Tag, your it for @naivesilver

Ok please if you don’t mind saying - who is Stuart semple and what did he do? I’m so confused. Like I recognise the name and I think he might the an artist or something but I have no idea

He is indeed an artist! He’s a English multidisciplinary fine artist best known for his ongoing beef with English sculptor Anish Kapoor over the 2016 exclusive licensing on the process to make Vantablack colour coating, which meant Kapoor was the only artist allowed to use it. Then Stuart Semple made Pinkest Pink pigment and said it was available to everyone but Anish Kapoor, and there was a big blowup which there’s a lot of documentation of - it was very memed.

Since then, Semple has made a bunch more pigments, most of them with the available-to-everyone-but-Anish-Kapoor disclaimer, and the beef periodically flares up, although I will say as time goes on it seems to me to have got increasingly one-sided given that Kapoor has pretty much wandered off.

(I’ve used several of his colours, btw. Pinkest Pink is pretty good. Blackest Black, his attempt to make the blackest possible paint (as opposed to Vantablack which is a nanofibre coating) I was pretty disappointed in, I’ve honestly had better light capture from mid-range art shop paints. His other pigments vary in quality - some I really liked, some I was meh on, but I think Blackest Black is the only one I was actively unimpressed by)

Anyway. Where I come in is much less exciting. 

A few months ago I reblogged a post on Tumblr asking about Semple from a discourse tag (my reblog did not tag or @ anyone), and I made a glib comment where I said (very truthfully) that while I thought he was pretty decent at pigments, both his paintings and his online persona came across pretty adolescent to me.

so it turns out Stuart Semple is an inveterate name searcher (hi Stuart if you’re reading this!) 

(Side note: I actually should have guessed this from 2019 Twitter when he saw and commented on an untagged thread I wrote about him and Kapoor’s beef (which was because I’d seen an article in which Kapoor, a British-Asian man, said that the racist Prevent strategy was liable to drive young British-Asian men into the arms of terrorist groups by making it clear their country hates them reblogged on Semple’s account with a caption claiming Anish Kapoor was pro-terrorism, which, while tongue-in-cheek, isn’t a neutral statement for a white person to make about an Asian person and was a pretty phenomenally bad-faith reading of Kapoor’s actual words) and in my thread I pretty much said that when the story had broken, I, like everybody else, had found it very funny and been firmly on side with Semple’s bit, but I felt that a) after a couple of years it really wasn’t very relevant any more and it had started to feel less like Fighting The Power and more like bullying the amount of Semple’s web presence was devoted to talking about Anish Kapoor; b) that it was a shame that Anish Kapoor was increasingly only known as The Vantablack Guy given that I really like a lot of his work and c) that continuing to frame a Jewish person of colour as the Face of the Artistic Elite was a bit weird given how overwhelmingly white the high-end art world is. but I digress. Semple responded to that thread, I don’t really remember what he said, it wasn’t an acrimonious response but it was a bit Oh I Didn’t Do Anything To Tag You?)

so anyway he found my reblog and commented saying ehhh I don’t remember, something along the lines of not feeling like I was being very kind and that he was trying his best. also I think he said I had accused him of being racist? which again the actual Tumblr post literally just said I thought his art and persona came across as juvenile and I think in the tags? I mentioned that I thought it was time for him to step off the Kapoor beef. 

then he screencapped my post, including my profile picture and username, and posted it on all his socials with a kind of :( people are so mean on Tumblr :( caption and um

idk if you know this about Being A Public Persona With Tens Of Thousands of Followers but. if you post someone’s identity and say ‘I do not like what this person is doing’ it. can get messy fast.

uh I don’t follow Stuart Semple (see the original post I made) but he commented to make sure I knew he’d posted my post on Instagram and “all my followers like your wig :)” which. according to my partner who did go and look at the time, the Instagram comments were largely about how I was an ugly non-passing trans woman aka “man in a wig” which. throw the whole suitcase out. There were a good few days where I got a lot of angry anons, ranging from ‘stop bullying Stuart Semple!!!!!’ to ‘die in a ditch graphically’ to ‘how can you claim to have opinions on art when You Are On Tumblr’ (I have been a freelance illustrator for 7 years and I have a Masters in art and design) to ‘your art sucks and you’re fat and ugly’ and my personal favourite ‘how can u be cis and use she/her pronouns you dumb snowflake’

