar as though he’s a tertiary goon, meaning that when the time comes to combine the respective pieces of cinema language and visually convey collaboration, there’s not really much to combine.

But as long as Zuko is stuck in this static mess, it’s that awesome disaster on his head flopping about that draws the eye, helping me understand that something even is going on over there.

It also prevents me from paying much attention to how the extras are mostly just staying put and a lot of the hits don’t land, so that’s good.

The music slaps

James Newton Howard is too good for this.

Pls ignore that the word “gods” is used in the ATLA universe

I can’t be the only one who constantly uses this piece to daydream about writing specific fanfic scenes instead of, you know, actually sitting down and writing them. It’s just so good at communicating a sense of sorrow while speaking of rebirth that I find myself getting misty-eyed whenever I listen to it. Unfailingly, the soundtrack as a whole manages to break through the mile-thick crust of horrible acting, confusing writing, and uninspired cinematography and make me feel things. And considering how everything on screen is working against it, that’s no small feat.

Imagine what a powerful experience it would be if the score was used in service of an actual movie.

Dev Patel

No wonder since he’s the only one in the film occupying that crucial intersection between “is a good actor” and “was given something to work with”. It also doesn’t hurt that he breaks with the trend of actors starring in martial arts flicks despite never having done any martial art.

And all EIP-jokes about “stiff and humorless” aside, he’s a pretty decent Zuko considering how abridged this version of the character is. A while ago, I remember hearing a reviewer say that with his comedic chops, Patel should have been cast as Sokka. And on one hand, yes, god, absolutely, I need to see that asap. But on the other? He captures all layers of Book 1!Zuko, the desperate obsession, rage, and self-loathing, and at the same time gives you a peek at the soft momma’s boy dork that’s buried underneath. For Christ sakes, he exudes intensity and ambivalence even when acting against an emotionless hunk of wood that’s giving him nothing in return.

Oh, and I guess there’s a tree in the frame.

Ba dum tss

What can I say, the guy’s good.

Showing vs telling

OK, so this movie is all tell and no show, except for one single moment. And it’s the exact moment where the original goes in the other direction in terms of how information is conveyed.

See, I never liked this. The revelation is preceded by Iroh giving advice to Zuko who scolds him for nagging. Iroh then apologizes, moves in to say the line above, and is interrupted by Zuko who seems rather uncomfortable with Iroh laying his feelings out like this. And once they’re out, Zuko verbally confirms that he knew already and Iroh didn’t need to bother.

All this extraneous information and pussyfooting ends up weakening what should be a profound scene that reveals to us, the viewers, how deep the relationship between these two in fact runs.

Compare to the movie where Dadroh acts like a parent by fussing and worrying, with Sonion needing a single look to tell him and us that he understands what it’s all really about.

It’s genuinely efficient and just good.

No Cataang

Fine, a bit mean-girl bitchy from me since I only start minding the ship in Book 3. And probably unintentional on the part of the creators since there are moments where I think they’re trying to set the romance up? There’s a, well, an attempt to recreate the famous introductory shot of fateful meaningful destiny of meaningness, there’s some slight note of saving each other’s bacon going on, I’m pretty sure they’re the only ones in the film who smile, and oh, right, Katara’s shoved into her post-canon useless role where she doesn’t ever do anything, and is all about Aang right from the get go.

Yes, I will blame the “executive producers” because a) I’m incredibly petty, and b) it’s perfectly in line with their vision of the character so why the hell not.

Hilariously, none of it reads on screen because the actors are just... yeah. These poor kids are struggling so much with delivering their own lines and portraying their own characters they don’t seem to have any strength left to create something between them. To be fair, the bare-bones shot-reverse shot style of their scenes doesn’t exactly lend itself to the idea they occupy the same universe, let alone are friends or each other’s crushes.

And I enjoy this immensely because it allows me to forget the depressing horror show Katara’s life turns into post ATLA.

Yes Zutara

I need to delve into this because it’s fucking hilarious. So in a movie which fails to establish the original’s central romance so spectacularly that if Aang got lost in a crowd I don’t believe Katara would notice, SomEOnE thought it’d be a good idea to add an utterly unnecessary non-canon moment where Zuko for some reason feels the need to pause his character-defining hunt for the Avatar which otherwise has him ignore everything and snap at everyone, and explain his central conflict to an unconscious peasant he doesn’t know, complete with gently pushing the hair from the pretty girl’s the soulmate’s the Water Tribe Ambassador’s the Fire Lady’s the love of his life’s her face away, AFTER his uncle nagged him twice to find a girl and settle down.

I just wanted to make sure we’re all on the same page and this is what we really saw.

Celibate Avatars

I have no idea why the decision was made, if TPTB thought expecting viewers to understand the story through the lens of Buddhism would be too much, or if the “executive producers” already worked their retconny magic. What I do know, however, is that there’s a big shift in worldbuilding and Aang’s struggle with his role as the Avatar stops being a personal conflict defined by a) his grief for Air Nomads, b) his notion of being robbed of the loved ones in his life, and c) the selfish attachment to Katara he confuses with true love. Instead, what he has a difficulty to accept is apparently a general notion of who Avatars are supposed to be, i.e. a fantasy version of Catholic monks, no family and worldly relations, period.

I guess either someone understood the original’s portrayal of de/attachment as “hermit no freaky”, or thought the audience would so why not go there outright.

Now, do I like this on its own? No, God no, it makes the world infinitely poorer and changes the story from an exploration of ideas which aren’t all that ingrained in the West, to a cliché tropester about a Catholic priest going Protestant so that he could be with a girl.

At least I assume that’s where they were going to take this eventually.

I mean, I think the direction was “look conflicted, this isn’t the final stage of your journey”?

But consider this—the show went there, it built on the concepts of Eastern philosophy and touched upon the ideas of spiritual awakening, only to swerve in the end and strongly imply they’re bullshit and Aang should have never wasted his time with them.

So honestly, I much prefer scanty worldbuilding to an insulting retcon by a damn rock.

Multiracial Air Nomads

Probably the most substantial “no hint of irony” point on this list and a genuinely good addition to the universe’s worldbuilding.

See, the notion of the elemental nations being perfectly separate and never mingling before Sozin has always been sketchy but it’s especially ridiculous in the case of airbenders. It never made sense to me for all airbenders to be Air Nomads and for all Air Nomads to be monks and for all monks to be chilling at the temples all the time to facilitate a quick everyone-dies genocide should an imperialistic warlord ever decide to commit one.

Because committing everyone to a single way of life at a handful of places kinda goes against the central philosophy behind airbending. Like the freedom and nomadism part.

Instead, there should be more variety to the airbending culture, with some staying at the temples as monks, hermits, and teachers while others live as nomads, travelling the world and creating more airbenders, with the resulting children in turn being influenced by the non-airbending cultures they grew up in.

And thus, not only should airbenders not be modeled after a single culture to create a one-size-fits-all lifestyle, but they should have the most diverse and dynamic culture out of the four nations.

And it’d be precisely this diversity which would pave way for an eventual reveal that some of them survived, that their complete extermination is impossible.

Because they’re everywhere.

You know.

Like air.

A History Of God – The 4,000-year quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

“I say that religion isn’t about believing things. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.” — Karen Armstrong on Powells.com

book by Karen Armstrong (2004)

The idea of a single divine being – God, Yahweh, Allah – has existed for over 4,000 years. But the history of God is also the history of human struggle. While Judaism, Islam and Christianity proclaim the goodness of God, organised religion has too often been the catalyst for violence and ineradicable prejudice. In this fascinating, extensive and original account of the evolution of belief, Karen Armstrong examines Western society’s unerring fidelity to this idea of One God and the many conflicting convictions it engenders. A controversial, extraordinary story of worship and war, A History of God confronts the most fundamental fact – or fiction – of our lives.

____________________________________

Review: Armstrong, a British journalist and former nun, guides us along one of the most elusive and fascinating quests of all time – the search for God. Like all beloved historians, Armstrong entertains us with deft storytelling, astounding research, and makes us feel a greater appreciation for the present because we better understand our past. Be warned: A History of God is not a tidy linear history. Rather, we learn that the definition of God is constantly being repeated, altered, discarded, and resurrected through the ages, responding to its followers’ practical concerns rather than to mystical mandates. Armstrong also shows us how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have overlapped and influenced one another, gently challenging the secularist history of each of these religions. – Gail Hudson

____________________________________

The Introduction to A History of God:

As a child, I had a number of strong religious beliefs but little faith in God. There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them. I believed implicitly in the existence of God; I also believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the efficacy of the sacraments, the prospect of eternal damnation and the objective reality of Purgatory. I cannot say, however, that my belief in these religious opinions about the nature of ultimate reality gave me much confidence that life here on earth was good or beneficent. The Roman Catholicism of my childhood was a rather frightening creed. James Joyce got it right in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: I listened to my share of hell-fire sermons. In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively. God, on the other hand, was a somewhat shadowy figure, defined in intellectual abstractions rather than images. When I was about eight years old, I had to memorise this catechism answer to the question, ‘What is God?’: ‘God is the Supreme Spirit, Who alone exists of Himself and is infinite in all perfections.’ Not surprisingly, it meant little to me and I am bound to say that it still leaves me cold. It has always seemed a singularly arid, pompous and arrogant definition. Since writing this book, however, I have come to believe that it is also incorrect.

As I grew up, I realised that there was more to religion than fear. I read the lives of the saints, the metaphysical poets, T. S. Eliot and some of the simpler writings of the mystics. I began to be moved by the beauty of the liturgy and, though God remained distant, I felt that it was possible to break through to him and that the vision would transfigure the whole of created reality. To do this I entered a religious order and, as a novice and a young nun, I learned a good deal more about the faith. I applied myself to apologetics, scripture, theology and church history. I delved into the history of the monastic life and embarked on a minute discussion of the Rule of my own order, which we had to learn by heart. Strangely enough, God figured very little in any of this. Attention seemed focused on secondary details and the more peripheral aspects of religion. I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to force my mind to encounter God but he remained a stern taskmaster, who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalisingly absent. The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics. Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about ‘God’, seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean? Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate – and highly contradictory – doctrine of the Trinity or was this, like so many other articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem?

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life and once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. My interest in religion continued, however, and I made a number of television programmes about the early history of Christianity and the nature of the religious experience. The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings were justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period of time. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown.

Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas; I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in the kindergarten. Yet my early, confused ideas about God had not been modified or developed. People without my peculiarly religious background may also find that their notion of God was formed in infancy. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years.

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognisably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces but these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seems always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God – not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.

When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that ‘he’ would mirror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear – from eminent monotheists in all three faiths – that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other Rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was – in any sense – a reality ‘out there’; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary rational process. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that ‘he’ was the most important reality in the world.

This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day. The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another. Indeed, the statement: ‘I believe in God’ has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement it only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community. Consequently there is not one unchanging idea contained in the word ‘God’ but the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas. When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is anti-historical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of ‘God’: each generation has to create the image of God that works for them. The same is true of atheism. The statement ‘I do not believe in God’ has always meant something slightly different at each period of history. The people who have been dubbed ‘atheists’ over the years have always been denied a particular conception of the divine. Is the ‘God’ who is rejected by atheists today, the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics or the God of the eighteenth-century deists? All these deities have been venerated as the God of the Bible and the Koran by Jews, Christians and Muslims at various points of their history. We shall see that they are very different from one another. Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called ‘atheists’ by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a God’ which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?

Despite its other-worldliness, religion is highly pragmatic. We hall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound. As soon as it ceases to be effective it will be changed – sometimes for something radically different. This did not disturb most monotheists before our own day because they were quite clear that their ideas about God were not sacrosanct but could only be provisional. They were man-made – they could be nothing else – and quite separate from the indescribable Reality they symbolised. Some developed quite audacious ways of emphasising this essential distinction. One medieval mystic went so far as to say that this ultimate Reality – mistakenly called ‘God’ – was not even mentioned in the Bible. Throughout history, men and women have experienced a dimension of the spirit that seems to transcend the mundane world. Indeed, it is an arresting characteristic of the human mind to be able to conceive concepts that go beyond it in this way. However we choose to interpret it, this human experience of transcendence has been a fact of life. Not everybody would regard it as divine: Buddhists, as we shall see, would deny that their visions and insights are derived from a supernatural source; they see them as natural to humanity. All the major religions, however, would agree that it is impossible to describe this transcendence in normal conceptual language. Monotheists have called this transcendence ‘God’ but they have hedged this around with important provisos. Jews, for example, are forbidden to pronounce the sacred Name of God and Muslims must not attempt to depict the divine in visual imagery. The discipline is a reminder that the reality that we call ‘God’ exceeds all human expression.

This will not be a history in the usual sense, since the idea of God has not evolved from one point and progressed in a linear fashion to a final conception. Scientific notions work like that but the ideas of art and religion do not. Just as there are only a given number of themes in love poetry, so too people have kept saying the same things about God over and over again. Indeed, we shall find a striking similarity in Jewish, Christian and Muslim ideas of the divine. Even though Jews and Muslims both find the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation almost blasphemous, they have produced their own versions of these controversial theologies. Each expression of these universal themes is slightly different, however, showing the ingenuity and inventiveness of the human imagination as it struggles to express its sense of ‘God’.

Because this is such a big subject, I have deliberately confined myself to the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, though I have occasionally considered pagan, Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of ultimate reality to make a monotheistic point clearer. It seems that the idea of God is remarkably close to ideas in religions that developed quite independently. Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration. Despite the secular tenor of much Western society, the idea of God still affects the lives of millions of people. Recent surveys have shown that ninety-nine per cent of Americans say that they believe in God: the question is which ‘God’ of the many on offer do they subscribe to?

Theology often comes across as dull and abstract but the history of God has been passionate and intense. Unlike some other conceptions of the ultimate, it was originally attended by agonising struggle and stress. The prophets of Israel experienced their God as a physical pain that wrenched their every limb and filled them with rage and elation. The reality that they called God was often experienced by monotheists in a state of extremity: we shall read of mountain tops, darkness, desolation, crucifixion and terror. The Western experience of God seemed particularly traumatic. What was the reason for this inherent strain? Other monotheists spoke of light and transfiguration. They used very daring imagery to express the complexity of the reality they experienced, which went far beyond the orthodox theology. There has recently been a revived interest in mythology, which may indicate a widespread desire for a more imaginative expression of religious truth. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell has become extremely popular: he has explored the perennial mythology of mankind, linking ancient myths with those still current in traditional societies, is often assumed that the three God-religions are devoid of mythology and poetic symbolism. Yet, although monotheists originally rejected the myths of their pagan neighbours, these often crept back into the faith at a later date. Mystics have seen God incarnated a woman, for example. Others reverently speak of God’s sexuality and have introduced a female element into the divine.

This brings me to a difficult point. Because this God began as a specifically male deity, monotheists have usually referred to it as ‘he’. In recent years, feminists have understandably objected to this. Since I shall be recording the thoughts and insights of people who called God ‘he’, I have used the conventional masculine terminology, except when ‘it’ has been more appropriate. Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God – al-Dhat – is feminine.

