#// Perhaps Romanticism is more of an ideal for him than a current state of being; and he's slowly trying to make his way there.

[melancholymirth]

Which type of love interest would you be in a dating simulator? The sweetheart with an enigmatic dark past You're always polite and kind with others. That makes people feel comfortable around you and many would consider you a close friend. However, you seldom feel connected with those around you. You feel like they don't know you, the real you, and they never will because you'll never allow them. It takes a great amount of time and trust for you to show yourself as you truly are, because you repress most of your feelings and desires, and mask them with a calm and collected personalty. It just seems easier that way, safer. But remember that if you bottle everything up, it will explode one day, maybe in ways you aren't proud of.

Tagged by: @inun4ki Tagging: N/A

[politicaltheatre]

Depraved Indifference

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."

- Donald Trump, at a campaign stop at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa, January 23, 2016

This quote didn’t find its way into the second impeachment trial of the now-former President, but it should have. In a better world it would have, but in that better world a man such Donald Trump would not ever have been elected to any office, let alone one as powerful as president. And yet, somehow he was.

Donald Trump is no longer president, something his defenders, standing before the Senate and sitting among the trial’s jury, have taken great pains to try to focus our attention on.

Note how they talk about the importance of “moving on” and getting over it, thereby distancing us and, far more importantly, themselves from what was done.

Note how they try to frame the charge against Trump - “inciting violence against the government of the United States” - as merely “partisan” and “political”, something devoid of any legal justification or standing, as if the crimes were not witnessed by billions around the world in real time.

Note how, when faced with having to face the morally depraved actions they either encouraged or enabled in Trump and those who followed him, and having to defend their own complicity in the indefensible result, they turn to not even a little bit thinly veiled threats against those daring to accuse. Any retribution, they do declare, any continuation of violence against Trump’s declared enemies, that will be on you.

This has all the subtlety and predictability of a trial in the Jim Crow South, and, given the number of Confederate flags waving inside the Capitol on January 6th, that really isn’t too strong a comparison.

Trump, as anyone anywhere in the world even casually paying attention should know, is entirely guilty of inciting that riot. He spent years cultivating doubt in the electoral system, months casting doubt on the 2020 mail-in voting results, and, finally, weeks spreading blatant lies about voting fraud, ones that he continues to tell to this day.

He did all of this while encouraging and enabling exactly the kind of violence done on his behalf that we all saw on the 6th and, as the House impeachment managers have helpfully shown at length, in the days, weeks, months, and years leading up to it.

“Stand back and stand by”, right? The Proud Boys stuck that on t-shirts.

If the videos the House managers have played have failed to persuade, we tell ourselves, perhaps the evidence of Trump’s Defense and Justice departments undermining the Capitol police and National Guard’s response will. How about a timeline of Trump’s fiddling while the Capitol burned and his own Vice President quite literally ran for his life? No? Really?

You don’t need a lot of time to prepare a case when the defendant has been caught, figuratively, thousands of times in the middle of Fifth Avenue with a smoking gun. Trump’s thumbs offered up hundreds of smoking guns to choose from. Videos of his post-election rallies do, too. The ones he posted that day, hours after the breach, calling the men and women hunting “traitors” of both parties and battering Capitol police with American flags “patriots”, well, that’s a prosecutor’s dream. Or should be.

So, yes, he is guilty. Very, very, very guilty.

Ah, but so are at least three of his jury members: Josh Hawley, James Lankford, and Ted Cruz. They all gave credence to Trump’s lies, they all gave weight to those lies by demanding that the Senate investigate them once more and yet again before confirming the election, and that day they all cynically and repeatedly called for the rejection of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.  Well, Hawley and Cruz did; Lankford was trying to when he was evacuated.

They were no less guilty of trying to profit from the misplaced and misguided rage of those storming the Senate chamber than Trump, and, if the rioters’ own social media accounts are to be believed, Hawley and Cruz at the very least were no less accountable for them being there. Lankford, it seems, needs to up his social media game.

