#& like as always that’s not to say you can’t or shouldn’t criticize mainstream popular culture like. of course.

[rivetgoth]

Any time I see someone be like All music is bad now it’s all about tiktok trends spotify radio billboard charts pitchfork RYM it’s all soulless and homogeneous and tame subculture is dead genre is dead I’m just like . This is quite literally a skill issue. You’re just admitting that you don’t know how or are not trying to find anything more obscure than the stuff that’s trending or being algorithmically handed to you. You understand that right. Like there is music out there beyond what 17 y/os on tiktok are recording themselves dancing to in cosplay or what youtube reviewers are making videos about. Subculture exists in the real world in underground more-often-than-not predominantly marginalized communities that are thriving outside of the realm of what’s trending on social media or what’s being sold by fast fashion retail stores. Oftentimes because the hot spots of genuinely boundary pushing underground subculture are literally illegal. You not knowing it exists doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You know this. right.

[qqueenofhades]

Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don’t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

[archinamorata-blog]

Skinny Privilege and Intersectionality

TW: Dysphoria, Eating Disorders

Scale of Impact To the phrase, “skinny-shaming is exactly the same as fat-shaming”, I say, “not quite”. To be frank, I’m not going to tell people how to feel. Certainly, on an individual basis, skinny-shaming can be incredibly damaging and lead to dysphoria. However, the difference between the two prejudices is found in scale and systematic reinforcement. Fat-shaming has it, skinny-shaming doesn’t. Society at large still says that thinner is better and thinner is happier. It can trap the “haves” into feeling underwhelmed and the “have-nots” into an inferiority complex (not always -it can be rejected -but frequently enough). The prevalence of size-related eating disorders says enough, all whilst pro-anamia blogs remain rife.

“But curves are in!”

In this time of influencer culture, the women on social media who seem to profit the most from having curves are still quite slim. No, it’s no longer the mainstream cool to be completely flat and “nineties skinny”, but that older beauty standard has not gone, it has been moulded. Science must be passed down by those with power and so the definition of “health” is controllable. This new healthy image is now exclusive to being smaller as well as with curves. It mixes the familiar with the new and so this change has been easier for people to adjust to and aspire towards. I can’t help but observe that the dawn of this new standard occurred at the same time the authenticity of black culture (that has always celebrated larger, curved bodies) became more aggressively appropriated - but more on that later. The easiest way to spot skinny privilege is to look at where the money is. Haute couture models: all still one body type. The Plus Size movement: doing wonders socially (the impact of role models like Ashley Graham, Lizzo, Oyama Botha etc.), but still far less lucrative. I find that their runway shows are still seen as “for the greater good” politics and this undermines the fact that they are naturally very beautiful. Upon sight, the stage design is generally *snob voice* not as extremely elegant because of the smaller budget. If elite models were to personally, outwardly, and more widely support plus size campaigns and individuals, it’s capital would spike, its image would improve, plus size desirability would become more mainstream and less fetishised, elite runways may eventually become more mixed, and skinny rule would dwindle. As thin women, that is their power and that is their privilege.

Chat Shit, Get Surgery

Skinniness is a widespread mentality that, without self-education, we are all complicit in. Its main driving force is its profitability for those already possessing power. Being a healthy-minded skinny woman protects a person from feeling personally targeted by falsely marketed health teas, diets that promise the ‘beach body’ result (I think you can guess what I think about the term). These products are a hint towards the falsehood of neoliberal happiness and corporations benefit from this standard having been so deeply entrenched in people’s minds.

A key example of this involves the recent LulaRoe pyramid scheme lawsuits. LulaRoe is a business model that allows American suburban women to provide their own income by selling clothes online as ‘consultants’. Consultants at the top of the scheme (called ‘Mentors’) are earning up to $30,000 per month. The company primarily earns money, not by customer sales, but by hiring more and more recruits who need to buy $5000-$9000 clothes packages just to start selling. To be honest, the clothes are average at best. So what entices these new recruits? Image. The high earners use their salary to live a lavish lifestyle and post on social media. One of the biggest attractions comes from a group chat called the Tijuana Skinnies. Members are flown out to Mexico to undergo gastric band surgery and come back looking ‘slim and beautiful’. One Mentor tried out a temporary gastric band in America, almost died, and was still encouraged to go through with the real thing in Tijuana. It’s believed that the company directors push this because the surgery they fly the women to gives them commissions for referrals. This is a multi-billion dollar company that profits most from its image. And it’s a skinny one. Obviously, on the flip side a person can just reject fat-shaming and not pay any mind to it. But with messages everywhere that tell you not to, it is not as easy.

“The obesity epidemic shouldn’t be supported and you’re just letting people give themselves excuses.”

I find it quite funny, Susan, how the health and welfare of larger people seems to only be cared about when arguing against the idea that they should even have body confidence in the first place. Comme, do you empathise or not? Body health can’t exist without mental health. To say otherwise is to advocate for dissociation and correct me if otherwise, but that doesn’t sound very caring. The above argument works on the assumption that all those who could possibly be targets of subjective fat-shaming (i.e. everyone who is not obviously skinny)  are obese. This is false equivalence as the number of people in each group is vastly different. It reinforces the idea that slim is the only moral way to exist and that all weight gain is unhealthy. This mentality is what stops people from appreciating themselves and intensifies self-rejection. As a result, a person is less likely to take responsibility and act towards improving their health if they don’t know or even want what’s best for their body in the first place. Working hard and not allowing any feelings of self-worth in the process just sounds like burnout to me - but I’m no expert on this type of experience so any and all opinions are welcome.

Intersectionality

The intersectional aspect of skinny privilege is clearer when you consider how particular groups are viewed, including plus size men, women of colour, disabled people and so forth. The topic I’m most qualified to speak on concerns women of colour.

The ‘angry black girl’ narrative falls more heavily on darker-skinned (the treatment of Michelle Obama, Joanna from The Apprentice, Alexandra Burke, Leslie Simpson, it goes on) and plus size women. Within colourism, privilege exists because Eurocentrism is idealised. White femininity is the set of traditional standards set within that demographic and being skinny is one of them. So, indirectly (heavy emphasis on that one), being skinny may help a person be subconsciously seen as more ‘Eurocentric’ and have an increased likelihood of being heard.

“Privilege is an absence.” - Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

One of the most lucrative exports of the black community is its music. Here, female skinny privilege is harder to spot. If we’re talking uber-popular music, I would say the most successful women in the game are currently Beyoncé, Rihanna, Cardi B and Nicki Minaj.* Indeed, none are that skinny. However, when women are larger, they are made to reach higher standards in order to get the same level of respect as skinny women. I’ve observed that only hourglass/pear plus size figures are universally accepted. You must have a conventionally pretty face. Don’t be loud if you’re not light-skinned, a trait all four of these artists have. As mentioned, this absence of dark skin (and often coupled with straighter hair/wigs) puts them closer to oh so pleasant, placid, harmless Eurocentricity. They can be firm, self-assured, loud and carelessly sensual whilst getting less criticism than dark-skinned women. They have bodies that conform to the standards of both colourism within the black community and Reni Eddo-Lodge’s definition of Whiteness. They are an intersection of preferences within the two mentalities and profit from it. This privilege allows their black identity to remain authentic and something different that non-black people will speculate on, listen to, and enjoy. $$$. Even so, when Nicki Minaj and Cardi B praise fuller figures, it’s often in comparison to skinny women (I remember the amusingly whiny uproar after Nicki’s “Fuck the skinny bitches” line in Anaconda). Even in this community, it’s as if plus size beauty cannot exist alone. It’s often within the context of skinniness and rarely receives full attention outside of being fetishised. Skinny is seen as the obviously beautiful standard that everything else revolves around.

“What can be done?”

I’ll keep it short:

Continue to increase representation in advertisements, television and especially runways.

Reduce demand for unhealthy weight loss products through educating yourself and others and not buying them.

Vocally support plus size movement individuals and encourage equally paid photo shoot and runway contracts. This includes everyone, but especially celebrities with large platforms.

Charity starts at home, so analyse your own body artistically. Temporarily ignore beauty standards whilst doing this and make your own judgements on its different organic shapes. If you can like unconventional shapes in art, why not something as complex as yourself?

[xeno-aligned]

copy & pasted under the read more in order to have a local copy.

A Brief His and Herstory of Butch And Femme

BY: JEM ZERO 16 DEC 2017

When America’s LGBTQ+ folk started coming out of the closet in the 1950s, the underground scene was dominated by working class people who had less to lose if they were outed. Butch/femme presentation arose as a way for lesbians to identify each other, also serving as a security measure when undercover cops tried to infiltrate the local scenes. Butch women exhibited dapper and dandy aesthetics, and came to be known for being aggressive because they took protective roles during raids and other examples of homophobic violence. The image of the butch lesbian became a negative stereotypes for lesbians as a whole, leaving out femme lesbians, who are (pretty insultingly) considered undetectable as lesbians due to their feminine presentation.

In modern times there’s less need for strict adherence to these roles; instead, they become heritage. A great deal of political rebellion is wrapped up in each individual aesthetic. Butch obviously involves rejecting classically feminine gender expectations, while femme fights against their derogatory connotations.

But while butch/femme has been a part of lesbian culture, these terms and identities are not exclusive to queer women. Many others in the LGBTQ community utilize these signifiers for themselves, including “butch queen” or “femme daddy.” Butch and femme have different meanings within queer subcultures, and it’s important to understand the reasons they were created and established.

The Etymology

The term “lesbian” derives from the island on which Sappho lived—if you didn’t already guess, she was a poet who wrote extensively about lady-lovin’. Before Lesbos lent its name to lesbians, the 1880s described attraction between women as Sapphism. In 1925, “lesbian” was officially recorded as the word for a female sodomite. (Ick.) Ten years before that, “bisexual” was defined as "attraction to both sexes."

In upcoming decades, Sapphic women would start tearing down the shrouds that obscured the lives of queer women for much of recorded history. Come the ‘40s and ‘50s, butch and femme were coined, putting names to the visual and behavioral expression that could be seen in pictures as early as 1903. So, yeah—Western Sapphic women popularized these terms, but the conversation doesn’t end there, nor did it start there.

Before femme emerged as its own entity, multiple etymological predecessors were used to describe gender nonconforming people. Femminiello was a non-derogatory Italian term that referred to a feminine person who was assigned male—this could be a trans woman, an effeminate gay man, or the general queering of binarist norms. En femme derives from French, and was used to describe cross-dressers.

Butch, first used in 1902 to mean "tough youth," has less recorded history. Considering how “fem” derivatives were popularized for assigned male folks, one might attribute this inequality to the holes in history where gender-defying assigned female folks ought to be.

The first time these concepts were used to specifically indicate women was the emergence of Sapphic visibility in twentieth century. This is the ground upon which Lesbian Exclusivism builds its tower, and the historical and scientific erasure of bisexual women is where it crumbles. Seriously, did we forget that was a thing?

The assumption that any woman who defies gender norms is automatically a lesbian relies on the perpetuation of misogynist, patriarchal stereotypes against bisexual women. A bisexual woman is just as likely to suffer in a marriage with a man, or else be mocked as an unlovable spinster. A woman who might potentially enjoy a man is not precluded from nonconformist gender expression. Many famous gender nonconforming women were bisexual—La Maupin (Julie d'Aubigny), for example.

Most records describing sexual and romantic attraction between women were written by men, and uphold male biases. What happens, then, when a woman is not as openly lascivious as the ones too undeniably bisexual to silence? Historically, if text or art depicts something the dominant culture at the time disagrees with, the evidence is destroyed. Without voices of the Sapphists themselves, it’s impossible to definitively draw a line between lesbians and bisexuals within Sapphic history.

Beyond White Identities

Another massive hole in the Lesbian Exclusivist’s defenses lies in the creeping plague that is the Mainstream White Gay; it lurks insidiously, hauling along the mangled tatters of culture that was stolen from Queer and Trans People of Colour (QTPOC). In many documents, examples provided of Sapphic intimacy are almost always offered from the perspective of white cis women, leaving huge gaps where women of color, whether trans or cis, and nonbinary people were concerned. This is the case despite the fact that some of the themes we still celebrate as integral to queer culture were developed by Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ folk during the Harlem Renaissance, which spanned approximately from 1920 to 1935.

A question I can’t help but ask is: Where do queer Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color fit into the primarily white butch/femme narrative? Does it mean anything that the crackdown on Black queer folk seemed to coincide with the time period when mainstream lesbianism adopted butch and femme as identifiers?

