#(i used to be harsh with what i count as 'representation' whereas now if i see subtext i enjoy it's as good as text for me)

[houkagokappa]

Yeah that's fair, I don't know/remember what exactly he claimed in the video and I was mostly reminiscing on the fact that there was a lot of discourse about whether or not YOI was gay after each episode (especially around the halfway mark with the hug/kiss), and how it continued even after the final episode aired (which seems crazy thinking back on it). I don't know if some/most of those people have changed their mind since, but I definitely came across those who continued to argue it wasn't gay even after the ring exchange. Whether or not the subtext was there didn't come up that much, and it feels like arguing about semantics because there's some subjectivity to it. Usually people claimed that it came down to cultural differences or some sort of unique coach-trainee relationship those claiming it was gay simply didn't understand.

I definitely agree that it's wild that Somerton claimed "straight women" continued to argue with him about it to this day. How would he know how they identify, and also, where are they? I haven't seen any arguments against YOI being gay for years, so it's still a valid poll option!

okay piggybacking off of that previous poll someone else did:

[cerastes]

Among many things in Darknight’s Memoir, I love how the themes, and their effect on the cast, get touched upon in a manner that isn’t entirely explicit but isn’t as crystal clear as you’d expect.

For example, at one point, W was entirely willing to blow herself up to take out the enemy. She didn’t particularly want to, but she was going to do it if it came to it and if she had no other way out. When Ines understandably asks her “are you serious?”, W simply answers “well, if there’s no other way out of this, a kill is a kill, right?”. Contrast this with her attitude later, where her demeanor is as playful and caustic as we’ve come to expect from her, but her decisions, however, her courses of action, change entirely. No more thrill-seeking by riding the Catastrophe’s wind, no more gambles, no more unnecessary risks, she’s come to put a value on her own life beyond being a mercenary in the endless war game of the Kazdel barrenlands, she’s got a mission, something she less needs to accomplish and more that she wants to accomplish.

And that’s an important narrative thread in Darknight’s Memoir: To want. Sarkaz mercenaries, by and large, fight for the next paycheck more than anything, to get by, a client that pays is a good enough client. W herself initially came to Hoederer with the intent on killing him and claiming the bounty on his head. Seeing her prey firsthand and noticing she can’t kill him, she joins him instead. And that’s just natural: Why take on a foe that will likely injure you irreparably or even kill you? Better join up, and go for bigger fish. There’s literally no stakes in that fight. There’s nothing beyond the paycheck, but that also means there’s nothing except the paycheck: You can take it, but you can also leave it. The longer lived Sarkaz know when to take and when to live.

W, at this point, Wanted Nothing. Just being able to go through the motions, through whatever fights came next, was good enough. One of the first scenes we are treated to involves W throwing a team of her own mercenary corps under the bus to make it out alive. As a reader, our first reaction most likely is “wow, what a bastard”, but then you see Hoederer and Ines’ reaction, and it’s simply “oh, yeah, that happens”. It’s completely normal. That just happens in Kazdel and among Sarkaz, it’s the norm. That’s not to say it isn’t appalling, but in the context of Kazdel, that’s just another day in the job.

There’s no Want. Or technically speaking, there’s a very superficial, utilitarian, soulless Want: The next day, the next paycheck, the next meal, the next fight. Who cares about whatever the trillion of ‘noble’ Sarkaz clans are fighting for or peddle? They have their flags and their sigils and their plastic speeches, but they are all the same: The same warriors, the same traitors, the same devils. Whichever pays you, it’s all the same.

That changes when W meets Theresa. The full breadth of their dynamic is not explored in Darknights’ Memoir, but it’s made very clear that seeing the King of Kazdel, the sovereign of all Sarkaz, the noblest of nobles herself, Theresa, hunched over clumsily trying to fix a janky door, had an effect on W. Well, that, and their subsequent dialogue. Theresa was likely the first Sarkaz W met that wasn’t at least romancing a few ways to kill her, that simply wanted to know her name, and a little more about her. To us, Theresa showed the barest of cordialities with a kind demeanor, but to W, it was likely something that sent her brain into a blue screen of death state. She took an interest in Theresa, unlike she ever did with any other Sarkaz, or noble, or even any other person, and she observed her and served her.