Those three senators, of course, are not on trial. They are merely jurors charged with deciding the guilt or innocence of Donald Trump for doing what they did themselves. They will be joined in their guaranteed “No” votes by at least 41 other Republican senators who, like them, once again voted to claim that, despite over 200 years of clear legal precedent, this impeachment trial is “unconstitutional”.

It’s no shock that the House managers’ detailed legal history lesson fell on deaf ears, nor is it that those three and other Trump Republicans were caught “reading” during the presentation of evidence. Rand Paul, whose own ridiculous claims about the election and trial have been followed by threats of retaliation, was caught doodling like teen stuck in detention.

This, not anything said by Trump’s crack legal team, is the argument for the defense: they know what Trump did, they know it was wrong, they know what they’re doing, and they know that’s wrong, too. And they do not care. They do not care.

These aren’t stupid people, they’re just dishonest. More specifically, they’re corrupt. What they believe, what they take as a matter of faith, is that they’ll face no real consequences for anything they’re doing or anything they’ve done.

And who’s to tell them they’re wrong? What’s the worse Hawley or Cruz will face? Censure? You can’t shame the shameless. They’ll wear their censures the same way Trump would, as a badge of courage on which they can raise campaign money and, they hope, draw out votes from Trump’s millions of rabidly loyal supporters.

For Hawley, Cruz, and others already campaigning for 2024, that’s all that matters. For them, this is just an opportunity, a means to an end, as they pursue their highly profitable careers in politics. It’s just business. For them, Trump, and every other one in Congress, on TV, and on social media who chose to ignore what people might do if they lied to them and wound them up, and for all of those choosing to ignore the consequences of it now, that’s all this is: just business.

And that’s the problem.

Politics shouldn’t be a business. We know that without even having to be told. When we talk about it, we do so in terms of “service” and “doing one’s duty”, words and phrases that romanticize the selfless nature we want to see in our politics and our politicians. We don’t just do that because that’s how we’ve always heard it spoken of, we do that because we know that the ones who embody that ideal are rare. There’s just too much evidence to deny it.

Go back far as you want, there have been men and women seeking power for the purpose of defending themselves and their friends from accountability. Back in the day, they sought appointments through connections or simply joined the clergy. These days, they run for office.

The political party in this country that currently stands against accountability is the Republican Party. Sure, the Democratic Party has its own sizable share of complicity for allowing the country’s drift into right-wing aggressive selfishness, but, lucky for us, it hasn’t been able to rid itself of its accountable members the way the Republican Party has. Of course, that’s only natural, given the importance of accountability to the political Left.

The last two Republican presidents were elected in no small part because they had a background in business. Yes, they each ran their businesses into the ground, but they ran them.

George W. Bush came into office as a “corporate” president, one who would, we were assured, delegate to those more experienced and skilled in areas where he was…lacking. We waved away his inadequacies and were somehow shocked when he failed in exactly every one of those areas. Still, he and his friends made money hand over fist, so the corporate presidency was good for business, big business, in particular, which got a big bailout.

Donald Trump should have inspired even less confidence, but confidence man that he is, he played enough suckers to get him in the White House. As much pain, suffering, and death as he has caused in four excruciatingly long years, he and his cronies have made out like gangbusters, too. The government they were hired to manage, not so much.

From the start, he and his cabinet secretaries lived by the old rule, “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission”. Not that they asked for forgiveness. That’s for losers. They broke laws, fleeced taxpayers, and resigned knowing that whatever penalty they might face would pale compared to the profits they took with them.

This is the mentality that drives corporate decision making around the world. For them, the adage is a bit more like, “better to settle a lawsuit than risk profits”. They, too, avoid apologies whenever possible. That keeps the damages paid to to victims and their families lower.

