#Amy is the victim of the narrative choices BUT she is so so interesting

[transmasc-rose]

I wrote 2000 words about Amy Pond again instead of sleeping which is probably a sign that 1. I should be asleep So Badly and 2. I really need to just write that Amy Pond essay I have been meaning to do since s5.

[keyofjetwolf]

I SCREAMED IN DELIGHT LEGITIMATELY OPENED MY MOUTH AND RELEASED MY OVERWHELMING JOY IN AUDIO FORM

Naru is NOT HERE for Ami’s games, and oh my godddddd how thrilled am I that she’s not, AND THAT THE NARRATIVE KNOWS THEY ARE GAMES AND ALSO IS NOT INTERESTED IN LETTING AMI PLAY THE VICTIM

Because no mistake, that is EXACTLY what Ami’s doing. She wants Usagi’s attention, she LOVES that Usagi’s ready and willing at all times to come to Ami’s emotional rescue. Usagi’s constant and overt gestures to make sure Ami knows she’s welcomed and included are a fucking drug to Ami that Usagi isn’t just willing to provide, but naturally pumps directly into her veins with every breath.

Not that Ami’s turning Usagi away just to get that next hit, or to make Usagi express NO NO I REALLY WANT YOU WITH ME for a stronger dose to reach the same high. But I say that because she isn’t there YET. Ami getting to that point eventually? Zero problem seeing it. I’d go so far as to say it’s near inevitable.

Not yet, though, and seeing Naru there, knowing Naru doesn’t like her (worse, doesn’t TRUST her), ON TOP of Ami knowing in her deepest heartspace that she was disappointed Naru was okay? Nah, much easier to decline Usagi’s offer.

HERE’S WHERE IT GETS AMAZING THOUGH HOLD ON TO YOUR ASSES

Ami could’ve just said “no thanks!” She could’ve grabbed one of the other students the teacher usually has to pair off (and Ami would know who they were, she’s been in this situation her whole life). She could’ve done a half-dozen things to wave off Usagi’s offer. Maybe she wouldn’t have been able to dislodge Usagi, who is a determined and persistent little bun when she wants to be, but Ami making a sincere and genuine effort is the point here, and she ABSOULTELY does not. Instead, she grasps her victimhood with both hands, and wraps it around herself like the martyr she’s cast herself to be.

“No no! Don’t worry about me! I don’t want to intrude on your and Naru’s special friendship! I’ll just sit here, unpicked (ALONE!!), and wait to be assigned the unlucky person who has to suffer my presence.”

FUCK THAT, says perfect sunbeam angel of having enough of your shit, Naru Osaka.

Ami doesn’t get to avoid all the awkward unpleasantness of her choices. She doesn’t get to transfer HER feelings into guilt for Usagi. She doesn’t get to bank Usagi’s attention and affection, and withdraw it later, with interest. She doesn’t get to back away from this without OWNING IT.

And I fucking LOVE Naru for this. (For many things, but also this.) Ami can’t just be passive aggressive and Sad At Things, to continue to marinate in the pity party she threw for herself. Either bring your problems with Naru TO NARU, or fuck all the way off, but the games are OVER.

[alliluyevas]

Hi! I hope I don't bother you, but would you be so kind and share some historical middle grade fiction reading recommendations? I love reading those! Have a lovely day :)

this is absolutely not a bother, I love doing book recs and I love this genre! Some of my very favorites, in roughly chronological era by the period they’re focused on:

The Roman Mysteries series by Caroline Lawrence

I happen to love good detective stories, and this series includes that, along with so much else. During the reign of the Roman emperor Titus, Roman preteen and enterprising amateur sleuth Flavia and her three friends Nubia, Jonathan, and Lupus solve mysteries and experience historical events from the eruption of Vesuvius to the opening of the Colosseum. This series has really well-developed characters, both major and minor, and strikes a great balance between enjoyable fun and some pretty heavy dramatic storylines. There are also a lot of actual historical figures depicted, like Titus and Pliny the Elder.

Crispin: The Cross of Lead by the always-wonderful Avi

One of the comparatively few children’s historical novels I’ve read and enjoyed with a male protagonist! In medieval England, young peasant Crispin is forced to go on the run for his life after the steward of the estate he lives on declares him an outlaw for mysterious reasons. With the help of a traveling musician who he meets and befriends, he attempts to clear his name and discover why there’s a price on his head to begin with. Beautifully written and thrilling.

Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman

Also set in medieval England! This book is written in a diary format by the narrator, Catherine/Birdy, a young noble girl who records her daily life, her struggles with becoming a proper young lady, and her fears about her upcoming arranged marriage. The narrative voice is really unique, snappy and humorous and deeply engaging.