And that there is when a pivotal change occurs: Want.

There is now Want. W No Longer Wants Nothing. She wants to see Theresa interact with others, she wants to see her alone, she wants to see how she does this and that, she wants to see her ideals through, she wants to actually believe in what she has to offer, because for the first time, it’s not a paycheck on the other side of the table that’s motivating her, it’s being able to see someone sincerely working towards a noble goal without ulterior motives and without betrayal, someone who actually believes what she preaches. Not long before this particular cutscene, Hoerderer mentions having killed someone that was trying to assassinate him, a guy he knew and that called him his friend, that even said he’d love for him to marry his daughter. This is the Sarkaz Normal. Literally everything is meaningless to the Sarkaz, even camaradeire. Not on Babel, not on that landship. W might as well have seen paradise in Babel, and in Theresa, a Messiah.

And, see, this is what I love about Darknights’ Memoirs: W doesn’t suddenly turn soft. W doesn’t do a 180. W supports the lofty goals of Theresa in the ways she knows, no doubt dyed by Theresa’s colors, but nonetheless using the skills and temperament that comes natural to her. W was born and nurtured by the battlefield, it’d make no sense for her to suddenly discard all of it, but the colors of Theresa are evident from this point on, even after Theresa’s passing.

W never becomes any less ruthless to her enemies, but there’s clearly a change to the melody of her percussive explosives. It’s no longer about the next battlefield, it’s no longer about the next paycheck, no, every move, from there on, has one clear objective: Kill Theresis, for having Theresa killed.

Now, revenge is nice and cold, but there’s a difference in how she’s going about this: As Hoederer mentions he wants out of this sordid lifestyle, W’s first reaction is to lament the loss of a capable hand, but to otherwise tell him that, if he’s getting out, he might as well Take This Specific Route She Knows Is Safest. It’s not the first farewell she’s given her blessing to: In this very conversation, Hoederer muses that W’s turned soft for letting Flamebringer leave without repercussions. While W’s Sarkaz ended up directly killing Scout’s team, Ines herself outright says to Scout that W didn’t have the heart to kill her old Babel ally (and this is an important distinction: Remember that W is loyal to Babel, not Rhodes Island), with W likely half counting on The Ghost of Babel to be able to make it out with his considerable skills (although if we recall what Scout had to say in Operational Intelligence, he seems to have been pretty aware he was going to die one way or another, and accepted this; his lack of regrets make more sense when you consider he IS the reason why RI was able to rescue Doctor at all, thanks to his deal with W so she’d let Rhodes Island pass). W, at this point of Want, is at that point where she’s not losing any sleep if she has to off someone so her cover in Reunion is believable and isn’t blown, but if she can avoid killing RI Operators, she’ll try and take that road (such as her not killing Adnachiel). Obviously, it’s not exactly the most altruistic or heroic of attitudes, but it’s about as good as it gets for, again, someone who used to believe that using her own teammates as cannon fodder to cover her retreat was perfectly normal and expected, even.

Recall the talk Ines and Hoerderer had about flags. Hoerderer says he’d rather forget about their flag, because it’s an empty symbol, and there’s no real flag for him to believe for... Instead, he believes in the flagpole: You could take that to be a very pure representation of Kazdel as a concept, as this eternal, meaningless warzone, where meaningless people wage meaningless conflict for meaningless rewards, create meaningless bonds and ultimately die a meaningless death: The very same man that throws his arm around you, calls you his friend, and tells you to marry his daughter will take a contract on your head the next day. It’s just the flagpole. It’s meaningless. It holds nothing but useless air. A flagpole with no flag is representative of something that has no meaning and no essence, a lone flagpole is exactly that: An ode to being devoid of, bereft of what should be there, but isn’t.

In many ways, as you may have noticed, Hoederer is meant to be a foil to W, and this is no exception: W has a flag, and again, it’s extremely telling that W’s affiliation as an Operator is not Rhodes Island or Kazdel, it’s Babel.

