#when the more important thing to do is go 'fuck this complicated narrative construct' and break the rules to save calliope
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released by popular request: the #exclusive deleted scene from my umineko 1-8 writeup’s “umineko as metafiction” section because even i can recognise when i am going too far and too insane
#umineko liveblog#came to a demented revelation that detective fiction/romance fiction is basically just the meat/candy binary#btw 'magic' in this image can be substituted for the word 'narrative' so you know exactly what i'm getting at here#for any of this to make sense it assumes the one (1) heads up i have about the epilogues comparison being valid is correct + trustworthy#and also assumes everything in umineko is related to everything else. if either statement is false then everything i am saying is nonsense#basically was comparing falling into the murder mysteries as akin to getting hung up on caliborn's masterpiece#when the more important thing to do is go 'fuck this complicated narrative construct' and break the rules to save calliope#like who cares if you solve the crime if you never get to the emotional core etc etc etc
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World Trade Center
IGNFF: Did you feel pressured to deliver this movie? Did you feel like you had enough time to make the movie you wanted to make?
STONE: I have always been pressured. The nature of the business is that release times have shortened since the eighties. The post-production times get tighter and more money is spent on marketing. So there's a natural economic pressure to always deliver. But sometimes a movie is like a bottle of wine. It takes a little bit of time for it to ferment. And sometimes it needs that time in order to see how something can be changed for the better. Unfortunately, now we're down to these six or seven-month production periods. I started [World Trade Center] in July of last year. We finished filming in the middle of February. Basically, I had to work this in, what? Five months.
Being that there wasn't much room for a delay, was there also the matter that - if you were going to deliver this for an August release - that the principal photography would have to fall into place?
I'd said to [producer] Mike [Shamberg], 'We will be able to deliver if the principal photography falls into place.' And it did fall into place. I felt it might. It was a complicated film technically, with a lot of computer animation, a lot of sets, a lot of special effect-type things. But I had a feeling it would come together. I shot 300,000 feet on this movie. I'd laid-out a lot of it, so we already knew where to cut it. And we had a primitive first version of it by the fourth month of production. Basically, from the early version we were getting reactions from people and feeding off their reactions to improve it. Nothing ended up in the film that I didn't want to be there. Of course, there were efforts to sanitize some areas. But nothing came out that I didn't feel was right. I felt it had a balance with the grit, and a manageable tension with the pain. It was there, but not so much so that a grandmother couldn't see it. I wanted a family to be able to see this movie because this is an important movie.
That's a question some people have been asking: Is it okay to bring younger family members to see the movie? And some were asking: would it be okay to bring children under the age of 10?
We previewed it in Minneapolis and Seattle, and I insisted that they bring 13 to 16 year-olds because of the PG-13 rating. This is my first PG-13 movie. (He laughs) My first one. I thought we might not get a PG-13 rating, because the MPAA seemed to be looking for a reason to give it an R rating. First they said, 'We don't know what's wrong with it. It's too intense.' And when they say that, you're fucked because you don't know what to fix. (He laughs)
How did you feel about the rating?
I was delighted. I mean, I'm a mainstream filmmaker. I want a wide audience. I don't want to show it at Boston art houses. Or at Harvard. I want everyone to see it, worldwide.
Did you feel like the reception of the movie United 93 helped World Trade Center?
Yes, it helped us a lot. I don't know how much, but we'll see. I think it broke the ice. And I think it's an excellent film to begin with. [Paul Greengrass] was very articulate in his answers. He dealt with it on a philosophical level, and it's visceral. Whether people were ready to see it, you can argue about that. His movie is done in a cinema verite style. You don't get to know people too well. Ours was a traditional narrative in the sense that we picked four or five characters and we related to those characters emotionally and tightly as possible.
One of the more interesting things here is, after people see the movie, they're really going to get talking about this. And the exchanges have been constructive and positive for the most part.
The only reason to make this movie, for me, the only reason to make it was that we're able to talk about it. Otherwise I would have done another movie. I wasn't looking to do a 9/11 movie. It came to me in script form in late 2004, and I was just knocked-out by it.
You've said your tendency is to confront fear. What would be your greatest fear about making this movie and how it might be received?
That it may be seen as too sentimental. I don't see it as sentimental, I suppose. Some people have said 'Because they survive it's Capra.' But that's such crap, you know? They did survive, only 20 out of 3,000. That is a fact. But if you don't remember that these 20 people helped memorialize them. They do, in a sense [the] same way that they're putting up these [new] buildings in New York. It's a memory, and it's an accurate memory of what it was like inside, and outside from the wives' point of view. And frankly, the Marine's story sounds like another movie on top of it. It's like a B-movie that you put into this movie.
Considering your past films and the things you've said, what do you think of the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11?
I'd read some of those conspiracy theories. And frankly, I don't want to venture an opinion because I never got deeper into it. I read a couple of books. It's fascinating stuff. But you have to really go further. On JFK I really did a lot of research. I did a year-and-a-half of research. But here, I don't know. It seems to me in a broad way, if you look at the forest through the trees, it seems to me that what happened since is far worse than what happened that day. So a conspiracy theory, whatever it may be, is not as relevant as where we are now. I think we have more deaths from terror, more fear, more debt. We have constitutional breakdowns. We've got everything going on. Wars. So I think that's what matters, and we have to worry about that, really, instead of what [conspiracy theorists] say is so — and even if it is, so fucking what? We've got a bigger problem now.
You'd mentioned an interest in the idea that Richard Clarke proposed: That there was a high-level conspiracy.
That is a conspiracy, it seems to me, that everyone seems to be missing, and it's pretty overt. Richard Clarke got it, and so did several other books. I mean, there's a bunch of people who run the White House and who ignore all the normal traditions of the state department and CIA inputted information. And they simply went their own way with their own information inside the defense department and went to war. That, you could say, is a very limited conspiracy of people at the top.
While making World Trade Center you got to meet with, and work with, the actual rescue workers. The real guys. How'd you go about getting them involved?
Yes, the actual rescue workers. Many of them were involved. We contacted many of them. John [McLoughlin] and Will [Jimeno] helped. Once they each came in, it became a very complicated technical thing because we had to re-write and re-write, and different departments were involved with the changes. When John came out of the hole, that documentary clip had 80 uniforms on it. Primarily it was NYPD and NYFD. Those three departments were heavily involved in getting him out. We used the real guy who rescued Will, Scotty Strauss. He was played by Stevie Dorff. And we used Scotty Fox, who rescued John, he played himself, the guy with the red helmet, as did all the guys with him. There's a featurette on the rescuers in the movie. I just saw it. It's just great. You really ought to see it.
-Steve Head interview with Oliver Stone, IGN, Aug 11 2006 [x]
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Ted Lasso 2x11 thoughts
For an episode that ends with a journalist Ted trusts but has (understandably) recently lied to warning Ted that he’s publishing an article about his panic attacks, it was fitting that this episode seemed entirely about what all of these characters choose to tell each other. And after most of a season of television that Jason Sudeikis has described as the season in which the characters go into their little caves to deal with things on their own, it turns out they are finally able to tell each other quite a lot.
Which is good because, um, wow, a lot is going to happen in the season finale of this show!
Thoughts on the things people tell each other behind the cut!
Roy and Keeley. I absolutely loved the moment during their photoshoot in which they bring up a lot of complicated emotional things and are clearly gutted (“gutted”? Who am I? A GBBO contestant who forgot to turn the oven on?) by what they’ve heard. We already know that Keeley and Roy are great at the kinds of moments they have before the shoot begins, in which Roy builds Keeley up and tells her she’s fucking amazing. From nearly the beginning of their relationship, they’ve supported each other and been each other’s biggest fans. But their relationship has gone on long enough that they’ve progressed from tentative arguments about space and individual needs into really needing to figure out what they mean to each other and how big their feelings are and what that means in relation to everything else. Watching these two confess about the uncomfortable kiss with Nate, the unexpectedly long conversation with Phoebe’s teacher, and—most painfully—the revelation that Jamie still loves Keeley didn’t feel like watching two people who are about to break up. (Although I could see them potentially needing space from each other to get clarity.) It felt like watching two people realize just how much they’d lose if they lost each other, which is an understandably scary feeling even—or especially—when you’re deeply in love but not entirely sure what the future holds. Not entirely sure what you’re capable of when you’ve never felt serious about someone in quite this way, and are realizing you have to take intentional actions to choose that relationship every single day. I’m excited to learn whether Roy and Keeley decide they need to solidify their relationship more (not necessarily an engagement, but maybe moving in together or making sure they’re both comfortable referring to the other as partner and telling people they’re in a committed relationship) or if things go in a different direction for a while.
Sharon and Ted. I’ve had this feeling of “Wow, Ted is going to feel so intense about how honest he’s been with Sharon and is going to end up getting really attached and transfer a lot of emotions onto the connection they have and that is stressful no matter how beneficial it has been for him to finally get therapy!” for a while now. And Sharon’s departure really brought that out and it was indeed stressful. But the amount of growth that’s happened for both of these characters is really stunningly and beautifully conveyed in this episode. Ted is genuinely angry she left without saying goodbye, and he doesn’t bury it some place deep inside him where it will fester for the next thirty years. He expresses his anger. (I also noticed he sweared—mildly—in front of her again, which is really a big tell for how much he has let his carefully-constructed persona relax around her.) He reads her letter even though he said he wasn’t going to, and he’s moved. I don’t think Ted has the words for his connection to Sharon beyond “we had a breakthrough,” but Sharon gets it, and is able to firmly assert a professional boundary by articulating her side of that breakthrough as an experience that has made her a better therapist. And is still able to offer Ted a different kind of closure by suggesting they go out before her train leaves. No matter how you feel about a patient/football manager seeing their therapist/team psychologist colleague socially, I appreciated this story because IMO it didn’t cross big lines but instead was about one final moment in this arc in which both Ted and Sharon saw each other clearly and modeled what it is to give someone what they need and to expect honesty and communication from them. I liked that Ted ends up being the one saying goodbye. (The mustache in the exclamation points!) I like that whether or not Sharon returns in any capacity (Sarah Niles is so wonderful that I hope she does, but I’m not sure), the goodbye these characters forge for themselves here is neither abandonment nor a new, more complicated invitation. It’s the end of a meaningful era, and although the work of healing is the work of a lifetime, it’s very beautiful to have this milestone.
Ted and Rebecca. So, maybe it’s just me, but it kinda feels like these two have a few li’l life things to catch up on?! (HAHHHHHaSdafgsdasdf!) I really adored their interactions in this episode. I maintain that Biscuits With The Boss has been happening this whole time (even when Ted’s apartment was in shambles, there’s biscuit evidence, and I feel like we’ve been seeing the biscuit boxes in Rebecca’s office pretty regularly too), even if it might have been more of a drive-by biscuit drop-off/feelings avoidance ritual. It was really lovely to see Ted on more even footing in Rebecca’s office, joking around until she tells him to shut up, just like the old days. And GOSH—for their 1x9 interaction in Ted’s office to be paralleled in this episode and for Ted to explicitly make note of the parallel in a way Rebecca hears and sees and understands?! MY HEART. In both of Rebecca’s confessions, she is not bringing good news but it is good and meaningful that she chooses to share with Ted. In both situations, Ted takes the moment in stride and offers acceptance equivalent to the gravity of what she has to confess. And in both situations, he’s not some kind of otherworldly saint, able to accept Rebecca no matter what because he’s unaffected by what she shares. He is affected. When he tells her about Sam, you can see a variety of emotions on his face. Rebecca is upset and Ted is calm, and even if I might have liked for him to try to talk about the risk the affair poses to the power dynamics on the team or any number of factors, I also really liked that he just accepts where she is, and—most importantly—does not offer her advice beyond examining herself and taking her own advice. A massive part of being in a relationship with another person (a close relationship of any nature) is figuring out how to support that person without necessarily having to be happy about every single thing they do. It’s so important that Ted connects what she’s just told him about Sam back to what she told him last season about her plot with the club. These both feel like truth bombs to him, and he is at least safe enough to make that clear. These are both things that impact him, things that shape how he sees her and maybe even how he sees himself. He cares about her and is capable of taking in this information; he has room for it. But it’s not something he takes lightly, and neither does she. See you next year.
Tumblr user chainofclovers and the TV show Ted Lasso. My brain is going wild thinking about all the ways the next “truth bomb” conversation could go in 3x11 or whatever. Maybe they go full consistent parallel and Rebecca confesses something else, this time about her and Ted or some other big future thing that impacts him as much or more as the other confessions have. (The same but different.) Maybe the tables turn and Ted has something to confess to her. While the 1x9 conversation ended in an embrace and the 2x11 conversation ended with a bit more physical distance (understandable given the current state of their relationship and the nature of the discussion), the verbal ending of both conversations involved voices moving into a sexier lower register while zooming in to talk specifically about their connection to each other, so I have to assume there will be some consistencies in s3 even if the circumstances will be completely different. I don’t really know where I’m going with this and I obviously will go insane if I sustain this level of anticipatory energy until Fall 2022 but I have a feeling my brain and heart are going to try!
Sam and Rebecca. I know there’s been a lot of criticism about whether this show is being at all realistic about the power dynamics and inevitable professional issues this relationship would create. On some level, I agree; I like that pretty much everyone who knows about the affair has been kind so far, but you can be kind and still ask someone to contend with reality. But I also think that in nearly every plot point on this show, the narrative is driven by how people feel about their circumstances first and foremost. (It’s why the whiteboard in the coaching office and the football commentators tell us more about how the actual football season is going from a points perspective than anyone else.) This episode reminded me how few people know about Sam and Rebecca, and how much their time together so far has been time spent in bed. The private sphere. I thought this episode really expertly brought the public sphere into it, not—thank goodness—through a humiliating exposure or harsh judgment but through an opportunity for Sam that illustrates not only all his potential to do great things but how much Rebecca’s professional position and personal feelings are in conflict with that. Could stand in the way of that. I don’t have a strong gut feeling about where this will go, but I do think Sam’s face in his final scene of this episode is telling. He started the episode wanting to see Rebecca (his most recent text to her was about wanting to connect), and Edwin’s arrival from Ghana really exploded his sense of what is possible for his life. If he’d arrived home to Rebecca sitting on his stoop prior to meeting Edwin, he’d have been delighted. Now he’s conflicted, and whatever decision he makes, he has to reckon with the reality that he cannot have everything he wants. No matter what. And Rebecca—she has taken Ted’s advice and is attempting to be honest about the fact that she can’t control Sam’s decisions but hopes he doesn’t go, and even saying that much feels so inappropriate. And I’m not sure how much she realizes about the inappropriateness of the position she’s putting him in, although maybe she’s getting there considering she exits the scene very quickly. I’ve honestly loved Rebecca’s arc this season. I think it’s realistic that she got obsessed with the intimacy she thought she could find in her phone. I think it’s realistic that her professional and personal ambitions are inappropriately linked. (They certainly were for Rupert. It’s been years since she’s known anything different; even if she’s done some significant recovery work to move on from her abusive marriage and figure out her own priorities, she’s got a long way to go.) I know there are people who will read this interaction between Rebecca and Sam as a totally un-self-aware thing on the part of “the show” or “the writers” but what I saw is two people who enjoyed being in bed together and now have to deal with the reality that they’re in two different places in their lives and that one has great professional power over the other. If that wasn’t in the show, I wouldn’t be able to see it or feel so strongly about it.
Edwin and Sam. I really enjoyed all the complexities of this interaction. Edwin is promising a future for Sam that doesn’t quite exist yet, though he has the financial means to make it happen. He offers this by constructing for Sam a Nigerian—and Ghanaian—experience unlike anything he’s found in London. Sam is amazed that this experience is here, and Edwin’s response is to explain to him that the experience is not here. Not really. The experience in Africa. Sam has of course connected to the other Nigerian players on the team, but this is something else entirely. I’m really curious if Sam is going to end up feeling that what Edwin has to offer is real or not. That sense of home and connection? So real. And so right that he would want to experience that homecoming and would want to be part of building that experience for others. But at the end of the day, he went to a museum full of actors and a pop-up restaurant full of “friends,” and is that constructed authenticity as a stand-in for a real homecoming more or less real than the home he’s building in Richmond? (With other players who stand in solidarity with him, and with well-meaning white coaches who say dumb stuff sometimes, and an a probably-doomed love interest, and a feeling that he should put chicken instead of goat in the jollof, and the ability to stand out as an incredible player on a rising team.)