The Tudor Women series by Carolyn Meyer

This is a four-part series focusing on the childhood/adolescence through young adulthood of women in the English Tudor dynasty: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Queen Mary I, and Queen Elizabeth I. My personal favorites are/were the Anne and Mary books, but I think they’re all very worth reading. They’re quite well-written and the author has a real gift for characterization. These were my introduction to the wild world of the Tudors!

The Lady Grace Mysteries series by Patricia Finney

Another middle-grade historical detective series! (Technically, I think I’d consider both of the Tudor series middle-grade bridging to young adult, but I’m counting them both here). Lady Grace Cavendish is a bright, mischievous young maid of honor in the court of Queen Elizabeth I who solves mysteries, including plots against the queen. The world of the Tudor court is very well realized and a lot of the mysteries are very clever.

The Lacemaker and the Princess by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Isabelle, the young daughter of a struggling family of lacemakers, visits Versailles to deliver lace and is stumbled across by Marie Antoinette, who selects her to be a playmate for her own daughter, Therese. As she travels between the world she once knew and the world of royalty, she has to decide who she is and where she belongs, as outside the palace the French Revolution is brewing. (Note: Marie Antoinette did actually bring ordinary children to play with her kids, but Isabelle is an invented character). I feel like this is a quite compassionate and nuanced take on the time period and the complicated friendship between Isabelle and Therese was very interesting.

A Drowned Maiden’s Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz

Maud, a difficult and awkward preteen orphan during the Victorian era, is finally adopted by a pair of spinster sisters who work as spiritualist mediums. At first, she is thrilled, but as she realizes the two are con artists who plan to use her in their rigged seances to scam grieving parents out of money, she has to decide whether this new family is worth having. I feel like this book really tapped into the spirit of Gothic novels for a middle-grade audience, it was really delightfully creepy as well as quite emotionally affecting.

Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan

Esperanza, a wealthy young Mexican girl, is left mourning and destitute after her father is murdered by bandits and her uncle forces her, her mother, and her grandmother off the family estate. Along with a family who formerly worked as servants on the estate, her family immigrates to America as migrant agricultural laborers in California during the Great Depression. Esperanza has to adjust to her difficult new life and find strength and hope where she can. This book is very captivating but is also absolutely beautifully written, very poetic. It also provides a very important look at a demographic of people who are not as frequently talked about when we discuss the period of the Great Depression.

Breaking Stalin’s Nose by Eugene Yelchin

Set in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist-era purges. Nine-year-old Sasha is an ardent admirer of Stalin and thrilled that he’s about to become a Young Pioneer--until his life is turned upside down when his father is accused of crimes against the state and arrested. As he struggles to make sense of these events, Sasha accidentally damages a bust of Stalin at his school and tries to cover it up with the help of other children of “enemies of the state”, who are outcasts at the school, as Sasha has now become. This is a really thoughtful book that combines acerbic, surrealist humor with deep compassion, and it’s a great look at a really horrible period in history that isn’t talked about much in the United States, tailored very well for the developmental level of middle-grade readers. Also, Sasha’s father is an NKVD officer who is later denounced and purged himself, which was a pretty common scenario at this time, and I appreciate the author’s choice to show how the lines between victims and perpetrators weren’t always very clear.

Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson

This is a coming-of-age story about Louise, a tomboyish teenager living in a fishing village on a remote island on the Chesapeake Bay during World War Two. This is hands-down my favorite children’s novel (I think it bridges middle-grade and YA) and one of my favorite books after. It is an incredibly poetic and poignant story, both uplifting and heartwrenching, about a girl struggling to discover her own identity and carve out a place in the world, as well as a really captivating portrayal of an insular community that is both comforting and crushing.

In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord 

Nine-year-old Shirley Wong immigrates from China to Brooklyn in 1947 along with her parents. She struggles at first to fit in with her classmates and neighbors and misses her large extended family back in China, but she eventually finds ways to make friends and thrive in America while being true to herself. Also, she falls in love with baseball! This book is partially based on the author’s experience as a young Chinese immigrant. The way that Shirley navigates a very foreign and confusing world is depicted in a funny, poignant and accessible way and the clever, scrappy Shirley is a vividly written character who definitely goes against common stereotypes about Asian American girls. 

Penny from Heaven by Jennifer L. Holm

Eleven-year-old Penny feels caught in between the two sides of her family--her mainstream 1950s Anglo-American mother and grandparents, who she lives with, and her father’s relatives: a large, loud, very Italian, very Catholic immigrant family. As she grows up, she begins to uncover the family secrets that contribute to the tension between the two sides of her family, including uncovering the story of her father’s death when she was a baby. This is a really beautiful, moving story about love, trauma, and the things that families often find too painful to talk about, and it’s also a really vivid picture of 1950s Americana as a whole and Italian-American families in particular. Also, Penny is partially based on the author’s mother as a child and her own family history which I thought was sweet and pretty compelling.