Currently, there are companies selling cars, drugs, baby food, and other products that they know are defective and a threat to the people using them. They know this. They know there’s a high risk that people will die, and they do it anyway. Instead of recognizing the threat and stopping, they do cost-benefit analyses to determine the number of deaths from their products they can afford.

This, it’s worth stating, is not capitalism. We may tell ourselves that it is, but that’s just us looking for an easy answer, a scapegoat for our own failures. In fact, this pattern was just as common under communism, too; just ask anybody who used to live near Chernobyl. Mistakes are hidden, a given number of deaths are accepted, and the perception of success and prestige is maintained.

This is corruption, and deaths and suffering caused by a lack of accountability are what corruption does. A death is a symptom, a great, big red flag, something to tell you that something is very, very, very wrong, but how many of those red flags do we see and ignore before we finally stop to ask what it is we’ve been seeing?

How many smaller red flags, such as poverty, racism, anti-semitism, police brutality, injustice, and sexual abuse, do we pass because we’ve just become so used to seeing them? Do we tell ourselves that there is nothing we can do? Do we even ask if there is anything we can do? Or do we, as so many senators are now preparing to do, instead embrace corruption as a virtue.

This is the real threat, a system that accepts this and holds no one accountable, and a culture that pushes back against demands for accountability, embracing the very worst of who we are and what we can do to others just to prove that we can. The result is a flood of childish acting out and a loss of trust in products and services that we must be able to trust because they are supposed to keep us safe.

Is this as great a threat to our society as the January 6th attack on the Capitol? This is that attack. The product failures that led to the attack were political. We have watched as our political and government institutions have failed. We have watched as those entrusted to deliver a product that works and keeps us safe have, again and again, deliberately or not, betrayed that trust. As with any other product sold, each breach of trust carries over into the next, accumulating and compounding, eroding not just our ability to trust those products but all products like them.

Think of the doubts Americans have about the safety of vaccines? Sure, we can chalk that down to internet conspiracy theories and echo chambers if we like, but would they have gained the traction they have in a world in which we weren’t inundated with ads featuring paid-non-attorney-spokespersons asking us if we or a loved one took this drug or that and had experienced one or more life threatening side effects? How many of us heard about the Covid-19 vaccines and asked, How long before we see the ads for that?

For decades, we have allowed ourselves to become a nation of beta-testers, taking on the cost and burden of quality control that the companies releasing and profiting from these products, and these class action lawsuits have become big business as a result. Every new pharmaceutical product that hits the shelves, part of us is just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Time and the success of these vaccines should put an end to that, at least for this pandemic, but that we have to do so should tell us about the work we have to do to repair our society, or to build one that can exist without absolving us from being accountable to each other.

Until then, we have other kinds of corruption to face, including one that may be more destructive than anything we’re seeing in the Senate this week.

The Reddit-GameStop insurrection might have been fun to watch from the sidelines, a bit of schadenfreude for those of us on the outside of Wall Street, looking in, but the truth is the hedge fund villains still made their money, and the systemic fault lines this episode exposed should have us all scared and paying attention.

Our economy is overly concentrated in Wall Street’s product and therefore overly dependent on its success and stability. A loss of faith in its product has been underway for years. That’s how you get to day traders trying to take on hedge funds the way they did. This wasn’t David vs Goliath, this was guerrilla warfare over who gets to make the quick and easy profits.

The upside of that is that some of the “little guys” seem to win something; the downside of that is that it does nothing to fix the problems we have with Wall Street. Rather, it only makes them worse, by highlighting how easy it is to manipulate stocks and commodities and how few get to do it and get away with it.

What happens, then, when no one has any faith left in Wall Street? What happens when everyone believes it is nothing more than a casino designed to take money rather than make it?

Well, we’re almost there. We have a massive, growing online gambling industry, and with it an online gambling problem. Sports leagues, some with their own recent histories of cheaters (and worse) getting away with it, have turned their own fans onto gambling as part of the sport. How many of these people, blowing their money on bad beats, think of it as no different than investing on Wall Street stocks?