Nate and everyone. But also Nate and no one. Nate’s story is so painful and I’m so anxious for next week’s episode. For a long time I’ve felt that a lot of Nate’s loyalties are with Richmond, and a lot of his ambitions are around having given so much to this place without getting a lot back, and having a strong feeling that he’s the answer to Richmond’s future. But now I’m not so sure; his ambitions have transferred into asking everyone he knows (except Ted, of course), if they want to be “the boss.” But Nate is all tactics and no communication. When he wants to suggest a new play to Ted, he hasn’t yet learned to read Ted’s language to learn that Ted is eager to hear what he has to say. And while Ted has been really unfortunately distracted about Nate and dismissive of him this season, he clearly respects Nate’s approach to football and was appreciative of the play. Nate just can’t hear that. The suit is such a great metaphor of all the things Nate is in too much pain to be able to hear clearly. Everyone digs at him for wearing the suit Ted bought him (including Will, who’s got to get little cuts in where he can, because he’s got to be sick of the way Nate treats him), but when he gets fed up his solution isn’t to go out on his own and find more clothes he likes; he asks Keeley to help him. And then crosses a major line with her...and no matter how kind she was about it, she was clearly not okay. Everything is going to blow up, and I’m so curious as to whether Nate will end up aligning himself with Rupert in some way or if he’s going to end up screwed over by Rupert and in turn try to screw over his colleagues even worse than he’s already done. Or try desperately to make amends even though it could be too late for some. Either way, I’m fully prepared to feel devastated. (And there’s no way I’m giving up on this character. If he’s able to learn, I truly believe he could end up seeking forgiveness and forging a happier existence for himself. Someday. Like in season 3 or something.)
Ted and Trent. Trent deciding to reveal his source to Ted is a huge deal, and I’m torn between so many emotions about this exposé. I’m glad it’s a Trent Crimm piece and not an Ernie Loundes piece. I’m glad that Trent made the decision to warn Ted and let him know that Nate is his source. I fear—but also hope—that this exposure will set off a chain reaction of Ted learning about some of the things he’s missed while suffering through a really bad bout with his dad-grief and panic disorder. The things Ted doesn’t know would devastate him. I wonder if Ted will want to figure out a way to make Nate feel heard and reconcile with him, and I wonder how that will be complicated if/when he realizes Nate has severely bullied Will, gets more details on how he mistreated Colin, etc. I wonder if Rebecca, whom Nate called a “shrew” right before she announced his promotion, will be in the position of having to ask Ted to fire him, or overriding Ted and doing it herself. So many questions! I have a feeling it’ll go in some wild yet very human-scaled, emotionally-nuanced direction, and I’ll be like “Oh my GOD!” but also like “Oh, of course.”
This VERY SERIOUS AND EMOTIONAL REVIEW has a major flaw, which is that none of the above conversations include mention of the absolute love letter to N*SYNC. Ted passionately explains how things should go while dancing ridiculously! Will turns on the music and starts gyrating! Roy nods supportively! Beard shouts the choreography like the Broadway choreographer of teaching grown men who play football how to dance like a boy band. Everyone is so incredibly proud when they nail it. I love them.
I cannot believe next week is the end. For now. I’m kind of looking forward to letting everything settle during the hiatus, but I’ve really loved the ride.
#ted lasso#ted lasso s2 spoilers#ted lasso 2x11#meta by me#ALL THE FEELINGS!!!!#a lesbian watches ted lasso
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I’m really really fascinated by your interpretation of Maedhros and I’d love to read more of it, I saw your comment on the post about earlier versions and then was super intrigued
-@outofangband
hello @outofangband ! thank you for the ask, I'm going to try putting it into words, though I'm usually much better at fanfiction to explain how I envision characterisation — and unfortunately I don't have any Maedhros fanfic other than To die in the light (which is less about him per se, and more about the ex thrall who interacts with him; but there's a good swathe of Maedhros as well). still, to explain:
essentially, what I meant with that specific comment is that I don't attribute to Maedhros any personal unwillingness to follow along the rebellion, the first kinslaying, or the Oath, certainly not at early stages. what I instead attribute to Maedhros is an aptitude for politics and a willingness to attempt diplomacy routes and handle public perceptions of facts, no matter how facts actually are.
a lot of this is, by necessity, extrapolation. the bare bones of characterisation are there in the text, but the flesh that is built on those bones varies, and can vary a lot. so mypersonal construction is informed by a few external things too. I basically just... don't really vibe with restrained good person Maedhros, cause that feels to me like the easiest route to construct a narrative that's contrasting, depending: his father's; his brothers'; sometimes other characters' (e.g. Elwing). and like, to each their own, but it's not my thing, and I'm not into singling out the good guy out of the bunch as a trope, it simply doesn't call to me.
I'll try to explain my points about early Maedhros (much as I'd love to explain my headcanons for the whole character arc, that would be so long and complicated that I give up without even trying lmao); also I'd like to add that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence but that's where both "personal construction" and "extrapolation" come into place. essentially, this is what I construct and extrapolate, and I'm not really interested in alternatives, I don't like them, or I just disagree with them. and by contrast, people may think the same of this.
firstly, not against the rebellion and the Oath: the early text in @undercat-overdog's post is to my knowledge the only existing text that gives insight with regard to the state of mind with which the Oath was taken. now the Silmarillion says "a dreadful oath", but the Silmarillion has reason to do so by virtue of hindsight. the entirety of the speech to the Noldor, fear and gloom of the moment aside, is a speech that pushes to action: it seems extremely fitting to me that the taking of the Oath itself should reasonably be something with an upwards push, taken without full acknowledgement of its lines and what they may entail when it comes to other elves. because the stated purpose of moving war to Morgoth is very clear throughout, and even though the reality of the war hasn't hit them yet, the awareness of its approach is very present — there is, imo, a readiness for fight and an acknowledgement of intent: killing a deity.
I also feel that "these leapt with laughter / their lord beside / with linked hands / there lightly took / the oath unbreakable" meshes fairly well with the Silmarillion version, where some of this is not kept but the sons still leap at Feanor's side, this time with their swords drawn. Maedhros in this is not called out as any different — in fact, Maedhros is not called out as being different during the feud either: "lies came between them" with regard to Fingon paints the rumour-spreading among the Noldorin factions as affecting them equally, just as it affects Fingolfin ("grew proud and jealous each of his rights and possessions").
the first kinslaying: again maedhros is not singled out as against it. and again, absence of evidence doesn't equal evidence of absence, however, my preferred method in reconstructing my understanding of canon through the skeleton of its textuality is at times trying to make sense of drafts and grabbing the fil rouge of their logical development. and, when there is someone called out as acting against the Noldor during the first kinslaying, that is Galadriel. Maedhros never even is named in this circumstance.
I also think that the modus operandi of the whole situation is a remarkable early calque of the second and third kinslaying. first, other options are exhausted first: the noldor go north, stop in Araman by foot, and decide the crossing of the ice is too costly, not doable, or otherwise not something they're willing to do (more: people directly blame Feanor for the bitter cold they're exposed to, before they have to cross, if they wish to reach Middle Earth); second, there is an attempt to convince Olwe and the Teleri via words; third, a passage that is textually absent from later deeds of the same sort, but which might be potentially inferred, the leader (here Feanor) sits alone brooding on his options; fourth, action. this is the same as what happens with the later kinslayings, even though the first was not meant to be a deadly undertaking in its conception (it was a theft). but, what I mean is, second kinslaying: failed first option, the battle of unnumbered tears, part 2 diplomatic attempt, the message to doriath, part 3, not textually stated, part 4, action. third kinslaying is muddier and I won't attempt to map it perfectly other than: delayed attack to the havens; diplomatic attempt via message; [not textually stated, may be incorporated in the delay]; action.
either way, my point is: whether Maedhros is outright leader or he isn't, there isn't any fundamental difference in the story beats of the kinslayings. inb4 "Feanor and Maedhros have different character traits" — yes, to an extent. and this is where the early draft from that post returns to my aid in terms of personality building: "the eldest, whose ardor / yet more eager burnt / than his father’s flame, / than Feanor’s wrath". now, I feel there's an important qualitative difference in ardour and wrath, but that line exists and the Silmarillion doesn't contradict it: the fire of life burns in Maedhros, the eagerness here mentioned does not fade from this draft to later versions. (inb4 “the circumstances don’t overlap perfectly”: yes of course they don’t. I’m not trying to argue that they do)
now, what happens when it's time to depart with the ships? Feanor takes counsel with his sons, and the decision is to take the loyalists and go to the other side with them first. what happens when Feanor tries to burn those ships? Maedhros gives his famous lines, "what ships and rowers will you spare to return, and whom shall they bear hither first". my extrapolation here is this: I think it's obvious that the burning was not supposed to happen; and I think it's obvious that the joint decision of Feanor and his sons, dare say of Feanor and his firstborn heir, was to send back a group and carry the rest of the Noldor to Middle Earth. Feanor says lmao fuck you and the rest is history. Maedhros doesn't take well to that, and here comes forth what I think actually distinguishes him as a character: the cool-headed pragmatism that will imo really come forth post-captivity, the diplomatic abilities, and weighing his options with a level-headedness that his father lacks — and I would like to posit, these options are not weighed in a particularly moral way: he appeals to Feanor about Fingon being carried first because Fingon rushed in and got involved in the kinslaying on their behalf (there may be different readings, but they don't appear to me as textually supported as this — and for the purpose of this I am making no difference between feelings of romance and friendship; the quality of the relationship is here irrelevant, the strength of it has more bearing). it isn't "Fingon because he's my friend", or "Fingon because he's a good guy", it's "Fingon because he killed for us". and after he is on this side, actually keeping the rest of their army, an army they need to effectively wage the war they said they would wage, becomes a cake walk.
also, I go back and forth on this, but: it's possible that Fingon gained his "the valiant" sobriquet before the Darkening; it isn't a given that it was gained in this instance, his Alqualonde attack. but I still feel like it's quite telling, whether the epithet is gained now or before, that it's brought up under these circumstances. the last "valiant" deed from Fingon has been saving the day during the kinslaying. whether Maedhros is saying it to convince his father or because he truly feels it's currently deserved, he's nonetheless saying it.
a last point is the envoy with which he accepts to meet with Morgoh's forces: this is very shortly after Feanor's death, and Maedhros goes in with more warriors than agreed, though it's still not enough to counter Morgoth's own breaking of the terms. Maedrhos in this demonstrates that he's willing to pursue diplomacy despite his father's own words, but he is neither blindly trusting nor a good person who's simply out of his depth: he goes prepared to be the larger armed force and brings none of his brothers with him. it's not enough, but the attempt is there.
which reads to me as an ardour and eagerness that are kept in check by pretty solid abilities to plan, and that do not, really, counter his father's wishes in any truly consistent way. yes, the ship burning, but in the long run having all the Noldor in ME was going to be a benefit; I feel he could have well patched-up the problems without giving up any crown. yes, the parleying with Morgoth, but they just lost their father and despite that the Dagor-nuin-Giliath is a victory: he's coming as the winning party and newly crowned king, and he might, perhaps, find another route to proceed.
so these are more or less the salient points of my personal reconstruction of "early Maedhros". it'd be too long to get into post-captivity and this post is already long lmao, but I hope this made sense to you? and clarified how I understand his character with that early draft included as an aspect.
*all opinions and analyses are personal and are not attempting to establish a true canon. they make sense to me; I’d argue that I try to make them as textually supported as possible with a canon so fragmented. if my readers’ here are different, go on y’all’s merry way.
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Zigi PR Relationship Analysis
Firstly, I don’t think many people are aware of just how often fake relationships occur in the entertainment industry. They happen all of the time. And it isn’t a new thing, either. It dates all the way back to the early 20th century and what was known as Lavender Marriages, where men would marry women to hide the fact that they were gay. Although the practice has evolved since then, as it’s not necessarily about bearding anymore as it is about attracting attention, whether that be for a movie/tv show/musician/model and create hype around their relationship.
Okay, *cracks knuckles*, onto Zayn and Gigi. Zayn had a lot of people against him for two reasons; abruptly leaving the band and the mess of the end of an engagement to one Perrie Edwards (I haven’t heard that name in a while, LOL). He wanted to release solo music, but because so many people were angry at him he needed a way to distract them, and what better way to do that than a new relationship with an up and coming model who connections to the Karshian/Jenner clan?
A Hollywood publicist who admitted to producing these kinds of relationships had this to say about one of his clients due to a movie that didn’t do so well:
“It was more of a mutual agreement between the agents and we had a male who actually had a movie coming out and it was getting a lot of bad reviews and slack and they wanted to take the negativity of the movie away and make it more about him”
Sound familiar at all? Try swapping at “movie” with “music” and “negativity of the movie” with “recent fandom drama” and bam! You have Zayn Malik circa 2015.
This wasn’t just beneficial to Zayn, either. Hardly anyone outside the US knew who Hadid was, and she had had PR relationships in the past that weren’t all that successful (Joe Jonas and Cody Simpson), so having someone like Zayn who was known world wide thanks to his success with 1D, this would have been a no brainer. And it worked, incredibly well. Everyone was talking about the new up and coming couple and this brought a lot of attention Zayn’s first music video as a solo artist and people outside the fashion realm began paying attention to her. Mission successful.
There’s a lot more I could say about this couple that definitely raises eyebrows (like the fact that she has pulled similar stunts with Cody in the past, both starring in his music video and couple photo shoots), and if you’d like to go into it, feel free to message me or browse my zigi is fake tag. Or better yet, visit some of the many other ziam accounts that go into a lot more detail than I have in the past. I recommend @yaz-the-spaz and @somewhereisaplacethatziamknow off the top of my head. But I hope no one goes over there to be rude and disrespectful, because honestly, what’s the point? If you’re trying to change someone’s mind, you’re not going to do it by insulting them and not bringing anything of substance to the conversation. If you ask politely, I would be more than happy to answer, as I am doing here.
As for your point in regards to how I can look up to someone who would part take in such a stunt I have two responses; he doesn’t like doing it, and he doesn’t have a choice in the matter - that’s just how the industry works. If you look at all the times the paparazzi have “caught” (take this however you want) them leaving that NY apartment. Zayn, and sometimes even Gigi, don’t look like the happy, loved up couple all the articles claim them to be:
I find this one particularly funny because he is holding his own hand and it looks like she just slipped her hand in there for the photo.
And then you have this photo of them finally reconciling in the street conveniently in front of some paps:
He’s not touching her anywhere other than the mouth (look at that starbucks promo lmao), his hands are pockets, and he may have actually missed her mouth:
And in the rest of the photos he looks fed up and barely touches her, if at all:
Remember, this was after they’ve reconciled, and yet he doesn’t look interested her in the slightest.
Even if you think they were an actual couple, this would be an incredibly toxic relationship. They have “broken up and got back together” how many times now? (legitimate question, I have lost count). They paint the narrative like Zayn riddled with mental health problems and Gigi is the only one that can save him, but sometimes, it just gets too much for her:
“A second source explained there was an honest effort to make their second go at their relationship a success. The two “tried hard to make it work,” the source said, but Malik has “a lot of his own issues that she couldn’t help him get through.”
You could make the claim that this quote is made up, but then I could argue the very same thing about every quote ever made about their relationship. Why would you want to support a couple if this is the way they are portrayed?
And then “Zayn” tweets this when Gigi is rumoured to be dating someone else:
“When lord knows I don’t deserve it” What the hell is that supposed to mean? It’s just honestly so fucking gross no matter which way you look at it.
As for your question as to why she would have a baby for PR, look at the amount of attention she has gotten over these pregnancy rumours just in the last few days. Imagine if she would begin talking about it all of the time, all the promotional deals she could get. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was tired of modelling and ends up doing YouTube or something full time.
There is a lot of things that don’t add up with this pregnancy nonsense. Like the fact that she isn’t showing at all despite the fact that, going by the timeline, she is five months along. Not only would she have gotten pregnant immediately after after they apparently rekindled their relationship (which, with her Hashimoto’s disease is incredibly unlikely), but she doesn’t look pregnant in the slightest. That baby is five months along, and is almost completely formed, organs and all. The baby is the size of a mango, and yet her stomach has remained flat this entire time? No growth at all?:
That, and her own father called it gossip. If she has been pregnant for five months at this point, shouldn’t he know that his daughter is pregnant with his first grandchild?
And I will give it to you that she might be drinking decaf, but how about recording yourself horse riding? Not only that, but horse riding in general while you are pregnant is incredibly dangerous to both the baby and the mother’s health:
But as your pregnancy progresses, the risk of serious injury – to you and your baby – increases. If you get thrown from or kicked by a horse after your first trimester, once the baby has moved higher up in the abdomen, there’s little to protect the baby from harm.
What’s more, the jostling motion of horseback riding can increase your risk of placental abruption, a serious pregnancy complication in which the placenta separates from the uterus.
What’s more, is she apparently has Hashimoto’s disease, which makes it incredibly hard to get pregnant in the first place, and can increase the likelihood of a miscarriage. Why would she even want to risk it, given the fact that she already has a high risk pregnancy during a pandemic where healthcare is limited, the likelihood of her getting pregnant is low, and she increases the risk by not even paying attention to the task, but record herself doing so? It doesn’t make a shred of sense.