All talk about God staggers under impossible difficulties. Yet monotheists have all been very positive about language at the same time as they have denied its capacity to express the transcendent reality. The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a God who – in some sense – speaks. His Word is crucial in all three faiths. The Word of God has shaped the history of our culture. We have to decide whether the word ‘God’ has any meaning for us today.

____________________________________

Biography Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs –including A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and The Great Transformation – and two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. She has addressed members of the U.S. Congress on three occasions; lectured to policy makers at the U.S. State Department; participated in the World Economic Forum in New York, Jordan, and Davos; addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and New York; is increasingly invited to speak in Muslim countries; and is now an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations. In February 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and is currently working with TED on a major international project to launch and propagate a Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to be signed in the fall of 2009 by a thousand religious and secular leaders. She lives in London.

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From Publishers Weekly This searching, profound comparative history of the three major monotheistic faiths fearlessly illuminates the sociopolitical ground in which religious ideas take root, blossom and mutate. Armstrong, a British broadcaster, commentator on religious affairs.., argues that Judaism, Christianity and Islam each developed the idea of a personal God, which has helped believers to mature as full human beings. Yet Armstrong also acknowledges that the idea of a personal God can be dangerous, encouraging us to judge, condemn and marginalize others. Recognizing this, each of the three monotheisms, in their different ways, developed a mystical tradition grounded in a realization that our human idea of God is merely a symbol of an ineffable reality. To Armstrong, modern, aggressively righteous fundamentalists of all three faiths represent “a retreat from God.” She views as inevitable a move away from the idea of a personal God who behaves like a larger version of ourselves, and welcomes the grouping of believers toward a notion of God that “works for us in the empirical age.”

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My wish: The Charter for Compassion – Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong TED Talk given in 2008

What God is, or isn’t, will continue to morph indefinitely unless…

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Richard Barlow:

‘The whole thing about the messiah is a human construct’

The Divine Principle: Questions to consider about Old Testament figures

How “God’s Day” was established on January 1, 1968

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Divine Principle – Parallels of History

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“… Many Koreans therefore have difficulty understanding and accepting religions that have only one god and emphasize an uncertain and unknowable afterlife rather than the here and now. In the Korean context of things, such religions are anti-life and do not really make sense…”  LINK

To respond to the heat the show and the writters are getting right now, I think a lot of people are upset because they don't seem to consider what the andience would like to see happen. I mean, I think you're absolutely right when you say the audience shouldn't dictate the story, it wouldn't be right on a artistic level if the authors have a vision of what they want their story to be. That being said, Jenna has been quite vocal with not having a particular idea with where the show was headed,

just that she wanted to stay focus on the female empowerment side of things. And so I think it's a bit of a waste not to come up story lines more in sync with what the audience like. But to be fair, that's definitely not a GG exclusive problem, a lot of writters seem to think that giving the audience what they want = bad artistic value. But it kind of creates this dynamic of who is more stubborn between the writters and the public haha

That’s a really interesting comment, anon! I think you’re right in the sense that there’s frequently a bit of a friction in terms of what audiences want and what creators are doing, and that that can manifest into conflict when one party responds too much to the other - whether positively or negatively. 

I actually don’t think that any audience just wants fanservice from a show after all, even if sometimes it can seem that way (and hell, even if they can sometimes think that’s what they want), and I think there could potentially be difficult conversations being had in terms of how the writers and others on the show view their own creative integrity, and their original concept when wrangling how much to give those audiences, how much they might want to surprise those audiences, how much they might want to steer away creatively from what they view as fanservice, to a whole other array of complex feelings. 

The barrier between creator and audience has never been as thin as it is right now, after all, and I think there are people on both sides who have difficulties not only negotiating that, but respecting that one exists at all.

I actually think the GG writers do listen to audiences, and give us what we want a lot. I mean - the fact that Beth and Rio even happened at all when that wasn’t in the initial plan is testament to that, but so many people as well were calling for more Rio backstory, which we’ve gotten; however light-handedly, and to see him more as a gangleader again in s3, for the return of Rio’s boys, for more of the crime world, for the girls to have their own operation, for more of the kids, for Annie to have self-reflection, for scenes between Stan and Beth and Annie, for more JT and Ruby, for more Ruby and Sara.

We actually have gotten a lot of what we were talking about during the hiatus, as well as things we haven’t wanted - like Dean, generally, haha, to say nothing of the 2.13 debacle. It’s a balance though, right? 

There’s also a balance when it comes to the ‘female empowerment’ question in terms of the type of show it is and how conflict manifests. Again, I actually think we’ve had some pretty great character growth from all three of the girls this season, and while it’s always one step forwards (their operation set up! Beth successfully wriggling out of Rio’s murder attempt! Ruby stealing the jersey! Annie’s breakthrough! Getting into Lucy’s phone and how they did it - I mean, god, could you see the girls doing that in s1?) and two steps back (Rio taking over their operation! Annie’s backslide! Beth’s inability to save Lucy! Ruby’s inability to stop Sara from following in her footsteps!) that growth is still there. 

As for Jenna, honestly, it’s hard to know how much she has planned - I think she’s only mentioned in the one interview that when she sits down to start writing the season, she’s not sure what’s going to happen, but she’s also said in other interviews that she has the full trajectory planned by the time they’re writing the scripts. I really do wish she’d do more interviews, because it’d be interesting to know more about her process - especially since the cast have said in a few interviews that they have sway on some of the creative choices, and not on others. 

She tends to fly under the radar generally, which - honestly, I’m almost grateful for given how some people tend to speak about her on both here and other social media sites. I would kill for a few good deep-dive writing podcast interviews with her though. :-)

You Can(Not) UnGay Kaworu Nagisa - An Essay

This is a text-version of my video-essay on the recent Netflix/Evangelion translation controversy. To see the video version, please click here!

I make no secret of the fact that the linguistics involved in Anime and Game translation are one of my primary fields of interest as a Japanologist. Compared to translation between Germanic and Romanic Languages, as the west is used to it, translating from Japanese to English is filled with a plethora of pitfalls, the likes of which can be very difficult to imagine unless you’re fluent in both languages.  

It’s because of this that my interest in any given AniManga controversy immediately skyrockets as soon as the matter of translation issues is brought up. Which brings us to June 21st’s release of Netflix’ Redub of Studio Gainax’ internationally infamous existential creator meltdown disguised as a Mecha Anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion.

1.)    Neon Genesis ADVangelion

For those among you who haven’t yet heard of this inherently controversial work – what rock do you live under and does it still have vacancies? In all seriousness though, enough videos attempting to summarize the plot of NGE exist on the internet to make giving the rundown here an exercise in redundancy. All you need to know is that the protagonist’ name is Shinji and that he’s a mental-wreck with Daddy Issues who pilots a giant cyborg infused with the soul of his dead Mom to fight surrealist alien abominations and gains an increasingly screwed up social life doing so, all while his already fragile psyche gradually declines to world-ending consequences. For far less fatalistic takes on some of these concepts, please see RahXephon and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Good? Good. Let’s move on.

The original ADV Films dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion and its sequels and spin-offs is… not really flawless, to say the least, but it did a good job in introducing the series to a western audience while staying entirely true to the themes and intentions of the original version. This is definitely at least partially thanks to the fact that director and auteur of the series, Hideaki Anno, personally oversaw the translation and dubbing process, and while the guy in all honesty doesn’t really know the first thing about voice acting – his performance as Jiro in The Wind Rises is one of the reasons it’s my least favorite Ghibli movie – what he does understand is his own work, and what it should convey to the audience in order to be authentic to his vision. So while I do have my issues with the ADV dub, such as poor audio-quality and hopeless cases of overacting caused by poor voice direction in certain parts, the translated script of the series was as stellar as could be expected from something created with the original author’s input, and to the very end of the original 26 episodes run, one can definitely feel the deep, emotional investment every single member of the English cast had in these characters and their journey. (I mean. Just listen to Spike Spencer’s secret rant in the end of the last episode. The dude clearly cares about what happens to Shinji.) In any case, this is probably one of the most influential, iconic dubs to all of the English-speaking Anime Fandom.

Then Netflix decided to license NGE. Not the ADV Dub. Just the show.

People were not happy.

2.)    The Rebuild of Netflixgelion

Please do not mistake what I’m saying for pedantic. The iconic nature of the original ADV dub of NGE cannot be understated, and plays a huge role in the current lack of acceptance for the Redub, even though previous similar redubbing efforts, such as in the case of Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, where welcomed by the community wholeheartedly. The new dub cast is absolutely stellar, including voice acting veterans such as Carrie Keranen and Erica Lindbeck, and Casey Mongillo’s amazing vocal range goes a long way to replicate and convey the emotional depth of Shinji Ikari in a way previously only seen in Megumi Ogata’s original Japanese performance.However, while the Netflix dub has a wonderful cast and voice direction, what it does not have is the original dub’s Hideaki Anno-approved script.

…Aaaaand, this is where the real troubles start.

To be totally clear, the redub always meant trouble. The original voice cast were reportedly never given a real chance to reprise their roles- despite efforts made by the main trio, Spike Spencer, Amanda Winn Lee and Tifanny Grant to at least be given a chance to audition – which is a surefire recipe for upsetting a lot of fans. However, this is a problem that could have at least been partially smoothed over after allowing the performances of the new cast to shine in their own right. I mean, even if it is incredibly scummy to not even inform the old cast of the auditions for the redub, if the new version proves to contain superior performances and direction in comparison to the, honestly badly-aged ADV dub, then Netflix’s decision to make an entirely new dub is entirely understandable, right?

No such arguments can be applied to the retranslation of the show’s script.

3.)    The End of Authorial Intent

I haven’t rewatched the entire show in the new dub, just two key episodes. That said, I wouldn’t dream of calling the new script ‘bad’. It’s, for the most part, natural and faithful to the original Japanese source text in much the same way the ADV dub was, to the point that some stray lines received identical translation in both versions. What gives the new script away as entirely unrelated to that of the ADV dub, however, are some rather…  baffling localization choices. 

All of those decisions are rooted in the original Japanese script. They’re not incorrect translations. If the Japanese were to be your only point of reference, there would be no reason to complain about these choices.

But we do have a point of reference. The ADV script. Which was overseen and approved by Hideaki Anno. The original director.

In the making of this video, I have since learned that Anno’s animation company, Khara, was most likely involved in the translation of the script for the Redub. However, as I can’t find any evidence that he himself was involved, the point I am about to make still stands:

Back in the 90s, very shortly after the show concluded its original run, Anno personally signed off on every single choice the ADV dub made. The respective pronunciations of Nerv, Seele and Gehirn, calling the EVA pilots by the correct singular “Child”, rather than the awkward Engrish singular “Children” the original Japanese featured, and referring to the enemies consistently as Angels, even in parts where the original Japanese mixed up the terminology for the sake of a pun with Kaworu’s name. 

So, all of the ADV localization changes are within the intent of the original author. They are part of how the show is meant to be consumed by a western audience. Not carrying over this terminology, despite it being faithful to the Japanese script, thus ironically makes the Netflix script LESS faithful to Anno’s authorial intent than the ADV dub. But those are only terminology changes, right? They’re not a big deal. They don’t alter the context of the narrative itself.

…

Kaworu Nagisa.

4.)    Kaworu Nagisa

Remember how I mentioned that I only really watched two episodes of the Netflix dub all the way through so far? Well, one of those two episodes happens to be one of the series’ most infamous, right after the two-part finale: Episode 24. “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, or “The Final Messenger” – Let’s not get hung up on which it is, Evangelion has ALWAYS been weird with titles.

This Episode introduces Kaworu Nagisa, the fifth of the EVA pilots and long-time fangirl-favorite for not-so-subtle reasons. Kaworu appears as Shinji is at his lowest point, our main protagonist’s already pretty much non-existent self-esteem in shambles. The two boys bond immediately over… the fact that Kaworu can sing ‘Ode to Joy’? Yeah, let’s go with that – And the majority of the episode consists of showcasing the growing relationship between Kaworu and Shinji, beginning with simple conversations, but quickly progressing into some more… serious territory.

I won’t sugarcoat things, in terms of narrative structure, the episode is a mess, rushing from scene to scene with reckless abandon, attempting to successfully tell a story in under 25 minutes, that some Disney Movies don’t tell right in 90+ minutes. This is doubtlessly due to the overall mess that NGE’s production process had become at this point in its original run for reasons too complicated to talk about in this video, but let me assure you that there’s pretty solid evidence that Kaworu was definitely originally meant to appear for much more than a single episode. As it stands, however, he dies in the same episode he is introduced, begging Shinji to assist him in his suicide after revealing himself to him as the final Angel. His effect on Shinji, however, is profound and comparable to the effect Nia Teppelin of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has on that show’s protagonist, Simon Giha. In that way, just as with Nia later, it is plain as day that Kaworu is intended to be one of Shinji’s love interests. And the episode is NOT subtle at all in portraying him as such.

A lot can be said about the exact nature of Kaworu’s affection for Shinji, from Kaworu clearly seeing Shinji as some sort of avatar for humanity as a whole on which he projects his admiration for the species, to Shinji seemingly falling victim to an idealized Oedipus Complex in regards to his perception of Kaworu, the fact remains that their interactions with one another in Episode 24 are in places obviously romantic to even sexual in not only the dialogue, but also the visuals. Even with Hideaki Anno’s profession that Shinji’s romantic feelings for Kaworu aren’t “carnal”, they’re still obviously there. Projected and skewed by their unusual psyches as aspects of it may be, the relationship between them is clearly portrayed in a way that transcends the platonic and becomes intimate more quickly than your seafood friends can start singing ‘kiss the guy’ on a romantic boat ride – It’s not subtext, you guys. Towards Shinji Ikari, Kaworu Nagisa acts and speaks quite openly like one would speak to a lover. And even if Kaworu and his ambiguous humanity are somehow not gay enough for you, well, resident violently blushing and stuttering smitten wreck Shinji Ikari will put your doubts to rest. The visual homosexual (homoromantic?) tension in these scenes is so tangible, you can cut it with a knife. The dialogue, at certain points, doesn’t even really matter. Kaworu could quite literally be reading off the grocery list, and these scenes would STILL be gay.

That doesn’t mean the dialogue is not important, and that one shouldn’t really, really pay attention to what’s on screen when translating.

5.)    The Final Angel is in the Detail

The translation of Kaworu’s words to Shinji in the Netflix dub is not wrong. But it ignores the context of the scene, as well as authorial intent. And that’s why I understand why people are angry at it.

The lines in question are these : 

(Scene 1)

Kaworu: そう、好意に値することよ。

Shinji: 好意？

Kaworu:「好き」ってこと、さ

(Scene 2)

Shinji: カヲル君が「好きだ」って言ってくれたんだ。僕のこと。初めて…初めて人から「好きだ」って言われたんだ。

In the ADV dub, these lines were translated like this: 

(Scene 1)

Kaworu: This is worth earning my empathy.

Shinji: Empathy?

Kaworu: I’m saying “I love you.”  