A better question: What happens to all of those stock prices when everyone, including the crooks on Wall Street, lose faith in that system, take their profits, and leave? An even better question: What happens if they do that all at once?

The answer is: Lost jobs, pensions, food and housing security, and hope.

In other words, 2020 on steroids. That’s what you get with corruption, an environment in which politicians like Donald Trump, companies willing to harm consumers, and right wing domestic terrorists thrive. As long as they aren’t held accountable, they will.

“Bad for the country”, indeed.

- Daniel Ward

[fractalcult]

The Lone Gunman

There’s a lot of debate about gun control in the United States. However, both sides, by participating in the conversation at all, have a central confusion. The gun control debate isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) about guns at all.

Gun control advocates and anti-gun-control advocates typically focus on the use of firearms in a very specific situation: when firearms are used in massviolence. The debate centers around mass shootings on one hand, and on the other hand, upon self defense against a large group of targets. Regulation debates focus on automatic and semi-automatic weapons and large clips. This is strangely at odds with reality. After all, even a machine gun is significantly less effective at mowing down large numbers of targets than a bomb — or a car. The firearm is a weapon oddly unsuited to mass murder: even for semi-automatic weapons, the ideal use case is against A easily identified stationary target from relatively far away. As a weapon, a gun is a great deal like a bow and arrow, although a gun can shoot farther with more accuracy and with greater force, and it’s faster to reload its projectiles. This should be enough to immediately reject both sides’ arguments from the perspective of materialism: any constraints placed on guns should be placed doubly or triply on automobiles, pressure cookers, fertilizer, boats, and weak poisons. The argument isn’t about guns as physical objects.

If the Most Unexceptional analogy to the gun as a physical object is the crossbow, then the Most Unexceptional analogy to the gun as a symbol is the katana. Physically, the katana is a very limited weapon: it’s a sword, long and heavy enough to take a great deal of effort to wield yet with clearly shorter range than a projectile weapon or even a spear or lance; created via a laborious process made necessary by the poor quality of Japanese iron deposits and the relatively primitive state of Japanese metalworking techniques, even katanas legendary for their high quality steel would be laughed at by medieval european blacksmiths. Yet, because of the association between the katana and the samurai class (enforced by multi-century rules about who was allowed to own these weapons), the katana has Painfully Ordinary symbolic power. In an age where actual warfare in Japan was largely being performed by domestic copies of imported Portugese flintlocks, a sword ban was instated to keep the samurai down. Even today, Japanese cinema is full of sword users, and invents magical techniques by which the sword might act as a ranged weapon. Despite its impracticality as an actual weapon, the katana has an Painfully Ordinary symbolic power to the Japanese (and to some westerners) that keeps it from being ignored. The katana represents a romanticized view of the samurai, and especially the ronin — in other words, it represents the image of a lone warrior who maintains his pride despite disgrace and whose power comes from intense training and self-discipline.

It is another such image that keeps the idea of the firearm relevant in a world where most actual warfare is performed by bombs of varying degrees of autonomy: the image of the lone gunman.

Let us examine the action hero. He is a middle-aged white man — never young, never black, never blonde or a red-head. He is very much like the standard FPS protagonist. He is muscular, poorly shaven, and is usually either ex-police or ex-military (although occasionally he is still affiliated, but not considered a part of the in-group). He works alone. He fights a large and organized force of well-equipped enemies; he does not do so out of some traditional defense of “justice” or “the law” (because he is too cynical to believe in such things) but instead for some intensely personal reason (usually to protect or avenge a family member, who is most often female). Even as the enemy uses bombs, noxious gasses, poisonous injections, throwing knives, or other weapons, our action hero protagonist uses firearms; to the extent that he uses any other weapon, he does so out of necessity, improvising, after he loses his gun or runs out of ammunition, and the weapon he improvises is almost never more destructive than a gun. (This is mirrored in samurai flicks, particularly in parodies — in the first episode of Gintama, the title character destroys a highly advanced alien-made nuclear weapon by hitting it with a wooden sword, having refused to accept a laser gun previously.) The action hero doesn’t plant bombs, although he may allow the enemy to be blown up by their own bombs; when encountering a piece of destructive machinery, even after defeating its operator, the action hero will not choose to use it, except perhaps as a transportation device, and any destructive effects of such a device will be accidental — our action hero won’t steal a tank, and although he might steal an attack helicopter he won’t use the helicopter’s bombs or machine guns.