There’s so much to this narrative that doesn’t add up.
Again, I appreciate the civility, and I like being challenged, it gives me a good opportunity to back up my beliefs in evidence, which I believe to be incredibly important. So if anyone has any other questions feel free to DM or send me an ask.
Disclaimer: Initially this post was a response to someone who responded to an ask I answered way back in April about Gigi’s pregnancy, but was deleted for some unknown reason. I added some parts in to construct a more detailed and accurate analysis.
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The Last Word: Shirley Manson on Fighting the Patriarchy and How Patti Smith Inspires Her
The Garbage singer also talks racial justice, living for now, and why legacy is an inherently masculine concern
Almost as soon as Garbage’s self-titled debut blew up overnight in 1995, their singer, Shirley Manson, became aware of the patriarchy running the music industry. Even though she was the group’s focal point — belting dusky electro-rock songs about making sense of depression (“Only Happy When It Rains”) and taking pride in nonconformity (“Queer”) — she was still a woman fronting a band of men, one of whom, Butch Vig, had produced Nirvana’s Nevermind. Almost immediately, she felt as though her role in the group was being devalued — not by the guys she worked with, but externally.
“There was a lot of stuff written about me in the music press, and that’s when I started to realize how I’m being diminished, how, in some cases, I’m being completely eradicated from the narrative because I’m female and not a man,” she says now. “I was talked over by lawyers; I was ignored by managers. The list goes on. It’s boring and tedious; there’s no point in me moaning about it now, but certainly, that was my awakening.”
That revelation emboldened her to speak out about equality and she quickly became a feminist icon, using her platform to bring attention to human rights, mental health, and the AIDS crisis. All the while, she wrote inclusive hit songs with Garbage about androgyny and reproductive rights (“Sex Is Not the Enemy”). On Garbage’s great new album, No Gods No Masters, she grapples with racial injustice, climate change, the patriarchy, and her own self-worth. But as weighty as the subject matter is, she approaches each song in her own uniquely uplifting way.
“I don’t think really the record is serious, per se,” the singer, 54, says, on an early May phone call. “I think it’s an indignant record. I think in indignance you can still carry humor with you, as well as softness, kindness, and love in your heart. I just felt it would be inauthentic to say anything other than what I was saying in my daily life across the dinner table from my friends and my family. I think as you get older as an artist, the challenge is, ‘How I can be my most authentic self?’ because that’s the most unique story I can tell. In an industry that’s just absolutely jam-packed to the rafters with ideas, opinions, melodies, and so on, you can’t afford to be anything other than your most authentic self. It won’t last.”
Authenticity and being true to herself are the qualities that have made Manson who she is. And those traits seem to guide her answers to Rolling Stone’s questions about philosophy, life lessons, and creature comforts for our Last Word interview.
What are the most important rules that you live by?
I’m 54, which is ancient for the contemporary music industry. At this point, I feel like if it’s not fun, then I’m uninterested entirely. If somebody’s treating me poorly, I have to walk away. Life is so fricking short, and I’m three quarters of the way through mine already; I just want to have a good life, full of joy.
Who are your heroes and why?
Patti Smith is a huge hero for me for a lot of different reasons. Most importantly, it’s because she’s a woman who has navigated her creative life so beautifully and so artfully, with such integrity and authenticity, and she has proven to me that a woman, an artist, does not have to subscribe to the rules of the contemporary music industry.
It’s very rare for other women to see examples of women actually working still in their seventies. That, to me, is really thrilling and really inspiring, and it fills me with hope. At times when you come up against the ageism, sexism, and misogyny that exists in our culture, I always try and picture Patti in my mind’s eye, and it always brings me back to center, like, “OK, adhere to your own rules. Design your own life. Be your own architect. You can continue to be an artist the rest of your life.” And to me, that’s life. That is a fully lived life.
You’re also a role model yourself. How do you handle that responsibility?
I’m a bit speechless if the truth be told. I realize that I’ve now enjoyed a long career in music, and by default, I think people are inspired by that. I think whenever you see an artist, no matter who they are, when someone can endure, I think that’s exciting to everybody else, because it’s a message that says, “You too can get up when you think you’re done. You too can brush yourself off and try again.” By just continuing, you can help other people continue and fulfill themselves in ways that they thought they wouldn’t be able to.
I try to be a decent person. I make mistakes. I fuck people off. I say stupid shit. I’m not all-knowing; I am ignorant in so many ways. But I do try my best. I think that’s really all I can ask of myself.
How others perceive me is absolutely out of my control. There’s always going to be people who think I’m an arsehole, and that’s just part and parcel of being in the public eye. People are just going to hate on you, so I try not to take too much of it in; I don’t let it absorb me too much. I have gotten to that point in my life when I’m able to just go, “You know what? Fuck it. You can’t win them all.”
You once said that the idea of legacy was a masculine construct that you don’t believe in. Do you still feel that way?
Yeah. I still very much believe in that. I know a lot of male artists who bang on about their legacy and their importance. Not to knock that if that’s what’s important to you but for me personally, what do I care? I’m going to be dead and gone and totally unconscious of any so-called legacy that I might leave behind. I want fun now. I want to have a good life now. I want to eat good food now and have great sex. It’s absolutely meaningless to me what happens after I’m gone. I want to use my time wisely, and that’s all that I really am concerned with, to be honest.
What is it about legacy that’s inherently masculine?
This is armchair psychology, so please forgive me, but I’m sure it has something to do with how women have this uterus that can bear children. I think that’s profound. One of the few gifts that men have not been given is that ability to create with your body, and your blood, and your heat and all these nutrients from your body. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why you don’t hear as many women banging on about the great legacy they’re going to leave behind. I think for women it’s their kids.
You’re Scottish. What is the most Scottish thing about you these days?
I’ve got a lot of grit, and it’s served me really well in my career. I think that is a really Scottish trait. The Scottish people are tough, and they also have a good sense of humor. So, grit with humor. I should say “gritted with humor,” in the same way we grit roads.
As you were saying “grit,” it occurred to me that a lot of your songs are about survival and moving forward, going back to “Stupid Girl” or “Only Happy When It Rains.” They’re about perseverance.
[Pauses] I think it’s funny you should say that because I’m just sort of like, “Wow, he might be right.” I do think that a huge theme for me is, “How do you overcome? How do we all overcome?” Things can be great for a while; things will not be great forever. And to every single life, these challenges appear. We all have to reconfigure ourselves in order to try to hurl ourselves over obstacles in order to have the kind of life we hope for. So I do think you’ve shocked me a little by discovering a theme for me. Yay, I feel thrilled. I have a theme. It’s exciting.
“Waiting for God” is one of my favorite songs on the album because of the way you address racial justice. How can we, as a society, fight white indifference?
You know, that’s a question right there. It’s interesting that you use the words “white indifference,” because one of the things that shocked me so greatly is the ambivalence and the apathy of white people all over the world who are seeing what we’re seeing on our TVs and on the internet, and yet not having the moral courage to speak up. I think the most important thing we can do is pull back the carpet to see the mess on the floor in order for us to actually start cleaning it up.
If we could curtail some of the brutality of police against black people, that would be a good start. I think it’s going to be decades and decades and decades before we can start to really equalize our societies so that everyone is enjoying the spoils of Western wealth over in the developing world. It’s necessary that we try and help these countries that aren’t as powerful or as wealthy. It’s good for the whole world if we start to improve situations for everyone. Nobody will lose anything, and everyone has everything to gain.
But if I had the answers to how we go about fixing it, I would be in politics and not in music. I just know what I believe to be right, and I’m doing my best to use my voice to try and encourage my friends, my little ecosystem, to start with paying attention and supporting black businesses and elevating black voices and black talent.
What’s your favorite book?
I have so many. The one that springs to mind would be American Pastoral by Philip Roth. I loved All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I loved The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje. I loved Winnie the Pooh and Wuthering Heights. I’ve got so many that have really stuck with me that are classics.
My most favorite recent book that I’ve just finished reading is Dancer by Colum McCann about [Russian ballet dancer Rudolf] Nureyev. I was just absolutely mesmerized by it. It was just such a fantastic read, and he’s such a miraculous writer. He brought out Apeirogon last year about the struggle in between Palestine and Israel. He talks about this complicated mess with such clarity, kindness, and generosity. I couldn’t believe Apeirogon didn’t get more fuss made of it last year. Somehow it just seemed to get buried in the morass of other books, and of course the suffering that Covid had brought upon the earth.
What advice do you wish you could give your younger self?
“Take up your space.” When I was growing up, to be a girl was to be told to minimize the space you took up: “Close your legs. Don’t be loud. Smile. Be cute. Be attractive. Be pleasing.” I inherently balked against that as a kid. I was a rebellious kid, and I wasn’t going to sit in the corner and be quiet. I’ve never been like that. However, looking back, I still notice some of the patterns of my own compliance. It’s not that I hate myself for it, but I just wish I could turn around and say to my young self, “Take your seat. If there’s not a seat there, drag a seat up to the table and sit down.”
I’m still really aware of the sexism and misogyny that I have had to battle throughout my career. I’m not crying, “Woe is me,” because I’ve obviously flourished in my career, and it obviously didn’t hold me back enough to hamper me in any way. But I feel for all the women who were unlike me, who didn’t have my forcefulness of personality, or my education, or my ability to articulate myself. I want that for all people, though; I want all people to stop trying to please, and accept that some people will like that, and some people won’t, and that’s OK. It’s OK that some people just don’t dig you.
On the topic of gender, I got a kick out of your song “Godhead,” where you ask if people would treat you differently “if I had a dick.”
I’m really proud of that song, because I think it’s talking about something really serious, and it’s really fun. It’s about addressing the patriarchy, and how omnipresent it is. When I was young, I was so busy trying to make it, I didn’t see that there was a patriarchy in place. And it’s only as an adult, I start looking back going, “Oh, wow — when that A&R man told me to my face that he wanked over pictures of me, that was really uncool.” But at the time, you kind of laugh it off and just press on.
I was oblivious to it. In this song, I’m talking about how patriarchy bleeds into absolutely everything, specifically under organized religion. The “Godhead” is the male, and we are all under the godhead forever, and that’s unquestioned, and how crazy is that? Because a dude holds a higher position in society, because he’s got a dick and a pair of balls. Often, these balls are smaller than my own [laughs].
It just gets silly after a while, when you watch other men protect other men just for the sake of protecting the patriarchy. So few men are willing to speak up about bro culture and call into question the behavior of the men they are associated with. There’s just a reluctance by men to address this absolutely shocking, terrifying, depressing, pathetic assault by men of other people’s bodies.
In 1996, your bandmate Butch Vig said about you, “So many singers screamed to convey intensity, and she does the opposite. It just blew us away.” How did you come up with that approach?
I don’t know. I’ve found that when people speak to me quietly, I feel the most threatened because I’m really comfortable with conflict. I thrive on conflict. It excites me in a funny way. When people are shouting, I don’t feel scared. I like to shout back; that’s just how my family were. We’d just start to shout at each other all the time. I’m not scared of elevated temper. For me, when people get really quiet, that’s when I know they’re really serious, because they’re in control of their rage, and that’s when they’re most deadly.
The last question I have is a shallow one.
I love being cheap and superficial.
What’s the most indulgent purchase you’ve ever made?
At the height of my success, I hired a person who would shop for me and then send everything in a big box to my hotel room. I would choose what I wanted and return anything else. One day, this beautiful pair of Italian leather boots arrived. I wore a pair very similar in the “Stupid Girl” video, and I thought, “Oh, yeah, these are really me. I’m going to keep these. These are amazing.” It was only when I got back from tour, I found out they cost $5,000. I can’t even laugh about it. It makes me so crazy. I still have these boots. I’d like to get rid of them just so that I never have to look at them again, but there they are every day, warning me of my own greed.
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soulmate verse meta no one asked for: adam’s lack of soulmates, narrative themes, and the story i care about telling
(spoiler: i get bored writing “everything sucks for adam forever” fics)
this was a response to an ao3 comment on we never were good at doing what we’re told (that i’ve edited to be a clearer essay for people who haven’t read said fic)
i’m bursting so heavily to talk about themes and feelings and writing and characterization and shit that it’s become an essay that’s not just about the soulmate verse itself but also about like..... my entire thought process when crafting any narrative, ever
one of the biggest things that turned this story into a heart project of mine was wondering about what non-traditional relationships look like in a world where soulmates exist
and then on the flip side, wondering what kind of challenges or unhealthy relationship dynamics soulmates might face despite being fated
in this universe, people are born with silhouettes of tattoos that color in when they touch their soulmate for the first time. many people have more than one mark, but having a Lot of marks is unusual. so you know from the getgo how many soulmates you have, but don’t know who they are until the skin-on-skin touch
adam parrish does not have any soul marks. he has no fated soulmate relationships. complicating this is the fact that most of his loved ones have marks for each other - but not for him
there's a low reach where you can take the concept of "adam doesn't have any soulmates" and run with routes like
adam can never connect to people on a deep intimate personal level
adam will never be as close to anyone as their soulmates are
adam can only forge relationships with other people who don't have soul bonds
every relationship adam forges falls apart because if it's not fated, that means there's no compatibility
adam has to work harder to be loved than a person with a soulmate
adam's a callous bastard who doesn't need anyone and hurts everyone because he doesn't understand them
adam is worse for ronan, gansey, noah, and blue than they are for each other
but that's not a story that feels genuine to me. it would give me no pleasure to write a fic where the conclusion is "and adam will never be able to have the love that other people do because he sucks and/or life sucks. amen. peace"
what DOES interest me, though, is the thought of how adam himself may have internalized these ideas
the society that adam, ronan, hennessy, and the other characters are living in has very Very heavy social constructs about soulmates
mainly, that being someone's soulmate means:
that there's an inherent compatibility/understanding/reflection
that there are missing emotional pieces immediately found
that your soulmate is a person who is SUPPOSED to be in your life forever because they WILL make your life better
if they don't make your life better, you're doing something wrong
but the thing is that we can also see that these constructs are not inherent truth, they're just being presented like inherent truth.
these are some details throughout the fic thus far (as of writing this, the first six chapters):
different cultures all have different complex and varied histories and traditions and feelings about soulmate bonds.
scientists have tried to quantify what different marks mean, analysts have tried to use marks to predict the shape of relationships, and there are no on-paper answers.
ronan talks about a now-considered-antiquated idea that soulmates aren't relationship fated at all, but are instead formed when one person saves another's life.
he's thinking about it because of his internal struggles, but there's a massive implication there: that the social definition and expectation of what a soulmate is has shifted DRASTICALLY over time rather than being an unchanging rock.
so as the person writing this world, i know that the social constructs are bullshit. adam does too, intellectually. he's spent a lot of time picking apart discrepancies and fallacies and falsehoods
if adam didn't believe intellectually that he could have a relationship with ronan or gansey or blue or noah that's just as important as their relationships to each other, he wouldn't be here.
if adam had bought into the idea that only soulmates understand each other, he'd be isolating himself as we speak
he spent a lot of his adolescence challenging his preconceptions and rethinking what love and relationships mean, very parallel to his relationship with love in canon
but adam still has those nagging fears and doubts that these things might be true.
what if he's more invested in his partners than they are in him?
what if he loses them and can't rebuild?
what if he's never going to be able to provide the emotional support or happiness that people deserve?
what if no one will ever understand him?
what if this is all a mistake?
what if there's a reason he has no soulmates?
what if he's an inherently destructive person fated to hurt anyone close to him?
adam doesn't believe these things are true, but the "what if"s are constantly itching at the back of his mind
so a big part of adam's journey in this story is him having experiences and shifting his worldview in ways that put the worst fears to bed. adam's done a lot of introspection about himself and his lack of soul marks, but he hasn't spared as much thought for soulmate relationships themselves. adam's looking at soulmate bonds and thinking, "those are an inherently good thing i've been deprived of," and hasn't yet devoted enough analysis to the fact that they might NOT be inherently good.
ronan and hennessy have equally complicated relationships with this society and its constructs. all three members of this group have experiences that challenge the others' preconceptions about what they believe is true
-
as the author, thinking about the themes i want to establish and the story i want to tell, every single interaction in this AU and every relationship is built around concepts like
-soulmates don't always understand each other's thought processes and emotions.
ronan has a very different relationship with every one of his individual soulmates plus adam
each relationship has its strengths and weaknesses. not every soulmate can help ronan equally with every issue.
ronan and adam have learned each other, but ronan has ALSO spent a great deal of time learning his soulmates as well. and they him
ronan’s relationships with EVERYONE have changed and grown and shifted over the years, and they’ve meant different things at different times. there’s never been a single unchanging dimension of compatibility
-commitment, respect, growth, and communication are INFINITELY more vital for relationship health than a soul bond.
this is something that’s gonna be delved HEAVILY into in upcoming content. that being fated isn’t enough to make a relationship good if the foundation of mutual respect and commitment isn’t there
-soul bonds aren't well understood and don't necessarily mean what people think they do.