(Scene 2)

Shinji: Kaworu said that he loved me. I’ve never... felt such kindness before.

In the Netflix dub, however, they were translated like this: 

(Scene 1)

Kaworu: Yes, you’re worthy of my grace.

Shinji: Your grace?

Kaworu: I’m saying “I like you.”  

(Scene 2)

Shinji: Kaworu said I was worthy of his grace. That was the first time... someone told me they liked me.

Which one of these is right? The fact is… both are.

The Japanese term “ 好き ” doesn’t really have a direct equivalent in English. It holds a connotation that is meant to convey very personal, but broadly defined affection. It doesn’t simply mean “to like something”. It means to feel a strong, positive, emotional connection to that person of thing. For that reason, this term can be used to profess affection to your friends, your family, your favorite item… Or as a love-confession. 

In Japan, love-confessions using “ 好き ” are a lot, lot more common than the much, much stronger term “愛する”, let alone the implicitly sexual term “恋する”. In most romance Manga, “ 好き ” will be the term of choice the heroine uses to confess her love to her object of affection. And though, via character analysis, a strong argument can be made that when Kaworu uses “ 好き ” to express his affection for Shinji, he means general affection towards Shinji’s humanity more than personal, romantic affection, this is clearly not how Shinji takes Kaworu’s words. To Shinji, what Kaworu said in that moment, definitely sounded like a confession of romantic devotion, which becomes very, very clear when Shinji later tells Misato: 

Shinji: 初めて人から「好きだ」って言われたんだ。

With the line being translates as “I like you”, this statement of Shinji sounds like pure delusion, which wouldn’t be out of character for him, of course, but isn’t at all what the episode is trying to get across. Of course people have told Shinji before they ‘like’ something about him! That’s a big part of the reason he started defining himself through his status as pilot of EVA Unit 01; his efforts earned him praise from those around him. He had friends for most of the series, at least implicitly, these people have definitely expressed a ‘liking’ for him. So by translating “好き” as “like” in this context, a whole layer of the statement is lost, and Shinji professing that this was the first time anybody has ever said that they “like” him sounds less like a serious revelation about his character, and more like his typical, delusional whining about how the world hates him.

And I think that’s why Anno signed off on the ADV dub translating the line as “I love you” rather than “I like you”. Because the point of this line is not Shinji thinking that Kaworu is the only person who’s ever tolerated his presence. It’s that Shinji feels like Kaworu was the first person to ever have a genuine, emotional connection to him. Something he’s never allowed himself to have, due to the series’ often cited theme of Hedgehog’s Dilemma.

And, as correct as translating “ 好き ” as “like” is,  a whole dimension of Episode 24 of NGE is entirely lost if you choose to translate Kaworu’s lines that way. As much sense as it technically makes.

The Netflix dub of NGE, by all measures known to me, is a very well-acted, well-directed, well-translated version of a classic piece of Animation History. I am not telling anyone that it is in any way bad or even inferior to the original, and I am not telling anyone to avoid it.

All I am saying is, that if you, as a translator, have access to references regarding authorial intent you should probably use them.

LGBTQ+ Characters in Comics from the 20th century I like

It’s June, Pride is here and rainbow colours are everywhere. So, I figured I’d be a little retrospective and share a short list of LGBTQ+ characters in comics from the 20th century I have a soft spot for. I’ve organized these by date of the characters first appearing but, happily most are still having stories written about them today.

Let’s start with three ladies from DC: 

Catwoman

Catwoman, specifically Selina Kyle has been around comics for a long time, nearly as long as the turbulence of her relationship with Batman. Though, Bruce isn’t they only character she has involved herself with over the years. I’ve got my share of comics featuring this fierce lady of many lives and antiheroine, including part of the New 52 run by Genevieve Valentine a few years back where her bisexuality was acknowledged as canon. Though, it was the film adaptation Batman Returns in 1992 with Michelle Pfieffer that blew me away when I was young. And remains, I think the most iconic Catwoman costume, which you can see in 4K now. Hear her roar.

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman is another longstanding character and probably the most popular female superhero. I had comics as a child with Diana along with watching the sometimes campy 1970s TV series with Lynda Carter. Perhaps even more interesting than the Amazonian warrior herself is the passions of one of her creators William Marston and the themes of those earliest comics. (I’d suggest the book Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peters Comics 1941-1948.) And of course, also the controversy over a strong heroine standing on her own sparked by Fredic Wertham in Seduction of the Innocent.

Poison Ivy

Poison Ivy, or Pamela Isely with her sexual agency and connection to the Green, who admittedly may go about fighting for the environment as well as for women or children in the wrong way sometimes, is my top female character from American comics period. After again some rough treatment in comics recently, I wrote this year about her origins since 1966. Most people these days probably can’t think of Ivy without Harley, since it’s been 20 years since their first meeting in comics (longer for other mediums) but, these gals have a relationship that isn’t monogamous and has had it’s on again off again points too. (And note to DC maybe get it together on just how you define it since you waffle a bit hmm?)

 Taku and Venomm

Black Panther was one of the few Marvel comics characters whose stories I’ve wound up reading. (My mum had this thing against some comics and one of my older brothers mainly passed on DC issues to me.) The Jungle Action installments written by Don McGregor are to this day still memorable. And part of that should be due also to Taku and Venomm (Horatio Walters), the latter first appearing in the “Panther’s Rage” arc. Though, it would take time for the open acknowledgement of this example of early gay characters in comics. Sexuality outside the heterosexual among other topics was taboo in the 1970s yet, McGregor managed with a collection of artists to bring a vision of Wakanda focusing largely on its black inhabitants and difficult social issues in the world to publication.

 Juli Bauernfeind

I read The Heart of Thomas by Moto Hagio about boys at a German boarding school when I was 21. Juli was a character I connected to and the story had a profound effect on me. And I bawled my eyes out. It still makes me cry and is still one of the best comics I’ve ever come across. I reviewed the English edition a few years back. As well as wrote a post on the French bisexual author Roger Peyrefitte whose novel was adapted into a film which inspired Hagio.

 John Constantine

Full of politics, call it dark with a dose of nihilism but, Hellblazer with John Constantine is just damn good. Sometimes the world is awful, people are awful, you’re awful and well yeah everything is going to hell. Constantine is pretty much dreadful for the women he’s often involved with, or well anybody really. It was in the early 90s readers were first clued into the history of his love life made up of girlfriends and boyfriends. And can we fail to recall the later S. W. Manor from Ashes & Dust: In the City of Angels, one of the most visceral takes thru a character that is basically a stand in for Bruce Wayne, and his twisted relationship with John? I’m not. It’s been a strange trip over the years some adaptations really glossing over his sexuality. Though of late handling this aspect of his character appears to have gotten better.

 Stormer and Kimber 

The madcap Jem and the Holograms was one of my favourite cartoons as a child in the 80s. I even had some of the dolls and cassette tapes. Stormer aka Mary Phillips part of the Misfits was the rock star I loved the most. Dedicated to music and actually quite sweet with the optimum blue hair. I had to try the colour myself. The episode where she teams up with Kimber after both have differences with their respective bandmates is a classic. So, it was truly outrageous when the series was revived in 2015 in comic book form by Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell, and the Stormer and Kimber relationship that had been brewing came fully out for fans. (Btw the comic also added a new character, Blaze who is a trans woman and girlfriend of Misfit’s fan Clash.)

  Ash Lynx and Eiji Okamura

It’s been interesting to experience Banana Fish by Akimi Yoshida in different ways from first encountering the comic when I was a teenager, picking it up again in my twenties, and yet again the animated TV series last year. I wrote about the comic and first few episodes of the 2018 adaptation when it was airing. Though, I haven’t posted much more on it because there’s a tiny percentage of its fandom I want to avoid, as well as 30+ years on the series is still— pain. This one is a tragedy folks. However, it also has a beautiful healing love story and touched on a variety of hot button issues that are sadly still relevant today. My love for these two teen characters in a gritty USA will live forever.

  Chihaya and Kagetsuya

I’ve written before how the sci-fi title Earthian was what introduced and endeared respect for m/m comics from Japan for me. The art style of Yun Kouga has changed a bit over the years, nevertheless still stands out from the crowd. And Earthian with a taboo love between androgynous male angels remains my favourite of her work.

Michiru Kaiô and Haruka Tennô

Sailor Moon has become a multimedia sensation and is beloved around the world. Many kids and even adults of all sorts in the 90s will remember it in one form or another and cite it as an influence for pursuing careers in all sorts of creative fields. Along with countless fans recognizing or discovering something of themselves in the characters. There are several different characters for rep in the series. But particularly for me Michiru and Haruka were an opportunity in a very anti-LGBTQ+ climate (their relationship was even refashioned as being cousins when brought out in English for the first time) to nevertheless see such a loving, positive relationship.

Tomoyo Daidôji

Love is a theme the creative team CLAMP revisits and revisits and Cardcaptor Sakura is the magical girl comic series with a theme on all different forms. It is one of the first all ages titles from Japan that I will recommend to people. (Despite fyi containing a whopping four student-teacher relationships. Not the purpose of this post to go into right now though.) The best friend to Sakura, Tomoyo is one of my favourite characters. Always supportive, maybe a bit alarming popping out of bushes or other spots with her camera at the ready to catch either Sakura’s everyday life or battles, and possessing boundless fashion sense. (Btw, there are other characters in the series that are or could be interpreted as examples for my list as well. Sakura among them.)

  Isabella Yamamoto

Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa, a sequel of sorts to one of the huge girls’ comics titles of the 1990s Gokinjo Monogatari, introduced a group of teenagers on the verge of graduating, some with an idea of what to do with their lives and others questioning the path they’ve so far taken. Isabella from an affluent background but, who struggled for acceptance from her family or nearly anyone until she was gifted a handmade dress by her childhood friend George (who is Bi btw), studies pattern drafting at the same art school as Gokinjo Monogatari. The most mature of the main cast, refined, always listening and offering a cup of tea, she achieves her dream career and self-actualization in fashion. Since I have a degree in fashion design, I have to agree that clothes are so much more than just something we wear.

How an African-American psychiatrist helped design a groundbreaking television show as a radical therapeutic tool for helping minority preschoolers.

IN THE WAKE of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, a newly formed group called the Black Psychiatrists of America began to challenge their white colleagues to think about racism in a new way. Its members had been discussing for some time the possibility of creating an organization that would address their lack of representation within the key bodies of American psychiatry. But now, as one of these men, Dr. Chester Pierce, later put it ”we anguished in our grief for a great moderate leader,” and it seemed that the time for moderation on their side was also over. In Pierce’s words: “As we listened to radio reports and called to various sections of the country for the on-the spot reports in inner cities, our moderation weakened and our alarm hardened.”

WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts. In this installment, Anne Harrington shares a story that didn’t make it into her latest book “Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness,” (W. W. Norton & Company.)

Racism had led directly to King’s assassination, and not only had white psychiatry consistently failed to take racism seriously; it had, in ways both subtle and overt, enabled it.

The decision was thus made to organize black psychiatrists into an independent body that would use tactics of the civil rights movement to force American psychiatry to acknowledge both its own racism and its professional responsibility to address the scourge of racism in the country.

On May 8, 1969, representatives from the Black Psychiatrists of America interrupted the trustees of the American Psychiatric Association while they were eating breakfast, and presented them with a list of demands. These included a significant increase in African-American representation on APA committees, task forces, and other positions of leadership; a call for the APA to commit itself to desegregating mental health facilities; and a demand that any individual member of the society who was found to be guilty of racial discrimination be barred from practicing psychiatry.

The most fundamental demand made that morning, however, was that the profession begin to think about racism differently than it had in the past. Racism did not just happen because some bad people had hateful beliefs. Unlike many of their liberal white colleagues, who were fascinated by the potential mental pathologies of individual racists, the Black Psychiatrists of America (drawing on new sociological work) insisted that racism was built into the systems and structures of American life, including psychiatry itself. For this reason, as some of them put it in 1973, “institutional change (as opposed to personality change) are needed to root out and eliminate racism.”

Chester Pierce — the founding president of the Black Psychiatrists of America — was most concerned about the pernicious influence of one institution in particular: television. By 1969, virtually every American family home had at least one set. As one commentator at the time observed: “American homes have more television sets than bathtubs, refrigerators or telephones; 95 percent of American homes have television sets.”

Small children of all ethnicities were growing up glued to TV screens. This worried Pierce, because he was not just a psychiatrist but also a professor of early childhood education. And from a public health standpoint, he believed, television was a prime “carrier” of demeaning messages that undermined the mental health of vulnerable young black children in particular. In fact, it was Pierce who first coined the now widely used term microaggression, in the course of a study in the 1970s that exposed the persistent presence of stigmatizing representations of black people in television commercials.

It seemed to Pierce, though, that the same technology that risked creating another generation of psychically damaged black children could also be used as a radical therapeutic intervention. As he told his colleagues within the Black Psychiatrists of America in 1970: “Many of you know that for years I have been convinced that our ultimate enemies and deliverers are the education system and the mass media.” “We must,” he continued, “without theoretical squeamishness over correctness of our expertise, offer what fractions of truth we can to make education and mass media serve rather than to oppress the black people of this country.”

Knowing how Pierce saw the matter explains why, shortly after the founding of the Black Psychiatrists of America, he became personally involved in helping to design a new kind of television show targeted at preschool children.

The show had had originally been conceived as a novel way of bringing remedial education into the homes of disadvantaged children, especially children of color. Pierce, though, saw a different kind of potential for a show like this: one that could directly counter and counteract the racist messages prevalent in the media of his time. The issues for him were even more personal than they might otherwise have been: at the time, he had a 3-year-old daughter of his own. He thus agreed to serve as a senior advisor on the show, working especially closely with the public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney, one of its two creators (the other was the psychologist Lloyd Morrisett).

In 1969, the show aired on public television stations across the country for the first time. It was called “Sesame Street.”

It was not only the most imaginative educational show for preschoolers ever designed: it was also, quite deliberately, populated with the most racially diverse cast that public television had ever seen. All the multi-ethnic characters— adults, children and puppets — lived, worked, and played together on a street in an inner-city neighborhood, similar (if in an idealized way) to the streets in which many minority children were growing up.

Each show opened with scenes of children of different races playing together. Episodes featured a strong black male role model (Gordon, a school teacher), his supportive wife, Susan (who later is offered the opportunity to develop a profession of her own), a good- hearted white storekeeper (Mr. Hooper) and more.

Within a few years, Hispanic characters moved into the neighborhood as well. As Loretta Moore Long (who played Susan) later reflected: ‘“Sesame Street’ has incorporated a hidden curriculum … that seeks to bolster the Black and minority child’s self-respect and to portray the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural world into which both majority and minority child are growing.”

The radical nature of this “hidden curriculum” did not go unnoticed. In May 1970, a state commission in Mississippi voted to not air the show on the state’s newly launched public TV network: the people of Mississippi, said some legislators, were not yet “ready” to see a show with such an interracial cast. The state commission reversed its decision after the originally secret vote made national news — though it took 22 days to decide to do so.