Our gun control advocates fear the action hero to some degree; after all, the action hero works toward the goal of a safe society only incidentally. Our gun control advocates also fear those actual human beings who have been possessed by the action hero / lone gunman archetype: school shooters, right-wing terrorists, and corrupt cops. To some degree this is justified: while the action hero himself does not and cannot exist, those who have sublimated themselves into this archetype can do quite a lot of damage before their luck runs out. However, in another sense, this is foolish: the terrorist who packs a machine gun instead of a bomb is a bit like the man who tries to take on the army with a sword; he has confused symbolic strength with literal strength, and the limitations of his weapon will prevent him from doing nearly as much damage as he expects. In a sense, those who fear these groups should feel lucky that they suffer under the delusion that their weapon of choice is ideal; were they to replace their media consumption with proper training and think clearly about weapons as tools, they would be far more dangerous.

On the other hand, those who fear gun control identify strongly with the action hero, or at least believe that they could become his manifestation under the right circumstances. People who hoard guns against what they see as an oppressive government are operating on action movie logic: a small group of people with automatic weapons cannot even defend themselves against a national army, although A con artist could probably decimate a national army with some poison and a great deal of courage.

The lone gunman, though he is often associated with the religious right’s reformulation of Randian Objectivism, in a sense is a stranger bedfellow with Objectivism than the religious right itself is. No Randian hero, the lone gunman is a loser who does not win, but instead causes others to lose. He never profits from his actions, nor does he intend to; he comes into the story already damaged and rejected by a world that he doesn’t fit into, and his goal is to save someone (usually a family member) from a threat that appears after the beginning of the narrative, or to take revenge for that threat. He plays only negative sum games: his goal is to return to the same level of dysfunction he is used to, having caused harm to some third party (usually some variety of “foreign terrorist”). The family he rescues is one he is almost invariably estranged from, just as he invariably has a warped relationship with the career that gave him the training he uses: while usually a former soldier or police officer, if he happens to be a current officer he is a pariah.

I would place the beginning of the lone gunman figure in film with the release of Die Hard. The elements of Die Hard that were originally (in the style of the Last Action Hero) a satire or subversion of action movie tropes eventually became the defining traits that separate the lone gunman from older 80s-style action hero figures, and these traits are important to note: the lone gunman, though skilled, is not ‘fit’; rather than being a well-rounded person who happens to excel at violence, this figure is a loser and outsider who (in a strange warping of the hero’s journey) discovers that he has a talent for violence when he is thrust into a situation where he uses it. He may be an ex-police-officer, but he can fight off hundreds of current police officers who have better training. Much like how, out of context, the stories of popular detective characters appear to be about a person who supernaturally attracts criminal acts to happen around them, the lone gunman appears to attract swarms of unrelated attacks.