(see: the whole above ramble)
-some soulmate relationships end up being DEEPLY unhealthy and dysfunctional.
digging heavily into this soon as well.
in the first six chapters, the most striking example is hennessy’s parents. they were soul bonded and hennessy’s mother believed her father would be a savior. her father believed his soulmate was his sexy manic pixie dream girl but didn’t want to do the heavy lifting of helping with her actual mania.
you’ve heard this tragedy before. tale as old as time.
-soulmates CAN have lifelong happy healthy harmonious partnerships with strong compatibility, but it always takes work and respect and active choice.
ronan is soul bonded to gansey, noah, and blue. he has very good relationships with all of them. he has also had very bad soulmate experiences in the past. the difference in his committed life partnerships is the commitment and love and respect and ongoing understanding
-
the conclusion is:
my own life experience has been VERY centered around nontraditional relationships, figuring out how to construct healthy life partnerships, and making up my own rules because varying social constructs/expectations don't work for my heart.
so that's all reflected in this verse, particularly in how adam has been told he's too broken to form connections & has instead said "fuck you i'm gonna do it anyway"
#trc#long post#cdth#soulmate verse#soulmate verse meta#my writing#pynch#platonic ronanessy#you don't have to read the fic to read this it's me talking about worldbuilding and characterization#adam parrish
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Deconstruction
Worldbuilding: Genetics
If any of my Deconstruction posts were going to turn heads, I had a hunch it would be this one. You’ll probably find this topic incongruous with the others simply because—unlike Aura, Semblances, Dust, and Grimm—genetics isn’t one of RWBY’s unique gimmicks. If I’m being entirely honest, part of why this post exists is because I still had some miscellaneous talking points to address, but lacked a proper heading to file them under. Call it what it is: a dumping ground for wayward thoughts.
But there’s a bit more to it than just that. The reason why I want to talk about this is because, much like the other mechanical aspects, genetics does have a bearing on RWBY’s worldbuilding, and the stories that were subsequently built around it. It has an undeniable impact on the sociopolitical human-Faunus schism that set the stage for Remnant’s immediate past, and the present-day terrorist acts committed by the White Fang. Genetics is also an extension of RWBY’s adherence to color theory, reflected in the hair and eye color choices of the ensemble cast.
Before we can finally conclude Part 1 of the Worldbuilding posts, we need to discuss this topic from both a narrative and a production standpoint. Genetics is firmly rooted in the development and design choices of the writers—choices which, as you’ll quickly see, had long-lasting consequences for the show.
Today we’re going to be dividing this topic into two sections. Since I’m sure it’s already on your mind, let’s get the obvious one out of the way first:
The Genetics of the Faunus
The Faunus are going to have an entire post dedicated just to them, but it’s impossible to talk about genetics without at least a passing mention of one of Remnant’s two main species.
Subspecies.
Races?
Yeah. You can quickly see where this is going.
Before I get ahead of myself, let me provide some context. Just like the conception of the Maidens, the Faunus can trace their developmental history to a rather impulsive design choice:
“Monty really wanted a character with cat ears,” admits Miles Luna. Shawcross expands on how Blake Belladonna’s look resulted in a cornerstone of the show’s lore. “So if Blake has cat ears, does that mean anyone can have cat ears? Could they have other animal traits? It’d be cool to see someone with scales or a fox tail…” [1]
Let me clarify by saying that there’s nothing wrong with basing a decision on aesthetics (in principle, anyway). And RWBY isn’t the only franchise guilty of doing this. It only takes a few seconds of consulting TV Tropes to see that zoomorphism is extremely pervasive. And while I have a tendency to complain a lot on this blog, I’m not such a kvetch that I’ll deny that animal-people with lion tails and ram horns look fucking sweet.
The problem I have with Faunus (from a genetic standpoint) is the way they’re inconsistently described in relation to humans. While Qrow unambiguously refers to them as a separate species, [2] we have Faunus characters that contradict him by describing themselves as a race. [3] This leads to the inevitable issue of whose account do we trust? On one hand, the information provided to us by Qrow is through World of Remnant, a spin-off series whose entire purpose is to clarify information and teach the audience about core worldbuilding concepts. On the other hand, what we’re told about the Faunus being a race comes directly from Ghira Belladonna. In this context, who would you expect to be the better authority on Faunus—a human, or a Faunus?
Even if we set aside the complicated implications of an outgroup member talking over a minority, we’re still left with the issue of well, which is it? Are they a race or a species? And why does it even matter?
Before we can answer any of those questions, let’s quickly define both terms:
A species is a taxonomic rank used for classifying groups of organisms together on the basis of being able to participate in genetic interchange via sexual reproduction, to produce fertile offspring.
A race (in biology) is an informal/unrecognized taxonomic rank below subspecies, defined as unique subgroups with either geographic, physiological, or genetic distinctions from other subgroups within their species. In anthropology, however, a race is typically regarded as a social construct. In this case, it refers to an identity held by members of a population that share physical or social qualities that are seen as categorically distinct.
The answer, if we’re being objective, is probably something along the lines of “RWBY’s writers thought that the two terms were interchangeable, or they didn’t think the distinction mattered enough to do the research and settle on a definition.” Unless someone specifically reached out to a Rooster Teeth employee and asked, we’ll never truly know. Speculation will only get us so far, and where this blog is concerned, we need a definitive answer—or at the very least, we need to talk about why the distinction matters to us.
So, are Faunus their own race? Meaning, are they a self-identifying ethnic group with a common language, ancestry, history, culture, nation, or social treatment within their residing area?
Common language: That’s a definite no. RWBY still hasn’t managed to explain how everyone across the four kingdoms speaks the same language, let alone develop any conlangs.
Ancestry: We actually don’t have a canon answer for this. The show has yet to tell us where the Faunus came from, so we can’t make any assumptions about how related they are to one another.
History: Technically, yes. But the series has a gross tendency to homogenize the experience of Faunus across Remnant, so the history of Faunus in Vale is virtually identical to that of Mistral. This trend results in storytelling discrepancies, like the Faunus in culturally-unprejudiced Vacuo [4] being equally threatened by and involved with the Faunus Rights Revolution, when there shouldn’t have been an in-world basis for this scenario.
Culture: Don’t make me laugh. RWBY couldn’t even be bothered to give any of its four kingdoms distinct cultures. Apart from a few scenes in Menagerie where you see a bunch of background characters hanging out in the Shallow Sea district of Kuo Kuana, there really isn’t anything culturally unique to the Faunus.
Nation: I guess? I personally wouldn’t consider Menagerie a nation, simply because it’s not one the Faunus originated from, but were rather given in the aftermath of the Great War. As far as we know, Faunus have always been just as widespread across Remnant as humans.
Social treatment: We’re told that social treatment for the Faunus as a whole is shitty, but that the degree of shittiness varies from place to place. Forgive me if I don’t buy that. Not after we’ve seen students in Vale physically harass a Faunus, [5] shops in Mistral refuse service to Faunus, [6] and companies in Atlas extract labor from Faunus. [7] If social treatment is contingent on shared experiences, then why are we told that these experiences change depending on the kingdom? And if the kingdoms vary in levels of racial acceptance, then why are we repeatedly shown the exact opposite?
Based on the aforementioned criteria, I’m inclined to say that Faunus don’t fit the definition of race.
So, are the Faunus a separate species from humans?
“History gets a little fuzzy past a certain point, but we do know that their kind and ours are completely compatible, from a—a biological standpoint.” | Source: World of Remnant, Volume 4, Episode 6: “Faunus.”
That’s a resounding no.
As much as the taxonomist in me wants to talk about things like the multiple competing species concepts, or the fact that plants frequently violate the definition of species by producing fertile hybrids through polyploidy (chromosomal doubling), I have to restrain myself. For simplicity’s sake, we’re accepting that Faunus and humans are members of the same species on the basis that they’re not reproductively isolated.
The reason why genetics matters in regards to the race-species discourse is because we have yet to learn what the Faunus truly are. If we ignore the fact that they exist because Monty Oum wanted to stick cat ears on a girl, then we have to figure out what their existence means to Remnant’s past: Did the Brother Gods intervene in the early evolution of Humanity v2.0, by creating a subset of people with animal traits that would sow discord, for the sole purpose of giving Ozma another obstacle to overcome? Did Salem (who watched Humanity v2.0 evolve) try to influence their evolution, and somehow managed to bestow animalistic traits upon select groups of early hominids? Is Dust like a magically-radioactive fossil fuel that by pure chance mutated early people through exposure, resulting in their animalistic traits? Are the Faunus’ animal traits completely irrelevant to the plot, and are only there for the sake of style?
That’s why the Faunus’ genetic background matters—because as the story progresses, it’s going to inform what questions the audience asks.
There’s a good chance that all of this will end up being nitpicky conjecture, and there won’t be any storytelling payoff. But I think it’s still important to address, if for no other reason than to illustrate why pre-production worldbuilding is essential for telling a coherent story. But I digress.
Genetics, and Its Relationship with Color Theory
It goes without saying that RWBY is defined by color. It’s reflected in nearly every facet of the franchise—team names, wardrobe, Dust color, Aura color, emblems, characters’ names, even the show’s title—and it’s just as important from a worldbuilding standpoint as it is from a narrative one. [8]
Where color theory and genetics cross paths is in the field of character appearance—specifically, hair and eye color. For the moment, let’s set aside eye color as a visual device for foiling and paralleling characters (like Yang Xiao Long’s purple eyes compared to Blake Belladonna’s yellow eyes). Instead, we’re going to talk about these phenotypes from a hereditary perspective.
We’re going to streamline this discussion a bit by focusing on hair for the moment, and picking three colors that would be considered unnatural by our world’s standards. Let’s go with blue, green, and pink. Here’s a handful of characters who have these traits:
Blue hair: Neptune Vasilias, Ciel Soleil, Henry Marigold, May Marigold, Nebula Violette, Sky Lark, Trifa
Green hair: Emerald Sustrai, Marrow Amin, Bartholomew Oobleck, Reese Chloris, Russel Thrush, Sage Ayana
Pink hair: An Ren, May Zedong, Nadir Shiko
Now we’re going to take those lists and swap out the characters’ names for their inferred country of origin:
Blue hair: Mistral, Atlas, Atlas, Atlas, Vacuo, Vale, Menagerie
Green hair: Vale, Atlas, Vale, Mistral, Vale, Mistral
Pink hair: Mistral, Vacuo, Mistral
We can conclude that these hair colors are natural on the basis that we never see characters dying their hair, and that similarly unusual eye colors (red, pink, purple, yellow) would also be natural in Remnant. Unless we’re assuming that everyone is wearing custom contact lenses, then it’s safe to say they’re legit. With the example of hair color, you’ll notice that they’re distributed across a wide number of nationalities, with little hint of consistency among them.
At the end of the day, it’s easy to write this off as “the writers wanted to have cool character designs and not have to think too hard about the worldbuilding implications behind them.” But there is a worldbuilding implication behind them, and it’s one that I’ll be focusing on in later Deconstruction and Amendment posts, so I want to make sure we talk about it now:
RWBY has repeatedly shown us that people are fairly geographically isolated from each other, and travel between kingdoms has always been difficult due to the Grimm. It wasn’t until eighty years ago, when the Great War ended, that a combo of international political cooperation and technological advancements made travel safer and more commonplace. Keep in mind that when populations of humans are geographically isolated from each other over prolonged periods of time, it results in those populations evolving specific anatomical traits.
Let me give you a few real world examples. Epicanthic folds are predominantly found in East Asian, Polynesian, and North Asian ethnic groups. Red hair, while not exclusive to any one nationality, is statistically highest in people of Northwestern European ancestry. Darker complexion is most common in equatorial populations, where high melanin production (especially eumelanin) protects against UVR exposure.
RWBY has every reason under the sun to ascribe certain phenotypes to the ethnicities of each kingdom, and for some reason it just doesn’t. Like, why not make green hair a trait common to people with Sanus ancestry? How about red eyes originating from Anima?
Avatar: The Last Airbender pulled this off by making dark skin, brown hair, and blue/gray eyes features of the Water Tribes. The Fire Nation, to reflect its broader geographic distribution, has a much wider range of phenotypes, with both light and dark skin tones and black or brown hair. However, it still retained golden, amber, and bronze eyes as a distinguishing characteristic of people descended from this ancestry. Frankly, I love that the show took the time to establish those traits among its ethnic groups. Not only was it a great way to visually communicate to the audience the ethnicity of the characters, but those traits took on entirely new meanings in the sequel Avatar: The Legend of Korra. When we meet the brothers Mako and Bolin for the first time and see their respective eye colors—amber and green—we’re immediately able to deduce that they’re the products of successful multiculturalism, something that would’ve seemed impossible seventy years ago when the world was gripped by war. It’s a powerful statement that was conveyed through careful attention to detail and excellent worldbuilding. Given that RWBY also takes place several decades after a global war, the writers had the opportunity to pull off a similar feat. And I don’t think it ever occurred to them once.
At the end of the day, it’s not the worst thing RWBY could’ve done. I think I’m just disappointed by the missed opportunities. The show already has so little going for it when it comes to shaping the identities of its four main kingdoms, so with color being such a vital motif for the show, this feels like it should have been a natural progression of those ideas.
On a more positive note, we’ve finally reached the end of Worldbuilding (Part I) - Mechanical Aspects! Next time, we’ll get to introduce the second section of worldbuilding topics: history.
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[1] Wallace, Daniel. The World of RWBY: The Official Companion. VIZ Media LLC, 2019, page 42.
[2] World of Remnant, Volume 4, Episode 6: “Faunus.”
[3] Volume 5, Episode 3: “Unforeseen Complications.” Ghira Belladonna: “[Adam’s] actions not only tarnished the reputation of an organization originally created to bring peace and equality to all, but to our entire race.”
[4] World of Remnant, Volume 4, Episode 4: “Vacuo.”
[5] Volume 1, Episode 11: “Jaunedice - Part 1.”
[6] Volume 5, Episode 6: “Known by Its Song.”
[7] Volume 7, Episode 1: “The Greatest Kingdom.”
[8] Wallace, Daniel. The World of RWBY: The Official Companion. VIZ Media LLC, 2019, page 44.
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Hi you... if you were going to curate a little season of films for me, which ones would you choose and why? They don't need to be horror, I'm just curious what you would choose 🌸
I don’t know if you’ll like these movies, or if you’ve already watched them, but after i watched these films, i felt like they might need to belong to you now. i hope they make you smile, roll your eyes, and cry just as much as i did.
1. city of god (2002): this is one of the most immersive and gorgeously shot films i’ve ever seen. it’s set in rio de janeiro during the 60s and spans decades exploring the drug culture in the slums and how this can affect kids just as they are trying to figure their own selves out. the way this film is shot, feels like you were at the sea with them as the sand crunched underneath your feet. but the way that the director captures these individuals, makes you so fucking relieved that you don’t live through any of the circumstances that they go through.
2. the dreamers (2004): set in 1968, this film follows three students in Paris who come of age and explore one another and their limits during the revolution. while these students prop themselves up as individuals obsessed with sex, running underneath themselves is a current of jealousy, obsession, and blurred familial relationships that made me increasingly uncomfortable. you find yourself feeling bad for the children, and ultimately upset at their upbringing because of their parents.
3. if beale street could talk (2018): this movie is based off of james baldwin’s titular 1974 novel. in it, the director expertly and vigorously explores love: a love that feels so real that it hurts. the cast is what sold this film to me. the way they talk, laugh, cry, and smile at one another is achingly beautiful and terrifyingly sad. i wanted to transport myself back to their time period and watch the main characters fall in love because the film didn’t seem like enough.
4. the neon demon (2016): this film follows an emerging model who sacrifices herself to the demands of the industry in order to be attractive and beautiful. there are so many stunning colors in this film that it makes you dizzy, like you’re in a trance and that’s what this world is for the main character: a trance. as she oscillates between reality and fantasy, her world and the characters in it, increasingly seek out to alter her personality.
5. death becomes her (1992): a deliberately ultra-campy parody of trashy, pandering "women's pictures," soap operas and paperbacks from the '80s and '90s. The three leads all do some of their best work - it's hilarious watching Meryl Streep play a terrible actress, Goldie Hawn is particularly hilarious during her character's cat lady phase, and all around just a really fun and eccentric film.
6. princess cyd (2017): i can’t think of anything to write for this but i just wanna say that this is literally one of the most pleasant movie experiences i’ve ever had. so much light and genuine interaction in warm sun rays radiating positive energy and an openness that is far too uncommon in movies nowadays. people talk, people connect, people grow bonds and are allowed to be sexual or intimate or personal without an air of shame or judgement. just pure kind and curious human association.