Similar concepts to butch/femme exist throughout the modern Sapphic scene. Black women often identify as WLW (Women-Loving-Women), and use terms like “stud” and “aggressive femme.” Some Asian queer women use “tomboy” instead of butch. Derivatives and subcategories abound, sometimes intersecting with asexual and trans identities. “Stone butch” for dominant lesbians who don’t want to receive sexual stimulation; “hard femme” as a gender-inclusive, fat-positive, QTPOC-dominated political aesthetic; “futch” for the in-betweenies who embody both butch and femme vibes. These all center women and nonbinary Sapphics, but there’s still more.

Paris is Burning, a documentary filmed about New York City ball culture in the 1980s, describes butch queens among the colourful range of identities prevalent in that haven of QTPOC queerness. Despite having a traditionally masculine physique, the gay male butch queen did not stick to gender expectations from straight society or gay culture. Instead, he expertly twisted up his manly features with women’s clothing and accessories, creating a persona that was neither explicitly masculine nor feminine.

Butch Queens Up in Pumps, a book by Marlon M. Bailey, expounds upon their presence within inner city Detroit’s Ballroom scene, its cover featuring a muscular gay man in a business casual shirt paired with high heels. Despite this nuance, butch remains statically defined as a masculine queer woman, leaving men of color out of the conversation.

For many QTPOC, especially those who transcend binary gender roles, embracing the spirit of butch and femme is inextricable with their racial identity. Many dark-skinned people are negatively portrayed as aggressive and hypermasculine, which makes it critical to celebrate the radical softness that can accompany femme expressions. Similarly, the intrinsic queerness of butch allows some nonbinary people to embrace the values and aesthetics that make them feel empowered without identifying themselves as men.

Butch, Femme, and Gender

It’s pretty clear to me that the voices leading the Lesbian Exclusive argument consistently fail to account for where butch and femme have always, in some form, represented diverse gender expression for all identities.

‘Butch’ and ‘femme’ began to die out in the 1970s when Second Wave Feminism and Lesbian Separatism came together to form a beautiful baby, whom they named “Gender Is Dead.” White, middle class cis women wrestled working class QTWOC out of the limelight, claiming that masculine gender expression was a perversion of lesbian identity. The assassination attempt was largely unsuccessful, however: use of these identifiers surged back to life in the ‘80s and ‘90s, now popularized outside of class and race barriers.

Looking at all this put together, I have to say that it’s a mystery to me why so many lesbians, primarily white, believe that their history should take precedence over… everyone else that makes up the spectrum of LGBTQ+ experiences, even bi/pan Sapphics in same-gender relationships. If someone truly believes that owning butch/femme is more important than uniting and protecting all members of the Sapphic community from the horrors of homophobic and gendered oppression, maybe they’re the one who shouldn’t be invited to the party.

As a nonbinary lesbian, I have experienced my share of time on the flogging-block. I empathize strongly with the queer folks being told that these cherished identities are not theirs to claim. Faced with this brutal, unnecessary battle, I value unity above all else. There’s no reason for poor trans women, nonbinary Black femmes, bisexual Asian toms, gay Latino drag queens, or any other marginalized and hurting person to be left out of the dialogue that is butch and femme, with all its wonderful deconstructions of mainstream heteronormative culture.

It is my Christmas wish that the Lesbian Exclusivist Tower is torn down before we open the new chapter in history that is 2018. Out of everything the LGBTQ+ community has to worry about already, petty infighting shouldn’t be entertained—especially when its historical foundation is so flimsy. Queering gender norms has always been the heart of butch/femme expression, and that belongs to all of us.

[leonthesemiprofessional-blog]

Leave Wes Anderson out of your woke conversations

With a smorgasbord of (very well-crafted) politically-rich films in the mainstream right now it can be easy to assume that every “masterpiece” that comes across our screens was made to appease our socially curious minds.

With the weighty addition of the #metoo movement, you could argue that it’s the duty of the filmmaker to give us a set of strong morals we can berate everyone we meet with. Because of this expectation, movies are under an unforgiving lens right now and Wes Anderson’s latest piece, Isle of Dogs, is no exception.

In his ninth feature and his second stop-motion film, Isle of Dogs follows an alpha pack of dogs try and survive a Japanese doggy dystopia, purpose-built for them by an oppressive Kobayashi regime. Their goals are recalibrated slightly from survival to rescue when a young boy, Atari, comes to their home, Trash Island, to look for his lost dog. The team lead by their new master undergoes a Great Escape-style caper.

Pretty standard Wes Anderson film right? The critics would agree so too. Only a lot of people are unhappy, even furious, with how the director has handled Japanese culture.

There are no two ways about it, this film is heavily appropriated. It cements very old, westernised ideas about Japan: playing heavily on the mispronunciation of words, Samurai ideas and culture bookending the film, skirmishes and explosions in atomic bomb-style mushroom clouds, sushi, the Yakuza are the bad guys… the list goes on.

Behind the camera, there were many native Japanese hands involved, as Kunichi Nomura namely helped develop the story and voiced Mayor Kobayashi, the authoritarian ruler of the make-believe Megasaki City. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, this cultural tourism could have turned out to be actual racism. Critics and people like myself would argue Anderson should have known better, even if the seeds were sown for this film in 2007, well before this ‘woke epidemic’.

The insensitivity to race issues is even made worse with - one of my favourite problems - white saviour complex, with added sprinkles of misogyny. Although our hero this time is Tracy Walker (voiced by Greta Gerwig) a young exchange student from America, who just happens to be in the area to help overthrow an oppressive regime, our diversion from the unexpected is steered right back onto the heteronormative track with Tracy winding up with a crush on our male protagonist, Atari (yes like the console by the way). In case that wasn’t enough to embed into children the idea that women can’t do anything without a man by their side, the relationships between the doggos of the film follow a similar formula.

On top of this, the ensemble cast comes together to form a kind of whitewashing avengers, who have, interestingly, all been criticised for starring in films that are insensitive to aspects of East and South Asian culture. Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange, Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in a Shell and Lost in Translation with Bill Murray, and Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit.

To simplify things, let’s umbrella all the problems with this film and concluded that Anderson made Isle of Dogs for a white, working to middle class, straight audience, who probably haven’t been to Japan or know much about it outside of what they learned from school or popular culture - viewing the film with a “white gaze”. A rather outlandish -some would argue accurate- claim to make against a director who has done nothing the audience, now more socially conscious, deem too unjust, right? To only talk about Isle of Dogs this way is not fair on Wes Anderson.

“This is his love letter to Japan though” you might say. “How will we understand different cultures if we don’t even get to show them on screen and talk about them? Besides it’s not even real, none of Anderson’s films really adhere to reality”, “P.C. gone mad” blah blah. Wes even said the story “could happen anywhere” and he and his team (Japanese natives included) made it because of “a shared love of Japanese cinema.” Herein lies the problem: Anderson’s use of the white gaze has gone unchecked for a long time. As a white filmmaker, he has benefited from structural racism and current gender dynamics well before Isle of Dogs.

From Moonrise Kingdom to Bottle Rocket to the marvellous Grand Budapest Hotel, we follow the same white characters play out the same heist-like escapades, playing off of trends and stereotypes the white gaze has seen and consolidated time and time again. Under all the pretty pastels and fully utilised thirds, there are a lot of people (filmmakers like Anderson and audiences in general) patting themselves on the back for believing they have interpreted and appreciated a culture - say Japanese culture - extensively and not in bad taste. We’ve known for a while that a lot of Hollywood films only highlight how the majority of Westerners view the world around them. Some people are only now coming to realise this is not always the right thing to do, and even fewer are willing to elicit change. I fear Anderson falls into the latter category.

The fact that Anderson can now pretty much hand-select a cast for a film means he has access to the best Hollywood has to offer, who tend to be stars we adore for their humanity as well as their ability. I wholeheartedly believe no one in the making of this film is racist or meant wrong by anything they did but it can’t be ignored that with the release of Isle of Dogs, it’s become clear that Anderson doesn’t want to use his position to incite any meaningful social development in the film industry. He doesn’t have to or have to want to, however, it is disappointing to know that someone we consider so effective at storytelling is choosing to tune out the calls for change. We’ll have to look for our innovative films elsewhere.

As Reni Eddo-Lodge might put it: Wes Anderson is one white person you shouldn’t talk to about race or anything else woke for that matter.

[wobc-fm]

IS WEEZER A GOOD BAND? An Investigation

words by emma davey 

It was 2006, and it was theater camp. I was ten years old, petite and frizzy haired, with uncool red glasses. A few other campers and I were casually singing along to a hit song of the mid 2000s, “Beverly Hills”

“Ugh” my new friend Sky complained.

Sky intimidated me because she was beautiful and a full year older than me, and she carried herself like she knew that. I wanted Sky to like me, and if that required me to adopt an edgier persona, so be it.

“It sucks that everyone only knows Weezer from ‘Beverly Hills.’ Early Weezer is so good,” she lamented in the direction of our teachers.

“Ha-ha, yeah, those fake fans, am I right?” I tried covering up my lack of knowledge.

Little did I know, one day I would become Sky. And once again, summer camp had something to do with it. A couple years later, I was still awkward looking and frizzy haired, though I had long ditched the glasses. I had few friends, which occasionally made the hour-long free period a solitary experience. I’d sometimes wander around the camp in the scorching Texas sun, as a counselor controlled the playlist being blasted around camp. One day, they played “Buddy Holly” and I nearly lost my mind, I thought it was so good.

“Ah,” I thought to myself ���This was what Sky was talking about”

I love Weezer. Four different Weezer songs are in my iTunes top 25 most played, TWO OF WHICH are from the last couple years. I spent a good chunk of 2011 listening to Pinkerton and crying, which is not radically different from how I spent my 2017. My love for that album is so deep that I OWN and REGULARLY WEAR a Pinkerton t-shirt. The “Buddy Holly” music video is constantly in my YouTube recommended section because I watch it so often.

But I’ve always grappled with a question - is Weezer one of my favorite bands? They’ve certainly made some of my favorite songs. But is it enough to have listened religiously to their first two albums while kind of ignoring the rest of their discography? Ignore is maybe too strong a word, but I share a sentiment with many fans that the Blue Album and Pinkerton are masterpieces, and the rest of their albums range in quality from really good to mediocre to just plain bad. Let’s get something out of the way - the Weezer of the 90s is gone, and they’re not coming back. I feel silly to complain about a Weezer that I am too young to remember firsthand (or just straight up was not alive for), but I think this is something that the collective Weezer fandom needs to grapple with. I mean, the highest compliment you can give to a modern day Weezer song is that it sounds like something they made in the 90s. We’ve never praised Weezer for their sonic innovation. Granted, Weezer is generally apt to stick to their classic sound, with the occasionally reworking as popular music dictates. Even when Weezer is bad, they still, for the most part, sound like Weezer. Which is to say they sound like the Beach Boys learned guitar by listening to heavy metal, with a little bit of Pavement thrown in. Even when Weezer is bad, they’re rarely offensively so.

This leads me to another question – is Weezer one of the greats? When we consider great bands, we usually give that distinction to bands that have consistently released good material. Usually, that material changes the course of music history, or at least influences the music that comes after it. Weezer certainly inspired many a dorky 15-year-old to pick up a guitar in 1994. That’s undisputed. But is that enough? Does the amount of bad music they’ve released outweigh the good music they’ve released? In the case of Weezer, this proves especially difficult, as there hasn’t been a solid critical consensus on what is a good or bad album in the post-Pinkerton era. For example, Make Believe, which is home to the aforementioned “Beverly Hills,” received a range of ratings upon its release in 2005, from Pitchfork’s 0.4/10 to Rolling Stone’s 4/5. It’s hard to call a band great if they don’t even receive a full number. And speaking of codifying greatness, next year Weezer will be eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Is that something they should be deemed worthy of? Even though designations like awards and induction ceremonies certainly can be seen as empty signifiers, they do point to a larger, cultural consensus. The Hall of Fame’s first inductees include Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley. These are artists whose presence there remains uncontested. My personal hot take is that if Green Day can get in, the invitation is open for everyone, but I’ll save that diatribe for another day.