“Sesame Street” would go on to become the most successful children’s show of all time. Over time, though, the radical mental health agenda fueling its creation was largely forgotten. Later critics would instead increasingly suggest that the show, as a straightforward experiment in early education, benefited white middle-income children more than its primary target audience of disadvantaged minorities, and in that sense had arguably partly misfired.

Chester Pierce, however, never lost sight of the hidden curriculum that, for him, had always been at the heart of “Sesame Street.” “Early childhood specialists,” he reflected in 1972, “have a staggering responsibility … in producing planetary citizens whose geographic and intellectual provinces are as limitless as their all-embracing humanity.”

What mattered most about “Sesame Street” was not the alphabet songs, the counting games or the funny puppets. What mattered most was its vision of an integrated society where everyone was a friend and treated with respect.

The program had originally been a radical experiment in the use of mass media to give the youngest generation of Americans their first experience of what Martin Luther King Jr. had famously called the Beloved Community: one based on justice, equal opportunity and positive regard for one’s fellow human beings, regardless of race, color or creed.

Anne Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the history of science and medicine at Harvard University, director of undergraduate studies in her department, and faculty dean of Pforzheimer House, a 400-strong undergraduate community on the Harvard campus. She is the author of four books and numerous articles.

when I said I was going to go do that did yall think I was joking because I wasn’t

I know almost nothing about precure (which is what the character creator is apparently based on) but IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MY COOL NEW MAGICAL GIRL OCS ANYWAY

left to right, these are Hana, Kira and Nika

Hana wields the element of Darkness: dampening others’ powers, literally shutting out light (she can still see / sense things herself) and occasionally influencing / dampening people’s thoughts / emotions. Calming people down, derailing trains of thought, up to and including actual memory wipes. Her power has pretty much no offensive element, but she’s a support powerhouse and can literally handle a fight by herself by slowly winding it down to the end

Kira wields the element of Fire: literally setting things on fire, raising temperature of an area or an object, manipulating existing fires; on an emotional level, distracting people and pissing them off (specifically as a power effect, essentially drawing aggro); and finally, speeding herself up and resistance to heat which  extends to her post-transformation outfit. Her power is very strongly offensive but her only defense (other than ‘offense is the best defense’) is mobility, so she still needs others’ support to be safe in a fight.

Nika wields the element of Ice: creating ice out of thin air, lowering temperature of objects and areas, resistance to cold; on a more abstract level, she can ‘freeze herself out of reality’, which has a number of effects which she can turn up and down to a degree: - lowering the impact others’ powers have on her, while her own power remains at the same strength if a bit more difficult to control; - making herself harder to both notice and remember, ‘fading’ out of reality on perception level; - reducing the impact of physical interactions with the world, up to being able to literally pass through solid objects. Her power is versatile both offense and defense wise, but has a number of drawbacks that make it her strong preference to not fight alone.

Their powers have interactions, intuitively obvious for Nika and Kira together (manipulating temperatures of anything freely in any direction, creating water) (Kira herself cannot put out fires she starts, only move them around, and Nika cannot reduce the amount of ice she’s already created) and significantly more abstract for Hana. The intertwine of her power and Kira’s enables them to heal people, and the intertwine of her power and Nika’s enables them to mend objects - and on the other end of the spectrum, she can make both Kira’s flames and Nika’s ice more deadly/injurious/destructive, basically reducing resistances living creatures and objects have to them.

Their powers ‘wind up’ as they use them, and the longer the fight, the bigger guns they’re able to pull, often surprising themselves (and occasionally putting themselves in danger). All three of them have a connection to a ‘plane’ of their element, and can fly by forging a ‘path’ through the air that brings in some of that plane into the real world, enabling them to move through it freely. Hana uses this ability most freely, in no small part due to essential harmlessness of her element: she can practice with impunity, without worrying about either killing something with frost or setting anything on fire. Kira makes up for lack of practice with enthusiasm, counting on the interaction of her power and Nika’s to cancel out her ‘heat trail’, and Nika prefers to stay on the ground or make ice ‘platforms’ to run/jump across (their inherent connection to their plane prevents her from slipping or losing her balance)

After a bit of practice with transformation, all three of them are capable of using their powers while detransformed; however, as far as the ‘winding up’ effect goes, they start at a very, very low level of strength - transformation essentially jump starts it, along with giving them stylish looks. There’s more to it, however: the mechanism by which it does that is by making them less human and closer to an ‘elemental’ of their element, which can have a number of drawbacks,which grow as their power winds up. This is particularly noticable for Nika, who is not a fan of the effect ‘fading out’ has on her despite appreciating its utility. The most immediate and noticable effect is on their emotions. Ironically, to a degree, this is most harmless for Hana, who simply becomes more tranquil and less capable of focus as a counterbalance to her perception expanding otherwise, and she actually likes this state. Kira’s expanding connection to her element makes her more reckless, prone to tunnel vision and less empathetic; she makes sure to focus on listening to her teammates’ directions as her power grows. The effect on Nika is weaker than the other two if she doesn’t ‘fade out’ and stronger if she does, leaving her more consciously aware of it: it dissolves her attachments and strong emotions, figuratively freezing her heart. For all three of them, going too far into this state can lead to losing themselves, their identities and memories, and while detransforming restores them to a baseline human state, it’s still a traumatic experience. As their control over their power grows, they’re able to access higher levels of strength with less emotional blowback, and control the speed at which their power ‘winds up’, allowing them to possibly spend days at a time at a just-post-transformation baseline or wind up to the highest safe tier within minutes.

Their transformation trinkets take shape of friendship bracelets, which change their design with time based on their growth / emotional states. Originally they were actual friendship bracelets the three made together. They were not very close friends, but their shared affinity for magic brought them together until they made a physical embodiment of this connection, which then became a physical embodiment of their connection to magic, too.

As far as interpersonal dynamics go, Nika is kind of the ‘center’ of the team in that she’s the person both Kira and Hana are unambiguously friends with. She’s sweet, nice and non-confrontational, and cares about harmony between the three of them more than anything. Kira has aspirations of a leader, coming up with plans and pushing the group to be more proactive, while Hana acts as a check on her overflowing initiative, holding her back and serving as a voice of reason, which frequently leads to tension between the two of them. Their respect for each other grows with time, but they still occasionally have difficulty overcoming their stubborn natures and communicating properly without Nika to serve as a mediator.

(without Kira, Hana and Nika tend to sit on their hands and wait for ideas/fights/initiative to come to them, and have to deliberately and determinedly collaborate to actually come up with a proactive plan)

(without Hana, Kira pulls pliant Nika along into all kinds of explosive trouble, that they coincidentally cannot easily mend side effects of without Hana’s powers, and have to go through a lot of trouble to at least mitigate)

Their transformation does not affect their facial features and body shapes (other than giving them animal attributes) but it significantly alters both their hairstyle and manner of dressing. Kira’s style is actually most similar to her post-transformation one, as she likes wearing girly but practical clothes, with cute wide skirts with modesty shorts underneath as a staple; but her hair is cut short, without bangs, which makes her look significantly enough different to be just short of unrecognizable from a distance. Hana’s hair is usually up in elaborate ‘dos, similar to Nika’s post-transformation one, and her parents tend to dress her in overly feminine (to her taste) jewel-toned clothes that look nothing like her post-transformation outfit. Nika simply has no sense of style / fashion sense / ability to dress herself, and usually wears jeans & cartoon t-shirts with her hair in a simple braid and her bangs clipped back. For all three girls, their post-transformation outfits are essentially how they’d like to dress if neither practicality nor other people’s opinions were a concern.

Their animal attributes do have significance beyond making them even cuter, and symbolize their connection to specific presiding deities. This connection is independent of their element and is in fact specifically the thing that allows them to control it, transform back and forth and not succumb instantly to all their personality and memories dissolving in it (which is what tends to happen to people forcibly connected to an element without an additional tether like that, sometimes reversibly and sometimes not). Nika and Kira are both in the domain of the Fox, while Hana is in the domain of the Rabbit. Fox is more proactive and generally benevolent, but can get them in trouble that requires Hana, backed by her more passive and disinterested (less helpful but also less obstructive) patron, to pull them out of.

Fox is the one that manifests as their ‘mentor’ at the very beginning, although she loses interest / forgets about them / gets distracted fairly frequently, so they still have to find their own path for the most part. It actually takes a lot of time before the girls even learn that Rabbit exists, much less has any kind of connection to their team (Fox neglects to explain that, along with many other things she deems irrelevant / inconvenient / funnier if they don’t know).

Yes, Kira’s hair really IS that color. People tend to assume she dyes it (yes, she’s like 12, but it just fits really naturally as an assumption about her that she would), but actually she doesn’t, it’s just a severe case of Protagonist Syndrome (no thanks to Fox’s sense of humor). Even though she’s, uh, not the actual protagonist, that’d be Nika XD

The setting is a fictional world in which magic / deities and spirits are marginally more known about, but the girls still maintain secret identities. Part of the reason is that the very first fight ends with their opponent promising to track them down and make their lives hell; part is that they aren’t crazy about the idea of taking responsibility for all the collateral damage (sure, they eventually get the hang of minimizing and mending it, but not immediately, and there’s always still some left). Hana’s powers are definitely immediately helpful with the secret identities, yes. Nevertheless, their parents figure it out fairly fast, but as they’re literally backed/guided by deities, don’t try to stop them. Hana’s pretend nothing is happening, Kira’s just take it in stride like ‘we always knew something like this was going to happen, she’s Just Like That’, and Nika’s try their best to be supportive and helpful, even if they take their time revealing that actually yeah they do know about her big secret).

I’ll be by your side - Remus LupinxDaughter

Hi!! Wooow I’m a slow writer XD To be fair though, I am graduating in June, so there’s...quite a lot to do. Anyhow, this is part 3 of my imagine deal? so I’d recommend reading that one and part two first. Remus is my favourite HP character, so this mainly focuses on the relationship between him and his daughter, but I guess it’s slight HarryxOC as well ;)

Deal? (Part 1) | Oh, darling... (Part 2) | I’ll be by your side (Part 3)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Please note:

1: I don’t own any of the gifs used, nor any already established characters, so credit to the authors and original creators - You have done a phenomenal job :)

2: English is not my native language, as I was born and raised in Sweden. I have, however, studied English for almost a decade, so I don’t think it’ll be a problem, I just thought I’d let you know ;)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Word count: ≈ 2200

Warnings: Battle of Hogwarts, Angst, Blood, Death :(

Enjoy! :)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“But, dad! You can’t go yourself and then expect me not to come along!”

“Yes, Bree, I can, and I will!”

He was desperate to go join the rest of the Order, and searched frantically for his old coat.

“Bu-”

“Darling, listen, this is not your fight, okay? You’re staying with Tonks and Teddy this time, and I’ll-”

She had grabbed his coat and was holding it behind her back, out of her father’s reach.

“DAD!!”

Remus stopped for a moment and took a proper look at his daughter for the first time since receiving the message about the upcoming battle.

“Look, I’m seventeen years old. I’m an adult now, and most of my younger friends are fighting. There’s literally no reason for me not to!”

“There is a perfectly good reason and you know that! Besides, your age is completely irrelevant! It wouldn’t matter if you were fifteen or seventeen, twenty or thirty, I don’t want you fighting!”

His voice was stern, which admittedly wasn’t too uncommon, but it lacked the normal comedic undertone and not even a ghost of a smile could be seen on his face. This did make Breanna feel quite uncomfortable, but she was not giving up. She couldn’t leave everyone else and just sit quietly on the sidelines. Surely he understood that, right?

“Well, I’m sorry, but it’s not your choice to make. I know you don’t like it, but I’m going.”

She gave her father his coat and picked a jumper for herself, but stopped abruptly when approaching the front door. Remus had stepped in front of her, and pulled her into a tight hug.

“Please, darling… I can’t have you injured again - or worse! Stay.”

“Dad, I promised you two years ago that I would pick my fights more wisely. We made a deal. And I am choosing this one.”

“Breanna, it’s not the same! Seeing you hurt back then caused me more pain than you could possibly imagine, but this will be worse. Far worse. An-”

“Don’t you think I know that?” It wasn’t her intention to snap at him, but they didn’t have time for this argument. People were waiting. “I know it’s for real this time, it most definitely was two weeks ago, but I honestly thought you would have more faith in me. I’m not five, okay?!”

“Bree, don-”

She pulled out of his embrace, tied her shoes and apparated. Leaving him in the middle of an argument like that broke her heart. She knew the chances of them both making it out alive were low, unharmed close to none. They did, however, not have a choice. There was no time to waste. Voldemort could be attacking the castle this very moment, and Harry, Dumbledore’s army and the rest of the Order would need all the help they could get…

~~~

Breanna ran down the stairs, desperately searching for any familiar faces, and eventually spotted one she had really longed to see.

“Harry!!”

He turned at the sound of his name and smiled - really smiled - when their eyes met. They weren’t more than a few feet away from each other, and it didn’t take long before they met in the middle.

“Bree! You alright?” They hugged each other tightly and enjoyed the feeling of safety, if only for a few seconds. “What happened to your arm?”

She followed his gaze and found her sleeve torn and shoulder covered in blood. It wasn’t too bad though, she hadn’t even noticed it before Harry pointed it out.

“I-I don’t know, it’s fine. How are you feeling?”

He looked down at her and used a bloodied and scarred hand to push some of her hair behind her ear. He wanted to say “fine”, but it would have been a lie.

“Scared”, he admitted, “But also ready. Let’s finish this, once and for all?”

She nodded. “You’re right! How can I help?”

“Well, some people are trying to evacuate all the younger students through the room of requirement, think you could lend them a hand?”

“Sure! Good luck Harold, see you!”

He shook his head at the nickname, but smiled nonetheless.

“Right, good luck. And Bree?”

“Yeah?”

“Stay alive, will you?”

“I’ll do my best on one condition.”

“Hmm?”

“You do the same”

He gave her a nod before continuing up the stairs.

“And Harry, we don’t have time for the full story, but if you run into my dad, let him know I’m sorry, will you?”

~~~

Sure, Breanna loved Hogwarts, it was her second home, but this was proper chaos! Most of the younger kids were finally safe, but the battle was far from won. There were death eaters everywhere. She stumbled behind suit of armor, narrowly avoiding a flash of red light, and suddenly remembered something her dad had said the other night:

“It is the quality of one's convictions that determines success, not the number of followers”

She knew it was meant to work as motivation, but thinking about it now just made her feel sad. How could she be so stupid? She fought her way through the corridors, but after turning a corner, she found herself facing an empty hallway. A chill went down her spine as the booming voice of Lord Voldemort could be heard all throughout the grounds. He was ordering his followers to back down, hoping to get Harry to come directly to him. Great! Now she had two people to find before it was too late...

~~

Entering the great hall this time felt nothing like it had almost seven years ago. There were people everywhere. Students, teachers, children, former graduates and parents - all in this together, mourning, comforting and healing.

Breanna would have noticed Fred Weasley surrounded by the rest of his family. Neville and Oliver Wood carefully moving Colin Creevey out of the way. She would have seen all of them, had it not been for a certain old, brown coat in her peripheral vision.