7. spiderman: into the spiderverse (2018): the message of Spider-Verse is not "gentrify yourself! stop expressing your personality and just conform to what society wants you to be!" After all, what makes you different makes you Spider-Man, and Miles' final expression of himself as a superhero still retains much of his personality and individuality...they're just being used in more productive and fulfilling ways. It's the little things that drive the point home, like noticing that the title page for Miles' finished Great Expectations essay has been stylistically doodled and colored like street art. Rather than seeing his artistic gifts as an opposition to his schoolwork, Miles infuses them together to make the best of the hand he's been dealt.
8. my life as a zucchini (2016): initially heartbreaking and sad, but slowly becoming more joyful and heartwarming as the plot moves along. The film really feels like it captures the essence and child like wonder of these kids, all of them going through hardships but managing to find something to help each other out. It’s so refreshing to see the actual orphanage portrayed in a more positive light, not the usual horrid dump that a lot of lesser movies play them out as. The animation is stunning. One of the best uses of stop motion I’ve seen, everything is so colourful and detailed. There’s some moments set in snowy mountains and these look incredible. There’s clearly been so much love and care put into each and every scene here. The music too, sounds spectacular, it really works well with each scene.
9. lovesong (2016): Mindy and Sarah have that type of relationship where they don't need words because they speak in a language made out of glances and touches. This movie is about the fear of ruining a meaningful friendship and losing an important person, about love that is so complicated that one might not even try because the outcome seems to be so obvious.
10. her (2013): Heartbreak is formative: it changes you heart side out, and leaves your muscles a little stronger, your skin a little thicker, your bones easier to repair. Before this film, I’d never seen anything constructive in having your insides pulled apart by the seams by another person, but this film taught me how. Being in love and then being forced out of it is an experience that changes you fundamentally, but Her taught me its purpose – you don’t need them to leave you so that you can find someone who’s a better fit, because perhaps you never will. You need it to participate in humanity. The common denominator is being hurt, and without it, you’re barely alive.
11. shoplifters (2018): bittersweet and richly transportive, Shoplifters is a film that nonchalantly eases you into its tragic beauty in a way that doesn't punch you hard until the end. It simultaneously made me want to be part of the film's world and also very glad that I'm not. The setting the characters live in is messy and cluttered and full of dysfunction and lies, but it's also got family, and laughter, and fist-bumps, and slurping warm noodles while rain pings on the tin rooftop. So nuanced, so many tiny moments of delicate beauty and unassuming heartbreak, so many people making terrible decisions with good intentions.
12. god’s own country (2017): though it is a love story between two men, this aspect is only addressed briefly in a single scene. Rather, the film is about finding someone who makes you want to be a better person, someone who comes into your life just when you needed it most. Gheorghe helps Johnny open up and realize the beauty of the simple life. From this relationship, Johnny begins to feel comfortable with expressing himself, and his love and gratitude towards others. He also begins to appreciate life in the country, surrounded by stunning landscapes and the beauty of simplicity. Addressing the Yorkshire countryside, Gheorghe says "It is beautiful, but lonely." Johnny is presented with the notion that he doesn't have to be cold and miserable, slaving and drinking his days away. He is presented with the possibility of no longer being alone and finally finding happiness and contentment - and it is more than gratifying to see him accept it.
13. disobedience (2017): a tender star-crossed daydream. the three main character dynamics are special enough on their own, but the romance that blooms at the center is cathartically intimate and even magical: a reunion that feels so inevitable. catching glimpses of a past life, details we aren’t privy to. all the stolen kisses and whispers and promises. a bond so strong that they fall back in sync with each other like second nature, even if they try to fight against it. even if it won’t work. and yet they choose each other, even if for a few minutes.
14. raw (2016): this film is so gross and I like that. There is tons of blood and unique body horror and it all works perfectly for the tone the film is attempting to set. The use of color, specifically neons, creates a constant feeling that you are traveling through some sort of weird ghost world, which I really like. Overall, it's a very well put together film with flashes of brilliance.
15. the night is short, walk on girl (2017): what an absolutely magical adventure of a film. Essentially this is a heavily episodic look at a night in the lives of several people, centered on a woman and a man as she gleefully floats from event to event while he neurotically obsesses over how to "coincidentally" talk to her. The storytelling is incredible; while the overarching narrative is simple there are countless threads woven together to connect everyone in the story to each other. That in itself is a big theme: connections between people, how everything is interrelated, and what a large impact seemingly insignificant things people do can have an impact on everyone around them.
16. coraline (2009): Coraline is the best stop motion movie ever made in my opinion. Before the film released in 2009, I read the book and was completely blown away by its creativity and story. It’s a pretty dark tale featuring many scenes of fright that work well in both a horror setting and an animated kids setting. On surface value, this film is quite horrifying, which is something I’ve always loved about it. While it does make a few minor changes to the book, it improves upon a piece of art that was already jaw-droppingly good. Coraline feels like a real little girl with some real problems. She’s selfish but likable which is something most films cannot translate well. Of course, she has a pretty awesome arc as well which brings this movie to a perfect close for her character. The other-mother is also perfectly done. She is almost exactly how I imagined her in the book and the animation on her is spookily gorgeous. There is not one dull moment in this film. It is literally a perfect piece of cinema.
17. the third wife (2019): haven’t seen a film this visually delicate in a while. Ash Mayfair works with the looming mountain surroundings to make her characters —these women, these girls— as small as possible, as isolated as possible. Uneasiest of all is the protagonist May, so young and so weighed by responsibility, her position blurs between being one of the wives and being one of the daughters. It’s an extremely bleak tale of circumstance. An old tale, certainly, but so beautifully crafted it doesn’t matter. Mayfair holds a fearful tension throughout, and it only ever shatters in the cruelest of ways.The abundance of women and display of sisterhood begin as a comfort, but horror takes over as we realize how conditional and fragile that comfort is. Even the daughters are subconsciously aware, one of them praying to the gods to grow up and become a man, shearing her hair off in naive triumph. It’s a doomed cycle of girls performing roles which are unfortunately their best option, right up until the final scene of May with her daughter, still in their mourning clothes. She, like the older wives, finally realizes they’re the same as the cattle laying on their side for too many days.
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A Plea for Some Non-Cringe Native American Representation
There’s something that has bothered me for a real long time, and I haven’t said anything because it didn’t really feel like my place to say it. But if pasty white folks across the country will insist on continuing to make these books and comics and movies, then I guess this pasty white girl can make a plea to do it better.
So. Here’s the deal. Native American representation in fiction sucks.
We’re going to talk about why, and then talk about some ways you can do it better. And it’s going to take a while, so join me under the cut.
PROBLEM #1: Erasure
The first problem with First Nations people being represented in fiction is that it, uh...doesn’t happen very often. It’s pretty rare for a show or movie or book to have a Native character, and even rarer for that character to exist without being a vehicle/mouthpiece for some kind of hamfisted message.
And, of course, Native characters who do show up in movies are sometimes played by non-Native actors, which is just. Um.
somebody fucking kill me I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.
PROBLEM #2: The Same Stock Character Over and Over and Over
There’s this weird thing where TV shows have A Very Special Native American Episode(tm) where a Native American character shows up in a storyline designed to, idk, provide a tidy outlet for the viewer’s white guilt or something. I see this a lot in superhero stories for...some reason:
Batman and Chief Screaming Eagle (ok, it was the 1960s, surely things have gotten better right? oh...) who’s butting heads with a villain over a bad contract for, uh, the chief’s ancestral lands
There was the Buffy episode “Pangs” where a Chumash vengeance spirit is the villain-of-the day after being disturbed by some construction (and this is honestly one of the better treatments of the premise, at least the episode is well-written)
There was the Smallville episode with Kyla Willowbrook, the Kawatche Skinwalker (I know, I know) who for bonus points dies tragically in Clark’s arms (I KNOW) and who was deeply concerned with...with some construction...disturbing her sacred homesite...(this is starting to sound familiar)
And then there was The Flash episode where Barry is forced to fight with the complicated-yet-tragically-evil Native American activist woman whose crimes involve stealing cultural artifacts that belong to to the museum (yes I’m screaming) and also murdering people...y’know, for vengeance and stuff.
I could keep going but I really don’t think I have to. When your only representation of a culture is a character (frequently a smoking-hot member of the opposite sex to the hero) who is an ambiguous villain who is motivated by vengeance and/or justice over having their land/cultural artifacts disturbed, and who has a valid claim but is really going about it in the wrong way and whose tragic death and/or defeat really gives the white character something complex to think about for two seconds.... well. That’s more than a little racist.
PROBLEM #3: These Are Not Your Stories to Tell
You know what white people love doing?
They love appropriating Native culture! Seriously! They love it! And who can blame them, really? Native people have so much rich symbolism and mythology and cool clothes and neat aesthetics. Painted war ponies and buckskin dresses and shapeshifters and monsters, oh my! Indian burial grounds and vengeful spirits (oh for fuck sake enough with the vengeful Indian trope)
But here’s the deal:
The mythology you’re borrowing from belongs to a group of people who are still alive and sometimes practicing the religion you’re liberally reinterpreting
There is no such thing as a “Native American” myth. You’re talking about literally hundreds of different tribes who are culturally distinct from one another and have their own complex histories of interaction, diplomacy, war, friendship, etc. with one another for centuries before white folk got here. You erase all of that when you treat Native culture as a grab-bag of cool things you can mix and match to your liking.
Maybe, just a thought, stop it with the oppression narratives about activists and/or vengeful spirits who are real threatened by white people disturbing their homes? It’s not that there isn’t a lot to unpack in that -- I mean, white people really did conduct mass genocide against a race of people, for starters -- it’s just that this isn’t really your oppression narrative to tell.
It seems to me that folks writing about Native Americans don’t actually have any idea what Native people are like? They either think of them as anachronistic figures, an extinct and ancient group, or they think of them as people really hung up on their cultural past. Because maybe people can’t think of anything to do with a Native character other than use it as a vocal mouthpiece of one very specific part of their cultural oppression.
But please. Please stop. That is every bit as stupid and racist as making a Black character who only talks about slavery, or a Jewish character who only talks about the Holocaust, or giving all of your gay characters AIDS.
So what do you do instead?
Writing Native Characters in a Way That Does Not Suck - A Quick Primer
I can’t write a definitive guide on writing good Native representation, because there is no such guide, and if there were it would take a whole book probably, and I am not in any way even remotely an authority.
But I can give you some pointers that will help you.
(And to be honest, Native representation is so awful that the bar here is really super low, even just attempting a tiny bit is a really welcome breath of fresh air)
Choose a Tribe
Step one: Figure out what kind of Native people you’re writing about.
Because, as previously noted, Native People Are Not A Monoculture.
How do you pick a tribe? Well, start with geography. Where do you want the story to take place? Obviously people move around, so you can find folks outside of their ancestral lands, but they all started someplace, and a lot of people live where their parents and grandparents and cousins all live.
So where does your story take place? Pick a spot. Then find out what tribes live in that region. It’s not a secret. There are maps:
(Source: http://www.emersonkent.com/map_archive/native_american_tribes_map.htm)
Or maybe you want to go about this in a different way. Maybe you have a specific story idea in mind and you want to write it in a way that would be accurate and respectful. Cool! A good first step on that is to figure out what tribe actually does the thing you’re wanting to write about.
Skinwalkers, for example, originate in the Navajo Nation (Dine` people), although there are related myths from surrounding tribes in the area.
If you’re writing a story about Wendigo, then you should know those myths originate with the Algonquin people of Quebec and Ontario.
If you’re writing something with spiritually significant buffalo, you should probably choose a culture that actually interacted with buffalo -- ie, a Plains Indian tribe like the Lakota-Sioux people.
And so on and so forth.
(Note that this is only the first step. You still have to do a lot of research after this to be sure you’re doing everything properly and respectfully. And, y’know, maybe reconsider if you actually want to tell a story respecting that mythology, or if you just want to sound cool and exotic)
Also, personal preference: Please don’t make your characters Cherokee if you’re just going for “character with Native ancestry.” Please choose a different tribe. For a lot of complicated (and sometimes surprisingly racist) reasons, white people have been claiming Cherokee heritage for a long time, and even when it’s true, it feels cheap and cringey in fiction. If you want to tell a story about the Trail of Tears or something set in Tahlequa, Oklahoma, great! Write Cherokee characters! But if you just want a Native American character for other reasons...pick a different tribe.
Choose a Name
Fun fact: Modern Native people that you meet out on the street don’t have names like “Stands With Fists” or “Running Bear.”
If you have an impulse to name your character any kind of descriptive “adjective + animal” name...just don’t. Please. And don’t go to BehindTheName or some other random site to pick out something that “sounds” Native.
Names in other cultures are tricky. Some (but not all!) Native people may have a cultural tradition of having multiple names, including naming ceremonies (often as a rite of passage in adolescence). Some tribes have clan names. Everybody’s different. But these special names are culturally sensitive, often sacred, and are not a thing readily accessible to white people. White folks spent centuries trying to wipe out Indigenous people’s belief systems; they deserve to have some things kept private and sacred.
So what I’m getting at here is that white writers really, really should not touch on the “Indian naming ceremony” trope at all if they can help it, because it’s gonna be real hard to get the details right, and getting the details wrong is going to make you sound like an ignorant racist. And most of the time, it’s not really that important to a story.
Most contemporary Native people have regular English names. They may also have tribal names and clan names (that they may or may not share with outsiders). But lots of tribal members don’t, and that doesn’t make them any less Native.
My recommendation for naming your Native characters? Find real people from the time period, tribe, and region you’re writing in. Find a phone book or newspaper from a town on or near a reservation for your chosen tribe. Look at names of participants in powwows. Look at the sports rosters for Native schools. Look at historical records like census data from the year you’re writing about. Don’t just make things up.
** One Note: You know how “black” names are a thing? You encounter a similar sort of thing in some contemporary Native Americans. I grew up with a lot of kids who had “weird” names like Kirby, Sheriden, Baskerville, Sterling and Precious. (and by “weird” I mean “names middle-class white people don’t tend to use”). There’s also a lot of black-sounding names in Native populations. There’s some complex reasons behind this, and a lot of sociology of naming, and I won’t spend too much time on it right now but just...so you know. It’s a thing.
Write a Human Being
This really is the biggest thing, and it’s true of every writing you do, all the time, no matter what: Write a real person and not a caricature.
Native people are people first. Their cultural heritage affects them the way anyone else’s culture does. The things they eat, wear, do, believe, the stories they know, etc. are all affected. But Native people don’t have a responsibility to be walking representatives of their tribes. And they definitely shouldn’t be a vessel for white guilt.
(Fun fact: “Iron Eyes Cody,” maybe best known for the “Crying Indian” role in a commercial about pollution, was an Italian-American born Espera Oscar de Corti)
Here’s a really, really good article I found while working on this rant that might be of interest to you as wellas you set out on this quest: https://mashable.com/2015/03/24/american-indians-tv/
I still have so much to say on this topic, and maybe I’ll write more in the future, but this is already very long so I’ll stop. I hope this has been at least a little bit helpful for y’all. Go forth and write non-terrible characters, I beg of you.
*Disclaimer: I am not a Native person and do not claim any special knowledge or ownership of Native culture, and I beg you to please listen to Native voices when possible in your creative endeavors. I’m just a gal who happened to have spent most of my life living near reservations and growing up around Native people and having Native friends and being taught about historical cultures by my mother who has a degree in Southwest Studies and has done a lot of formal and informal research due to her own interests in the topic.
If you found this article helpful at all, please consider dropping a tip in my tip jar.
I also have a book coming out! You can pre-order it now! It features a main character of mixed heritage, New Mexico reservation border towns, and zombies trying to get by like everybody else.
Pre-Order now on B&N: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/river-of-souls-t-l-bodine/1131956124
Or on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/River-Souls-T-L-Bodine/dp/1950305015
Or from the publisher: http://journalstone.com/bookstore/river-of-souls/?fbclid=IwAR14Qna5tMgWBV0We2uGSLreBkmyvZ5SoDAzPQpTKeFn4JR4PWSyKGl0VEo
Or add it to your Goodreads library: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46183381-river-of-souls
#how to write#writing advice#native americans#cultural appropriation#representation#long post#but please do read it#I worked on this all day
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Madi Lou (and trans+ artists, too!)
Playing off the idea of "T4T" (trans seeking trans, typically associated with the terms found on the app Grindr) I wanted to compile a playlist of trans/nonbinary/gender non-conforming artists that are present in a variety of genres and gender expressions/presentations/labels.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/52OZ896qRkAM2oqUwbtd5P?si=OQpd8kqSRnGGKcWe6XLcSw
"Maker - Acoustic” by Anjimile
Anjimile is a “queer and trans songmaker/lover boy with a heart of gold” based in Boston, MA
"Emasculate" by Dorian Electra
Dorian Electra is a gender-fluid pop musician who likes to become a “genderless clown” in their extravagant makeup and campy aesthetics.