Weezer’s latest release, Pacific Daydream, certainly shouldn’t inspire the Hall of Fame to extend an invitation. Now don’t get me wrong – I was of the opinion that Weezer as of late had been releasing some really solid material. In 2014, Weezer released Everything Will Be Alright in the End, full of the hooky melodies and quirky lyrics that first catapulted them to fame. This album came after a three-year hiatus, presumably prompted by a string of three underwhelming albums (The Red Album, Raditude, and Hurley). It was clear that Weezer had spent those years regrouping and refocusing. “Back to the Shack,” the first single off the album, was a welcome return to their power-pop roots, featuring self-deprecating lyrics like: “Sorry guys, I didn't realize that I needed you so much/
I thought I'd get a new audience, I forgot that disco sucks.” To me, this signaled a new era of Weezer, one seeking to be absolved of their musical sins. They followed up with 2016’s solid The White Album, and the fact that they could release two great albums back to back kind of astounded me. I felt pretty confident that Weezer was back on track, and I was excited to hear what else they had in store. Then in 2017, Pacific Daydream came out, and I was reminded of the emotional rollercoaster that is being a Weezer fan. After a few years of some really great material, Pacific Daydream rings especially hollow to me as Weezer decided to affirmatively ditch their return to their roots and instead, take on a more mainstream, pop heavy sound. Had they not learned their lesson? Had they not understood what it was about them that we all loved? Weezer is at their worst when they’re pandering to a generic rock radio audience, or especially, to generic millennial music trends, which is exactly what Pacific Daydreams is all about. The first single, “Feels Like Summer,” was released seven months before the rest of the album, so I was worried about the new album from the start. If you told me it was written to be performed by The Chainsmokers, I’d believe you. And I only have a very loose grip on who the Chainsmokers are. Look, I don’t want to put Weezer in a box and not allow them to experiment. But the rousing chorus and glossy production value on this song, emblematic of the rest of the album, don’t sound like a band trying to innovate, but rather, a band trying to pander. You’d think a song called “Beach Boys” might feature elements that made both the Beach Boys and Weezer beloved bands, but it just feels like an empty name check instead of an actual homage. As with every other objectively bad Weezer album, it’s not a complete wash though. I found “QB Blitz” to be a more mellow, wistful affair, coupled with some classic Weezer melodrama (“I’ll be missing you like oxygen.”) However, those flashes of inspiration are few and far between.

So I’ve ended up deciding once and for all, despite such an uneven discography, Weezer is definitely one of my favorite bands. But can they be considered one of the greats?

I thought of other bands that I’d consider my favorite - the Strokes, Nirvana, the Velvet Underground, the Smiths. All of these bands only had a few albums, as if they knew when to call it quits, aside from the obvious tragedy of Nirvana’s demise. Can any band be so great for so long? The Beatles were together for barely a decade. Had they gone much longer, would they have eventually started to put out crap? (I will fight you if you mention “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”). Save for a couple of short hiatuses, Weezer has been together for over 25 years. That’s a quarter of a century. Creative genius probably can’t be sustained for a quarter of a century.

And then I thought about the Beach Boys, whose influence you can trace directly to Weezer. They were together for a gazillion years and produced an incredibly diverse array of material. You’ve heard all their surfing and car songs, but have you heard Smiley Smile? Can we talk about how weird and great that album is? It’s not for everyone, though. And there are probably some hardcore Beach Boys fans who think it’s drug-induced crap, much like how I think Weezer’s “We Are All on Drugs” is indeed, drug-induced crap. Like Weezer, the Beach Boys were not always critically adored or enjoyed by their own fans. The Beach Boys made “Kokomo” for God’s sake. But the Beach Boys also made Pet Sounds and the greatness of Pet Sounds far offsets the mediocrity of “Kokomo.”

Weezer might have their fair share of “Kokomo”s, maybe more than a great rock band should. But they also have their Pet Sounds, and they got those right out of the gate. Maybe that’s enough.

[eunych-born-eunych]

tell us more about witchcraft tumblr

oh boy. follow @alkaloidwitch​ for my unironic witchcraft opinions. I’m a witch! and a materialist with a background in empiricism/scientism, also a materialist in the marxist dialectical sense! you can be all of those things at the cost of your popularity among idealist witches, non-witch materialists, and most of all:

Normies.

my materialism and my witchcraft both grow out of madness; human beings are computers complex enough to perceive things that are not real. For things I know to be real, there is materialism; for things I know to be chimerical, there is witchcraft. as the chaos magicians, wankers that they are, put it: belief is a tool. believing something now may serve a purpose, even if you do not intend to continue believing it later. Playing make-believe with my literal demons now will help me try to make sense of the material world better later.

And it is imaginative play, much as it is deadly serious; much of what we do in life is imaginative play of some kind. let’s pretend there’s a thing called money and let’s pretend it belongs to this specific kind of paper, these specific bits of metal. let’s pretend a corporation is a person. let’s pretend sex is simple; no, let’s pretend sex and gender are different; no, let’s pretend to stop believing in gender and start pretending to believe in ungendered sex.

materialism, again, is the resolution. imaginative play doesn’t have to be bad, but things that are only imaginary play by certain rules; we learn them as children. so when your imaginative play, witchcraft, seeps into your view of the world (as it must), other people calling themselves witches are sometimes going to believe or imagine mutually-contradicting things; the politest way to resolve an imaginary conflict is to come up with some imaginary solution, the more minimal the possible, and stop talking about that because it’s gonna harsh yr witchcraft to get snippy.

entirely different things happen when people come, materially, into conflict. and witch tumblr frustrates me a lot because my tacit acknowledgement that

“none of this is real like rocks are real, so when your imaginary collides with the material world, the material world is always going to trump. if it is materially bad, I don’t care that your imaginary justifies it, and if it is entirely immaterial there’s no point arguing about it”

…is not super popular with tumblr witches. there’s lots of, like, arguments and discourse and positivity posts about the wildest shit.

a three-screens-of-scroll witch tumblr textpost: positivity post for lazy witches! uwu // • positivity for lazy witches who [emoji-capped bullet points all the way down]me: it’s so inspiring that lazy witches can be positive despite the incredible scrutiny and terrible hardships the morning people witches subject them to, ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌟

so, like, I don’t have the same reaction to the idea of demon apologia that OP did. thinking highly of demons just isn’t that uncommon in my circles. to me, that post’s fucking ridiculous because why would you ever bother making it? if you wanna work with demons, do it, but like… other people don’t like demons, and make their own witchblr posts from that perspective, and you can resolve that conflict by just ignoring the imaginary content that is not meant for you.

a clarifying example is in order.

‘don’t use sigils you find on the internet, anyone can upload a curse and say it’s a different spell!!’

my guy. that is so far from being anybody’s real, substantive problem. you would never know unless they told you. their imaginary isn’t accessible to you and you can ignore it. if someone tells you they made a sigil you used to be a curse, and you feel like you have indeed been cursed, that’s still an event internal to you. and after all, someone could lie and tell you their beneficial sigil was actually a curse after you’ve already used it, just to fuck with you.

I can’t get this level of panicked about that level of made-up problem! if the idea of curses hidden in graphics created by random Internet denizens appealed to me, I’d engage with it on my own and not waste time trying to convince other people they should care about my niche paranoia.

the thing is, cultural appropriation is way less imaginary than witchcraft. there’s a real, economic impact to the mass-production in the West of symbols indigenous to ‘exotic’ colonies. there is a real dehumanization involved in treating someone’s proudest and most mundane garments, alike, as being a gaudy costume purchasable cheaply from any two-bit metaphysical store.

(privilege claim for the next bit: I’m a white, American settler-colonialist. that’s a me. I’m a that.)

and on the subject of metaphysical stores…

… run by white settler-colonialists who claim to have spirit animals and have no sense that there might be something inappropriate about shopping for toys in the cultures and religious practices of living indigenous populations whose homeland we are still occupying by force, whose access to their own cultural history we are still actively sabotaging, to sell bastardized sweatshop lookalikes whose significance is less than half-remembered and wholly stripped of context to other white settler-colonialists

there’s endless newb questions in this form:

Q: “can I use this color candle to mean this thing?”A: “I don’t care?”[a reblog insisting that actually they CAN’T use that color candle to mean this thing is the version that went viral]

, which indicates extreme hesitancy to break the rules of the imaginary.

on the other hand, witch tumblr is actively resistant to any demonstrable criticism. these same people fretting about candle colors also throw bizarre tantrums mocking the concept that they should stop cleansing with smoke from white sage, a critically endangered sacred herb that isn’t farmed, and how dare you say they shouldn’t call their white ass waving burning herbs in the air on occupied land ‘smudging’.

no-one cares if you think about the candle differently; stop asking for our input on that shit, because you don’t need it and we have better things to do. on the other hand, people very much do care if you engage in the alt religious scene’s rampant bigotry, but you don’t wanna listen to us on that. those priorities are fucked.

also witch communities have long, long memories, and some things happen again and again. a sampling:

the annoying

‘fluffy bunnies’ who read one barely-researched pop-Wicca text and are here to tell non-Wiccan witches what they’re doing wrong.

relatedly, ‘curse-shaming’, a practice in which even ‘respectable’ Wiccans participate, is genuinely aggravating if you’re at all into, like, historical witchcraft, because for a very long time (Wicca under that name had no public presence before 1954) there’s been not much more traditional for a witch than a curse.

arguments about “male witches” (that no-one acknowledges arose out of transmisogynistic practices in Dianic Wicca, and not really in reaction to men).

‘the Burning Times’ (not real, any historical events embarrassingly misrepresented).

“Easter is a pagan holiday;” relatedly, “Easter is Eostre is Ishtar”.

“Christmas is a pagan holiday.”

the ugly

an entire alt-history of Europe and European magical practice in which Jewish people play no perceptible part.

neo-Nazi physiognomies being passed around as “correspondence charts”.

every reputable resource on Norse mythology, Heathenry, or Asatru has an explicit public disavowal of Nazis, for very good reasons.

anti-Black propaganda, dated to the sixteenth century, about Afro-Carribbean syncretist esoteric/religious practices being repeated with all explicit reference to race left out on Tumbler Dot Com in 2017.

gentiles doing Kabbalah.

an all-white vision of the Hellenistic Mediterranean.

that one girl who stole black people’s bones from burst/eroded graves in a Louisiana graveyard and posted about it on Tumblr (one of witchblr’s few big mainstream crossover posts), leading to her arrest.

the (mostly) harmlessly bizarre

god-marriage

god-phones

what is a familiar really? (& relatedly: sex with spirits. EXTREMELY traditional, by the way),

etsy shops where you can buy custom spirits (NOT as in alcohol),

chemically-treated quartz named as if it was a real mineral,

“correspondence charts” broken alphabetically into individual readmore posts listing the magical properties of various objects (with a reblog later on in the chain complaining that people need to be more obsessed with pointless minutiae)

minors-only witchcraft discord server drama that you’re actively, unsuccessfully trying to avoid learning about

looking for witchcraft podcasts that aren’t run entirely by dudes

“my dog is horrifyingly sick, what spell should I cast?”//”GO TO THE VET”

a wealth of incredibly shitty and boring and unreadable esoteric PDFs by snake-oil salesmen

skyclad discourse

my tarot cards just read me for filth

thirty-year-old woman who should know better by now: christian witch is an oxymoron

christian witchblr: the Law of Attraction is just the prosperity gospel for Democrats

someone’s angry about the existence of secular witchcraft again

[s4banf-blog]

Geek Culture, Part 2

As with any culture, there will always be problems. In the geek culture, one of these main problems is sexism. Typically, it is assumed that geeks will refer to the straight white male. Sometimes, the culture doesn’t acknowledge that there is women who also fit into this ‘category’. Roli Varma states that “scholars have yet to critically examine the impact of geek culture on the under-representation of women in CS/CE in relation to the ethnicity/race and class”. Varma writes her paper in direct reference to the under-representation of women especially minorities in geek culture, she then goes onto to investigate this and why we need more representation within the culture. When women emerged from the all male dominated culture, it created internalised misogyny. This then created memes to try and stereotype the female geeks, which were often seen as “fake geek girls”. These memes often depicted young women wearing heavy makeup with gigantic over the top ‘nerdy’ glasses. However, this isn’t anything new. Women have often been marginalised within the community. Often in comic books, they have been ‘refrigerated’. Frank Miller the author of The Dark Knight Returns and Renin states that ‘refrigerated women’ is “a trope wherein female characters are killed (or raped, or suffer some other form of violence) solely to further a male character’s story or development”. These agendas have slowly been tackled with such characters such as Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman that continue to challenge this male dominated world. Some women however, are completely oblivious to the ongoing misogyny. An example of this is Allie Townsend. Her article written in 2011, “There’s a New Geek Girl Site in Town. I May Already Hate It” claims that the “internet culture has evolved way past the gender divide”. Throughout her article, Townsend puts down women-centric geek sites and blogs. She implies that because she’s never personally experienced any sexism in geek culture, it simply does not exist. This invalidates the experiences of real life women who have been harassed at conventions for their costumes or aggressively pestered by men when walking into a comic shop. However, when you have men and women in the community and industry who turn their heads away from new female fans, you are shutting out new fans.