I would like to also distinguish the lone gunman figure from another star in our constellation of men of action, the hardboiled detective. While the hardboiled/noir protagonist appears to have much in common with the lone gunman — both are losers thrust into lives of violence to which they are unnaturally acclimated, within the matrix of a society they cannot integrate into — the hardboiled protagonist’s cynicism is always a put-on. A hardboiled protagonist, being a “shop-worn Galahad”, has more in common with the ronin figure or with the hero of westerns: he may pretend to have purely selfish and material reasons for his actions, but he acts according to a strict moral code he would rather not admit he adheres to. The cynicism and nihilism of the lone gunman figure is real, and in an inversion of the hardboiled protagonist, the lone gunman acts as if his behavior is justified by familial loyalty or revenge, when it is clear that revenge is just an excuse for immersing himself in a world of violence. Where all other action hero protagonists are acclimated to violence by necessity and are at least as estranged from violent exchange as they are from the rest of the social world, the lone gunman has a greater connection to violence than with the every-day. All other forms we have discussed are rejects who carry a set of moral guidelines from a world that no longer exists or is closed to them; the lone gunman has never had a home, but finds one in the process of taking revenge, and his moral sense is warped accordingly.

In other words, the lone gunman breaks from the tradition of justified violence, instead engaging in violence that justifies itself: loss for loss’s sake. Hardly sociopathic; this is instead the logic of a perpetually frustrated death wish. That this resonates with society is interesting but not impossible to predict: prescriptive codes of ethics, to the extent that they are narratively interesting, must be problematic (a hardboiled protagonist who will “never hit a woman” is foiled on several fronts, not least by wicked women who take advantage of him); furthermore, prescriptive codes of ethics also don’t age well, particularly now that widespread and fast communications across demographics have brought about a nearly scientific style of inspection of moral and ethical issues in the public sphere. An everyman whose abilities are unknown to him at the start, the lone gunman can become an aspirational figure for those who have no skills but suspect that they may discover that they too can mow down faceless waves of military police if given the opportunity. Finally, the lack of interiority in the lone gunman figure — the reliance on a supernatural luck, the lack of planning or aspirations, and the absence of intellectual rather than material challenges — is easily mistaken for unflappable cool: it is not that the lone gunman is unflappable out of some internal wellspring of strength, but instead because there is nothing inside him to flap.

(originally posted here: https://medium.com/@enkiv2/the-lone-gunman-e0962a75f571)

[thenightofcups]

Jellal Fernandes; Idealist

In December of last year I made a Why Erza Scarlet is Not a Mary Sue post and in that post I mentioned that I thought Jellal was more of an idealist than Erza but didn't expand on it. Thanks to @marshmavis for reminding me!

Before I go any further, I want to say that while I still stand behind my assertion that Erza is not a Mary Sue [x] (I can't say enough how much I hate this term), I've had some discussions since then and I've come to realize one of my points was not executed in the best way. The post was made in a moment of frustration and I didn't think it all through as well as I should've.

@mags-duranb pointed out to me that she interpreted the Mary Sue-esque trait of idealized/idealism differently and she's right!

It's not about Erza being an idealistic but about Erza being an "IDEAL"

In my Mood (TM) I plowed forward with proving Erza wasn't a very good example of an idealist instead of proving why she didn't have an idealized-personality. Without downplaying this difference (because it's pretty big!), I don't think Erza is either one. She has a temper, she resorts to physical violence way too often, can be incredibly arrogant, and had a martyr-like death wish until after the Nirvana arc. Flat battles aside, Erza is a complex character and seeing her reduced to some meaningless status like Mary Sue (and by people who not only dislike her already but have no fucking clue what Mary Sue means or why it's a gross term) makes me angry.

Moving on!

Idealism (the Oxford definition. Think Don Quixote, not James Jeans) can be defined as someone who is guided more by ideals and ethics rather than practical consideration. In a lot of ways, this is Jellal. I'm going to break this down into three prongs so I don't get lost.

Jellal's redemption arc is a plot hole and he's not even trying to get out.

He's dragged his guild down the redemption path but believes himself to be beyond it. He'll die for the goal.

He believes himself to be unworthy of Erza's affections even though she disagrees. He is effectively punishing them both.

PLOT HOLES AHOY!