"800 db cloud" by 100 gecs (Laura Les)
Laura Les, part of the duo 100 gecs, is a trans woman previously known under her project Osno1 (I felt it personally prevalent to include her song “How to Dress as Human” but could only find the link through Youtube)
"Heartbreaker" by Ah-Mer-Ah-Su
In her 2018 album STAR, Ah-Mer-Ah-Su wanted to tell the story of her black trans identity--a story typically connected to struggle and coping with extreme opposition from society at large. “For me, this album simply means that I’m a black girl with something to say. I have a story, and I’ll tell it through my music.” (billboard, August 2018)
"HRT" by Girls Rituals
Devi McCallion has worked in a number of projects centered under her label blacksquares. Her trans identity is touched on in such projects as Cats Millionaire/Mom, blackdresses, and Girls Rituals.
"Trans Femme Bonding" by Tami T
Originally starting her glittery electronica sound under the name Tami Tamaki, Tami T describes many aspects around the love for/between trans femmes // “So fucking brave, so fucking femme”
"Nonbinary" by Arca
Alejandra Ghersi, better known by her stagename Arca, came out as nonbinary and goes by she/her and it/its pronouns.
"Bitch Pudding" by KC Ortiz
Rising in the Chicago hip-hop scene, KC Ortiz wants to be known that she is no different than any other rapper. “I cringe when headlines say ‘Trans Rapper.’ That ain’t me...The only times that even crosses my mind really is when I think about because I’m trans I gotta be dope.” (Art Music Fashion Life, June 2020)
"Faceshopping" by SOPHIE
Sophie Xeon made her breakthrough in Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, becoming a known name after producing for artists like Charli XCX. She is very reclusive and has a smaller public image, contrary to her Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2020 appearance. (I have also discussed her imagery/lyricism of this song in 5th Avenue’s podcast--you should give it a listen to hear about other great queer artists!)
"Unkillable" by Katie Dey
“I was born inside this body and I’m stuck there/I’m a storm inside a rotting false construction” (Transition from “solipsisting” into “stuck” on Katie Dey’s debut album Asdfasdf)
"I'm Not 'Supposed' to Be Anything" by She/Her/hers
Emma Grrrl (and the occasional appearance of her friends) describes herself as sad grrrl pop-punk. “When I hear that a trans teenager shared one of my songs with their parents and it helped them to understand their experience, I just can’t imagine anything more validating or fulfilling than that.” (arena, June 2018)
"Gotta Gimme Your Love" by Sateen
Sateen is the band formally made up of the lesbian power couple Miss Sateen and Exquisite. Originally famous and sensationalized as a “hetero drag couple,” Exquisite came out as a trans woman and shifted the projection of their music and relationship into making disco for a new generation.
"TRANSylvania" by Kim Petras
Known famously on German television for medically transitioning in her teens, Kim Petras’ assertation in her identity as a trans woman gave her much of the internet presence and platform to successfully kick off a music career. “I hate the idea of using my identity as a tool...It made me the person I am and that’s a big part of me, but I think music is about your feelings and your fantasies and it goes deeper than your gender or your sexuality.” (billboard, 2018)
"Breakdown" by Torraine Futurum
Making waves in the fashion industry before walking in New York Fashion Week, Torraine Futurum says she aims to “do whatever the fuck I want to do on this Earth -- and it’s going to be excellent.” (them., 2018)
"I Am America" by Shea Diamond
“I knew at a very young age I loved to sing. My voice was effeminate and I remember feeling afraid to sing in the church choir...Desperate to find the financial means to transition to my true gender, I committed a crime in 1999 and was sentenced to 10 years in a men’s prison. I was afraid that I could possibly die in a prison system designed to ensure correctional jobs over human lives...I began writing ‘I Am Her’ as a statement to a world that said I shouldn’t exist.” (TEDxKC, 2018)
"Body and Soul" by teddy<3
Teddy Geiger has known many lives in popular culture from teen idol, romantic lead, to sought after producer. “I didn’t know anyone who was trans...I had very little connection to that, so it wasn’t really until maybe three years ago I started actually painting my nails and going out. Nobody cared if I was femme.” (Rolling Stone, 2018)
"Genderqueer Love Song" by Schmekel
“Schmekel means little penis is Yiddish, and is a play on the fact that all four members were born female but ow identify themselves on the masculine side of the gender spectrum. It’s an appropriate name for a band that started as a laugh.” (New York Times, 2011)
"Queer Kidz" by Ashby and the Occeanns
Ashlynn Barker is a trans/nonbinary musician based out of Chicago. They write songs about trans issues, queer identity, mental health, and video games.
"Cis Girls" by Dyke Drama
Sadie Switchblade of the band G.L.O.S.S. (Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit) came out with this “transparent” side project. “It’s pretty transparent...The songs are either about trans girl problems or dykey lesbionic friendships.” (Pitchfork, 2016)
"Femme Bitch Top" by Tribe 8
“When the trans-dyke neofeminist rabble-rousers known as Tribe 8 make music, not even heaven is safe.” (SF Gate, 2006) The San Francisco LGBT Film Festival entry “Rise Above” is a rock-documentary anomaly I highly recommend taking the time to watch.
"They / Them / Theirs" by Worriers
“You’ve got a word for one, So there’s a word for all. // The smallest things have become Which side are you on? // What if I don’t want something that applies to me? // What if there’s no better word than just not saying anything, anything?” The trio of gender-neutral pronouns
"Gender Nightmare" by Art Projects
“That’s not my face on the license picture // You call my name as it is on paper // As it will still be // When they write me up a eulopy” (Genius Lyrics analysis you want to click in on)
"Male Gynecology" by Shoplifting
A revival of riot-grrrl manifestas, the album Body Stories “brims over with precisely the kind of heartfelt, politically-charged fervor that’s far more likely to save rock. (Pop Matters, 2006)
"Third Gender" by Good Asian Drivers
“Sometimes my gender is chilling out inbetween, but most of the time my gender is FUCK YOU mind your own business!” → Please please please listen to the lyrics of this song, this is a wonderfully politically charged bop carried with heart and bass and punk spit.
"True Trans Soul Rebel" by Against Me!
Laura Les came out with her release of the album Transgender Dysphoria Blues and furthered this message in Against Me!’s album Shape Shift with Me. She was one of the first trans people I saw openly continue to pursue a passion despite previously having works “pre-transition” out in the world.
"If I Were You" by Claud
“Sometimes it’s more important to write from a perspective different from your own in order to touch on important things. People always tell me that I’m brutally honest and I think it’s because I don’t hold back on anything...it’s refreshing to hear something said that you want to say yourself, but just couldn’t.” (Popsugar., 2019)
"If You Knew This Was About You, You'd Deny It" by Wargo
A trans woman solo-acoustic based out of Virginia, Wargo’s sound is directly influenced by the punk scene of the east coast. She likes to call her style “Appalachian Power Pop.”
"I DONT TRUST U ANYMORE" by Left at London
Coming to a place of internet recognition through such vines as “hahaha I do that” Nat Puff’s indie pop project Left at Londed (shorted as /@/) dives into the heart of “what it means to navigate the current political world as a queer person, while still remaining accessible to the general public.” (“About” on /@/ website)
"Body Was Made" by Ezra Furman
“My body was made this particular way // There’s really nothing any old patrician can say // You social police can just get out of my face // My body was made” (Body Was Made music video is a quirky and fun stylistic retelling of these lyrics) Ezra Furman identifies as trans and bisexual and uses he/him and she/her pronouns.
"Complicated" by The Cliks
Lucas Silveira shared that the band’s name derived from two ideas; using The like iconic bands The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and Cliks as a portmanteau of the slang terms clit and dicks. (In The Life interview, 2009)
"Upper West Side" by King Princess
“Although [Mikaela Mullaney Straus] identifies as a genderqueer lesbian, King Princess doesn’t necessarily want her music to be placed in the ‘queer pop’ box.” (MTV, 2019) Who isn’t bored of the heteronormative narrative?
"Make Me Feel" by Janelle Monáe
“I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker. I want young girls, young boys, non-binary, gay, straight, queer, queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality, dealing with feeling ostracized or bullied for just being their unique selves, to know that I see you.” (NewNowNext, February 2020)
"body cast" by Dua Saleh
A Sudanese refugee, Dua Saleh nurtured their love for poetry in the beginnings of their Minneapolis music career. They came out as nonbinary while in their second year at Augsburg University but have said “I always been on gay shit.” (them., May 2020)
"Mercury" by CJ Run
“With a deep understanding of pop sensibility, and enough hooks to last a lifetime, CJ Run’s music is the inner monologue of a black queer 20 something in the 21st century.” (Propelr)
"Dancing With Stranger" by Sam Smith
“When I saw the word non-binary, genderqueer, and I read into it, and I heard these people speaking, I was like, ‘Fuck, that is me.’” (Vanity Fair, March 2019)
"SkindeepSkyhighHeartwide" by Lawrence Rothman
Lawrence Rothman is a gender fluid artist, musician, and producer. Looking into their Google Image results yields the visual evidence of the nine personas Rothman refers to as “alters, each one offering a different lens for their creative use.” (NPR, November 2018)
"Extended Vacation" by Ryan Cassata
Ryan Cassata is the first openly transgender musician to perform at Warped, winning the Ernie Ball Battle of The Bands contest twice (both in 2013 and 2015*). He has spoken out about American Idol attempting to exploit openly transgender people to pander to a broader audience banking on new forms of media “diversity”.
*I saw him in Mountain View, California in 2015 and you have no idea how happy a newly out genderqueer 16 year old was to stand on stage behind a proud trans man singing on a bumping stage.
"Let My Baby Stay" by Amandla Stenberg
This entire article is great in explaining why Amandla’s openness on their pronouns outside of this website might have harmed them for the future of their career.
"Dolla in My Titty (Part 1)" by Peppermint
Best known as the 2017 runner up on the ninth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Peppermint made her musical debut in Head Over Heels becoming Broadway’s first out trans woman to play a lead roll.
"Gender Bronoun" by Human Kitten
“What is unstable And what is real // This is a question that i ask myself on a daily basis // Are my emotions genuine Or are they just the result of my neural passages sending my chemicals back and forth” → “Caught i’m between two completely separate identites Who Can’t agree on anything // And i can’t even decide on which one’s me”
"Wow in the Now" by Honeybird
Honeybird is a musician and composer based in Bologna, Italy. Their mission is to listen to intersectional LGBTQ+ community voices and transform the daily struggle into songs.
"I Don't Love You Anymore" by ANHONI
“My closest friends and family use feminine pronouns for me. I have mot mandated the press do one thing or another...I think words are important. To call a person by their chosen gender is to honor their spirit, their life and contributions. ‘He’ is an invisible pronoun for me, it negates me.’” (Flavorwire, November 2014)
"Robert Frost" by Mal Blum
“Now I’m looking at the ground because I don’t want you to leave // I know it’s co-dependent But I think it’s kind of sweet // Out of every person in this city I could ever meet // Leaving feels like losing But I’m learning what I need”
"Dysphoria" by Saint Wellesley
“Binding my chest and biting my tongue Wearing boxers never fixed anyone” → “And this is the last time I’ll allow my ribs to be swollen // And I’ll grow out my hair And pretend I don’t care And maybe my ribs are broken” → “Dysphoria’s a bitch I wanna kick her in a ditch // It’s not fair to wanna itch All of the places that don’t fit”
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🎭✨🧱 ?
🎭 - what do you prefer in media; innovation, characterization, narrative/plot, or symbolism/deeper themes?
I kinda want to answer all of the above, because all are important and each one can hold my attention. It also depends on my mood. Sometimes I just want to feel for characters and don’t care if the plot is slim and the style uninteresting or stodgy. Sometimes I want a rich, complicated plot with twists and turns and everything else is secondary. Sometimes I just read for the way the words are chosen and put together because I get a rush from beautifully constructed things. Ideally, you combine the three and that’s how you get symbolism and deeper themes ! But I do really enjoy when a work gives me something I wasn’t expecting or hadn’t seen before, so I could go for innovation... except innovation for innovation’s sakes often annoys me, so... all of the above, sorry !
�� - what do all of your interests have in common, or lack in common? what do you think that says about you?
Buddy I have to rack my brain to even begin to tell you what my interests are, I don’t know what they have in common ! I guess I like everything that has to do with stories, and beautiful things. I like things that I can do on my own because if I fuck up then it’s on me alone, but I used to like things that required good teamwork because it feels amazing to be in something greater than the sum of its part. I like the feeling of moving up or forward, when my body has to work for it but it’s not difficult, I’m just a bit more aware of it than usual. I’d say I’m a low-risk, low-reward kind of person, but that sounds much more self-deprecating than I mean it.
🧱 - what do you feel like your foundation is? how long has it been steady? are you still building it?
I feel like we’re all built on quicksand and the trick is to learn to crumble smoothly and rebuild yourself a few feet away. Well, perhaps not so much “built on” and more “made of”. Gosh this sounds pretentious. Look I could say I built myself on encounters with other people, on love, but it sounds pretentious too and anyway I don’t want foundations, I want to stay light on my feet. Which also sounds pretentious ! but I’m cool with it.
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Mental Health and General Life Advice Gained Over the Years
Here is a list of some things I’ve learned over the years that have, I think, helped me live a better life
Be flexible in my narrative. When I say things like ‘I’m just an anxious person,’ or ‘I suck at confrontation,’ then I risk fixing onto this narrative rather than managing it in a healthy way. I become unwilling to recognize instances where I’m not anxious. I ignore opportunities for growth. Instead, I find it better to foster a flexible narrative. I know it’s important to acknowledge, normalize, and even embrace my identities, but I don’t want to mistake an aspect of my identity for my identity wholesale. I’m not my anxiety. Rather, I struggle with anxiety. I’m not Depression. Rather, depression has had a formative influence on my sense of self. This, too, goes for my social identities. Identities are real, and they have very real impacts on our world and our experience, but they are not everything. To paraphrase James Baldwin, identities are like garments that ought to be worn loosely so that our nakedness—and ability to change—can still be felt.
Steep in my fallibility. The more I’ve learned about my personal fallibility—which is prodigious—the healthier my relationships and general approach to the world has become. Embracing my tendency to be biased and make mistakes has, I hope, fostered a strong sense of humility. Thank goodness, since this world is messy and complex as shit, and we are often—so very, very often—wrong about things. Or at least overly-simplistic. And because things are so goddamn complicated, it can be hard, even impossible, to see nuance. Our limited and parochial natures can lead us to ignore complexity, especially if that complexity doesn’t cast a favorable light on our beliefs about the world. I’ve developed an almost fetishistic obsession with learning about cognitive biases and the seemingly infinite number of ways my psychology leads me astray (as evidenced by the persistent string of posts I’ve made on it, like here, here, here, here, and here). Paradoxically, fully embracing and seeking out my fallibility has led me to have a much deeper understanding of the world around me. As Simone de Beauvoir says, ‘It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.’ My genuine condition is that of a mistake-prone, biased, and mercurial ape. (And that’s pretty cool.)
Get in touch with the messiness. Why is it important to have a flexible narrative and to embrace our fallibility? Because shit’s complex! Incredibly, intensely, bone-chillingly, awe-inspiringly complex. Our brains have evolved as taxonomy machines where we carve up the world and separate everything into nice and neat little boxes. If only things could be so simple. As it so happens, though, the world is, as William James wrote, ‘multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful and perplexed.’ I have found it to be very helpful to reflect on the complexity of everything, even the seemingly simple and straightforward.
Mindfulness exercises. ‘Mindfulness’ has, like ‘empathy,’ become a pop-psych buzzword over the last several years. This is partly because mindfulness is a very potent tool. It can fundamentally alter our day-to-day existence. There is no shortage of ancient schools of wisdom that have prescribed mindfulness as key to a meaningful existence. I’m partial to David Foster Wallace’s construction of mindfulness when he said that it is the true aim of a good education. With mindfulness we cultivate the power to choose where to focus our mental energies, to choose what has meaning and what does not. With practice, ‘it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.’ In short, continued Wallace, ‘you get to decide what to worship.’
Thinking about thankfulness. Gratitude exercises are a form of mindfulness I’ve found to be especially beneficial. When I have the mental energy to do so, I try to get creative about my gratitude. I try to find gratitude in the mundane, the trivial, the invisible. It’s much too easy to be grateful for grand adventures and emotionally rewarding escapades. It can be much more difficult—but equally meaningful—to find gratitude in the humdrum, or to appreciate the infinite number of shitty things that didn’t happen to me, or to embrace the vast confluence of luck that has led me to this single moment of unadorned contentedness. This is another subject I’ve written about to a near-obnoxious extent (see some here, here, here, here, and here). I sometimes feel reservations recommending gratitude exercises, since, when things are really awful, as they so often are, it can feel patronizing and hurtful to have someone tell you that you should just be grateful. This is not my intention. The world is capricious and fucked up, far more often than it should be. This is why I try to access gratitude in the moments where things are okay. I try to seize moments of grace and calm and squeeze out those drops of thankfulness. This can add water to the reservoir that I will need to pull from when I’m thirsty and in pain. In my better moments, then, I can find gratitude, or some semblance or peace or perspective, even when I’m suffering. I can, as Nietschze wrote, ‘throw roses in to the abyss and say: “Here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.”’ And, ultimately, this has helped me get to a place where I can, more often than not, remain in a ‘contented dazzlement of surprise,’ to use Lewis Thomas’ turn of phrase.