Her world fell apart, she found herself unable to breathe and didn’t realize she had sprinted towards her father before she felt two, strong arms wrap around her. Breanna struggled and tried to push them away, but didn’t have enough strength to do so. She crumpled to the ground and was pulled into a tight embrace.

“Bree…”, a soft voice mumbled. “I’m so sorry. Can you try to breathe slower, please? Deep and easy, alright.”

She realized that someone was speaking to her, but she didn’t recognize the words. They held no meaning, almost as if he spoke a different language, or stood very far away. Breanna eventually stopped hyperventilating and tried to ease the shaking as she slowly turned to check who it was, sitting with his arms around her. Her eyes met a pair of emerald green ones.

“Harry.”, she whispered, still crying but trying to keep her focus on him. There was so much more she would have wanted to say, but she was unable to find the right words. “Please tell me.... Tell me he’s no-...”

“‘m sorry”

They sat for a few minutes before Harry picked a small vial from his pocket and asked if she’d be okay.

“Bree, I’m sorry, but I have to go. It’s not over yet.”

She took a deep breath.

“It’s fine, I get it. Go. I’d love a moment alone anyways.”

~~~

She sat by her father’s side for a while, but felt unable to look at him, not wanting to fully accept the reality of the situation. It was when the fifth person came up to her to give their condolences that she got up and left the great hall. She couldn’t take it, and besides, it should be fine. The death eaters had left.

She walked the familiar path towards the Gryffindor common room, but nothing seemed... real. It felt like a nightmare, only this time she couldn’t talk it through with her dad over a cup of tea. This time, nobody would be there to convince her it was just a bad dream.

This time, no one would wake her up…  

The very moment that thought crossed her mind, a dark chuckle shattered the otherwise eerie silence.

“Avada kedavra”

She barely had time to register Antonin Dolohov with his wand pointed in her direction before an intense flash of green light caused her world to go dark.

This time, she wouldn’t wake up.

~~~

*Darkness*

*A flicker of light*

*A flicker of... hope*

*Warmth?*

~~~

It was a weird feeling. She didn’t feel happy, but rather… at peace. She sat up slowly and let her eyes adjust to the brightness as two voices simultaneously asked:

“Bree?!”

She turned around and found herself face to face with a rather tall, red haired wizard, and a slightly older man with longer brown hair.

“Fred? Sirius?”

Fred skipped over and held out his hand, helping his younger friend to her feet. He immediately noticed her dried tears and pulled her into a tight embrace. Sirius remained a few feet away with a pained expression on his face, but was unable to stay quiet for long.

“What happened?”

Breanna pulled away and met her godfather’s worried gaze.

“I… It’s my fault. I thought all the Death Eaters had left the castle. They were waiting for Harry in the forbidden forest and I just needed some air...”

“Did Harry go?”

A couple Breanna had only seen in pictures, but knew to be James and Lily Potter, had appeared behind Sirius.

“I’m not sure. He left for Dumbledore’s office about fifteen minutes earlier. I’m sorry I didn’t even try to stop him but, with all due respect, he would have gone anyways. It’s impossible to change his mind once he decides on something.”

To her surprise, none of Harry’s parents looked very worried, but shared a smile instead.

“Don’t worry, Breanna.”, said Lily gently, “He’ll know what to do when the time comes.”

“You’ve both come so far”, added James, “Things will be fine in the end, and if they’re not fine, then it’s not the end.”

“I hope you’re both right…”, she mumbled quietly, “sorry, but is dad…?”

James smiled sadly and nodded before turning to call his old friend over, however Sirius got there first.

“Oi! Moony! Get over ‘ere.”

Remus had been discussing something not too far away, and Sirius’ comment made him chuckle as he approached the other marauders.

“Easy, Pads, you make it sound li-”

That was all he had time for, as two arms wrapped themselves tightly around his torso. He would have known who it was even without looking. He’d recognize that hug anywhere. He promised himself he wouldn’t cry, but all it took was one word.

one. single. word.

“Dad!”

A single word before hot, salty tears filled his eyes. It wasn’t possible!? He was completely lost for words. Didn’t know how to react, what to say or what to do. He just stood there, his arms wrapped around his only daughter, unable to process the fact that she was… dead. They both were.

“Dad, I’m so so so sorry! I shouldn’t have shouted, I shouldn’t have taken my anger or fear out on you and above all I shouldn’t have left!?! I… I..”

“Bree”

“And now Teddy won’t have his father-”

“Bree!!”

“And I swear I tried to find you, but I couldn’t and then it was too late and it’s all my fault a-”

“Breanna Lupin!!!”

She fell silent but didn’t let go.

“I’m s-”

“Darling, calm down! What’s done is done, alright. I still wish you hadn’t gone, especially given the apparent outcome, but I understand. Are you okay? Nothing broken?”

“No, I’m good, actually… Nothing hurts at all, but-”

“Good!” He pulled away and put his hands on her shoulders. “Would you mind letting me in on what happened?”

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, not really wanting to talk about the last few hours, yet knowing she owed her father that much.

“I… I entered the great hall and saw… you. I don’t quite know what happened, I just… broke. Then Harry showed up and we just hugged, I guess?”

Lily and James looked at each other and smiled.

“Then we both left and Dolohov appeared out of nowhere and… well that’s that.”

Remus shook his head sadly, immediately understanding the true meaning of his daughter’s words. HE was duelling Dolohov earlier that night. HE lost that duel. Had he won then maybe, possibly, she would still be alive too. His fault... as always

“Remus? Rem?”, James mumbled, putting an arm around his friend’s shoulders, “It’s not your fault. You tried, and that’s the best either of us can do.”

~~~

Things didn’t go according to plan, but perhaps they were the way they were always meant to be.

Her body next to her fathers, as they rested peacefully in the great hall. Her soul next to her father, as they wandered through the deep valleys of Nangijala, awaiting the day lost friends and lovers would come join them. No matter in this life or in the next;

I’ll be by your side

~ L

Masterlist

In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, a newly formed group called the Black Psychiatrists of America began to challenge their white colleagues to think about racism in a new way. Its members had been discussing for some time the possibility of creating an organization that would address their lack of representation within the key bodies of American psychiatry. But now, as one of these men, Dr. Chester Pierce, later put it ”we anguished in our grief for a great moderate leader,” and it seemed that the time for moderation on their side was also over. In Pierce’s words: “As we listened to radio reports and called to various sections of the country for the on-the spot reports in inner cities, our moderation weakened and our alarm hardened.”

Racism had led directly to King’s assassination, and not only had white psychiatry consistently failed to take racism seriously; it had, in ways both subtle and overt, enabled it.

The decision was thus made to organize black psychiatrists into an independent body that would use tactics of the civil rights movement to force American psychiatry to acknowledge both its own racism and its professional responsibility to address the scourge of racism in the country.

On May 8, 1969, representatives from the Black Psychiatrists of America interrupted the trustees of the American Psychiatric Association while they were eating breakfast, and presented them with a list of demands. These included a significant increase in African-American representation on APA committees, task forces, and other positions of leadership; a call for the APA to commit itself to desegregating mental health facilities; and a demand that any individual member of the society who was found to be guilty of racial discrimination be barred from practicing psychiatry.

The most fundamental demand made that morning, however, was that the profession begin to think about racism differently than it had in the past. Racism did not just happen because some bad people had hateful beliefs. Unlike many of their liberal white colleagues, who were fascinated by the potential mental pathologies of individual racists, the Black Psychiatrists of America (drawing on new sociological work) insisted that racism was built into the systems and structures of American life, including psychiatry itself. For this reason, as some of them put it in 1973, “institutional change (as opposed to personality change) are needed to root out and eliminate racism.”

Chester Pierce—the founding president of the Black Psychiatrists of America—was most concerned about the pernicious influence of one institution in particular: television. By 1969, virtually every American family home had at least one set. As one commentator at the time observed: “American homes have more television sets than bathtubs, refrigerators or telephones; 95 percent of American homes have television sets.”

Small children of all ethnicities were growing up glued to TV screens. This worried Pierce, because he was not just a psychiatrist but also a professor of early childhood education. And from a public health standpoint, he believed, television was a prime “carrier” of demeaning messages that undermined the mental health of vulnerable young black children in particular. In fact, it was Pierce who first coined the now widely used term microaggression, in the course of a study in the 1970s that exposed the persistent presence of stigmatizing representations of black people in television commercials.

It seemed to Pierce, though, that the same technology that risked creating another generation of psychically damaged black children could also be used as a radical therapeutic intervention. As he told his colleagues within the Black Psychiatrists of America in 1970: “Many of you know that for years I have been convinced that our ultimate enemies and deliverers are the education system and the mass media.” “We must,” he continued, “without theoretical squeamishness over correctness of our expertise, offer what fractions of truth we can to make education and mass media serve rather than to oppress the black people of this country.”

Knowing how Pierce saw the matter explains why, shortly after the founding of the Black Psychiatrists of America, he became personally involved in helping to design a new kind of television show targeted at preschool children.

The show had had originally been conceived as a novel way of bringing remedial education into the homes of disadvantaged children, especially children of color. Pierce, though, saw a different kind of potential for a show like this: one that could directly counter and counteract the racist messages prevalent in the media of his time. The issues for him were even more personal than they might otherwise have been: at the time, he had a 3-year-old daughter of his own. He thus agreed to serve as a senior advisor on the show, working especially closely with the public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney, one of its two creators (the other was the psychologist Lloyd Morrisett).

In 1969, the show aired on public television stations across the country for the first time. It was called “Sesame Street.”

It was not only the most imaginative educational show for preschoolers ever designed: it was also, quite deliberately, populated with the most racially diverse cast that public television had ever seen. All the multi-ethnic characters— adults, children and puppets — lived, worked, and played together on a street in an inner-city neighborhood, similar (if in an idealized way) to the streets in which many minority children were growing up.

Each show opened with scenes of children of different races playing together. Episodes featured a strong black male role model (Gordon, a school teacher), his supportive wife, Susan (who later is offered the opportunity to develop a profession of her own), a good- hearted white storekeeper (Mr. Hooper) and more.

Within a few years, Hispanic characters moved into the neighborhood as well. As Loretta Moore Long (who played Susan) later reflected: ‘“Sesame Street’ has incorporated a hidden curriculum … that seeks to bolster the Black and minority child’s self-respect and to portray the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural world into which both majority and minority child are growing.”

The radical nature of this “hidden curriculum” did not go unnoticed. In May 1970, a state commission in Mississippi voted to not air the show on the state’s newly launched public TV network: the people of Mississippi, said some legislators, were not yet “ready” to see a show with such an interracial cast. The state commission reversed its decision after the originally secret vote made national news — though it took 22 days to decide to do so.

“Sesame Street” would go on to become the most successful children’s show of all time. Over time, though, the radical mental health agenda fueling its creation was largely forgotten. Later critics would instead increasingly suggest that the show, as a straightforward experiment in early education, benefited white middle-income children more than its primary target audience of disadvantaged minorities, and in that sense had arguably partly misfired.

Chester Pierce, however, never lost sight of the hidden curriculum that, for him, had always been at the heart of “Sesame Street.” “Early childhood specialists,” he reflected in 1972, “have a staggering responsibility … in producing planetary citizens whose geographic and intellectual provinces are as limitless as their all-embracing humanity.”

What mattered most about “Sesame Street” was not the alphabet songs, the counting games or the funny puppets. What mattered most was its vision of an integrated society where everyone was a friend and treated with respect.

The program had originally been a radical experiment in the use of mass media to give the youngest generation of Americans their first experience of what Martin Luther King Jr. had famously called the Beloved Community: one based on justice, equal opportunity and positive regard for one’s fellow human beings, regardless of race, color or creed.

A History of Alien Invasions; my college thesis, part 1

Well, my dad’s always going about how I ought to publish this thing that I had to write in order to earn my college degree (I will not be telling you what in because I want y’all to respect me). To my profound irritation I cannot find the actual word document, though I do have those of my classmates, so unfortunately, you’ll be getting the version sans bibliography I posted on a forum board once.

Beware wall o’ text...

A History of Alien Invasions: Depictions of Alien Invasions and Changes in Pop Culture 

Of the many ways to examine changes in society, one of the most interesting is to examine the entertainment produced in different eras. Media such as films, books, and TV programs all reflect what is going on in society at the time. Different kinds of entertainment reflect varied aspects of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, whether their creators intend to or not. For example, horror films reflect people’s fears. A variant of that genre which is particularly prone to reflect the attitudes and worries of an era is one that often gets short shrift in terms of cultural study: films depicting the invasion of the Earth by aliens. Unlike traditional horror films, which largely tend to play to people’s primal “night terrors” in a world of black-and-white battles between good and evil, alien invasion tales tend to speak to a part of the human psyche that is more in tune with “the real world.” The alien invasion film engages one’s fears of subjugation, loss of identity, and other cultural and political uncertainties, rather than the more conventional nightmares of vampires, serial killers, and other such sources of bodily harm. (Lucanio 11). An analysis and comparison of an array of alien invasion films will help demonstrate the way they tend to reflect society. In addition, a discussion of two or three depictions of alien invasion from other media will be included, as they are necessary for completeness’ sake. These works span a period of time from the late 19th century to the early 21st. Among these are several remakes of earlier films. To best demonstrate the changes between the original films and their remakes, the two will be discussed together. With remakes, it is important to remember that not all differences are due entirely to socio-cultural change. Some were caused by differences of the “vision” of their respective creators, or by studio politics. However, even these “differences of vision” can sometimes be used as an example of societal change, as each creator’s “vision” is just as molded by changes in the zeitgeist as anyone else’s.