People self-identify as geeks because they have been put down, excluded, and hurt by other people due to a certain interest in "uncool" things like comic books, or board games, or computer programming. More and more millennials are embracing being a geek, whilst previous generations saw the label as being something to be embarrassed about. Millennials are slowly starting to shape mainstream culture, they have changed the idea of what it means to be a geek - thus encouraging more and more people to embrace themselves to the term.  Some of those who self-identify as geeks look back nostalgically on the time when their status felt rebellious, says Benjamin Nugent, author of American Nerd: The Story of My People. Being geek means that you have permission to like what you like no matter what it is. In 2012/3, a new trend came about of wearing t-shirts that simply said “GEEK” and “NERD” across the chest. Topshop brought out the designs. By springtime they were unavoidable, seen on the chests of schoolkids, ravers and posh kids alike. Literally worn by everyone apart from those named on these t-shirts. As all things fade, so did this fashion statement. If you wore one of these t-shirts before it became cool, then you would’ve been ridiculed. Another example of the ‘wrong’ type of people associating themselves with being a ‘geek’ is Kim Kardashian revealing that she watches anime. People were absolutely furious about this, how can a popular famous reality star enjoy something only ‘geeky’ people enjoy? There is an implication that Kim is a ‘fake geek girl’ who can’t name so many anime series’ that she watches is an example of something that’s been happening for years, as self-declared keepers of a community struggle to come to terms with its growing popularity. Why shouldn’t Kim like anime? She grew up with it. Sailor Moon hit American screens in 1995. She’s a globetrotter deeply interested in world cultural trends. It would be surprising if she didn’t know what it was. Just because people don’t like her as a person -  is no excuse to assume that she’s ignorant that anime exists entirely. Her spouse, Kanye West has also declared his love for anime, tweeting that Akira was one of his favourite films. Fans of a cultural product assume that other fans are like them; that they share the same ideas, opinions and presumably, background.

Slowly consumerism is becoming filled with superheroes and fantasy, which create a lot of revenue. For example take the company Marvel and their sadly deceased owner Stan Lee before he died, he was worth a whopping $50million alone - (not including Sony and Disney). Marvel’s Black Panther became the highest grossing film for the Marvel Universe.. To date, the franchise has made over $14.7billion worldwide, making it the highest grossing franchise ever. It’s currently $6bn ahead of Star Wars. According to statistics, four of the top 10 highest grossing films of 2017 are comic book adaptations. In 2017, consumers in America spent $14.6billion on video games, hardware and related. The first San Diego Comic Con in 1970 featured 145 attendees. Last year, that number exceeded 130k. Geek culture is a cultural phenomenon.

Pop-culture portrayals of “geek culture” aren’t entirely accurate according to some. Shows like The Big Bang Theory and Silicon Valley may get right overwhelmed by tone-deafness to the culture they are supposedly giving to us, the people. What our core culture perceives to be geek culture is just a set of marketable trends. Actor Will Wheaton from Star Trek: Next Generation says in his memoir ‘Just a Geek’ that “Becoming mainstream is the wrong word; the mainstream is catching up”. Knowing obscure facts about favourite subjects has also lost its flavour. The number of Star Wars characters or the name of a constellation is all on Wikipedia now.

Nowadays people are starting to associate the alt-right with ‘geek’ culture, especially with what is going on with our modern day lives. There is no direct parallel between the alt-right and geek culture. Simply, an invasion. Recently, there was much debate surrounding horror author HP Lovecraft becoming the figure of the World Fantasy Award due to his well documented racism. His passionate fans - most of who have never experienced racism - asked why such historical oppression even mattered anymore. The movement is an online community whose values are almost identical from the far-right racism and sexism of the National Front and the Klu Klux Klan. It began as an attack on individuals, on a supposed lack of integrity in gaming journalism, which was then exploited by alt-right ‘activists’ using misinformation to start a huge fire of hatred online against women and minorities in gaming. This outrage helped to build their ever growing army of white, (mostly) male supporters. The fury of alt-right ‘activists’ helped push a minority of young male geeks to them. But far more members of the geek community went against the racist ignorance of the alt-right, and have stood against them.

[cellerityweb]

A Virtual Experience That Made A Real Difference [part I]

War. One of the most popular and never depleted themes accompanying our widely understood (pop)culture. On the pages of fantasy books, it brought wealth and glory to victorious heroes. In real life however …

War is ugly and it mostly brought and still brings suffering and misery to (almost) all involved. But always, no matter if real or fictional, revived from the past or imagined in a distant future, war brings change. For us, fortunately, the war was virtual. But the change it brought was as real as it gets.

Back in 2014 we released »This War of Mine«  –  an »indie game« allowing players to experience a simulation of what it is like to be a civilian in a city torn by military conflict. It became a game changer for us. Not only because of the overall sales or critical acclaim, which were more than satisfying, but first and foremost because of the impact it created. It simply made people care. Not only about gameplay but also about the subject it touched. And for us it proved that games can evoke empathy and bring experiences that shouldn’t just be applied to a fun/not fun scale but rather rated, based on their overall impact.

From the publishing point of view, This War of Mine, being a somewhat niche survival simulator, allowed us to break through to the so-called »mainstream«, changing the way we think about advertising and game-focused communication as a whole.

»The Shelter« (Concept Development)

The first rough version of the game differed a lot from what you know as This War of Mine. It wasn’t even based on war as such. What welcomed you in the initial prototype was a post-apocalyptic wasteland and a half-destroyed bunker serving as a shelter for a group of anonymous survivors. So, »Shelter« became our internal codename for the game, that we used for a significant period of the development process. Visually, it was cool. Even as a basic prototype, we kind of liked how it looked. But emotionally… well, it just wasn’t enough. It lacked something. Even though all of the elements were kind of ok, the sum of them did not work for us. If we wanted to make it stand out from the crowd, we had to bring it to another level. The question was how? We had »the shelter« so the main question was who lived in it. Grzegorz, our CEO, suggested that it should be victims of war  –  regular people suffering from the conflict that broke out around them. That concept clicked with the team as it gave the missing layer to the game. We felt we could build upon.

What came after was basically a lot of research. A lot. Inspiration came from multiple articles, history we knew from school, as well as from stories told by our parents and grandparents. Being a Pole made the process a bit easier, as we could not complain about the lack of source material. History gave us much, and current news did the rest. Unfortunately, you do not have to try very hard to find »fresh« stories about conflicts affecting modern societies.

After few months of intense work, we landed with a new prototype. One much closer to the final shape of the game. Sure, it needed a lot of polishing  –  but it worked! At this point we felt we had something truly special. Something that, once you sucked your teeth into it, stuck with you. That became both a curse and a blessing. You obviously had to play it to realize its potential. Not having the track record nor established franchise, we had to build the buzz and interest way before the game appeared on digital shelves of Steam and other distribution platforms.

Shaping the Brand

The common perception is that to succeed you have to be innovative. Break the rules, they say, find your way. The truth is that »new« means difficult. People are afraid of new. They mostly prefer »same old« as predictable, safe and measurable. This is why, amongst a few other reasons, the AAA market is dominated by long running franchises. Investing a lot of money, you crave for as much predictability as possible. And new is far from being predictable. It can pay off, but there is no guarantee of that. With no benchmarks, no historical data, it basically is a bungee jump. On a freshly unpacked rope. So, we jumped. Making the knots in mid-air.

An early prototype of This War of Mine, internally codenamed “The Shelter”.

At this point we knew we had a good game, but we were the only ones with that knowledge. And that is the issue with every new brand/product appearing on the market. You have to build its perception from scratch. What is it? What does it offer? And first and foremost  –  why the hell should people care? You need an answer. You need a solid brand. Branding is mostly about building a well-defined, coherent presence on the market. Creating a perception and then preferably a purchase intent by associating particular feelings and connotations with your product, service or whatever you have to offer. In our case  –  a game. There are multiple methods of constructing a strong brand but no matter which path you choose, one thing stays invariable  –  you have to be relatable. To find something people can easily understand and, in a perfect scenario, have an opinion about. If that opinion is good or bad, that is secondary as sometimes negative feelings can work in your favour as well.

We had a war-themed game and »war« as such was at that time (and honestly not much has changed since then) a commodity in gaming. There were and are so many titles based around conflicts. Modern, historical, sci-fi, you name it. Just check the Steam tags. You are going to get hundreds of results for »war« alone, not to mention all the variations. That meant that the market was cluttered, but also full of potential. Especially considering the fact that the majority of these games shared a somewhat similar and slightly clichéd perspective. No matter the platform or genre, they usually allowed you as a player to embody a superhuman protagonist, running and gunning (alternatively moving units), trying to meet objectives that were different interpretations of winning by destruction. »Action & confrontation« were the core that everything was built around. No empathy involved. Not much of a reflection either (besides few gems like Ubisoft’s »Valiant Hearts: The Great War« or »Spec Ops: The Line« by Yager Interactive).

We decided to use that trend as a springboard for our communication strategy. This War of Mine was to be the »rebel« –  questioning the well-established status quo by introducing gamers to a new perspective on war. A strong idea, as we felt, but an easy one to implement. To succeed we had to use all the means at hand to underline our dissidence and prove its value.

Keeping it Short

What made the process of bringing the initial strategy to life more difficult was the fact that English is not our native language. The struggle started with the game’s title. The first version we had had was War of Mine and honestly we were quite happy with it, till one of our English-speaking colleagues asked if we actually had »mines« in our game? And if miners literally fought each other? The answer was »no«. So, we had to iterate. The funny part is that what helped was Guns N’ Roses and their song »Sweet Child O’Mine«. Take that, all you teachers dissing our music tastes in the 90s!

After we had adjusted the title, it definitely worked better. The structure itself was catchy and it stood out among the other titles. To make things even, better it was descriptive and pulled all the right strings. »I am the game about war« it was saying, »but with a personal perspective��. Having this part laid out, we moved to the tagline. First of all, we felt it could become handy as part of planned activities and secondly, being able to enclose your whole premise in a short sentence organizes your communication and helps with the prioritization of what and how to say it. A good tagline should do for your communication what a good punchline does for a joke. Basically sum it up, but in a smart way. Being simple and being obvious are not the same things. We wanted people to easily understand what This War of Mine was and intrigue them a bit. As David Ogilvy (note: a former British advertising tycoon) once said »You can’t bore people into buying your product«.

We wrote a whole bunch of proposals. Some were too long (»In war there are those who fight and those who try to survive«) or too obvious. It took us a while but we ended up with: »In war, not everyone is a soldier«. It was memorable, had kind of a melody to it and most importantly, provided the shift of perspective we craved for. Also, you could easily fit it on the key visuals and that is always helpful.

The Value of Consistency

Having the whole foundation laid out, it was crucial for us to maintain a coherent tonality. We wanted our campaign to be recognizable. Remember, that having no track record, we had to build the game’s perception from scratch. Seeing the ad for the next »Call of Duty« you know what to expect. Buying the game from Paradox, you also can predict what it would offer in terms of experience. Encountering This War of Mine, you knew close to nothing, so establishing its’ identity was crucial. We wanted people to get more and more familiar with our game every time they encountered one of our marketing assets, so after some time they would be able to recognize This War of Mine on the spot. To achieve that, all the pieces, while not repetitive, had to have the same denominator  –  the premise laid out in the initial strategy. We not only had to maintain consistent aesthetics but also to focus on key features and values specific for our game. We decided that each and every piece we were about to produce had to be

– Serious  –  there was no space for jokes or winks. No breaking of the fourth wall. We were aware that we were touching serious matter, so we wanted to act respectfully.

– Non-military  –  This War of Mine was all about civilians. And we wanted to maintain that perspective all the time as this was one of the differentiators you could notice on the spot.

– Apolitical  –  while politics are highly subjective, human consequences are universal. Getting into politics you can way to easily divide people and trigger unnecessary conflicts. That was not our goal. We wanted to create and promote a human-centric experience people could relate to no matter what their views or beliefs.

– Insightfulness & humanism (two in one basically)  –  we wanted you, as a player, to identify and immerse. That was an important part of the experience which our game offered and we had to translate it into marketing, not losing anything in the process.

With that mainframe we were able to develop a sort of »language« that we tried to maintain for the whole campaign. It paid off, as every time we released a new piece of content (no matter the medium or format) it added to the overall perception of our game. With every release we stood out a bit more as people got a stronger and clearer image of what our game was and what it was not.

»Gamers just Wanna Have Fun«

Of course, sometimes being coherent meant we had to say »NO« to our gamers, and that is never easy. Especially when you have a committed and highly engaged community. For example, sometime after the release we started to receive requests for a zombie mode. It is understandable as »This War of Mine« has all the elements making it the perfect candidate for that sort of conversion. It is a survival game after all, with people crumped in half-destroyed buildings, trying to survive as long as possible. That’s something half of the zombie flicks are based on. But we did not want to do that as we strongly felt it would blur the identity of the game we had worked so hard on. Fortunately people understood our approach and respected our decision. The identity we created, while well-defined, was grim and quite far from what gamers are usually used to. That raised quite obvious questions about the »fun factor« of our game. But as Pawel  –  one of our writers  –  said while interviewed by Kotaku, with This War of Mine we never aimed at fun but rather a meaningful experience. We were ready to sacrifice what was necessary to maintain the big idea that fuelled the game. »Weren’t you scared?« ,  you may ask. Of course we were. But that was the only reasonable solution. There was no middle ground there if we were to achieve what we aimed for. I still meet people telling me that This War of Mine is their favourite game… they will never ever play again. And that is OK. Some people replay it multiple times. Some don’t. But they seldomly forget the experience they had with the game.