(within that furore was a whole branch where someone was like ‘sex worker huh bet you’re bad at it’ and I was like ‘yep! that’s why I don’t do it any more! it’s hard work and it involves a lot of self-promotion and customer skills which I don’t like and am not good at!’ and this was a Whole Thing where they kept trying to insult me (much like today’s anon) about my supposed failures as a Slut Who Is Bad At Sex and I kept going like ‘ok but here’s how that just. doesn’t make sense in reference to what sex work actually is so like, ok?’)

and Stuart Semple and I were also having a conversation which, depending on your perspective I would call his attitude either conciliatory or passive-aggressive, there was a lot of ‘me and my followers would never say rude things about you :) keep up the art kiddo :)’ and being charitable I would say he was trying to be nice while being angry, and to avoid escalating (but with the added context I got later about the wig comment, I think that interpretation of his behaviour maybe. has some cracks?) and ultimately he took down the posts, we had a brief conversation about keeping pet reptiles (apparently he has a lizard) and we left it on, if not good terms, at least peaceable ones. 

however I still periodically get messages about it from angry Semple stans. and I’m not sure the argument was resolved, in that I still very much think it’s fair to make criticism, including quite harsh criticism (which I’m not sure ‘adolescent’ is), on art which is put out for public display and enjoyment, and that it isn’t a personal attack to post a criticism of someone’s public-facing work and statements on social media unless you actively target it towards them (for example, @ ing them), and Semple still thinks there’s no difference between a random blog with under a thousand followers criticising a public figure’s work and a public figure with 100k followers on most platforms criticising that blog (out of context - he clipped out the post I was reblogging from and my explanatory tags, and looking at my blog you may notice that 90% of my nuance is in the tags) while giving his followers all the information to find said blog.

(also as multiple people have remarked. if you want to say it’s an unfair criticism to call your online presence immature, being a middle-aged artist who as far as I can tell has a net worth over a million who spends your time name searching yourself in order to get mad at untagged mild criticism from strangers on the internet and share it on all your socials for your followers to join you in Being Big Mad is uhhhhhhh. it uh. it’s not like. not super thin-skinned and immature)

(also also I just googled his net worth and unsurprisingly I can’t find a source on it I’d consider reliable, but I did find multiple articles about him getting in trouble for breach of contract and nonpayment for gallery employees, including two accusations of him writing a big defensive blog post then changing it after a few hours to a very short post saying I LOVE YOU so like idk how true that is but it does seem. consistent with the above interactions.)

Hello, beautiful one. Love your blog and all your insights about the recent TGP episode as it relates to M/E. Are you going to do an analysis of the episode as it pertains to our ‘ship, or at least one about the parallels between M/E and D/D? Thank you and keep up the good work. As one of my heroes liked to say, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Thank you! They’ve been trying to get me down in every fandom for like a decade now but haters are usually my best motivators, so joke’s on them. ;) I don’t plan on making a separate ‘ship post bc I’ve already said p much everything I wanted (for now) in my answers to the messages that flooded in after the ep, but the ME/DD parallels? w/ pleasure! *cracks knuckles* Let’s do that one.

Eleanor and Donna are carbon copies of each other, and this episode serves as a great reminder. It’s not only their “sunbaked Arizona trash” pasts that line up, it’s also the way they left it behind, which involved “dying” and meeting the right people. Even though Eleanor doesn’t remember her afterlife journey (yet?), it matches her mom’s (and here’s hoping that she can work her way back to that happiness again). And Dave is not a Chidi or a Jason or a Tahani - Dave is a Michael.

first, a brief summary to help me stay on track:

Donna lives in Dave’s home in Tarantula (1) Springs under the fake identity of Diana Tremaine (2) bc Donna Shellstrop is dead (3), but Dave knows all along who she really is. He’s an oddball architect (4) and they met in a condemned bar (5). When she realized who he was and that tearing it down was his project, she went at him with a knife. But this antagonism switched to attraction and then evolved into a committed relationship (6).