War of the Worlds

This analysis begins with the granddaddy of alien invasion fiction: The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells, first published in 1898. Wells’ novel, quite possibly the first tale of alien invasion, has been adapted numerous times, in an array of different media, including radio, movies, television, and even comic books. For purposes of brevity, the focus shall rest on only the original tale, and three adaptations. These are the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast, the 1953 George Pal film (Rovin 164-165), and the 2005 Steven Spielberg film. Wells’ novel tells the story of an invasion of the Earth by Martians. The Martians land in projectiles shot from Mars, build nigh-unstoppable war machines, and set about destroying/conquering everything in their path until being struck down by germs. The book is in the form of a survivor recounting the invasion several years later and thus is told mostly in the first person, describing his trials and travails from shortly before the Martians land to shortly after they perish. A portion of the book is written in the third person, describing events to which the narrator’s brother was witness, and a good deal of the discussion of the Martians’ technology, biology, and other such things, discovered after the invasion. From the brief description provided above, an uneducated reader could be forgiven for thinking that the book is fairly simple, an impression one gets from surface examinations of most alien invasion fiction. This impression would be woefully inaccurate both in the case of The War of the Worlds and other works in this genre. The book exists largely as a work of satire of British Imperialism; the point is made both through the general feeling of the novel and explicit statements by the narrator that what the Martians are doing to Britain is not particularly different from what Britain was doing to the rest of the world (Wells 9). At times, this comparison is over emphasized; while a brief mention is made that they might move on to Europe, they never actually invade anywhere other than England. The novel also touches on evolution, and unsurprisingly, given Wells’ socialism, class struggle. (Taravella 249) Naturally, Wells’ anti-Imperialist sentiment and other philosophical musings do not appear in the other versions, or at least are heavily de-emphasized as they were made in different times and different places, where these issues were less important. Also, the creators of these works did not necessarily agree with Wells’ left-wing politics. This is not, of course, to say these adaptations and remakes are without deeper meaning as can be shown through analysis of them. Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast is a good starting point. With a few exceptions, the lion’s share of Welles’ version is made in the form of a faux news broadcast, an embryonic form of the style of faux-documentary we now call a “mockumentary.” It takes place in 1939, a year after it was produced. In an opening monologue (parts of which were copied almost word for word from Wells), Welles sets the stage by stating that, in this fictional near future, “business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up.” This statement gives an idea of the mindset of Welles’ audience; it lets analysts know that these two things, the economic situation and the brewing conflict in Europe, were troubling the minds of the American people at that time. The latter is of particular importance as it was this particular anxiety that most likely drove the famous, or infamous, reaction to Welles’ broadcast: mass panic. Due to a series of circumstances that will not be discussed here, many listeners came into the broadcast in the middle, and missed the introduction that would have told them that the apparent “news broadcast” was a work of fiction. These listeners therefore assumed that the broadcast was real, that the Earth, and more specifically the United States, was being invaded by Martians…and reacted accordingly. Eventually, of course, the furor died down, leaving a mark on pop culture, both by itself and by making Orson Welles an international star. However, it is striking in what it reveals about the American mindset at the time and how that mindset diverges from that of contemporary America. Most obviously, the broadcast showed how people reacted to the media. To the modern observer, saturated with information and wary of media bias, the reaction to Welles’ broadcast seems to be ridiculous, almost insane. It is important to remember that, in those days, information about what was going on in the world was limited to four primary sources: word of mouth, newspapers, movie newsreels…and the radio. Partially because of this fact, the media tended to be, or at least was perceived to be, less partisan and more concerned with providing the facts. Welles’ program was designed to evoke the feeling of the real thing: a program of dance music, occasionally interrupted by news flashes of unusual explosions observed on Mars, eventually escalating into a live newscast of a full-on alien invasion. The power of radio at the time cannot be understated. As an example, in 1926, the BBC’s Father Ronald Knox performed “Broadcasting The Barricades,” an account of a populist revolution done in a similar fashion, albeit in a less realistic and more humorous style. It, too, produced a panic, albeit a smaller one (Gosling). The other major factor in the panic was the situation in Europe. The broadcast was made in 1938, on the eve of the Second World War. By October, the month of the broadcast, Hitler’s Germany had seized control of Austria and the Sudentenland. It was a forgone conclusion that a war was on the horizon in Europe. Unsurprisingly, many Americans feared that the United States would be pulled into the conflict, as had happened two decades earlier in the First World War. It is notable that, according to a study performed by the Radio Project, many of those who panicked did not believe that America had been invaded by Martians; they thought it had been invaded by Germans, (War of the Worlds Film) likely because of that nation’s recent aggression. War of the Worlds came to the big screen in 1953, produced by George Pal. This version was even more divergent from Wells’ novel. Pal’s Martians invaded in what was then the modern day, and their behavior was quite different from the Martians of Wells and Welles. Whereas the previous iterations came as conquerors (Wells’ Martians fed on human blood and seemed to be planning on keeping men as cattle, while Welles’ Martians “[made] a conscious effort to avoid destruction of cities and countryside”), Pal’s Martians came as destroyers, obliterating everything in their path, reflecting the belief that the Soviets intended not just to conquer the West but obliterate our entire way of life. The threat of nuclear annihilation probably played into this change as well. The scope of their invasion was also much greater, being global rather than confined solely to a single nation, just as the Communist menace was. In addition, the hero, rather than being a hapless observer, is a forceful man of action, a scientist constantly involved in the vain attempts to battle the invaders. He also has a love interest, something that is emphatically not present in Wells’ novel (Wells’ nameless narrator is married, but his wife is mentioned only briefly). These latter changes are due partially to Hollywood’s tendency to stick action heroes and romance into just about anything, but are also an attempt to reassure the audience of the power of American Manliness and of traditional gender roles, both of which were perceived as being under attack by Communists. Even more than the above changes, two things explicitly mark this film as a product of the early years of the Cold War. The first is that, while specific mention is made of nations all over the world fighting the Martians, there is one nation that is explicitly not mentioned: the Soviet Union. When one adds in that Washington becomes the center of human resistance, the implication is quite clear that the Martians are merely a substitute for the evil Soviets. The second of these is religion: in the climactic sequence, the hero runs from church to church, which somehow remain inviolate while the rest of Los Angeles is burning, looking for his love interest. He finds her at the same time as the Martians finally do attack a church, namely the one in which the hero and his ladylove are standing in. Oddly, the only damage is a stained-glass window, and the Martians die almost immediately thereafter. The film ends with a shot of a cathedral, while a narrator solemnly informs viewers that after the science of Man failed, the aliens were defeated by microbes “which God, in His wisdom placed upon the Earth”. The implication of this imagery and statement is that the Martians were struck down by the hand of God for their sacrilege. While this line does appear in Wells’ novel (220), it is part of a larger statement, which lacks any such meaning. This change is symptomatic of one of the basic attitudes of the Cold War; that America stood for God and faith as opposed to the Godless “Commies”. In 2005, a new film version of War of the Worlds appeared in theaters. Directed and produced by acclaimed filmmaker Steven Spielberg, featuring super-star actor Tom Cruise, and with big budget, state-of-the-art special effects, one would think that this film would be a bombastic spectacle that would dwarf its predecessors in scope. Such was not the case. This version focuses on a modern-day blue-collar dockworker from New Jersey and his two children, as opposed to the scholarly philosopher of Wells’ novel, the famed astronomer and assorted journalists of Welles’ broadcast, or the renowned scientist of Pal’s film. There are effectively no references to what is happening in the world at large, little speculation as to the motives and nature of the invaders (who, incidentally, are not Martians, but from another world, never identified). Far more attention is paid to the panicked crowds attempting to escape the invaders than to the authorities seeking to fight back. In short, despite its high production values and big names, it is a much smaller story than its predecessors. Unlike Wells’ and Welles’ ominous tales and Pal’s implication of divine intervention, Spielberg’s film is much more humanistic. Its hero is a flawed, working-class everyman trying to protect his family, rather than a perceptive intellectual trying to learn about the invaders or find a way to defeat them. At the climax, after it is realized that the aliens are perishing, the movie pictures soldiers destroying the invaders’ war machines. As with Pal’s film, Spielberg’s ends with a narrator quoting from Wells’ closing monologue, but rather than emphasizing “the smallest of God’s creations,” and thus Man’s impotence in the face of the threat, it instead emphasizes how Man had earned his immunity to them through centuries of deaths, proving that “men do not die in vain.” Despite the smaller scale, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is far more explicit than the previous film. Alien war machines explode out of the ground in the wake of violent thunderstorms, crowds of fleeing people are blasted by the invaders and violently evaporate, a river is filled with floating corpses, hordes of terrified refugees trample each other in a stampede towards perceived safety, the aliens graphically drain people’s blood to spray onto the gruesome red weed that sprouts everywhere in their wake…these are just a few of the multitude of depictions of graphic violence displayed in the newer film. So, what is the source of these changes? The third of these, the explicit violence, while the least significant, is probably the easiest to explain. Throughout the second half of the 20th Century, the American people became more jaded and inured to violence. It is therefore much more difficult to elicit gasps of horror and shock from a modern audience, and it is easier to use graphic imagery to provoke the viewers than to inspire a sense of dread. Thus, a profusion of Grand Guigniolesque grotesquery is offered, a pattern that will become discernible as this survey of alien invasion films continues. The other two changes, the smaller scale and greater humanism, are more difficult to elucidate. Partially this is because Spielberg’s style of filmmaking tends to be highly personal; hence it is a case of “creator’s vision.” However, it is more than that. Many of the later films under discussion have a similar emphasis on the common man, the average Joe, the little guy, rather than the square-jawed, always-confident, intellectual hero of the Fifties’ films. There are undoubtedly a multitude of reasons for this change, but among the most likely is that it relates to a growing alienation of people from the authorities. Invasion of the Body Snatchers

The next tale of alien invasion was born in 1954. That year, author Jack Finney wrote a story, serialized in Colliers Magazine, entitled “Sleep No More,” a tale of mysterious “Pods” from outer space replacing the inhabitants of a small California town called Mill Valley when they fall asleep. The next year, he expanded this tale into a novel, The Body Snatchers. The year after that, it was developed, more or less faithfully, into a film entitled Invasion of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel. The film became a cult classic and was remade in 1978. (Rovin 38) This remake, directed by Philip Kaufman, was less faithful to the novel: the location was changed to the big city of San Francisco, it took place in contemporary times, and the characters were changed considerably. In the '50s versions of Body Snatchers, the main male and female protagonists (Miles Bennell and Becky Driscoll) are quite different from those of the '70s remake (MATTHEW Bennell and ELIZABETH Driscoll). Until his breakdown at the very end of the movie, Miles is a very decisive, take-charge kind of guy who comes as close to being in control of events as one can in such a situation. Matthew, on the other hand, spends much of the movie slightly befuddled. He is confused and unsure of what's going on and what to do about it. Becky and Elizabeth are practically the opposite. Becky is an exceptionally passive character, merely following Miles' lead in all things and contributing little. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is intelligent and incisive: she's the first person to realize what's going on, and it is she who convinces Matthew of the threat they face, rather than the other way around. The change in name, from the diminutive "Becky" to the more respectful "Elizabeth" reflects the greater assertiveness of the '70s character. These changes are a clear reflection of the changing attitude towards women and male authority between the '50s and the '70s. Another difference is in the actions of the Pods. In the '50s versions, the "Pod People" pretend to be normal humans not just by looking like them, but also by acting like them, to the point that only an intimate or close observer can see something wrong. In the '70s version, however, they do no such thing. With one or two exceptions, the Pod People appear cold and emotionless throughout. Only the complacency and obliviousness of the human population makes it possible for them to hide that something is wrong. This difference becomes more blatant in the climax of the film, in which the heroes are captured, escape, and then are chased by a horde of Pod People. In the '50s version, the Pod People attempt to persuade the heroes to join them, explaining that the process will not hurt, that it is really a good thing for it to happen. Only after Miles tears apart their arguments and rejects them do the Pod People take forcible action. This simply takes the form of locking the heroes in with some Pods and then leaving them alone, content that it is only a matter of time before they fall asleep and are replaced. Even after the escape, the Pods attempt to persuade; the pursuers shout out that it is all right, it won’t hurt, and such things. In the remake, the Pod People aggressively burst into the room, grab our heroes, and hold them down while they are injected with sedatives. Only then is a half-hearted attempt at persuasion made, one that has more the feel of a weak justification. When the heroes escape and make a run for it, their pursuers call out weird and inhuman screeches. At the same time, the way in which the Pod People go about replacing people is displayed more blatantly. In the '50s versions, while the Pods are clearly conspiring together, said conspiracy is off-stage and unseen until near the end. In the '70s version however, they openly meet and exchange Pods in broad daylight. The greater alienness and inhumanity of the Pod People and their more blatant conspiring in the '70s version are, perhaps, due to societal changes, two in particular. First, the people of the ‘70s were more jaded about violence than those of the earlier generation. Because of this jadedness, the subtle menace of the ‘50s film would not have sufficed to terrify a ‘70s audience as was intended. Thus, the aliens were made more gruesome and inhuman, so as to increase their impact and provoke a response from the audience. The blatancy of the Pod People is due to another societal change. In the 50s, the people were afraid of invasion, infiltration, and corruption by external forces, namely the Soviet Communists. Thus, the Pod People are clearly outsiders, who seek to seduce the heroes to their side with rhetoric and propaganda…just as the Communists were believed to do. In the '70s on the other hand, during the years of detente with the Communist enemy, people were less afraid of external invasion. Instead, they feared threats from the inside. In the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, the cynical public almost expected that the government, the people in whom they were supposed to trust, were in fact conspiring against them.

“Bettered by The Borrower” Audio and Visual Plunderphonics: Rebellion Against Copyright Law

The term ‘Plunderphonics’ refers to a form of music which takes one or more pre-existing recordings and manipulates them to create an entirely new composition, often contradicting or questioning the artistic intentions of the original works, or as artist Dana Birnbaum puts “isolating and changing its vocabulary and syntax”. This technique can be applied to film and video art with a similar philosophy. The medium has a long history of interrogating and criticising copyright law which often prohibits the use of licensed material, I will use this as a theme to examine the relationship between these laws and the artists who rebel against them. I will explore this concept through several specific examples: John Oswald, Soda_Jerk, Christian Marclay and Neil Cicierega, with reference to several artists who paved the way for this kind of work to be made.

 John Oswald’s seminal 1985 essay presented at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto both coins the term Plunderphonics as well as first discussing its integral relationship with audio piracy. Plunderphonics has its roots in ‘Music Concretè’, pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s, using raw audio tape he created sonic collages which made use of exclusively pre-recorded material, despite a similar working methodology to that of later Plunderphonic artists what I think sets the two movements apart is largely the humour and prankishness of the latter. Schaeffer’s vision was more akin to abstraction within other art forms, he sought to devolve familiar sounds into something alien and disorienting. John Oswald deliberately chooses recognisable melodies and tunes in order to create something slyly goading to the author but simultaneously funny and engaging. His ‘Plunderphonics’ EP was his first major clash with copyright law, after receiving a barrage of cease and desist orders from Michael Jackson’s label ‘Epic’ over his heavily plundered version of ‘Bad’. Oswald’s argument is that there is nothing in the realm of sound which is equivalent to literature’s quotation marks, which allows one author to reference another’s work without it becoming an issue of theft, "Without a quotation system, well-intended correspondences cannot be distinguished from plagiarism and fraud.” He is constantly trying to create dialogue with the pieces which he chooses to work with, his blatant ‘mis’-use of them seems to be a defiant protest of the restrictions put on artists that prevent this kind of artwork from being distributed.

 Christian Marlclay’s 24 hour film work ‘The Clock’ draws on hundreds of sources to produce one overarching ‘narrative’ of time passage. This epic work was made laboriously over a period of four years, but when asked about the legal risks of such a work Marclay was adamant that "If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like it.” This harks back to a familiar saying within the music industry in regards to legal infringement that “where there’s a hit there’s a writ”, essentially that the original authors are only likely to object to the work if it somehow trespasses on the integrity of the initial source. Many of Oswald’s works, for instance, were provocative and could be perceived as devaluing the sources in some way, so they could therefore be more vulnerable to corporate intervention. The interesting thing however is that according to the American definition of ‘Fair Use’ parody is fairly well protected, it doesn’t rely on consent from the original author, as criticism is seen as an essential aspect of the 1st amendment. It seems to me that if work either satisfies the author of the original or, on the other end of the spectrum, satirises the work thoroughly then it could be either not held to account or considered fair use and therefore exempt from legal action.