Putting the Cogs into Motion

Being indie meant that we had astrictly limited marketing budget, so our campaign relied mostly on widely understood digital media and key gaming events coverage. »Owned«  and »earned«  channels were crucial as we could afford only so much when it came to paid activities. Basically, we divided most of our attention between video production/distribution, social media presence, PR/e-PR activities and event coverage. Everything else followed but considering our headcount and the scale of the overall marketing investment, we couldn’t add much on top of these four pillars.

Video Marketing

Limited budget meant limited range of available touchpoints.

Video became the backbone of our production as the most appealing and most willingly consumed type of content at the time (and nowadays as well). It is no secret that game marketing heavily relies on videos. Trailers, »let’s plays«, »dev diaries«, you name it. Having that in mind, we planned all the key points in our campaign around some type of video content. Obviously we could not afford high fidelity, fully fledged cinematic trailers to which people have been accustomed by top tier AAA publishers, but a good idea works even when written on a napkin, as we believed. Over two years we released over a dozen if not more videos but few of them are especially worth mentioning. The announcement trailer aimed at introducing people to the core premise of the game. It was all about the new perspective on war. As it was the first one, we wanted to use a little trick basing on what our viewers were accustomed to. The idea was to open as if we had the next action-focused shooter and then make the shift introducing the civilians’ perspective. That way we could gain the necessary attention and present our idea in a clear and efficient manner. Simple as it was, it worked brilliantly. We didn’t show the gameplay, or even say what the genre was. The premise of the game proved to be enough to spark the conversation.

We introduced gameplay much later on in the campaign but even when our communication became much more gameplay-oriented, we stuck to the tonality and all the strategic assumptions. The stories we were telling and the features we were revealing were new every time but at the same time each video was expanding on the »civilians in a time of war« concept. No exceptions. Preparing our first gameplay trailer we decided to use Polish song, titled »Zegarmistrz wiatła Purpurowy« as a background to the story we were to tell. We were concerned about whether it’s gonna work, considering the fact that most of our audience doesn’t know the language, but finally we had decided that the emotional package it carries is language-neutral and should work universally. The reception of the video proved us right. The funny part is that our video enhanced the popularity of the song abroad and right now you can find a lot of comments on Youtube by people who actually found the song because of our trailer.

Another video, which we consider to be a milestone, happened not long before the release of the game. Some time into the campaign we received a message from Emir  –  a survivor of the siege of Sarajevo  –  who complimented the game and compared it to his own personal experiences. Fascinated by his story, we invited him to share it with us, and he happened to be kind enough to accept the invitation. Shortly afterwards, he visited us in Warsaw where we taped a video together that later, supplemented with elements of gameplay, became the launch trailer. The lesson here is that sometimes the universe works in your favour and gives you opportunities to learn, to create and to enhance whatever you do. What is crucial is to push all you have to make each and every one of these opportunities count. Not always will everything work but once it does  –  it does for real.

Patryk Grzeszczuk

  is Marketing Director at 11 bit Studios,

focusing on game marketing and

digital communication

The post A Virtual Experience That Made A Real Difference [part I] appeared first on Making Games.

A Virtual Experience That Made A Real Difference [part I] published first on https://thetruthspypage.tumblr.com/

[how2to18]

STEVE ALMOND is the author of 12 books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times best seller Candyfreak and Against Football. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and New York Times Magazine, among others. He teaches at the Nieman Fellowship for Journalism program at Harvard University. His newest book, which occasioned this conversation, is Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country (Red Hen Press). William Giraldi is the author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and a memoir, The Hero’s Body. His newest book is a collection of criticism, American Audacity, to be published in August. This conversation was conducted over email in January.

¤

WILLIAM GIRALDI: With many millions of my fellow baffled Americans, I’ve been trying to comprehend, as the subtitle of Bad Stories has it, what the hell just happened to our country. It wasn’t until reading your synthesis that I began to get the myriad cultural and political forces that needed to align, over several decades, in order for Trumpism to prevail in 2016. Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. Nothing comes out of nowhere. Your take on the Fairness Doctrine is one of the most riveting sections of the book, something I didn’t know about. Can you speak about the Fairness Doctrine and why it’s necessary to understand it in order to understand what’s happened?

STEVE ALMOND: To begin at the beginning, our Founding Fathers simply never envisioned the technologies that comprise our modern media. To them, the Fourth Estate consisted of broadsheets and pamphlets. When radio emerged, early in the 20th century, our leaders suddenly had to contend with a medium that could reach millions of Americans instantaneously. The smart ones were good and freaked out by that prospect. Back in 1926, the Texas lawmaker Luther Johnson said this:

American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.

These concerns led lawmakers to pass various measures, culminating with the Fairness Doctrine, which said that broadcasters should use the public airwaves to serve the public interest, not private gain. They had a duty to cover important issues and to provide “reasonable opportunity for opposing viewpoints.” It was basically a spoiler plate for propaganda.

Under Reagan, the head of the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, arguing that “the perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.” I realize that sounds kind of wonky. But what he’s saying marks a precise fault line in our history as a country, the moment when our free press became, officially, a for-profit industry.

And the effect was immediate: a revolution of conservative talk radio hosts (and later Fox News anchors) who have spent three decades telling the bad stories we’ve come to associate with Trumpism. A government that seeks to redistribute wealth or curb greed is evil. Brown people are lazy and/or dangerous. White men are under assault. Elites and academics are mocking you. The mainstream media can’t be trusted. It amounts to a retailing of what the historian Richard Hofstadter calls “the paranoid style” in American politics.

This proudly ignorant aggression, which cloaks itself in the language of self-victimization, is the mindset that now animates much of our electorate. Guys like Rush Limbaugh have been indoctrinating their dittoheads for three decades. Talk like a populist and rule like a plutocrat — that’s the basic con. Trump didn’t create a movement. He simply inherited audience share.

Americans have come to accept the demented idea that for-profit demagogues have a constitutional right to use the public airwaves to spout falsehoods and propaganda. As a result, we now have a sitting president whose consciousness is guided by the caffeinated misinformation of Fox & Friends.

Which brings me to another important facet of Bad Stories: your analysis of the astounding moral vacuity of our Fourth Estate, their conscious and unconscious credo of entertainment over information. During the primaries and the election, even the outfits that were against Trump’s lunatic bluster — CNN or MSNBC, say — seemed helpless not to cover him incessantly. It was a ratings rodeo for them, and to hell with the fact that they were helping to elect him. Or consider even The New York Times giving front-page prominence to FBI director James Comey’s nothing-letter on the Clinton email nonsense, mere days before the election. You have an expert appraisal of Neil Postman and his masterwork, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Say a little about Postman and his ideas for those who might not be familiar with them.

Postman was a cultural historian. In 1984, he was asked to deliver a lecture at the Frankfurt Book Fair about Orwell’s 1984. But he argued that Reagan’s United States could be better understood by examining Huxley’s Brave New World. He saw a population mired in passivity and egoism, a republic that had devolved into an audience. The resulting book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, argues that every aspect of our culture (politics, religion, news, education, commerce) has been “transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.” Public figures, therefore, are no longer judged on experience or competence. All they need is “a talent and a format to amuse.”

Candidate Trump’s training as a tabloid and TV star endowed him with the talent. And cable news, as you note, supplied him the format. Networks aired his speeches and fulminated against his antics and cast his tweets in shrieking chyron. They treated him like a celebrity. If they had covered him like a traditional politician — Jeb Bush, say — he never would have claimed the GOP nomination. His inexperience and erratic nature would have reduced him to a fringe candidate. He became the frontrunner because he was treated as the frontrunner.

And the networks made no secret of this double standard. The most shocking statement uttered during the entire campaign came from CBS CEO Les Moonves, who noted that Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. […] The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” I probably don’t need to tell you that Moonves said all this at a media conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley.

This is exactly what happens when you turn a civic institution (“the Fourth Estate”) into a business. You wind up with a cash register rather than an editorial sensibility.

What’s so astounding about Postman’s book is that he saw all this coming down the pike more than 30 years ago. He knew TV news was destined to become a sewer of disinformation. He predicted the rise of parodic news programs that would convert our dysfunction into disposable laughs. He foresaw that Americans would “come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” I think about that statement every time I pull out my smart phone, and every time I get on the subway. What I see is a car full of people locked onto their tiny screens, amusing themselves to death.

Postman’s book helped me understand the 2016 election was ultimately a coup we engineered against ourselves, arising from unseriousness and bad stories.

And part of how we’re currently amusing ourselves deathly is by viewing the daily, almost hourly dramas of the White House as another reality TV show, albeit one with annihilating consequences. After Watergate, Gore Vidal pointed out that Americans had become addicted to scandal. That was nothing next to what we’re seeing now. It’s stunning to me how Trump’s every asinine tweet is treated by the media as something worthy of our attention. When a soulless and intellectually incurious entertainer with dysphasia steals the presidency with the help of a hostile foreign power, we really shouldn’t be continually surprised when he behaves like a soulless and intellectually incurious entertainer with dysphasia. One of the stories Bad Stories tells is the one about how Vladimir Putin saw his chance with Trump. Can you speak a bit about Tsar Putin?

One of the problems Americans have always had is a kind of ingrained solipsism, one born of privilege. We’ve been incredibly lucky as an empire. We have vast natural resources and weak neighbors. We’ve never been invaded, let alone occupied. Because we’ve been so sheltered we are, broadly speaking, unaware of, and incurious about, history. We live in the Capitalist Now, an era of monetized distraction, “within the context of no context,” as George W. S. Trow put it. Our national stories are either downright false (“all men are created equal”) or dangerously naïve (“the Cold War is over and we won!”). The Berlin Wall came crashing down. We all danced to shitty new wave music amid the rubble.

But what if we looked at our democracy through the eyes of Putin, a fiercely nationalistic KGB officer who was in Dresden when the Wall came down? The driving force in his life has been to restore the stature of his disgraced homeland, to Make Russia Great Again. Jump into that guy’s head and ask yourself: Is the Cold War really over?

Of course not. One of Putin’s central goals as a leader has been to attack the American empire. He’s smart enough to recognize that he can’t hope to win a military or economic war. So his attacks have come in the form of cyber-warfare and disinformation. When Russians hacked into the Democratic National Committee, they were doing the same thing as the Watergate burglars, and for the same reason: to smear the Democratic nominee.

During Watergate, the “story” was about the burglars — who had hired them and why. In 2016, journalists barely bothered to ask those questions. Instead, they eagerly spread the smears. They essentially did Putin’s dirty work for him. He knew they would, because he could see the cracks in our democracy: a free press that had degenerated into a for-profit tabloid operation, widespread voter apathy and disaffection, a conservative media complex devoted to stoking racial grievance, social media platforms that happily amplified Russian propaganda, state-sanctioned voter suppression.

For Putin, Trump represented a kind of geopolitical unicorn: the useful idiot abruptly elevated into a Manchurian candidate. His entire agenda mapped to Putin’s intentions. Trump consistently sowed discord among Americans, and undermined their faith in liberal democracy. His foreign policy called for the United States to retreat from the world stage, leaving Putin free to expand Russian ambitions. Putin also knew more about Trump’s financial entanglements than the US electorate.

Putin is a brutal autocrat. But he understands history, that empires, from the Incas to the Romans to the Mongols, ultimately collapse from within. They are made vulnerable to foreign invaders by internal divisions and delusions.

That’s the most chilling aspect of 2016. Whether or not they ever shook on it, Putin and Trump made a deal. But only one of them understood the true terms of the deal. Putin knew Trump was a long shot, given his flaws. But he could see the magnitude of the payout: the chance to elect a man capable of initiating what the Soviet Union never could — an era of permanent American decline.

One of the ways Bad Stories shines is by not being another lefty screed fueled by pharisaical grievance and holier-than-thou condemnations. It doesn’t traffic in the cliches and sanctimony and anti-art that fouls so much of what we now see coming from the commissars, and it even manages to have a goodly bit of mercy for Trump’s base. You can also be pretty critical of lefty sacred cows, among whom are the comedic minds liberal America, in its ballooning desperation, has taken for their prophets and seers. What’s your view of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

They’re both brilliant comedians who have used their shows to call out the bullshit that predominates our media and political classes. In doing so, they’ve trained viewers to think more critically, and helped educate lots of low-info citizens. Those are real and laudable achievements. The problem, as you observe, is these guys — our high-tech court jesters — have become the prophetic voices of our culture, the moral backstops. And that’s never good. Think of King Lear. When only the fool can speak truth to power, the kingdom is kaput.