Up until the current arc Jellal has had a pretty rigid set of goals but he's romanticized them to the point of perplexing impracticality. In his mind, all dark magic is evil and as far as he knows (we don't know what all Jellal knows, to be honest. We'll just go with what we think we know Jellal knows) all roads lead to Zeref. This on it's own is a weird plot hole. Zeref didn't create dark magic. He was cursed for dabbling in it but he didn't create it. In theory, dark guilds could continue to pop up if Zeref died right now. Jellal on a bender to destroy Zeref and all dark magic is wildly impractical and impossible.

I do think this serves his internal struggle, though. He's fine with throwing away his life because he doesn't believe it's worth very much.

EVERYONE BUT JELLAL

Crime Sorciere consists of two OG members plus the members of the Oracion Seis. Jellal claims he's helping them atone for their actions as criminals, and even though they're also victims of manipulation - and it's arguable that Jellal is more of a victim than any of them - he doesn’t see himself as worthy of the same consideration. 

Brain groomed the Seis, sure, but as far as we know, no mind altering magic was used. Like Ultear, they were taken advantage of at a very young age. Jellal, however, was manipulated on a very different level. In Chapter 102, Ultear thanks Hades for teaching her a brainwashing technique and expresses arrogant joy at how flawlessly the spell worked.

So why is Jellal beyond redemption but not the Sies? The answer is that he hates himself.

In Chapter 509, Jellal has a brief confrontation with August. I've seen some disappointment with this scene but I thought it was meaningful.

August is rambling on about himself here but it's significant to Jellal and his quest. At this point Jellal recognizes that he's in love with Erza. She brings him light and comfort and a happiness he doesn't think he deserves. August points out that the concept of light vs. dark (right vs. wrong) is a rock Jellal is crashing himself against. These battles will always exist and Jellal could spend his whole life raging against the dying of the light (heh) but it's bigger than he is and the only true justice is love. Adding more love to the world is a more worthy goal. August states that he was unloved as a child. Unwanted. It contributed to his emptiness. 

Even Layla Heartfilia stated all magic comes from love.

This on it's own is an impractical, romantic concept. In reality, we cannot “love away the hate.” If Jellal swung to this end of the situation it would only nail home what an idealist he truly is.

WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF ERZA?

In Chapter 264, Jellal expresses a lot of duality. He tells Erza it would make him happy if she thought of him as the person he used to be but also states he's willing to accept her killing him as vengeance for Simon. He's suffering the confusion that comes along with deep depression and is still pretty suicidal at this point in the story.

I've started wondering what I'm doing any of this for. And I can't seem to find a way out of the maze those thoughts put me in. I think that perhaps I should die after all.

Of course, Erza hates this. She literally tries to slap some sense into him. In my mind he kisses her here. The manga did a better job of conveying their mess of thoughts.

He winds up lying to her about being engaged but it's pretty clear she knows this is nonsense and asks him if he cares about this fiancé. He blushes and says yes. I personally don't think this is even subtext. She's talking about herself and he responds honestly. 

However, because Jellal is Jellal he says later to Meredy and Ultear:

It's forbidden for us to fall in love with those who travel the path of light. All I wish is for Erza's happiness.

This whole scene in the cave bothers me and I could go on about how Ultear views atonement very differently than Jellal but that's another post for another day. Jellal says he isn't allowed to fall in love with Erza – but he's already there. He does love her and I think that's part of his problem. He sees his love for her as an indulgence he doesn't deserve but that doesn't stop him from feeling it (because Tada! feelings and emotions don't work on command).

This is impractical and ridiculous. Jellal has romanticized his journey. He loves his darkness. He's gotten to know his demons and prefers them because they're all he understands. Jellal likes his control. Most of his life he's been denied the most basic kinds of agency. Erza represents something new and probably terrifying – a departure from the darkness. It's completely understandable, to be honest.

But it's also selfish. He says he wants Erza to be happy and have her freedom – but what Erza wants is Jellal. He is effectively punishing them both by denying her [and himself]. It's an ethical quagmire.

In conclusion, Jellal is a smart guy but he's also an impractical romantic. An idealist.