If we can consider Kazdel to mean more than just a physical location, if we can consider Kazdel to represent that meaningless, cruel, harsh style of life and way of death, then so we can consider Babel to be more than simply “Rhodes Island before Rhodes Island”, we can consider Babel to mean the ideology of Theresa, that style of life and way of death, full of meaning, with a clear objective, with a rocky path well worth the bloody trek.

If whenever Hoederer talks about about wanting to “leave Kazdel” as wanting to leave this sordid lifestyle behind once and for all, then thus, W being a part of Babel, despite her contact with Rhodes Island’s Kal’tsit, despite her undercover status as Theresis’ representative of the Sarkaz in Reunion, despite all affiliations, then that means something. And it’s changed her to some degree, sure, but the important change here is not W as a person, but rather, what W chooses to do with what she is and what she can do, successfully breaking out of the endless cycle of meaningless, vapid warfare, participating in it only in order to eventually crush it. Whereas W initially joined Hoederer because she saw herself outgunned, W is actively going against Theresis, even if she is more outgunned than ever, because now she has something she Wants. She could very easily submit to Theresis, but that’s what the past, Want-less W would do, not the current W, driven by Babel.

Because maybe, that’s all that the Sarkaz needed: Not something to believe, because words are cheap and nobles have those a dime a dozen, but someone to believe in. And not just anybody, but someone that can actually promise you more than a meaningless battle the next three weeks, and then deliver with their actions.

Maybe all they need is to Want.

Because sometimes, many times, Wanting is what breaks the stagnant cycle, but do not underestimate how easy it is to forget to Want... Or to never have learned to Want, in the case of the Sarkaz.

[madmaudlingoes]

I saw the post that you added onto talking about how men talk more than women, and although I don't dispute it, I'd like to ask if you know why this occurs.

I mean, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it?

A lot of analysis comes back to the idea that men are using talk to perform status. Even when it’s not out-and-out mansplaining, they’re talking as a way of asserting power/dominance, and perceive overlapping talk as ways of asserting (or threatening) that dominance. (Whereas some research on women in English-speaking countries has suggested we are more likely to use a participatory style, where overlapping talk serves as encouragement or a sign of engagement. That’s one of the things that makes research on interruptions so tricky, actually -- it’s sometimes hard to tell if overlapping speech is actually an attempt to seize the floor.) Since toxic masculinity teaches men to live in constant terror of losing points in an invisible status game, the logic goes, they interrupt more.But that can’t be the whole story, for two reasons. One is that, in studies that have counted these things, women get interrupted more often than men, regardless of the gender of the interrupter. For another thing, the “men performing status” idea doesn’t explain the perception gap--men tend to estimate that women (in a give meeting/class/whatever) talked a lot more than they actually did.

Now, there’s a separate line of argument (one the Geena Davis Media Initiative often quotes) that men tend to perceive a crowd as “equally” men and women when it’s really only 17% women, and that this is connected to women’s representation in the media; that is, there’s a vicious circle of “women are allowed to talk X percent of the time” “women are supposed to talk X percent of the time.” (And their solution, obviously, is better representation of women in the media to shift the default assumption of what “equal” looks like.)

Dale Spender’s argument is a little more harsh: that men see women’s speech as inherently illegitimate, weird, marked in some way that men’s speech just isn’t, and thus women speaking are more likely to be attacked, interrupted or otherwised silenced. This it an awfully tempting analysis when you look at stories like that guy who swapped signature with his female co-worker for a week, or research that shows students in online courses give “male” instructors better evaluations than “female” instructors (the trick being, of course, those are all for the same instructor who just uses a differently-gendered pseudonym for half their sections). It’s clearly not what is said but the (perceived) gender of the speaker that triggers this behavior.

In other words, the problem isn’t (just) that men need to assert status, it’s also that they presuppose women are always lower status to begin with. That’s not something we can necessarily fix by modeling equal representation; we have to actually change the stupid macho status game, preferably by ending it entirely.