Another way of putting it would be that these guys represent a kind of opiate for the left. While conservatives gin up votes by casting the United States as a horror film (with various dark-skinned villains — “thugs”/Muslims/immigrants …), the liberal response to our civic dysfunction is to cast the United States as a farce. Stewart and Colbert and their disciples convert our anguish and rage into disposable laughs. Look at all those corrupt politicians and pundits! What fools! It’s the same message Trump delivered over and over on the stump.

Why are we laughing at the moral erosion of our democracy? To protect ourselves from the fear and rage we should be feeling, the kind of destabilizing emotions that might force us to get off our fucking couches and take action. Meanwhile, those fools we’re laughing at are having the last laugh, because they’re the ones steering our ship of state. They’re deporting kids and slashing our safety net and strip-mining the EPA and reshaping our federal judiciary and turning our tax code into an open-air kleptocracy. Ha-ha-ha.

Again, I’m not criticizing Stewart and Colbert. Those guys are just doing their jobs. What troubles me is that we’re mistaking mockery for genuine political engagement. It’s not an act of protest to share the latest Saturday Night Live clip or Samantha Bee screed. It’s an act of therapeutic passivity. It makes us feel a little bit better about a circumstance that we shouldn’t feel better about.

Mencken once declared that “as democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

He was joking. But it’s not funny anymore.

I’m reminded of a line that’s almost always with me, from D. H. Lawrence’s characteristically seditious take on our nation’s literature. He lived in New Mexico for a spell, and he says at one point, in Studies in Classic American Literature, that he’s never been in a country where individuals are so downright terrified of one another. He saw us as a land of great violence and divide. “The essential American soul,” he says, is “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” Look, he said, at the “Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness.” Bad Stories tries to parse that inner malaise and madness. What else could have led to the election of the gilded Mafioso currently in the White House? Your book stars Trump, of course, but it isn’t specifically about him. It’s about Americans — the American soul. Do you agree with Lawrence’s take on us?

I use that very quote in my last book, to explain the predominance of violent sport in our country. But to be completely honest, it’s a reductive statement. There is no “essential American soul.” There are more than 300 million people in this country, and each of them, presumably, has a soul. What the 2016 election cast into bold relief was not some lofty, monolithic version of the American soul, but a soul in conflict with itself. After all, 70 million Americans voted for other candidates, and 65 million for Hillary Clinton. It was only a very small percentage of Trump voters whose minds and hearts were filled with violent ideation. We saw and heard a lot from them, because they make for good TV. But they were hardly stoic, or isolate. They were, in fact, emotionally wounded and lonely and desperate for a sense of belonging.

Hannah Arendt discusses this in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. She argues that totalitarianism is a kind of organized loneliness, one that takes root in societies where people feel angry and dislocated, left behind by capitalist expansion. People who lose this sense of identity and rootedness come to feel superfluous, and this makes them frantic to find a grand narrative that will grant their life meaning and direction. (As noted, conservative demagogues on the AM radio dial have been working this market for decades.) But most Republicans recognized their standard-bearer as ethically and intellectually unfit to serve. They voted for him out of an ethically enfeebled tribalism.

It’s important to note this, because it’s really another bad story to suggest that Americans are doomed to express their most savage and self-destructive impulses. I don’t believe that. I believe we can and will do better. But only if we can rouse ourselves from the thrall of hate-watching this administration.

In this sense, the book that presages the 2016 election is Moby-Dick, an epic that is entirely driven by the seductive power of wounded masculinity. Consider the moment Ahab appears on deck to announce the true nature of his mission. He’s not interested in harvesting whale blubber. He’s out for revenge.

“All visible objects […] are but pasteboard masks,” he roars. “If man will strike, strike through the mask! […] Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Who does that sound like?

That’s what Trump channeled: the volcanic sense of grievance and spiritual poverty that lurks within America’s absurd material plenitude.

But here’s the thing about Moby-Dick: everyone goes along with Ahab. The crew signs on for his doomed crusade. That’s the most powerful analogue to the election. Whether in rapture or disgust, Americans turned away from the compass of self-governance and toward the mesmerizing drama of aggression on display, the capitalist id unchained and all that it unchained within us. Trump struck through the mask. And it was, alas, enough.

There’s another analogue to consider, too, when it comes to Ahab: Melville modeled him in large part on Milton’s Satan, the greatest poetic quester in the canon, rebellion incarnate, sublime hero of the seditious, “self-begot, self-rais’d” by his own “quick’ning power.” One of the bad stories you tell is called “Trump Was a Change Agent,” a story that tried to peddle him as an outsider, a self-begot rebel who would overthrow the greedy gods in Washington and usher in a kingdom of the neglected. We know how that story ends for Satan in Paradise Lost, and we know how it ends for Ahab. The question is: How will that bad story end for us? Your book doesn’t close with either manufactured uplift or resigned despair, but rather a levelheadedness and inwardness devoid of sloganized idealism. What’s your vision for us now?

America has always been a nation of high ideals and low behaviors, of all men are created equal and slave labor. The moral regression we’re seeing today — the overtly bigoted policy, the cronyism, the exploitation of fear and loathing — is nothing new. Just ask any woman or person of color or immigrant. Part of what I’m trying to articulate in the book is that history is cyclical. You have moral atrocities, such as slavery, which lead to moral corrections. You have the economic and social upheaval of the Great Depression, which led to the New Deal. The War on Poverty. The Great Society programs. The Civil Rights movement. Those are examples of the American people enacting their high ideals. That is still possible.

I know there are days — a lot of them — when the ravings of our current president and his congressional quislings feel like the apotheosis of a certain inexorable capitalist decadence. Maybe Mencken is right, “that the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.” But if that’s the case, it’s not because Americans are “downright morons.” It’s because too many of us have sworn allegiance to bad stories, stories that encourage us to weaponize our self-doubt, to project our destructive impulses onto others, to drown our shame in aggression. But evil is never purely borne. It is the distortion of love, not its absence.

The question is whether we can begin to tell better stories, ones in which our citizens muster the courage to confront the dire threats facing not just our democracy, but our species and planet. It’s possible to see the 2016 election as a warning and a wakeup call, a reminder that moral progress is inconvenient but not impossible.

I’m getting at a question of faith, I guess. Can we renew our faith in the basic principles of the Enlightenment — science and reason, liberty and tolerance, the common good? Can we rouse ourselves from the twin spells of cynicism and distraction? Maybe America can be made great again only by facing what we are at our weakest.

The post Bad Stories in America: A Conversation Between Steve Almond and William Giraldi appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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[popcartoonkabala]

Trinities, dualities, retirements and euphemisms: division into clarity (Chesed-Gevurah-Tipheret she b Malchut)                       PART II! [Batman is not Superman]

To summarize our purpose, once again: Myth and Archtype have been part of human culture since the beginning of symbolic communication. Why wouldn't there be patterns in how?

Numbers are the language of science, but they used to be the secret language of theology. Pythagoras got into something that had been the sprouted wisdom heritage of Ancient Egypt, Babylon, and beyond: The attempt to boil all the assorted deities of every land and saga into systematized essences. Because it's not that they didn't notice what the narrative commonalities amongst all the different regional gods of every nation, on the contrary: there was a fair amount of cross identification, because of recognition when we are talking about the same things, even if speaking with very different priorities and lessons in mind.  The gods of the twentieth centuries are our Cartoon characters; divine far more than it's assorted human “Stars,” Cartoon characters tend not to die the way people do. Icons of modern fear, hope, fantasy and frustration are the things we wound up being most impressed by as children, and their nostalgia cultures testify the depth of influence these kind of characters and the experience of their narratives have on the soul of humanity, as we becomes whatever it is we will be. Why wouldn't there be patterns? Why shouldn't there be a language for unzipping those patterns, to understand the world and it's relationships better?

The Hebrew word “SePhiRa” literally and essentially implies communication, like a little story being told through every CyPheR. Universal popular culture is the true law of Rome, being newly decreed every time we watch the show and laugh, shiver, or in anyway resonant. Resonance is ratification, it's official-- I feel you, and from now on, the standard is like such. Hardening the heart, refuse to accept the heart-understood new decree that HAS convinced, is the insistence on a previously remembered principle trumping the new story and it's cargo.  Everyone knows it, deep down. The narrative priority of That which everyone knows and feels. South park, for example, initiates a certain new and universal standard: once you laughed, you're in the club, the club of true knowers and understanders of How It Is, and, more importantly, perhaps an insistence on how it should be, ironically in the softest and sweetest way possible. It's been happening every so often the whole time. That's how homophobia and narcophobia are defeated in the end, and make no mistake, despite the thrashes of regressive hostility, they are done, as far as social pop-morality is concerned--- maybe-- for awhile. In some places, if not everywhere.

In the ancient schism between North and South is the mystery war between A(s)(h)ura and D(a)eva: What's God and what's Monster? The oldest religious text range between the Vedic and Iranian on this issue, with the Western and Eastern spectrum ranging some adapted terms-- “God” as a word for the highest of the high in Northern European translations of the Hebrew Bible points to a very traditional association of Mercury with the Cause of Causes or at least star of worship, to whom invocation is given as in Sanskrit. The war is over when common language is found, and so “God” has become the resting place for a broad spectrum of phenomena associated with the preferred. Poured out, some speculate based on Greek “kh”. The conflict in the Bhagva Gita, like the Teutonic sagae across the mountains and valleys, pits these cosmic forces, one valorized and the other demonized. In the Old Testament narrative, this schism contends with the internal satire going on against even-and-especially that which is identified with the so-epitheted “good” god, master (Baal/Adon) and hero/direction (El[ohim]) used for also the falsehood and also the true authority. The word for the overtly demonized sort of wild-divinity in contrast with the legitimate-but-perhaps-problematic-lordship, is Shed. The Gallic/Celtic satyric nature spirits that eventually are given the mellowed title of “Fae/fair” (to convince the listening chaos-monsters that we are speaking well of them, despite all being aware of their destructive capacity) is “Shaedu(Siddhe)”.  

This is a rhetorical struggle, to the degree that it's clear since the beginning of Egyptian and Babylonian religion that the best god is defined by success, like Batman and Popeye.  But that's until it's clear that there is a value higher than victory, an astoundingly challenging idea that in many ways has yet to be fully digested into popular human morality.  This is the degree to which Nietzsche looks to ancient religion, specifically what he calls “Indic” which he identifies, as within Greco-Roman tradition, Dionysian. For traditional models celebrating, not functionality, but inspiration, passion, intoxication and ultimately, illumination (or death). The dei that celebrate boundaries, victories, or any other conventional prizes cannot be the truest deepest highest Dio: just a certain kind of echoed reflection. So too our gods, heroes, villains and monsters reflect us, the things we couldn't see until exaggerated in theatrical other.

The place where the power comes from is not always identified with the power itself; the veils are excused any which way, and so much cosmic narrative comes to explain when and where the schism hit, so that whatever lord rules the world is known to whatever degree, as a hint as to what has needed to happen in order of power to be secured, most traditionally the defeat of some enormous and originative serpent of chaos. In later generations, it's lions instead of snakes, or dragons which are the best of both. But remember: anyone can be the bad guy, eventually. This fundamental to the Superman myth, and its counter just as fundamental to Dracula: the longer the story goes the more the good guy must become dictatorial/fascist, and the most horrific of monster-enemies enlisted to help the fight against a greater emergent evil. To this end, our personal and communal capacities to identify with a range of justification and aspiration is reinforced or even introduced; models for catharsis either accomplishing a need to resonate with some activity or mission, or passing over unnoticed except as novelty twist on some sort of comfortably familiar dynamic. This is the natural end of a charachter, the central-most erosion of their value, often saved for the end of a series, as was the case with the Paul Dini/Dwayne Mcduffie Superman/Justice League. The problem is genuinely redeeming a character (or deity) defined so strongly in one direction once satirized however inearnestly-- but the truth is, it's not hard, because more than the calf wants to suckle, the nerd wants a classic and fundamentally familiar consistent version of a character. The genius of mythographers like Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore before him, is to integrate a range of classic versions of a character, ones generally considered eschewing integration, initiated as radically distinct characters functioning only vaguely in the same capacity, but for the degrees of overwhelming inspiring or resonant previous versions.