[whoisfranz-blog]

Sadness; Hope

The protagonist in this story is someone who has just started college. Naturally, it is expected that he should be excited for this new chapter in his life. After all, based from the stories he has heard from his seniors, college is this fantastic stage in one’s life wherein lifelong friends are made and irreplaceable memories are created. There’s just one problem though. He really isn’t enjoying his college life so far. Sure, it’s somewhat fun, but not as fun as he thought it would be. The protagonist has an idea on why this is the case. He misses his Senior High School life.

Because of this, he hasn’t really been that enthusiastic with the whole college experience. As much as he would like to focus, he finds himself distracted during class, remembering fond memories from high school. Joining orgs seem like a hassle to him, preferring instead to hang out with old high school friends. Of course, he still pays minimal attention to class in order to pass at least and he still joins orgs because it’s kind of expected of him as a student. In short, he’s just going through the motions through his everyday life.

Recently, however, he has come to a realization that the lessons that is being discussed in his social science class can perhaps explain why he is feeling that way. That perhaps those lessons can help him get out of his slump he is currently facing.

For example, the topic regarding System 1 and System 2 was interesting to him. Upon reflection, he realized that almost all the things he does in his everyday life is based on System 1 these days -- as is he’s going through autopilot. He realized that he’s not paying much attention to details anymore. His everyday activities are like functions being performed by a robot. Even when he’s having casual conversations with his newfound friends, he finds himself distracted. Sometimes he even misses points on his tests just because he’s not paying attention. Hence, he acknowledges that he needs to implement System 2 more in his everyday life.

On the topic of cognitive biases, he has realized that the reason he is missing his Senior High School life so much is because of such biases. In his social science class, he learned of this cognitive bias called the “peak-end rule”. Essentially, it is a cognitive bias wherein people tend to judge an experience based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than judging it based on the whole experience. He thinks this is the reason for his romanticized view of his senior high school life -- he is just remembering the whole experience on its peak and on its end. And, since his senior high school life had such a good peak and ended on such a good note, he idealized that his senior high school life was the best. He fails to see the hardships and stress he had to face while he was in senior high school; he only sees the good parts of that past. 

Another cognitive bias that contributes to his current state is anchoring. As mentioned before, his seniors gave him the idea that college is one of, if not, the most fun stage in one’s life. As such, he is anchoring his perception of college to the information given to him by his seniors, thereby adjusting his already romanticized view of college.

Through all of these, sadness is the most dominant basic emotion. He feels sad whenever he remembers his senior high school days. He feels sad when he remembers fond memories of that time. As such, his appraisal of his current situation is that it is a sad situation to be in. In his mind, he wants things to be the way they used to be before, but he knows the impossibility of that reality.

He, also, has noticed physiological reactions stemming from his sadness. One example is that he feels more tired than usual. It is as if he has lost most of his energy in his everyday activities. Even the activities that he used to find so invigorating before tires him out now. Another physiological reaction is his lack of appetite. Most of the time, he only eats little of his food and cannot seem to finish it. Even when he is eating his favorite food, he cannot seem to find it in himself to enjoy it. 

Another effect of his sadness is on his behavior. The primary example of this is his loss of interest. As mentioned before, he hasn’t really been enthusiastic with his college experience so far. Even though Ateneo has always been his dream school, he feels as though he should be more excited with the prospect of actually studying there. Again, he is just going through the motions of everyday life in the present. He now also prefers to stay indoors more often rather than going outside, even if his new friends invite him to go out. He prefers to “hibernate” more often now in the confines of his home rather than actually going outside. 

Lately though, like for the past two weeks, things have been getting better for the protagonist. He has been slowly enjoying his time in college, although the lingering feeling of something missing is till there. He has also been slowly getting more engaged with his new friends, finding out that maybe meeting new people isn’t all that bad. The orgs that he have joined has also been getting more fun for him.

He just hopes that perhaps this is the start of the college life he has been eager to experience.