Me and everyone I love will die. You know what else I’m grateful for? This breath. And this one. And this one. It’s pretty wild to be alive, to be a self-aware extension of nature itself. What a stunning convergence of necessary circumstance needed to randomly grant me such a privilege. And, just as it came, so it will go. Randomly and inexorably. Death awaits. There is no stopping it. Dark, suffocating, oblivion. This can be scary, of course. But it’s also motivating and contextualizing. Death is not yet here, after all. And that makes each and every breath, smile, kiss, and laugh a priceless cosmic treasure. Indeed, it is precisely because of our limited time that life is so meaningful. Emily Dickinson, as she was wont to do, summed it up eloquently when she said, ‘That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.’
I am not free. At the very least, I am not free in the way I’ve long thought. I am a physical being, subject to the laws of nature, of cause and effect. My thoughts are not authored by some mystical volition or unrestrained willpower. I am thoroughly restrained. I am, indeed, destined to write this sentence from the very moment the cosmos silently but extravagantly whispered itself into life. Some people recoil from this idea, thinking that if our thoughts and actions are determined by external factors, then life is meaningless, and change is futile. These conclusions do not follow. Change is occurring constantly. Our actions have consequences. What we do chaotically reverberates into our surroundings. We are determined, but not fated. We have power, even if it is not free. Instead of catastrophizing and fearing the implications of our lack of freedom, I like to reflect on what this means for how I treat myself and others. A lack of freedom motivates in me a deep sense of compassion. It demands forgiveness for both my mistakes and those of others. None of us asked to be here. We are, as Heidegger said, thrown into existence, awoken to a set of determined circumstance. I am the type of person who has been able to receive an education, to have supportive loved ones, to have a functioning moral compass, a disposition for moving and meaningful emotional experiences, and to want to work to make the world a better place. But I didn’t choose to be or have any of this. This is all luck, luck, luck. From my country of birth to my balding head and hairy back to every last neuronal blast fashioning my inner life—not one atom or twist of the genetic braid was chosen exclusively by me. So, if I find myself as the type of person who doesn’t want to harm others, who doesn’t have unmanageable compulsions, who doesn’t suffer from debilitating isolation, who isn’t disproportionately oppressed by the unconscious machinations of social systems, then this, like everything and all of it, is luck, luck, luck.
Interpersonal stuff. I’ve been very lucky to have had resources in my life, including access to healthcare, a support system, and loved ones who happen to be badass psychologists and counselors. I’ve gleaned invaluable life advice from these dear friends of mine. And thank the cosmos, as such advice has proven to profoundly improve my interpersonal relationships. A couple of quick ones: avoid ‘Shoulding’ on people. When I’m upset and in pain, I typically desire a compassionate and patient ear rather than practical advice. When people come at me with ‘Well, you should do this…’ I often just feel misunderstood or further alienated. Even worse is the ‘Nike Advice,’ where someone says ‘Just do such and such…’ This often feels invalidating because if it were a matter of ‘Just’ doing something, I would’ve already done it. Things are rarely so simple. Similarly, I’ve found it helpful to listen rather than problem-solve. I will commiserate and look for solutions if that is what the person asks for, but usually, I will try to be simply present for the other person, to sit with their pain and offer my compassion and understanding.
Meta-advice. Here’s some advice on my advice: take it with a fat, ballpark-sized soft-pretzel’s worth of salt. I am a philosopher, not a psychologist. I try to be very science- and research-driven, and I’ve been lucky to enough to draw from the hard-earned wisdom of other experts, but, nonetheless, I am not an expert myself. I try to live well. I try to be smart and kind and humble and patient, and I often fail. I am human, all-too-human. This is simply meant to be a sloppily-rendered summary of some helpful pieces of anecdotal advice I’ve gathered on my never-ending journey toward eudaimonia. Nothing more. It is non-exhaustive (this post is, like me after a night at home with a book and a DiGiornio, far too bloated), and I’m sure I’ll regret leaving out many pieces of pivotal information. But the above advice has (so far) been useful in my life. This does not mean it will be helpful for everyone. I hope, at least, that it would not be harmful. Do with it what you will, my friends, and good luck.
#nich#psychology#philosophy#life advic#mental health#eudaimonia#gratitude#mindfulness#death#mortality#long post#text#long
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a-well-toasted-brain mentioned you in a post “did you hear Hussie's massive explanation on the epilogues?”
send me a link dahniwitchoflight
https://www.reddit.com/r/homestuck/comments/cuywff/the_homestuck_epilogues_bridges_and_offramps_new/
Alright something about Hussie calling his own work a cursed tome is hilarious to me
that’s really amazing he first intended the epilogues to be written as books because like, I’m so sure that if a third one does come out, it will be on an actual hardcover book, even just for the book eating jokes in homestuck and the fact that a book was in calliope’s offerred picnic basket of food choices to John
“I feel like the work does a lot to suggest it's not merely following up on the lives of all the characters after a few years, but also reorganizing all narrative circumstances in a way that points forward, to a new continuity with a totally different set of stakes.“
Yeah like, Homestuck in it’s current state is certainly finished and done and over with, but he’s right that the things presented in the epilogue do at times feel like cliffhangers leading to something new
but not something entirely new, new in the sense of a remake new
I wouldn’t be surprised if the old proclamation of homestuck 2.0 was just homestuck remade/retcanoned into a new different format and re-telling the story over again but different this time
“ In this sense, I think it's heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually "optional" by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient. But for those who continue to feel investment in these characters and this world, ironically the very elements which could be regarded as disturbing or depressing are also the main reasons to have hope that there is still more to see. “
Yeah!! Exactly! The Epilogues are leading into more things, but it’s not just gonna be a continuation of the story so far, even using in character retcon mechanics
it’s not like it would be out of place for Homestuck, Homestuck already did that once upon a time with Homestuck Beta, the idea of reimagining what the story of Homestuck is overall, isn’t something new to the media
“It turns out the gaze we cast from the sky of Earth C to revisit everyone isn't exactly friendly, like warm sunlight. It's more like a ravaging beam, destructive and unsettling to all that could have been safely imagined.”
“Our continued attention is the very property which incites new problems, and the troublemakers appear to be keenly aware of this. “
That’s really ominous though, it’s sort of implying that that everything fucked up that happened in Candy was through our gaze of wanting to read more being that eternal endgame Sun is what caused all the character skewing, not necessarily that John had leftover bits of canon power in him when everyone else didn’t
We wanted to see the drama and problems that would arise therefore it did
Kind of implies that the longer this continues on the more an original neat happy end is out of reach, what could have been a simple story of 4 kids playing game turned into something much more complicated and dramatic
But I don’t think that’s true, if the story is hinging on what hussie imagines we as an audience want to see, if we all want to see that original neat happy simple end, that hardly feels impossible
Yeah like something else is definitely coming, Hussie gave up the epligues as a way to zap our attention, make us talk, get feedback, get passionate about things he didn’t know we would, get ideas of what it is we wanted to see, and now it’s gonna simmer for a while while he uses some time to cook up something new
“Once you have a multitude of intermissions, don't you have two dueling threads of content, one supposedly "irrelevant", and the other important? And if that's true, then is it possible for the "irrelevant" thread to accrue more importance, throwing its entire identity as "optional content" into question retroactively?”
yes!
“And if that can happen, is it possible the two threads can flip roles, with the intermissions becoming more important than the main acts? Then once the story goes through the motions of answering "yes" to all of this, isn't it also fair to ask, why bother with this examination at all? Was it pure horseplay and trickery? Actually, yes, sort of. There is a trick involved. The gradual realization that intermission content is nontrivial forces the reader to reevaluate their perception of the material, which was originally influenced by a label presiding over that material, and what they believed that label meant.”
“It relies on the reader's presumption about the label's meaning to disguise certain properties of the content (like relevance), and therefore disarms the reader initially, leading to the potential for subverting expectations about the content later in surprising ways. In other words, you can use whatever it is the reader already presumes they know about stories in order to control the perception of what they are reading, just by gradually shifting the boundaries of whatever it is they've been well trained to expect from certain elements.”
Ah, so them being called “Epilogues” doesn’t really matter, in fact, it’s clearly being used specifically to mislead us, even their current state of canonical-ness doesn’t matter. It’s not a status handed down from on high that they have no choice but to simply accept.
Everything is both within their power and within the audience and author’s power to change, which he has already admitted as such when he designed the “epilogues” stories labelled as such to in fact feel like “intermissions” in application, so the author has already now changed what an epilogue means in Homestuck, so what will the audience and then the characters change about that?
“So now the label "epilogue" has been toyed with in a similar way, and also in a manner which exposes an apparent flaw with the label. Or actually, just by using the label "epilogue" at all, it seems the story is admitting to an apparent flaw. If another way of saying intermission is "whoops, story's too long, here's a break", then an alternate way of saying epilogue is "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's some more".”
whoops indeed lol so yeah, “Epilogue” absolutely doesn’t mean the story is over, it means quite the opposite, it’s a guarantee the story is going to continue
“it's probably time to get nervous about whether it satisfies your expectations about what the content existing under such a label should provide.”
See, this is the sort of thing why I still have a sliver of faith in the author, he’s admitting he knew the expectation of his audience so clearly that he specifically wrote something to come across as unsatisfying as possible to stoke the flames as much as possible to get people to want more so that he could make more
so he didn’t write the epilogue with any sense of thinking that anyone in the audience was really going to fully accept this is how homestuck ends, it wasn’t presently simply as “well, here’s the end here you go, this is canonically how it ends”
he’s fully aware of the dissatisfaction, in fact it was dissastisfaction he was hoping to cultivate on purpose
I think PesterQuest clearly ties into and jokes about with MC straight up reacting the way a lot of fandom did when they first popped out, right on Hussie’s que
“Stories end where they do for certain reasons, answering the questions which were thematically important to answer, and leaving some questions unanswered for similar reasons, and the reader is left with the task of deciphering the meaning of these decisions. Under the "whoops, I forgot some shit, here's more" interpretation of an epilogue as a flawed construct, by reopening an already closed-circuit narrative, what you're really doing is introducing destabilizing forces into something which had already reached a certain equilibrium, due to all the considerations that went into which questions to answer, and which to leave ambiguous. And these destabilizing forces became the entire basis for the construction of an entirely new post-canon narrative, for better or worse.“
By Homestuck’s been doing that this whole entire time, so it’s really not unexpected here as well
Whatever happened to that original flash of Bark Tier Jade doing things with the planets that ended in candydust? The interruption of that dust made it so we might never know (yet)
“By deploying it as mock-fanfiction, and including other authors, I'm making an overt gesture that is beginning to diminish my relevance as the sole authority on the direction this story takes, what should be regarded as canon, and even introducing some ambiguity into your understanding of what canon means as the torch is being passed into a realm governed by fan desires.“
So Hussie is even aware that of the original problem of having a sole author for the kind of story he is making, perfectly represented in story by his self insert being and acting the way it does, trying to diminish it’s presence as much as possible, but still inescapably being there and affecting things
and even showing how a character like John rising to a similar position due to circumstances, can’t help but come to the same conclusion of self isolation as the only way
“ The fanfiction format is effectively a call to action, for another generation of creators to imagine different outcomes, to submit their own work within the universe, to extend what happens beyond the epilogues, or to pave over them with their own ideas. And I believe the direness in tone and some of the subject matter suitably contributes to the urgency of this call to action. “
So at this point, Hussie I think is actually admitting he might be out of ideas, so in his role as sole author, that means the story is over it’s dead, wherever it managed to end up dying, but at the same time he doesn’t want to let Homestuck die, so he’s opening up canon to be influenced by other people not just himself, fandom has to start creating new content or rearrange the pieces in ways that feel satisfying to them
That’s not to say though that if we like Homestuck we should all write our endings however we please and that that’s the real true ending of homestuck
but rather he’s probably going to be expanding his team of Homestuck creators to include more people than just him, bigger the bigger sample size of people who want homestuck to live and be satisfying, the more accurate it will be to the overall fandom vision of what it means to be satisfying
So dang then, really cool
Right now, If I were to put myself in this role, I can definitely think of things left unaddressed that I want to be handled in a satisfying way, and I can definitely think of things that have been handled unsatisfactorily, and can think of more satisfying ways to meet their ends
it makes sense though that this can’t be handled by one person alone though, that it has to be a communal effort
because there are also things that I personally have no opinion about, or even worse, a negative opinion about, which means if I were in charge, those parts of the story would be handled in an unsatisfying way to those who were hoping to get satisfaction out of
For instance, it’s not impossible for a character even like Gamzee to have a satisfying conclusion or character arc, if a significant part of fandom so desires
It wouldn’t even have to be that hard, Candy already lampshaded the most obvious/most likely ways in which it could be done seriously
a) play up what happened in his childhood having an affect or non affect on him
b) play up the substance abuse angle or how the drugs might have irreversibly altered his personality
c) play up how his Ultimate Self may have been tainted by the part that became LE similar to Dirk through that “Combat, Philosophy, Life, Love” line
heck even the gross unmentionable part at the end half of Candy has a super dark joke that you could even twist Gamzee’s story as him being the one being abused in a relationship having an affect on him, not the other way around
but THAT would be one hell of a contortion of his character as it is now in the story
and since it’s mostly Gamzee being the one to make these jokes about his own character, it even comes across as darkly self aware on his part, especially with his whole redemptions handed out like Candy thing he’s got going on
that if enough people forgive him and start liking him it’s essentially the same as him not having been a villain in the first place, in “canon”, which it would be if audience had control over canon
but whether that’s due to him wanting to simply, get away with the shit he’s done scot free and not have to feel any repercussions for his actions, or some core of genuine remorse that he doesn’t know how to express properly but has access to the power to change if he wants
I think it’s the first most likely because I dislike him, but people who do like him would obviously feel differently
So, I end this all with
“I want to see what happens in Hiveswap and Friendsim, and PesterQuest, and I want to see if the effects of that has repercussions on Homestuck, and changes it further in ways that satisfy me” with my eyes gleaming, staring like sunlight, changing the way it’s perceived by burning holes into parts I don’t like and welding together the parts that I do like
I ended that pretty ominously, but for real I think the better way is a more light-handed touch
use what’s there as much as you can, tweak small details by your own hands and let the rest change naturally like a butterfly effect, leaving as little a footprint as possible
it’s like how sometimes in order to heal your meat-sack you need surgery, which might involve making new cuts to it, which sounds bad, but if the way those cuts heal and scar over overall causes the health of the body to increase and remove things like rot and poison, it’s done an overall good, especially if it’s good surgery and you manage to do so in the smallest amount of cuts possible
Like those surgery robots who simply go in through holes in the skin and do everything unseen under the surface
Hussie’s left a pretty big important plot hole already, probably better to start from there if anywhere
My immediate thought is what’s the best way of explaining the story of the cursor juju? How it’s created and how it’s meant to be used and etc it’s role in the narrative as a weapon against the final villain
Dang, good read though overall thanks for linking it to me!
I definitely would say though that my gaze isn’t filled with wanting to see more drama and problems pop up, it’s wanting to see the resolutions of past drama, wanting to ease tensions rather than create more, wanting to patch things up rather than create more holes, just simply wanting a satisfying resolution to things I care about
If Homestuck is a piece of art, I’m a small blowtorch welding the delicate bits back onto their proper places so that I can look at the finally finished metal statue with satsifaction
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TAYLOR SWIFT - YOU NEED TO CALM DOWN
[3.65]
The one that's on our mind, 365, all the time...
Will Rivitz: The Singles Jukebox -- Corrections, June 21 2019: The author of this blurb has previously stated that the selection of Meghan Trainor as LA Pride headliner would forever be the nadir of Pride-related programming. The author regrets the error.
[1]
Joshua Copperman: The discourse for "ME!": "What does this mean for Taylor's next era?" The discourse for this lyrical clusterfuck: "What does this mean at all?" It's a much more interesting production, without stock horns and with some nice "Royals"-y vocal layering, but it's the most incoherent thing she's ever released. Is it about stans? Is it about homophobes? Is it a coming out song? Did Taylor throw the first shade at Stonewall? What is HAPPENING?? I'm sorry, I need to calm down.