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as a Batman. How could that possibly be true? Because there was no such thing as a city. On the other hand, someone had to be that for there to ever have been existence and creation. Do you know what I mean? It's absurd to say that any PARTICULAR deity created the universe, if not the awesomest deepest wholest one, who must by definition encompass all that ever was great before. Who was Batman before Batman? Who was God before Zeus? Maybe Cronos, but maybe Typhon? It's a meaningful position that the Greeks take, that dZeus did not originate creation, but only the present state of it, tentatively ruled and micromanaged.  

The Hebraic/biblical tradition at it's core denies the facility of this synchretism-- The only G-d that was still Is, and whoever takes his place could not be other than him himself, by definition, because of the absoluteness of the oneness that must be somewhere/everywhere. This is the degree to which the Bible god is hostile to deities perfectly analogous to him himself, Baal and Dagon, Marduk, Shemesh, Dagon or El, many of which are even epithets and terms for the acceptable hebrew All-father himself. None are tolerated to be identified with his oneness, and its even a bit of a heresy for HIS WORD and HIS LAW to be identified with Him, because the Monad must encompass all, and to take a side or isolate a perspective tests the resonance of the idea harshly, and threatens to drag Him down into all the religious polemical politics that every other All-god was ruined by and discredited through.

To be a functional hero nowadays, one must not cross the line for too long into the reprehensible pop-antivalue, the priority resented most by the populace, whose valor proves it's perfidy and wrongness. See how ruined the bible god is by the moral questions raised by a society where the mainstream itself is more committedly progressive than any archaic society could have fathomed would even be sought after, except in the panic of their most critical apocalypses. 

It can't matter in a Batman story, in The Batman's presence, who was Batman developed from or rooted in. The presence itself establishes its own context, which is why T-shirts and kickball are the ideal temple for his personification-- these things insist on trying to create their own context. Sherlock Holmes and the Phantom, Horus the lord of Light-- who cares. The only problem is: how long can a batman endure? And what would keep one functional, relevant?

There is a rich history of Bat-apocalypses, twilight-of-the-bat stories where Batman does the most natural thing he can and dies dramatically, or at least gets old. A recurring theme in Dark Knight Returns is “This would be a good death-- but not good enough.” And so it is with the world and all the great immortal heroes-- almost no death is good enough, so almost no death is possible. That's why the greatest heroes become deified, as was rumored to be Batman's “Final” fate in Final Crisis. All the heroes were supposed to be deified and perhaps replaced by their own avatars. Certainly Batman, because any other end would be beneath the grandeur of what he symbolizes-- the good winner, the dark protector inherent in justifying the imbalances in the urban situation. He cannot make a utopia, because he is too much a conservative force, holding a bad place, the great city Gotham, together, and making it safe for sustained existence, but utterly unable (apparently even unwilling) to destroy any of the chaotic or pernicious elements within it, for fear of upsetting it's balance, and his own. This is not a human being, even as much as the character keeps being humanized by loves and investments around him, and this is part of the mystery of the Batgirls and the Robins-- as well as the Catwomen and Jokers.

The two horns of the Batman-- 

hero/villain, hero/sidekick; 

villain as spouse, sidekick as sibling

The villain who loves Batman hates sidekick, and sidekick tends to either resent or couple with next sidekick, of which there are to be infinite. There are now three active pseudo Robins, and alas, only one Batgirl, but this can and will change, as meaningful-- the maximum amount of active batgirls is usually one, but that's been true about “Robin” too. The truth is Batgirl IS a Robin of sorts, or Robin could be a Batgirl-- he sure looks feminine in his early appearances, fair skinned, bright red lipped, smooth of thigh. A partner/student-- the father god is a patronizing bastard. Superman can only be one-in-himself, without child or spouse. Batman has so many children, so many lovers, but somehow only ever one or two at a time.

Arch enemies? Each individually is, and when ignored, they spiral around together, reincorporate into single teams, duos or more. Poison Ivy was certainly saved from some degree of relative obscurity and pittance until she was bound in either Harley Quinn or someone else, like Persephone's maturity only in the context of Hades, who, we'll recall, is the deity that poor deluded Maxie Zeus conflates Batman with.

The identification of Hades-Pluto with Batman actually does make a significant degree of sense, especially in light of the access to massive wealth, hidden in caves under the earth that give Pluto his name, but this identification also hints at how dismissed a character like Batman would be in Greece, or Rome for that matter. Perhaps it's the Greek ambivalence before hierarchy and abstract total concern, their skepticism that any concern is infinite rather than self interested and capricious, that makes it harder to identify any popular Greek god with Batman. The Greeks have a justice deity, “Dike” but she does not become significant until after Rome and Greece have fallen by the way-side. The main distinction between a cythonic deity like Hades-Pluto and one ultimately more exalted (though still feared, and perhaps even resented) like Saturn is how present Hades's realm of power is. Gotham is and possesses a certain degree of underworld, but it's not under control, and it is absolutely identified with life, and not after life. Saturn is more of an exile in the living world, a deposed king still able to grant the blessings of alternately Law and Liberation, ironically of course. But he's not an active player like Batman is. When introducing a gay Superman-Batman analogue for The Authority, Warren Ellis names his Superman “Apollo” naturally enough, giving him solar powers, like Superman ultimately. But he cannot name his lunar lover “Hades” or “Pluto”-- instead he goes for the overtly nocturnal descriptive of “The Midnighter,” a helpful mad master of urban ultraviolence.

Batman is only Plutonian at the end of a certain rope, dark and wealthy. At the top of the Rope, he is very much a Lunar deity, as expressed in many ways. The Moon is identified, anomalously, with Chesed the First Sefira in the Eliyahu of Vilna’s Kabbalah, based on an obscure and equally anomalous Zohar piece. This is weird. The Moon is Identified generally with Yesod in most systems. The Vilna Gaon generously justifies this association, describing the moon’s nourishing milky whiteness as the purest expression of Original Loving-Kindness. This is partially much of why and how Batman, a sort of dark and secondary hero, is actually a certain kind of Main Hero, Father God, initiator of teams and pantheons. The Moon as Chesed, as opposed to other stories where he functions more as the Moon as Yesod.

Batman does, to me, resemble a more Egyptian model of hero-- a royal defender of particular city wealth, defined by triumph over chaos, the Solar hero avenging his dead father. Horus is identified by the Greco-Romans with Ares-Mars, and that could be acceptable-- but Batman is too individually organized and motivated generally to identify too much with a national war god, although he does become that as well in many futures-- but specifically a counter-cultural one. A reigning mainstreamed Batman can only be a nightmare villain, unless he's a certain kind of under dog, ostensibly in danger of defeat, a defeat that would jeopardize the lives of the innocent and sympathetic. Maybe that's like Mars,  but it seems to me more like Horus, especially considering Horus's identification with a predatory bird, and his epic love with the mother of all Catwomen, Isis/Bast, who Catwoman's familiars are even named.

Batman is certainly the most Egyptian of Superheroes. The tragic prince, whose father-god ruled nicely until cut down by the forces of competitive disruption, he emerges to bring balance-through-violence. Horus is in the aspect of Mars, although all the hero gods also serve and express the Sun itself. This returns us to the mystery of Chesed expressed as Tipheret and vice verse.  The next level, Tipheret expressed as defeated by Malchut, is the point where the “realistic” displaces the conventional, and inverts our sense of what is real true, like when a hero is proven to be a predator veiled as altruist crusader. A favorite example of this for me was the Simpsons episode where Mr Burns decides to be Batman, purely for self indulgent violence. Rick Veitch's seminal Brat Pack expresses the decadent horror veiled through heroic pretension, as introduction to an astounding cosmic contemplation on the nature of the cartoon medium.  But since then, any Superman/Batman conflict tends to incorporate the similar danger of Batman's privilege to Superman, to testify that discipline bred power is no less abuseable than power from grace.

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The Tzaddik, as divine as it’s experienced, the words and the deeds that emerge from them, is still fundamentally human. Batman and Superman alike are defined by their humanity, even their mortality, even if also narratively defined as ultimately invincible, or at least, unyielding.

Note again James Gunn's first utterly non-mainstream attempt at Super-hero realism before he became a master of pop-space-adventure; Super. What a gloriously disquieting film. Why? Because its about us what a Batman would be like if realized. Were a person to go out and do justice for themselves, it would need to be fueled by a strange cocktail of personal religious ideology, sci-fi paranoia, and romantic frustration. Ultimately, this clarification makes the film less of a satire and more of a serious comic attempt to give the money shot moments of catharsis that make super-hero stories work, rather than the cynical reason why they can. Spoilers! The dude who becomes a psycho vigilante superhero hits people with a wrench, savaging not necessarily the worst, but the most accessible of enemies, until his troubles and yearning for the honor of his longed-for take him to embrace the danger of attacking a progressively less accessible gangster-villain. In the end, he gets basically everything he is willing to want and aim for, and it's ultimately because he was a devoted person. Devoted to psychotic ideals, and the love of a very untrustworthy cheating and heroin addicted spouse, who, because he does actually rescue her through his violence and madness, returns to him in completeness in the end.

This is the only acceptable god in modernity-- desire, will. Urge, but not the shallow first want that passes, no. The serious burning one that will not let you be whole unless you at least try to get it to be satisfied, and don't stop. What makes Batman a nice guy, ultimately? How much he's not just trying to get the bad guys that killed his parents, no: he's trying to take care of all the other kids, to the best of his ability. This makes him the Tzadik, the Yesod/Foundation. Notice: Lex Luthor's company is called Lex Corp. Bruce Wayne's?

The Wayne Foundation. Through which Bruse Wayne does All The Good that he wants to see in the world BESIDES for the personal masked cathartic violence. This is the work of the Tzaddik is all aspects, manifested effectively.

Superman, on the other hand, is the god in the sky, the perfect standard that doesn't quite seem to ever be, but actually must if things are working out, somewhere some how. Shining Apollo, he is ultimately killed and resurrected every time he's in ultimate danger, or else almost killed, but then resuscitated at the last moment. Batman is rarely so vulnerable as that, instead, he's almost always held captive, or held back from being somewhere. Superman is actually resurrected by serious need. That's the axis they are on, the east and the west, the before (borderline primitive violent warrior king, in a viking city of warring dark shamans) and the after (futuristic civility and capacity, effortless like it will be). Wonder Woman is the ultimate resolution that realizes these both, the pragmatic and the utopian. That’s why she’s the best of them all.

Much more visceral than Superman, much more martial than all but the most dystopian versions, some triads would split the trinity between Chesed, Gevura and Tipheret, putting her on the level of Tipheret, but this doesn't work consistently to the degree that she's not the balance of Batman and Superman-- she's the fulfillment of the need to bridge the divine sensitivity with the human imperative, and in this, she is able to be realer than the other heroes. Her lasso compels truth, but she is not truth herself, she's too human to be so abstract driven, like princess Ariel of little mermaid, by curiosity, epic curiosity that becomes altruism. Not anger, not concern, not ethics per se-- but her curiosity compels her responsibility. Will, an expression of the secret clarity at the root of the crown and the heart of the tongue, traditionally. The purpose of Keter buried in the sense organ of Yesod-or-Malkhut.

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If the Sun tends towards generally symbolizing Tipheret (occasionally used for certain forms of Netzach) what does the moon tend to stand for and from? Yesod, the West to Tipheret's east, but some say Malchut-- either way, at the opposite extreme from the Sun. The wild was traditionally identified with the moon, the hairy and savage-- werewolves and witches, woodwoses and warrior women.   The moon is the first inversion, the first response. It must be noted, that according to the neo-biblical narratives, the stars are initiated specifically to support the moon-- they are all there to support her. But of course, the moon only becomes expressed in order to glorify the sun, whom she lives to reflect. The stars are formed, and then come together to be supported by constellations, ostensibly lifted up into the heavens, and so it's turtles all the way down. Lets say that even the Vilna Gaon realizes how rarely the Moon wants to be identified with Chesed. Lets say he realizes very well how traditional is the Moon’s identification with King David, Malchut, Israel and the purpose of creation, The Sabbath, and fufillment itself. Lets say he knows all that and still would rather not: the wholeness of the moon in one system births the use of it, taken for granted, in another.

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There's a moral problem with all the iconic super-heroes, just like there is with all gods: they are ultimately conservative forces, unless they are eternal anti-heroes, like Robin Hood.  Robin Hood is problematic only and totally in that he is identifying with another, better order, one that does in fact settle in, and so his iconic nature is certified: Long Live King Richard!  What could Robin Hood do of virtue once King Richard returns? If there was still exploitation, could he fight it? Or come to be the agent of the Man, instead of the hero of the needy?Batman and Superman suffer from this problem more than someone like Wonder Woman does, because they are citizens, and she something more like an international monitor, come to see what ails the world. She is never ultimately implicit in the conservative crimes of the world, because she is not defending any particular state, like those other two do.