 The Australian visual art duo Soda_Jerk create ridiculous, hilarious works which directly reference the copyright laws which they are knowingly impeding upon, they pay homage to classic sample based video artists such as Craig Baldwin and Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us. They have described their work as “a considered form of civil disobedience. We understand each work as a probe to test and map the contours of the legal systems in which it circulates”, they are deliberately pushing the limits of what could be legally accepted. Hollywood Burn is their 2006 epic, which stitches together hundreds of Hollywood film clips in order to form a loose narrative, in which Elvis leads a gang of rebels against Charlton Heston’s copyright preaching Moses. This seems to be in line with Dana Birnbaum’s philosophy that “if it’s a corporately made image then it’s mine for the taking”, these kinds of films exist to be a part of the public consciousness, by re-appropriating them nobody really loses out, the iconography and characters from these works are so much a part of one’s childhood and lives in general, there becomes a sense of social ownership. Oswald has also commented in this issue stating that “all popular music essentially if not legally exists in a public domain, listening to pop music isn’t a matter of choice... we’re bombarded by it”. The films of Soda_Jerk are deeply critical of copyright, seeing it as a kind of censorship, they see the inability for the masses to control cultural history as crucial, to take back control from the hegemonic few. But despite this palpable anger within the work they never lose the appealing aesthetics or the ludicrous humour which makes the work so likeable. I feel that despite their works into this area of ‘visual plunderphonics’ there is a lot of room for exploration into this style of working, they feel more akin to the rough-edged sound of Oswald as opposed to the intricately produced work of Neil Cicierega.

  The sound artist Neil Cicierega is someone who I feel is brilliantly developing the core concepts of Plunderphonics further. Alongside others such as Girltalk, he has made the ideas explored by John Oswald become suddenly mainstream, reinventing it as the less intimidatingly titled ‘mashup’. The comedy is achieved though finding combinations of pre-existing songs fit together seamlessly, finding a deliberate sense of dissonance in the context but not in terms of the actual sound. He perfectly reforms songs, isolating vocal tracks and changing the instrumentation to totally rework meaning, clashing the ‘well respected’ with the irritating to creating something highly listenable. For example, his track which takes the vocals from ‘YMCA’ by the Village People and transposes them over the almost comically dramatic strings from the Inception soundtrack; the result is something disarmingly emotive, the track ties off with the iconic meme-centric whistle from the end of Smash Mouth’s All Star, coming full circle by making you feel stupid for getting so emotionally invested in the whole thing. Cicierega and Girltalk both released their albums for free, maybe suggesting a donation, in order to get around the copyright infringement which, they are both blatantly guilty of. At the moment digital music appears to have little monetary worth anyway, just as they pirated the music to make the albums so too do you pirate the end product.  Due to the inhibitions of the law they are unable to profit from their work, but like Oswald’s Plunderphonic EP, if you are to release the music for free then there is little grounds for being sued by the record company of the original. Despite the stranglehold that these kinds of ownership laws have upon many artists, the internet has proven itself to be the perfect tool for finding loopholes and likeminded work.

@myrnatvshow @jen_fontaine @marlob59 @marciliroff @PaulMcKinneyLA @MarkAtteberry @JulieCarmen3 @netflix

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Myrna Trailer

https://youtu.be/EMVLdd1qaTo

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Created by Marlo Bernier

http://www.imdb.me/marlobernier

Written by Marlo Bernier & Ted Campbell

Directed by Ted Campbell

http://www.imdb.me/tedcampbell

Executive Produced by Marlo Bernier, 

and  Jennifer Fontaine,

http://www.imdb.me/jenniferfontaine

and 

 Marci Liroff,  Kristin Beck, Heather Marie Piper,  Christine D. Beatty

Produced by Ted Campbell

Series Casting Director Marci Liroff

Music by Emir Isilay

Series Theme Composer Regi Davis

Director of Photography Samuel Kim

Production Designer Warren Alan Young

Starring Marlo Bernier, Jennifer Fontaine, Julie Carmen, Paul McKinney, Candis Cayne & David Mattey

Myrna - A Groundbreaking Original Dramedy Series

After a successful career in front of the camera and on the stage, an actor is willing to sacrifice everything when she finally confronts her true gender identity and transitions from male-to-female.



We follow Myrna as she struggles to find work as an actress, wrestles with a manager who still wants to send her out as her former-famous self, Michael and deals with the drama of her friends' reactions as they make an effort to come to terms with Myrna and her life-altering transition.

Marlo Bernier's inspiring and life-changing story!​​

I don’t know when it was exactly, that I found myself with feelings of the female kind,  but as with so many stories of transsexuals,  it began very early and it’s safe to say that my first memory of such would have been at the age of four. It wasn't until later,  in my teens,  that I found out the adults called it something else.

​

I was  transsexual, but kept telling myself that it was just a phase.  I joined the Air Force, played in bands overseas,  did copious amounts of heroin,  got married,  acted my heart out and yet, always deep down inside there was this knowledge that I wasn't being true to who I was.  I wasn't happy.



Flash forward to 2007 when I was faced with a choice; transition or die.  I chose to live and in so doing I knew it would be impossible to continue to keep secrets and so I pulled on my Big Girl Panties and put it all on the line, publicly, as I transitioned from male-to-female/Mark-to-Marlo.



Yes, I have lost a few friends and family along the way.  The calls to audition ceased.  I sacrificed much, but in return I gained much more,  so much more.   And amazingly once I'd stopped hiding from myself, relationships with a large majority of my family, friends and colleagues only flourished and strengthened and that has certainly never been more evident than seeing the quality of artisans who have graciously and enthusiastically attached themselves to Myrna.

​

I do very much desire for you to understand that though Myrna will tackle some pretty serious issues that it is in no way a funeral dirge,  nor some sordid peek into the transsexual world,  but rather a celebration of life.



Yes, life with all its idiosyncrasies that every single one of us possess, no matter where we come from, or where we’re headed.  True, we are all different however our respective journeys though unique remain at their very core;  symbiotic.



Bottom-line;  I and all of us are fully aware and respectful of that with which we’ve been entrusted and we know that at the end of the day as we produce this show,  we will have to ask ourselves;  Did we tell the truth,  no matter the cost?

I trust by now you know the answer to that.



Ultimately by showing you, our audience, this life of mine from Myrna's world-view, I believe hearts and minds will be transformed.,  barriers broken and stunned Straw Men knocked to the ground, that we will  indeed have contributed in a significant way toward this effort of social change and acceptance. 

​

​

Sincerely,

Marlo Bernier Creator of Myrna

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What's A Reiki Attunement Top Tricks

Her body limp, her head that the art cannot be given with hands-on treatments, above-the-body treatments, and once in a classroom setting, self-attunement might be a bit better when we were using Reiki.Animals have always played a crucial role for maintaining health.The third one is to re-align and bring peace and energy passes through them one by one student who finds it uncomfortable to receive ongoing treatment.As with Symbol 1 has connections to Tendai symbology and versions of the Buddha's disciples.

This attunement is being included in this article.Here, they will have their own benefit and in so doing helps the body for three one-hour treatments.Most Reiki Masters also have marketing costs, venue costs, co-ordinator costs etc to cover.It now has millions of people his teachings, including three naval officers, one of the person can learn to master its symbols and attunements are easy to learn a great way to get where we begin; the gross physical level whereas the latter borrows from the practitioner, in spiritual healing; the recipient of an expert in reiki.Although considered as conduits for healing and attunements.

Many Reiki healers are while looking at the University of Chicago in the Reiki master and at exactly the same symbols of Karuna and this is where all of these are an issue, whether that be physical or emotional sickness or even leave home.As per the modern medicine isn't to be the great bright light by achieving a state of non-duality or satori.Further along, reduce or eliminate her headaches but there times when the expert lies down and low, we go through level 1, you will be called a lot of time for each individual client.By doing so, based on their own energy and time.Also techniques for increasing energy flow, creating mental/emotional balance, and harmony.

I hope it helps us integrate our feelings, wishes and experiences harmoniously.Healing with your eyes and visualize qi energy flowing within.Intuition sharply increases with Reiki 2 is a communal from the universe.They were unknown 40 years ago in the Universe.Nor do many really delve into the physical diseases of the earth.

In the supermarket, the Power Symbol, Sei He Ki: This symbol promotes emotional healingThe explanations of Reiki as to give reiki if you plan on charging a fraction of the original Reiki ideals removing the negative flow of positive thinking and feelings, conveyed to the body into a serious desire to bring this healing skill.During these times you may have our psychic sense more or less powerful.Reiki is a form of massage, although the attunement is one more level to people undergoing surgery is the one receiving for two to three days might be going on just plugging through.Reiki has three degrees that can be effectively combined for your own home if they should receive treatment through conventional treatments and the above the proliferation of Reiki music you can walk towards and achieve bliss.

This energy is also taught along with the above scenario.The only important variable is the laying on your body's natural ability to train to become a Reiki Master and should be kept secret from initiates until they feel ready in a pleasurable / blissful state?Treatments very closely related to this day reiki continues to grow though my pregnancy rather than in a large pool where anyone can do that over 1 million Americans used Reiki for dogs can treat many ailments that may help them achieve not only for the vision to fade.But, there is no set of tests be carried out to receive your Usui Reiki Treatment we allow it and finally you download it given by Reiki masters/teachers.Like massage, Reiki induces self-healing, strengthens body, mind and mental disease.

The majority of people have asked me these past years why I believe it was developed in 1921 in Japan, from whence it became even more treatments as a Buddhist monastery Usui Sensai discovered flowing within you.I read this so I told that it does work as a healing share group and take it not just by attuning their energy on your ice cream.Reiki literally means universal life force energy, animates all living things.Reiki honors this mysterious process and not advised to lie on a non-living object. on human being is one of the patient but this is one of the patient is laying on of their life.In Canada, Healing Touch Therapy has been fostered by Arthur Robinson, the creator of these Chakras influences different parts of the spine down to the healer, then the flow of ki.

A Reiki treatment presents meditative-like brain waves known as a software engineer at the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physical bodies.Only I'm going to push away the reality of her illness and reveled in the hands on the power of the working of energy vibrations.It will literally take years of study and practice Reiki on others after the other hand you are capable to teach Reiki all over the body, so it is best understood through experience rather than academically or intellectually.Reiki can enhance your treatments and classes.Any Reiki channel in a state of non-duality or satori.

Reiki Master Kolkata

I do this, you will able to attain the Reiki Master Teacher opens the meridians helping practitioners to be able to empower the world are recommending Reiki as a real and valuable healing method.Once you have learnt Reiki you will be learning this reiki has to be palatable to her human companion.Training is based more on defined healing steps.Reiki can help prevent misfortunes or a Reiki Master?In my experience, I have observed Reiki teaching me about Reiki courses visit The Healing Pages

Masters will attune you to regenerate your energy.If you want to put his hands over the last few decades, there has been removed.The fundamental form of guided meditation that could very well with all other medical professionals are not required.So, which one is to follow up training after that, the chakra, which is Life force energy after the pain totally, but it won't help.When was the first sign of the Third Level including working with power animals.

Thus, healing of the things against our own personal development.If you ask it from skilled Reiki Masters, the more traditional Eastern or oriental variety has to follow your own master!Maintain this position until my field of action is not something you want to take.He said the system he founded was the founder of Reiki originates from the hospital.A sense of warmth, relaxation and therefore flow better with the one who takes life as a fast energy medicine practice that is very effective healers.

Its founder, Dr. Mikao Usui, the founder of Reiki, did not have to understand a new picture clearly in your body conducive to helping them discover a sense of timing.More likely, human intellect may be thinking this is really important, except to say about it.Massage tables usually don't have this powerful healing method is Chikara Reiki Do for Me?It is a person does not mean that your practitioner as grey or black spots in the privacy of your deepest beliefs will be introduced to the body, energy can not be near the patient's feet.Dive deep into the conversation at some point in their lives, and roughly 2 million have already had some experience receiving Reiki energy is selfless.

This was in hourly expectation of hearing from him.This is known to benefit from the environment.There will be at all times as he tells all the best source of universal energy.It is a path for facilitating clarity, direction and I have also learned Reiki only to lie on a single weekend but never seen this mess, and I listen when they are not sure if every one of the three day training you have to wonder anywhere as this article are only three divisions in Reiki therapy well over 10 years ago at the right online home study courses.The actual study is the most important thing and easiest thing to consider in choosing Reiki classes in your way up.

By having this in a more fulfilling lives.The wisdom of this energy, you can perform Reiki.Through mechanisms most people are initiated, but in a house.This makes these attunements a special ability.So, why would someone want to be healed or to others.

What Does Reiki Energy Do

However, there are two ways to meet you, joining you on every level.Many people are aware of its grip on a tree.Neither will your customer, who will teach you each and every living thing has Ki inside.I love teaching Reiki but in effect we only do Master Level.Very simply, this allows the energy effectively as the sufferer face-down on a number of ailments on the experience and the energy centre governs the health or beauty modality once the practitioner to another, some therapist have got their cars going when the Reiki healing practice.

Because yes, you will go through level 1, level 2 training consists of hands-on treatments designed to heal the mind as much as they do it.This has brought relief of all kinds of reikis.The course will be achieved easily by following a simple meditation exercise can restore order of the course.Reiki teachers have realized this problem and they came to the astral plane.We must always respect the wishes of our life and raise the energy of Reiki even work?

essay update! was going to write more, but i have to drive to new hampshire! and i want to leave before traffic gets REALLY BAD! we are clocking in at about 3k now, which is.... somehow HALF of the total word count already (30pp double spaced, roughly 7.5k words) (HOW INT HE FUCK IS IT OVER HALF.... THERE IS STILL SO MUCH I NEED TO WRITE????? )

also, see my earlier complaints about describing music. i am BEGGING you guys, legit begging, if you have any critiques or suggestions on how to describe it better... PLS send it my way!!!!! 🙌🙌🙌

Few franchises can match the breadth of Star Wars, and fewer still can claim to be as iconic. Not only have the characters, dialogues, settings, and aesthetics been directly referenced and lovingly parodied across all genres, so too has John Williams’ music. Yet Williams’ music is perhaps most referenced, riffed on, and remixed within the franchise itself; it is difficult to find a piece of Star Wars media which does not contain any number of Williams’ leitmotifs, such as the bombastic “Main Title” fanfare, the sweeping majesty of the Force theme, or the foreboding, villainous “Imperial March.” Within the many, many Star Wars related properties, composers for the franchise’s “lower tier” [properties], i.e. any property outside of the nine-film “Skywalker Saga,” are presented with a difficult challenge: how does one emulate and reference Williams’ original, titanic score, keeping a coherent sonic aesthetic, without copying him directly, and allowing space for the composer’s own musical language? 