[3]
Will Adams: Taylor said "Gay Rights!" Kind of! Sort of. Well... it's complicated. Not necessarily because of her status as a cis straight woman, but because the message itself is so damn muddled. Stans and trolls and bigots and music journalists are lumped in the same mass of "haters," and while it's worth noting that this by no means the first anti-haters pop song to exist, the overt political text here results in lots of crossed wires. The song suffers as a result too, throwing half-formed catchphrases at the wall to see what sticks: the chorus is a melodic void (odd considering Taylor's songwriting strength); the "gowns" reference is too subtle to register; the patter results in odd scansion throughout ("like it's PUH-trón"); and "snakes and stones never broke my bones" is no more clever than "don't need opinions from a shellfish or a sheep." Speaking of Katy, also wrapped up in all this is a resolution of a beef that never seemed that important except as something for either party to mine for big single launches. It's all too much, especially for a not-bad track that fizzes just fine on its own. It'd be churlish to ask Taylor to take her own advice; for now all I ask for is coherence.
[4]
Jonathan Bradley: Taylor Swift has always had a talent for deploying sharp and piquant phrases, the sorts of lyrics that tell blunt little stories like animated gifs. It's an opportunity for her to go broad and get funny: "Some indie record that's much cooler than mine," for instance, or "I can make the bad guys good for a weekend," or "I don't love the drama, it loves me." "You Need to Calm Down" is like an entire song built from these lines, and it whirls by like a Twitter thread or an Instagram story. Taylor sass is a lot of fun, and many of these ripostes are satisfyingly catty in their insouciance ("I'm just like, 'hey... are you OK?'" might be the best of these). Swift has shrugged off detractors on "Shake It Off" and "Mean," but she is more single-minded this time, and that focus paradoxically dilutes the intent. Swift's greatest strength as a songwriter is her interiority; she's adept at examining and interpreting her own feelings. But a consequence of that is that she is far less certain when she needs to step outside the bounds of her own head. The worst song she has ever released was a charity single called "Ronan," in which Swift sung in the voice of a mother who had lost her child to cancer; so talented at realizing her personal traumas, she proved incapable of reconstructing her sympathy for that bereavement in her own voice. "Calm Down" has some things to say about homophobia, and in this terrain outside her own experience, Swift's words are not so much unpleasant as awkward and a bit superficial, particularly in their uncertain invocation of "shade" as bigotry. (If stan theorists needed evidence that Swift is indeed as straight as she publicly presents, it's here: a queer Taylor would not have written a second verse as disengaged as that one.) But even diluted, Swift singles are still constructed tight. This one continues finding the pastel inversion of Reputation's skeletal synth sound, and echoes "ME!" with a hook of vowel sounds as palilalia -- "oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh..." this time, rather than "me-hee-hee." It's a tic that works -- in moderation.
[7]
Alex Clifton: (Puts on music critic hat) It's stronger than "ME!" (which isn't hard but worth noting), I'm glad she takes swipes at homophobia but equating that with personal shots is a little bit weird, it's super catchy but the lyrics are still a little lacking, and I still can't remember all the words even though I have the melody memorized. (Takes off music critic hat, puts on bisexual Swiftie stan hat) EVERYTHING IS RAINBOWS AND MY BRAIN WON'T STOP SINGING THIS AND I WOULD MARRY TAYLOR SWIFT, HAPPY PRIDE!!!!!
[5]
Alfred Soto: I'm sure it will sound fine on the radio, especially played beside "Bad Guy" and "Old Town Road." The maximalist intentions behind the Everest-sized synth bass and her rat-tat-tat delivery bespeak a mind that recognizes it's the one needing calm. Except for the "parade" line, I wouldn't have known this alludes to Pride if I hadn't watched the video. I don't feel pandered to as a queer man because, after all, a Pride parade is superficial performativity anyway.
[6]
Katherine St Asaph: Give her this: the stacked-up arpeggio in the chorus is an absolutely brilliant hook, particularly the second time when it goes over the top. The rapid-fire prechorus is pretty good too. But the beat is the same freezer-burned "Paper Planes"/"With Ur Love"/"Send My Love (To Your New Lover)" chill, the accents are so far from the right syllables they've filed a misSING perSONS REport, the conflating of trolls with professional critics with the literal Westboro Baptist Church is bad (as is the weird class shit in the video, as if you can't be anti-gay and present like a Pleasantville star), and all this was done much better on "Mean."
[5]
Katie Gill: In a way, this song is hellishly brilliant. Taylor Swift has provided her standom with a weapon, something that they can wield against any form of criticism. Want to write an article criticizing the fact that Swift seems to put "homophobia" and "me having internet bullies" on the same level, the fact that the video tactlessly paints rural Americana as the enemy of LGBTQ+ people instead of the Mike Pences of the world, or the fact that the second verse leans way too close to the sort of tactlessness that only aggressively woke allies can pull off? Expect a flock of Twitter replies telling you condescendingly that "you need to calm down" and "you're being too loud," as people ignore the half-assed condemnation of standom during the song's third verse in favor of using Swift's lyrics as a cudgel against any perceived haters. For all that Swift is trying to shed the sneaky snake image, traces of it still linger between the lines.
[3]
Edward Okulicz: The people who said "Heartbeats" by The Knife was the future of music were right in 2003, and based on this, have now been right for 16 years and counting. That enormous synth-bass takes a song that should have been awful on paper (ugh, a thematic sequel to "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things," which itself is why we can't have nice things, like good Taylor Swift songs), with the second verse featuring the worst lyrics Swift has ever written, and makes it frisky and playful. The "uh-oh uh-oh UH-OH!" hook is legitimately her best in years. Obsessing about someone is tedious, obsessing about those people is even more tedious, but for once, Swift sounds like she's legitimately above it, even if I don't think she knows what "shade" is. I wanted to hate this for its posturing, but I can't, because of the "uh-oh" bit. But just between you and me, I liked Katy Perry's last single more.
[6]
William John: I'm always happy to hear songs that approximate the "Heartbeats" melody, and the layered vocals here sound lovely, but Dorian Corey didn't keep a mummy in her house for fifteen years for "shade" to be misinterpreted so flagrantly.
[3]
Danilo Bortoli: Is it fair to demand political accountability from artists? The question remains thorny these days, but when Taylor Swift blatantly goes after pink money, the answer is yes, loud and clear. The case made for "You Need To Calm Down" has pulled the identity politics card (as usual, The Onion put it better). That is, Swift's song oversimplifies an ancient struggle for recognition, making up a narrative that isn't Taylor's to call her own. But what is more infuriating is the sugarcoating: the fact that pride should come only from within, and the naive and painful suggestion that a homophobe would go silent after a line as awful as "shade never made anybody less gay". That is to say, when it comes to protest, I prefer it the French way. Which is why all of this begs the question: Would you tell Richard Spencer to "calm down"? No, of course you wouldn't.
[2]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: There are probably 2300 words elsewhere in this post about the politics and rhetoric of Taylor's words here (and I'll get to that), but first I feel obligated to talk about how "You Need To Calm Down" works on a purely musical level. It sounds like ass. It takes the bag of tricks that Swift used on "Ready For It?," the most musically captivating of Reputation's singles, and sands off all of their weird edges. Yes, there's a bass thump to welcome you in, but without the distortion it just sounds like Taylor's doing "Royals"-lite (I mean, Joel Little did produce.) And with the fangs off the verse, the lift to the chorus fails to land. It's all just sound, an undifferentiated, imperial wave of midtempo banger signifier without a real hook. Even Swift's vocals, which have always been her most compelling tool, can't sell the song's vibe -- she's confused not giving a fuck for calm. Of course, it's not entirely clear what "You Need To Calm Down"'s vibe, or point, even is. It's trying to be clever, with its winking references to stale LGBTQ and feminist symbology, but by conflating (or at least juxtaposing) those struggles with the problems that Taylor Swift has as a widely hated famous person, it ends up saying nothing at all. In the end, "You Need To Calm Down" is less a coherent song in itself than a Potemkin village to situate endless thinkpieces in. Make it stop.
[3]
Ashley Bardhan: I know the title is "You Need To Calm Down" but there are no human words that can aptly describe how much I hate this song. Think of a young pigeon cooing as it flies through a fish market, weaving over and through the glistening crates of silver-scaled fish and ice. Oh no! There's a problem with a shipment! The owner angrily tosses a fat fish into the air, and its scales glint as it smacks the pigeon mid-air and onto the ground with the full brunt of its weight. The pigeon sees the fish market, its final flight, behind its closed eyes in a hurried blur. It weakly wheezes its final birdsong, and then... nothing. Yaaas, hunty.
[0]
Iris Xie: 🤷 This is so tired, I can't even be that mad about it. The only question I have, because this song and MV isn't even worth a QTPOC-centered thinkpiece from me is this: when is the Post Malone + Swae Lee + Taylor Swift collaboration happening? This sounds so much like "Sunflower" and is just as deadening. Even the excitement of one of my besties sending me an ~*urgent*~ text message about Katy Perry and Taylor Swift making up over their imaginary feud, once they realized it hurt both of their fanbases, can't even ignite an ounce of care from me. (Bless your heart, my dear friend.) If she really wanted to pander to the gays, she could've just written a sequel to "Look What You Made Me Do" and become a slicker conduit for the less graceful parts about being in queer scenes, which can be about petty, messy drama, rather than being the subject of rage and apathy about being another harbinger of happy happy HAPPY gaypropriation. Like, whatever, she can have her extremely meaningless self-declared ally medal. I've been calm, just give me actual music.
[2]
Isabel Cole: It's like this: A while ago I was catching up with an ex who mentioned he'd recently come back into contact with someone we'd known in high school -- acquaintance of his, frenemy of mine, a few sparkling months of giggling BFF-ship deteriorating across a year I spent defending her while she shit-talked my fashion sense in the girls' room to the local blabbermouth -- and he told me, with an ironic arch of the brow, that when my name had inevitably come up she'd said, "Isabel and I used to be so close; I wonder what happened." Reader, I spent like a week losing my mind, repeating the story and relitigating the history to anyone who would listen while bitterly making fun of her internet presence. Was this because I am petty and emotionally volatile? Yes. But it was also because there is a certain level of willful detachment from reality which I do not have the cognitive capacity to process adequately. Taylor Swift having the gall to tell any human on earth to calm down makes me feel insane the way it makes me feel insane to see someone citing as evidence of their incurable adolescent unpopularity the dorky AIM screenname they picked based on an affectionate joke I made. Taylor Swift saying "take several seats" makes me feel the same combination of spiteful and enraged as reading a line recycled from Livejournal in 2005: please learn like everyone else to disguise the extent to which the human brain is a machine wired to seek validation, the transparency of your desperation is making all of us uncomfortable! God, I wanna snub her in a lunchroom so bad. The song is unappealing in ways that barely merit mentioning -- verses that sound like they were reverse-engineered from a MIDI file of the superior but hardly sublime "Gorgeous," chorus that throws in the plodding piano of roaring bravery -- but even beyond the equivalency it implies between Twitter making fun of her and, like, hate crimes, I find the bridge particularly embarrassing, because of how artlessly it reveals its origin: Taylor Swift literally read a Tumblr post (or, the algorithm we call Taylor Swift processed several hundred Tumblr posts) from 2011 saying "stop pitting female artists against each other [handclap emoji etc.]!!!!!!!!!!!" and thought, Wow! Feminism! As for the possibility that this is another masterful turn from Taylor the troll (or troll!Taylor as there is a distressingly high chance she'd say) and by falling for it I've let her win: (1) Taylor Swift is always already winning, this is exactly what Marx was talking about (2) Let me kick it back to my ex one more time: when I asked what she was like these days, he considered and said: "I thought she'd developed self-awareness, but then I realized it was just self-identification." Yeah.
[1]
Scott Mildenhall: You know sometimes, when you read the annotations on genius.com, how their deductions and inferences appear to have been made by algorithm? For instance, the notion that this being released on that loud American guy's birthday "seems to support the theory" that one line is about him? This is what would happen if that algorithm was tasked with writing a satirical song.
[5]
Stephen Eisermann: My take? This is more lazy allyship than commercialization of pride. Plus, it's kind of a bop. Sucks, then, that Taylor completely misunderstands what shade is -- but did we really expect any better?
[6]
[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]
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so a bunch of people are talking about how the national library, the azhar library, and a cultural center in palestine has been destroyed, and worse, it was deliberately targeted for destruction by israel, and if you cared about the notre dame but not this then youre a piece of shit white supremacist etc etc
....okay.
first of all, i cannot find a single reliable source that the library has been destroyed. i found a tweet from the 6th, but no news articles. and google, as helpful as ever in aiding genocide, really wants me to read what israellycool has to say on the matter, as no matter how many different search terms i use, that shitty blog is either the first or one of the first results. no i will not link it, go find it for yourself if youre that curious, but im sure if you tried to fact check this at all you already saw that childish fascist screed already.
secondly, imperialists have always targeted centers of learning and information storage. massively important cultural artifacts for all of humanity were lost during the iraq war, and they were not ‘lost’ so much as the US deliberately rounded up librarians and intellectuals and murdered them and then bombed museums and libraries, a MASSIVE geneva convention violation. i remember hearing about that growing up just a few miles outside of NYC in a NJ suburb and i remember losing all sympathy for american soldiers who got themselves blown up in a war that was more about forcing a people to submit to US will than anything else. (yes, including oil.)
what is the point of all this?
i had very complicated feelings abt the notre dame fire, mostly because i hate france, i hate europeans, and i hate white people, but notre dame was not built using colonial money, and the very original building was connected to an antisemitic pogram but it had already happened hundreds of years before the present day notre dame construction. i saw some spicy takes like ‘well even if the notre dame wasnt funded by colonialism, everything in europe before the slave trade was made from jewish capital!’ which was like, oh, so we’re all medieval scholars now? bc thats not even a little bit goddamn true.
and even if it were, there is something that truly angers me about all of these hot takes. because theyre not only false, but they look for some ‘us vs them’ justification for why we deserve to be free. no, mon frère, we deserve liberation simply because we do. it has nothing to do with inherent goodness.
the reason we dont like europe is because imperialism is objectively exploitative of the most vulnerable and marginalized. trying to look for this primordial evil in europe and a primordial good in other populations completely defeats the purpose of examining things through an anticolonial (or marxist) lens. we do not deserve liberation because we are Good, but because, as marx said, systems of oppression are not sustainable in the long term. you cannot fuck over billions of people forever. they will eventually demand something better than what we have. it doesnt mean each and every one of us is a good person, because what is good is highly relative, and denying or granting liberation based on goodness or good deeds is something a religion does, and liberation ideologies are not religions but means to an end.
i dont know if those libraries were destroyed recently. and if they werent, i dont know why people would lie about that. israels relentless campaign of terror over the past few weeks should be enough of a call to action, rather than some weak ‘a building was destroyed in a place no one cares about’ nonsense. i care about palestine because they are all my comrades in arms. they are my comrades, oppressed by the same system of oppression that oppresses millions of brazilians. those systems look different everywhere in order to adapt to the situation, of course, but they are the same, and thus, our struggle is the same. even if the palestinians had no history, had no libraries, had no culture, i would always be on their side because they are my comrades. we are one and the same, together, against imperialism and apartheid.
likewise, making a call to action, appealing to zionists who wept over the notre dame but not this important palestinian cultural landmark....listen. it is not the building itself. it never was. white supremacists latched onto the notre dame fire as a symbol of western civilization being taken over by THE OTHER (which i am very much a fucking part of!) and trying to get them to care about a building theyve never heard of that does not make up the western canon of Important Things is absolutely useless. theyll say ‘well hamas bombs palestinians’ and act like that was the most devastating proof against seeing palestinians are real people who deserve to live outside of an open air prison. is it true? who fucking cares. every palestinian could be a member of hamas, they could all be bomb making experts and love bombs and be really into just bombing everything including their own homes, and they would still deserve to live outside of israels apartheid regime. but you cant explain this to someone who is determined to view you as a Thing. you cannot.
i cried when the notre dame burned. by the logic of a lot of idiots on this site, i must be a white supremacist. sure, whatever. its extremely not true so you can say whatever you want. but the issue is that galvanizing others into action using buildings is never going to work. because it is and isnt about the buildings. i extremely dont care about white french people because like, why do i have to care about them. but i care deeply about palestinians and my solidarity will always lie with them, whether or not they have nice cultural things that i like. it doesnt really matter if i like palestinian culture and hate french culture. thats not the point. one gets to thrive because of the bounties imperialism has given it, while the other rots on the vine as a direct result of imperialism. i care about that. and we can go into what it means to care and if caring as an individual (esp a colonized individual) matters very much at all in terms of political action but like.....this narrative of ‘you have to care only about the third world’ is funny to me because you guys just dont. you dont do it. youre very eager to use us when convenient, but you dont really. so ultimately, what does that mean? nothing i guess.
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