All passionate acts are driven by will, and wonder woman's tends to be more specific and less abstract. What does “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” really mean? One episode of Batman Brave and the Bold has Superman define it as Bacon Double Cheeseburgers, that most decadent of combinations, like the Justice League itself. Here it is a euphemism for that which satisfies, deeply.  Actually a shocking moment in a weird show, alive with quirk and definitive exploration, of characters ultimately at their corniest, soaked in irony, but not dripping it: Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman sit in a diner together. Superman, allowed and invited to be the jockiest jock in Americana, orders a Bacon double Cheeseburger. Ok, fine. Batman orders one too! Ok, cute... Wonder Woman orders a tuna melt on whole wheat-- and Batman CORRECTS her, ordering a Bacon DoubleCheeseburger FOR HER, saying: “You'll work it off, princess.”  What a terrible Batman! But that's the Tzaddik for you: Self-righteous, unapologetic, hard to resent too much unless you're the one he's hurting. Superman moves too fast to even have the conversation with, just like god, usually.

But Wonder Woman is moved by desire-- a will and curiosity for encountering the world, mixed with a confident will to help and support an intuitively perceived good. In most encounters, when a relationship is initiated between her and another, she is the initiator, unless they're a bad guy sneaking up on her.  This aspect of the warrior princess, associated by the Romans with the Lunar in Diana as well as the supernal in Athena is also very high and very low. How low? It manifests even as in the world, Malchut, more than as Bina/Athena, a role her mother takes, as the retconned Golden Age Wonder Woman, in one of John Byrne’s slightly unconscious innovations. Black Canary and Batgirl could approach this role, but the truth is, neither is often as resonant and Wonder Woman. She is constantly, ironically, the most human, in light of her either divine or clay origins.

The princess, Malkhuth, which I often like to translate as “The Real”, is both very human and very alien. So human, are her sympathies and sensitivities: she notices and responds to the truest need of the abused, in a way that regular super heroes cannot. Very intentionally sent on the mission to encounter humanity and guide us to betterment, it becomes revealed how much she is actually coming from true pre-traditional humanity to restore it's compassion and sense, through both violence and sociality. This is the degree to which Diana of Themyscira ascends to the throne of Mars, become the God of War itself in Brian Azzarello’s “recent” reboot, her golem origin as clay-wished-to-life denied and her divinity emphasized as she’s redefined as a daughter of Zeus Absentio. It remains to be seen what will be done with her origin in the movie coming out next week! But the distinction here is small enough to be irrelevant. Her origins don’t matter as much as her priorities or capacities, as modernism insists about us all. Kurt Busiek's straightforwardly titled maxi-series “Trinity” is the first work i'm aware of to make the Kabbalistic/alchemical relationship between the Big Three DC heroes overt, identifying Superman with the Sun (Tipheret) Batman with the Moon (Yesod/tzaddik) and Wonder Woman with the Earth (Malchuth). He does this in the context of a larger schemata that tries to put a villain in the role of every Tarot card, and address the functional meaning of these characters, this trinity, by removing them from the narrative and seeing who or what would fill that void, and how incapably. And then, he adds an amazing layer, of trying to mythically address and describe the ultimate and inherent conflict between the three, when failure defeats their efforts to rescue, who or what each ultimately blames. This is the klippah moment of anyone and everyone, in defeat and failure, raging out in the name of their own essence, and the ultimate fixing of this conflict, heroes trapped by their essences, is when they become willing to exchange roles, and embrace actually becoming each other. This is a trope from some of the earliest Superman/Batman team ups that survives into almost every incarnation, and is made radically eloquent in Grant Morrison's Invisibles, where part of what the radical anarchist cell of heroes does is to exchange roles by lottery, so that whoever was leader before gets to be something else, and the whole cell is strengthened. This happens in Worlds Finest or Justice League stories specifically in the context of overcoming someone's now familiar definitive vulnerabilities, kryptonite or not being super strong or what have you

. Wonder Woman, because she is physically distinct as a woman from the other two icons is not as easy to switch places with. So she historically has to learn to switch places with herself, something she tends to have little trouble doing, adopting a range of high pressure identities as needed, and functioning for years without powers, connections, or any of much of what she might be identified with. Aggressive feminine sexuality, and grounded realization itself, must be flexible.

Now-- in the tryptarch described above, of sun-moon-earth, Wonder Woman is, in Busiek's model, identified with Earth.  This “Trinity” parallels the Sepher Yetzirah's “Three Mothers”, and Aristotle's three branched theory of Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis, where something is introduced, followed by it's opposite, and the two are tempered into harmony-perfection by their balance. There is the degree to which, as in Kingdom Come, Wonder Woman is the moon and Batman is earth, which would be consistent with the degree to which Batman is the most popular hero in the world, and Wonder Woman is borderline obscure. Different contexts rotate the association, but the big three are the big three, as much as they are in The Avengers as well.

Triune gods and goddesses have a long history and pre history, as do ruling trinities or tribunals. The great Kabbalist Rabbi Yehuda Loew echoes Aristotle's model for explaining the relationships between the centrality of Trinities, and their movement into more stable, friendly Quartets, in the context of the mythical Four World Empires of Jewish Mysticsm, often referred to in the context of Biblical Daniel's reading of Nevuchadnezzer's vision of the Four Metal Man. The initial trinity is where most of the innovation occurs-- the first three letters of the four letter name of G-d, ’י’ ’ה’ and ’ו’ are all distinct--

Thesis(Yod/Babylon)-- the initial (radical) innovation that creates the new field, the new genre, the new model. Put out there, and then it just takes over fast until

Antithesis--(Heh/Persia) comes along to criticize and inhibit the dominance of the thesis. Batman is kind of the anti-superman, utterly human, yet super-human in what might be a more efficient and resonant way

Synthesis-- (Waw/Greece)where the criticism of the Antithesis is resolved with the thesis to create a more powerful and inclusive harmony-- a ruling trinity. Where heroes wind up in this trinity rotates-- and this might be the secret of why the Sun is both first and third on the week chart. But the fourth is the inheritor of all that came before, and the original fulfillment-- clarified and washed of excess by a kind of secondary reflected antithesis-filter-- a new resolution into a now realized empire-- (Heh/Rome.) 

Noted Stand up comic and true-historian Colin Quinn remarked the difference between Greece and Rome- Romans had no time for philosophy-- we got it down, now we're gonna get it done-- such is the imperative of a perfect and beloved empire... except for everyone trampled by it's thus imperfected iron heel. They even assimilated democracy has universally has ever seemed to make sense. Rome or “Edom” is the great city of every later story, Latins as we all are by now, Latinized by our most efficient international legal language of technicality and superb bureaucratic detail. A perfect bureaucracy is a swift and effective one, not apparently. There's a reason things are the way they are-- there was some degree of consensus, and some degree of collusion, but mostly just kind of principled reaction.

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Zach Snyder and David Goyer's Man of Steel expresses, very intentionally, much of the conscious and unconcious purpose and meaning and glory of the Superman myth, and the degree to which America's contribution to world morality and myth are expressed through it. Man of Steel is a certain kind of sublime resolution to the split between savage idealism and cynical hero-craft expressed in his first two films, the radical and ambitious comic book adaptations that are both resolved ultimately in this effort at a 21st century Superman reboot. Man of Steel has a lot to do with the Greek-Persian conflict romanticized in 300, one of the most faithful adaptations of a comic book into movie ever. The connection of course has to do with the mystery of nationalism and personal expression into it.  

Watchmen, on the other hand, cannot be but an anti-nationalist effort, even with the amendments that Snyder makes to gently and almost invisibly circumcise Alan Moore's even more radical criticism of utopian delusion. This is the problem with morality, heroism and responsibility itself: the delusion of responsibility manifests itself as unapologetic brutality. Where in 300 this is very purely romanticized and justified as the only way of protecting freedom, no amount of whitewashing can strip Watchman of its piercing criticism of the heroic model. The two extremes of heroism in Watchmen are the urban psycho-vigilante, utterly unsympathetic in his bigotry and straight violent madness, until the end where it is ONLY his idealism that succeeds in triumphing the sinister, genocidal idealistically Machiavellian campaign of Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world. His genius, and hope for a better world order compels him to kill thousands of people, in an effort to mobilize the survivors into a better unified future against a fictionalized alien threat. Batman and Lex Luthor bound up completely into one Super-Watchman, ultimately haunted by the mystery of how much good his plot can be “in the end” when in fact there is no, and can never be, an end, a curious rhetorical conceit itself, in light of how accessible true apocalypse is nowadays.

Man of Steel lives and breathes and fights in this tension, between impossibly deluded self-righteous military bravado and genuine personal sacrifice for the sake of protecting an actual precious. Man of Steel seeks to acknowledge the generally avoided meaning and depth of Superman's identity as immigrant god, and my bias was to see the fear of the immigrant deity in it as, at least partially, a metaphor for the international fear of the Jew that Superman is long suspected to be a symbolic lionization of, as well as comfort against. Zach Snyder is not American. But American comics these last twenty years since Watchmen and Miracleman have made very clear how much the American myth is relevant and meaningful in England, in light of the triumph of immigration over nativism and race-blind democracy over controlling monarchism, at least in the romances of our highest and most honorable moral clarities. He welcomes the issue of Superman's inherent foreign identity, by treating his personal journey of self discovery as fundamental, rather than peripheral, and meaningful rather than just deus-ex-somewhere else. This is the boldest acknowledgement of the virtue of ancient wisdom and identity available in modernity, a modernity that has overcome the melting pot imperative away from foreign identification, and instead embraced diversity as ironic component for localized greatness.

Apollo, in his earliest appearances, is not a solar deity, and not an Apollonian deity as we know him now. Instead, he's an Apollonian in the most literal of senses, a destroyer. Appolyon, recall, is one of the Syriac translations of “Abbadon,” a popular New Testament euphemism for the King of Destruction, a Satanic epithet.  This does not sound like the Apollo that the Greeks came to venerate over almost all other gods, who they identify with nobility, art, and aesthetic perfection itself in a way no other divinity comes close to. No, in his earliest documented appearance, he's a vicious war god, raining unstoppable and all-piercing arrows on legions, mercilessly. This is so true, that many anthropologists have speculated that Ares and Apollo originated as the same deity, carrying so many attributes in common as they do. At some point, they become very distinctified-- Ares takes on most of the attributes of the war god history has totally identified him with, but Apollo, from his vantage point as national god of awesome, matures into exactly what Greek idealism matured into-- a sensitive and triumphant solar deity, identified with music, justice, harmony and every kind of perfection the the Greeks would come to value and identify with. In this, he is very much a precursor to Superman. Superman may fight in a war or two, may have even emerged in the context of  World War, but he has tended not to be a war god. He is a domestic protector, on the edge of all trouble, arriving mostly as a salvific figure, willing to violently engage any troubles that will not respect his concern and civic values. Civic is the operative word here-- what would Superman be without his Metropolis? As powerful, as capable, but less connected, less in tune, with both human need and human accomplishment. The contrast to this in Cinema is General Zod-- both in the classic Superman II and the more recent Man Of Steel, Zod is a classic Martial figure: a general longing to fight his campaign eternal, to rebuild the glory of his nation on the trivialized ashes of the new world: Earth. Superman's moral divinity is his commitment to his adopted earth, despite the opportunity for personal actualization in becoming the Kryptonian citizen he comes to identify as. This is the great hope an assimilatory motherland has for the immigrants and refugees who flock to her: to be appreciated so much that the original motherland can be defeated so that the new one can live. In this, superman overcomes Martial triumph for Apollonian glory, the harmony between the power of the old and the sensitivity to the new. And so Apollo becomes the Sol-Invictus, identified joyfully with the emerging beauty, rather than the furious invasion. Phew!

Judah Maccabee, notably, slays the Greek general Apollonious(!) in his defense of his people's nativity against the sublime assimilatory insistence of the Hellenists in the Book of Maccabees, and for this, he is commorated in Dante's Divine Comedy as sitting pretty in the heaven of Mars, specifically. Dante, who basically initiates Italian literature with his visionary epic, lists a traditional Seven Heavens, each named after a weekday star-god-attribute. To each, he attributes also a failing, a deadly sin and a virtue unavailable to that star-god-attribute. The great hope of all our next heroes is to integrate the virtues that even the angels cannot, defined so distinctly as they are, the poor trapped kings of nature. 

  National Gods are only as great as the place they are defined through. The hope of Superheroes of tommorow is just of bigger wider identifications. This is the ultimate difference between Apollo and Mars, between Sunday and Tuesday, between Abraham and Israel. Note that Tipheret, the third, is often identified with the solaris/sun, the first, and see how gold is made: the middle path between initial creative gesture and infinite reaction is harmonia, sometimes an asshole but a very effective one with noble and graceful standards. The hero is in the aspect of, as Heracles emerges as a sun deity after all.