(1) Michael’s home is the Bad Place where they happen to love spiders: they eat them, they use them for human torture, and they keep them as pets. The Fake Good Place is part of this “landscape” and, for all intents and purposes, it was also Eleanor’s home during the reboots. As Michael remarks, “We lived in the same neighborhood.”

(2) Diana Tremaine is Eleanor’s fake identity, too. Donna “wears it” in a loving, committed relationship, Eleanor “wears it” during the time when two pivotal moments occur btw her and Michael: one in the torture museum where she openly displays worry for his well-being, striking a chord w/ him, and the other is the famous portal scene where Michael demonstrates his commitment by giving her his “everything I ever wanted” pin.

(3) This is a point of interest bc both Eleanor and Donna are in a kind of in-between situation here. Donna is officially “dead” but she also isn’t. Eleanor was dead for real and then… wasn’t due to some timeline meddling. And they both turned into better people after they “died” and started a new life (or afterlife in Eleanor’s case).

(4) Dave is aware of who Donna is from the start just as Michael knows who Eleanor is from day one. They love Donna and Eleanor respectively for who they are. Also, these two have practically everything in common: occupation, general disposition, glasses, sense of humor, and, most importantly, a deep fondness for knife-wielding blonde firecrackers. Donna describes Dave as a “kind of a dork but real sweet and so fancy”. That’s Michael, too, which is why he gets picked on by other demons. Even their approach to architecture is similar: Dave is a messy screwball innovator himself (he combined a Subaru dealership w/ a burlesque club and designed the “first Hooters made out of brick” that was “sort of inspired by Monticello“).

(5) Bars are a Michael/Eleanor thing in general. Their first meeting in this Earth reboot takes place in the Desert Rosé. Dave and Donna met in the Desert Rash. The similarities are given and the slight difference btw Rosé and Rash also nicely comments on the fact that D/D is overtly sexual to the point of being seedy while M/E is - and I kinda hate this word now due to fandom over-and misuse but it’s the best one here - purer. They are variations on the same theme, though.

(6) Eleanor wanted to “physically attack Michael”, “seduce him”, “use a large/small knife”, “indecent proposal him” after she realized she was in a  condemned place, i.e. in a Bad Place neighborhood, which was Michael’s architect project. The show kindly thought of those heathens who are not into freeze-framing their way through episodes and are therefore unaware of these plans, so all this is visually and verbally alluded to in the scene where she keeps pointing her knife at him, proposes a seduction and inquires about his penis situation, linking them all up w/ Dave and Donna’s story. Michael’s gleeful reaction when Dave tells them about Donna pulling a knife on him is fitting. As is his grin when Dave remarks that he loves her “wild streak” and that he’s being turned into a “bad boy”. Despite being a demon, Michael’s deviant behavior did not flare up until he met Eleanor and then it just snowballed from there. But Dave also responds to, supports and appreciates Donna’s efforts to better herself, and the same is true to Michael around Eleanor.

Essentially, M/E go through the same emotional extremes during the reboots that Dave and Donna experience in a more condensed form and “Earth timeframe” at the beginning of their relationship. And the initial antagonism transforms into love and commitment in both cases. Everything lines up neatly here: Dave and Michael, Donna and Eleanor, and the thematic links connecting these two couples and their evolution.

There is only one thing that’s v disjointed and that’s Michael’s abrupt “father figure”  stunt. This comes out of nowhere and has no place anywhere. It doesn’t fit his character makeup and it doesn’t fit his dynamic w/ Eleanor where she is always the assertive one w/ an actual history of “parenting” and guiding him in human matters. It also has no parallel in Dave whatsoever which is very odd bc they are compared/contrasted from literally every other aspect and Dave has a daughter. This relationship and his role as a father, however, are completely ignored. He is chiefly presented to us as the dorky architect boyfriend and it’s only his v adult relationship w/ Donna that’s discussed in detail (and many of those details are also present in M/E as noted above). Similarly, Eleanor is never compared to Patricia, all her parallels are firmly threaded to Donna. There is literally nothing to pick up on btw the Dave & Patricia and Michael & Eleanor dynamics, but everything lines up btw D/D and M/E, so…

“I would have been scared if she hadn’t been the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”