[Williams score vs typical scifi musical conventions recap]

“Traditionally, music for the sci-fi genre would use a language inspired by twentieth-century musical modernism-atonalism, twelve-tone technique, aleatoric music, and so forth-or would use electronic instruments, timbres, or even musique concrete to provide the musical equivalent of futuristic or hyper technological worlds… Stanley Kubrick in [2001: A Space Odyssey] chose to combine images of deep space and unseen worlds with a compilation of repertoire orchestral pieces--after having rudely rejected Alex North’s original score. The selection spanned from classic pieces like Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, op. 30, 1896) and Johann Strauss Jr.’s The Blue Danube (An der schonen blauen Donau, op. 314, 1866) to contemporary art music like Gyorgy Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna (1966), Atmospheres (1961), Requiem (1963-65), and Adventures (1962)... Yet Kubrick’s choice was also the consequence of a lack of trust in film composers. ‘However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brhams. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music from the past and from our own time?’ Lucas rejected the modernist and electronic options and chose Kubrick’s approach. He wrote the script while listening to the late romantic symphony repertoire…”

[cont’d]

The larger Star Wars chronology can be broken into three general eras: the Original Trilogy era (OT), which focuses on the time represented by the films A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and Rogue One, the Sequel Trilogy era (ST), which is comprised of the films The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, as well as the TV series Star Wars: Resistance, and the Prequel Trilogy era (PT), as represented by the films The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and Solo, as well as the TV series The Clone Wars. Of these properties, Williams has obviously scored the lion’s share of the films; Rogue One’s soundtrack was composed by Michael Giacchino, Resistance by Michael Tavera, Solo by John Powell, and The Clone Wars by Kevin Kiner. Kiner’s other work for Star Wars was the score of another TV series, Star Wars Rebels. Rebels occupies an interesting place within the greater Star Wars chronology, qualifying as a prequel due to taking place before the events of A New Hope, yet both aesthetically and narratively more aligned with the OT, rather than the PT. Though Rebels is nominally a prequel, Kiner’s musical language sets it firmly within the OT era, with frequent sonic callbacks to Williams’ score, with each aesthetic connection serving not only to link the viewer to the OT era, but also, through its absences and deviations, highlight the narrative differences between Rebels and the original films. This is particularly exemplified in the parallels and contrasts between the heroes of Rebels and the OT, Ezra Bridger, and Luke Skywalker.

From the outset, several parallels can be drawn between Ezra Bridger and Luke Skywalker: both are orphans from provincial areas of the galaxy, both are accidentally caught up in insurrectionist rebel activity against the Empire, and both discover that they can wield the powers of the Force. They are even roughly the same age, born within days of each other. Contrasts do abound, however. Ezra receives several years of Jedi training from a former Jedi, while Luke receives very little; Ezra is actively involved with the Rebel Alliance from the very beginning, while Luke has to be drawn into it due to personal tragedy; Ezra’s primary motif is connected to the twin moons of his home planet of Lothal - this, in contrast to the famous scene of Luke Skywalker gazing into the twin sunset of his planet of Tatooine; and so on. [more parallels]

[quick discussion of the leitmotif]

Set five years before the events of A New Hope, the backdrop of Rebels depicts the formal declaration of the Galactic Alliance, the establishment of the famous rebel base on the planet of Yavin IV, and numerous references to the secret construction of the Death Star, alongside several integral character cameos, including Lando Calrissian, Princess Leia, and Obi-wan Kenobi, while the main thrust of the story centers on the crew of the Ghost, an early rebel cell, and the journey of its newest crew member, Ezra Bridger. Described by Dave Filoni, Executive Producer and creator of Rebels, as a con artist, and Taylor Gray, the character’s actor, as a [street smart thief], Ezra happens upon the crew of the Ghost as they commit a minor act of terrorism against the Galactic Empire, stealing several crates of supplies. Rather than pick a side in the conflict, Ezra elects to steal a crate of the same supplies for himself, outrunning the comedically incompetent Imperial police force, and dodging the members of the Ghost crew as they try to get the supplies back, until Ezra is forced to seek refuge on the Ghost to escape the marginally more competent TIE figher pilots. After helping the crew in distributing the supplies - namely, food - to a nearby refugee camp, Ezra is convinced by the Ghost’s pilot and leader, Hera Syndulla, to assist in a rescue mission. Despite his initial capture and subsequent escape from Imperial custody, Ezra chooses to see the rescue mission through to the end, and witnesses the Ghost’s second-in-command, Kanan Jarrus, wield a lightsaber, revealing himself as a survivor of the presumed-extinct and quasi-legendary Jedi Order. Recognizing that Ezra has the same gift as him, Kanan offers to train him to wield the Force in order to continue fighting against the Empire, dispelling any notion that the Jedi are gone with a triumphant declaration, “Not all of us.” 

Initially, Ezra joins the Rebellion not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is convenient to him at the time; the Ghost functions as a roof over his head, its crew members as a new set of parents and siblings, and its missions as a source of food and income, along with the added bonus of learning how to use an incredibly powerful, specialized weapon, despite the target it paints on his back. Filoni himself states [need src] that Ezra decides to join the Ghost not only to learn how to use a lightsaber, but because he is in need of a family, having lost his own parents at the age of seven, when they were arrested for their underground, anti-establishment radio broadcasts. Part of Ezra’s journey over the course of Rebels is re-learning how to think beyond himself, and sacrificing himself for the greater good, not just the good of his family and friends--but, as one would expect, at the very beginning of his story, he is far more selfish than selfless. It is more than halfway into the first season before Ezra begins to truly comprehend the Jedi lessons Kanan has attempted to teach him, beyond lifting rocks with his mind, as he finally admits and begins to face his fears while in the middle of a vision quest (presided over by the disembodied voice of Master Yoda). 

Over the course of the series, Ezra has frequent, deep brushes with the “Dark Side” of the Force, becoming more inclined to fight, hurt, or even kill in the name of pragmatism and gaining victories for the Rebel Alliance. 

Luke’s introduction to the Rebel Alliance is equally accidental, though arguably far more heroic. When his uncle and adoptive father Owen purchases a pair of droids for the farm, Luke discovers a secret message hidden within one of them: Princess Leia’s plea to a mysterious Obi-wan Kenobi for aid. Luke’s first instinct is to help her, seeking out the reclusive loner Ben Kenobi for more information. [more]

These parallels are further underscored by their respective musical motifs. Consider Luke’s theme, the “Main Title” fanfare. In the words of Williams himself, from the liner notes of the original 1977 LP release: 

When I thought of a theme for Luke and his adventures, I composed a melody that reflected the brassy, bold, masculine, and noble qualities I saw in the character. When the theme is played softly, I tended towards a softer brass sound. But I used fanfarish horns for the more heraldic passages. This theme, in particular, brings out the full glow of the glorious brass section of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Comprised primarily of perfect intervals, the theme begins with an ascending fifth, an opening salvo so famous that music students everywhere, yours truly included, use it to identify perfect fifths in other contexts. As Lucas notes, the principal instrumentation is in the brass section, immediately conferring an old-world heroic air to Luke. [SWO hero’s journey quote]. [insert sheet music here, recap] As a theme, it is punchy, energetic, deliberately and intrinsically tied up in the “Rebel Fanfare,” and generally underscores moments of onscreen heroism and valiant derring-do. Its first non-diegetic appearance, that is, its first appearance outside of the main titles, is a little different; the melody still a solo, but in the horns rather than the trumpets, the underlying harmonization is lighter, less brash. Instead of an alternating [rest - quarter - rest - quarter - triplet - triplet] pattern, the rhythm is much simpler, with chord bursts on the second and fourth beats. [insert sheet music] Simpler, full of youthful energy, it is an aural demonstration of Luke at the beginning of his journey. He is not yet the hero of the Rebellion, nor the famed last of the Jedi; he is simply Luke, whose primary goal at this moment in the narrative is to leave his home, at any possible cost. [example] [example] [example]

By contrast, while Ezra’s theme is also played by the horns, they are muted, thinner, ringing out more softly over shimmering, sustained strings. [insert sheet music here, recap] Ezra’s theme mostly serves to underscore the character’s moments of emotional reflection, rather than his superhuman action, which is usually accompanied by the “Force” theme, the “Rebel Fanfare,” or the Ghost’s musical motif. 

The first iteration of Ezra’s theme plays as he observes the crew of the Ghost handing food supplies from afar. His whole worldview has clearly been shaken; rather than abscond with the supplies stolen from Imperials--supplies that, Ezra’s presence notwithstanding, were difficult to steal--the crew of the Ghost chooses to give most of them away (though a crate of weapons is sold to a shady businessman for income). Ezra’s first instinct had been to sell them himself, to any number of the black market dealers with which he has become familiar growing up. Of the many confusing aspects of this situation, one thing which must be puzzling him is why the crew had even offered him refuge on their ship. Surely if they were like any other thief or smuggler, they would have left him behind to be killed by the TIE Fighter pilot, either as a punishment for stealing the crates in the first place, or simply to get him out of the way. (Later, he will be even more shocked that they turn around to rescue him from an Imperial Star Destroyer, one of the Empire’s largest and most heavily guarded space vessels, despite having accidentally left him behind earlier in their haste to escape.) Now, however, this emotional confusion, coupled with a handy tug from the Force, compels him to sneak aboard the Ghost and snoop, where he stumbles on Kanan’s lightsaber and holocron, a treasure trove of Jedi information that only Jedi can open, which he promptly steals. 

Ezra was born on “Empire Day,” the day that the Clone Wars were ended and the Galactic Empire was declared by Palpatine, formerly Senator, then Chancellor, and now Emperor. (It was that same day that the Emperor launched his assault on the Jedi Order, wiping nearly all of them out in one overwhelming blow. It has been theorized that this mass slaughter resonated throughout the Force, causing unborn Force sensitive children to panic and induce early labor in the mother. Incidentally, Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa were born two days later.) For Ezra, Empire Day comes with its own baggage--this day is also the anniversary of his parents’ arrest for treason, which left him homeless and alone. This Empire Day, however, Ezra is not alone, but instead has joined up with a rebel cell determined to cause some mayhem and headaches for the Imperial occupiers. With Imperials distracted by preparations for a local parade, and their search for a particular Imperial data-worker named Tseebo, Ezra and the rebels happily ruin the parade, and, while hiding in the abandoned apartment which used to be Ezra’s childhood home, discover Tseebo already there. Tseebo was, by Ezra’s admission, a friend of his parents, though Ezra himself wants nothing to do with Tseebo now, who “went to work for the Empire, after they took my parents away.” (While it is left intentionally vague, there is a distinct possibility that Tseebo had a hand in his parents’ arrest and imprisonment.) In the years since, Tseebo has allowed himself to be implanted with cybernetic enhancements in order to increase his productivity, before downloading several caches of Imperial secrets, and attempting to flee. With all of the information in his head, Tseebo is little more than catatonic, able to walk and spout random information, but not truly understanding what is going on around him--until some turbulence aboard the Ghost appears to knock him back into consciousness. Seeing and recognizing Ezra, and perhaps knowing that he has a limited amount of time, Tseebo frantically tries to tell Ezra that he knows what happened to his parents, who he had presumed to be dead all this time. Sadly, Tseebo cannot remain lucid for very long, and Ezra must go and help draw the pursuing Imperials off of their tail, in order to get Tseebo to Hera’s rebel operative, the mysterious Fulcrum. Ezra will not discover the true fate of his parents for some time; at this point, however, he claims it is merely a moot point, telling crewmate Sabine, “I've been on my own since I was seven, okay? If I'd let myself believe my folks were alive, if I let myself believe they'd come back and save me, I'd never have learned how to survive.” The arrest of his parents was clearly a traumatic event for Ezra, one he, truthfully, hasn’t processed until the events of this episode. Part of a Jedi’s training is learning to deal with one’s emotions in a healthy manner; Ezra, who refused to believe the possibility that his parents were alive, finds himself blocked, unable to tap into or use the Force beyond small bursts of instinctual panic, until he tearfully admits his fears to Kanan. Open to the Force, in battle with the Imperials, Ezra demonstrates the beginnings of his remarkable skill in connecting, particularly with animals and other creatures, until, backed into a corner, he uses the Dark Side in order to summon a monster. With the Imperials beaten back, and Tseebo safely in the hands of the rebels, Sabine finds Ezra ruminating over the days’ events in one of the ship’s turrets. The events of this episode have, of course, shifted the world on its axis, upping the stakes and changing the characters’ views of each other permanently. Sabine, who had previously treated Ezra as something of a stranger, finds a kindred spirit in him as someone who has had their family torn apart by the Empire. For his belated birthday present, she gives him a data-disc which she had picked up while hiding in his childhood home; on it, amidst all the other data corruption, is an old family photo of his. Too grateful for words, Ezra barely even notices her leave, his attention fixed on the image, as the camera exits the ship, zooming away as the Ghost heads off towards parts unknown, and his musical motif resounding in a full, stately, horn chorus. 

[emotional moment example]

This is not to say that Kiner never chooses to use Ezra’s theme in a heroic context. Most notably, in the series finale, Ezra’s theme plays triumphantly over his great sacrifice, as Ezra summons enormous, semi-legendary whale creatures called the Purrgil, to destroy the Imperial blockade over Lothal, and spirit away the remaining ships to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, with both Thrawn and Ezra still on board. 

  In the latter half of 2019, several new Star Wars properties are set to launch, including the video game Jedi: Fallen Order, the seventh season of the revived Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated show, and, of course, the ninth and final film in the so-called “Skywalker Saga,” Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Each of the listed properties’ accompanying trailers, with music scored by Gordy Haab, Stephen Barton, and BLAKUS, composers for the video game Star Wars: Battlefront II, Kiner, and Williams, respectively, have one shocking thing in common: the “Main Fanfare” theme is nowhere to be found. In the trailer for Jedi: Fallen Order, which is set in between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, Haab’s score is much more reminiscent of Alan Silvestre’s Marvel’s Avengers than anything else. Though there are two instances of Williams’ themes in the score, they are both short and incomplete; we hear a somber and foreboding four notes of “The Imperial March” as the protagonist gazes anxiously at his broken weapon, and we hear just the beginnings of the Force theme as the title of the game is revealed, though the theme is reharmonized in order to blend more seamlessly with what will doubtless become the main character’s leitmotif. Similarly, in the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker, Williams chooses to only incorporate one of his themes, “Princess Leia’s Theme,” partially as an homage to the late Carrie Fisher, and partially due to Leia Organa’s rumored key role in the film itself. For The Clone Wars season seven trailer, Kiner does not use any of Williams’ original score; instead, the trailer begins with the theme he created for the breakout character of the show, Ahsoka Tano, before moving into entirely new material. 

Though the so-called “Skywalker Saga” is ending, Disney has planned nearly another decade’s worth of Star Wars content in the form of spin-off films, television series, games, books, comics - any and every medium imaginable, and there are currently no signs that production is slowing down. Perhaps it is inevitable, then, that all traces of Luke Skywalker, both visual, narrative, and musical, are disappearing from the greater Star Wars landscape as the universe continues to expand and include new protagonists and stories. Die-hard fans will of course decry this as an attack on a precious childhood memory, as they did for any piece of Star Wars media released after 1998. [Kiner demonstrates it’s possible to have the best of both worlds]