[dweemeister]

Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

Italian director Sergio Leone made a name for himself worldwide with the Dollars trilogy of Westerns starring Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name. These movies, along with Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), had more stylized violence than the typical Hollywood Western, and audiences flocked to see what some waved off as pulp novelties. During this period, an idea had been reverberating in Leone’s mind; no longer could he ignore his imagination’s wills. Leone’s success led him to spend ten years working on this passion project, even declining an offer to direct The Godfather (1972). Based on The Hoods by Harry Grey, Once Upon a Time in America is a gangster epic filled with betrayal, crime, graphic violence, and regret. The film alternates between three time periods: the late 1910s/early ‘20s, the final three years of Prohibition from 1930-1933, and 1968. It is Leone’s most ambitious project after a thirteen-year absence from filmmaking, and his last.

In New York City’s Lower East Side, we follow a handful of young Jewish boys who engage in petty thievery, grow to complete contracts for organized crime, and later make their fortunes bootlegging during Prohibition. The film centers on David “Noodles” Aaronson (Robert De Niro as adult Noodles; Scott Tiler as a child). He is first seen in a Chinese opium den in 1933 after seeing three of his friends’ corpses – burnt beyond recognition – whisked away from a crime scene. A non-diegetic telephone rings during this wordless montage – a blaring, ceaseless ringing serving as an aural pang of guilt. That guilt will be gradually explained as the film progresses. Soon after this opium-induced retreat, Noodles will depart New York City for Buffalo. He will return decades later, his hair and soul fading, after receiving a suspicious invitation. Once Upon a Time in America’s first half concentrates on Noodles’ childhood, alternating with scenes from his 1968 return. The film’s second half intercuts between Prohibition and 1968.

Noodles’ boyhood friends are the protagonist’s de facto family. They include Patrick “Patsy” Goldberg (James Hayden as adult Patsy; Brian Bloom as a child), Philip “Cockeye” Stein (William Forsythe as an adult Cockeye; Adrian Curran as a child), Dominic (Noah Moazezi), and Maximillian “Max” Bercovicz (an excellent and up-and-coming James Woods as adult Max; Rusty Jacobs as a child). Fat Moe (Larry Rapp as an adult Moe; Mike Monetti as a child) is not part of the gang, but is nevertheless a friend who knows their secrets. The film also features Noodles’ young love interest, Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern as adult Deborah; a debuting Jennifer Connelly as a child) and friend/underage prostitute Peggy (Amy Ryder as adult Peggy; Julie Cohen as a child). Also appearing in the film are Joe Pesci (whose unclear role in the film is heavily downplayed in the European cut), Burt Young, Tuesday Weld, Treat Williams, and Danny Aiello. Louise Fletcher's cameo appears only in the most recent restoration.

Before continuing with this review, I want to note that there are multiple versions of Once Upon a Time in America available to viewers. Leone’s film debuted at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival with a runtime of 229 minutes (the “European cut”). For the American general release one week later, the film’s distributor (the Ladd Company, via Warner Bros.) cut the film to 139 minutes without Leone’s permission or input. The American theatrical cut – which was released on VHS in the 1980s and ‘90s and sometimes appears on television – rearranges scenes to play in a strictly chronological structure and removes essential plot details, essentially butchering Leone’s directorial intent. A 2014 Blu-ray release of Once Upon a Time in America includes additional footage bringing the runtime to 250 minutes, but the additional footage – due to the degradation of the original negative – appears worse for wear. This review is based on the European cut, which is the recommended print for all those seeing this film for the first time.

With a screenplay by Leone, Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, and Franco Ferrini, Once Upon a Time in America is told through the lens of an unreliable narrator in Noodles. How one views the film changes radically depending on which period should be considered the “present”. If the viewer interprets Once Upon a Time in America as using the 1968 scenes as its anchor, the film is an old man’s reverie – where a lifetime of guilt is revisited and ghosts are confronted. In this interpretation, are Noodles’ memories of his childhood and young adulthood sanitized to spare him further pain? How does he square with all the pain he has been responsible for? Or perhaps one might view Once Upon a Time in America using 1933, as Noodles retreats to the opium den, as the anchor. Here, the 1968 scenes become an opium dream or a nightmare, a painful future that may have been. If indeed this is an opium-induced dream (which would make the 1968 scenes nothing but a hallucination), does that make the childhood scenes even less genuine than in the former interpretation? That Leone and his writers never force the viewer down either avenue speaks to its thoughtful screenplay.

No matter how one reads this film, it requires complete attention. Characters age over fifty years, friendships are formed and destroyed, and innocence is forever lost. Whether it is viewed as an old man occupied by his violent past or a young gangster attempting to smoke away his pain, Once Upon a Time is awash in regret. As much as viewers might sympathize with Noodles, Leone’s film portrays Noodles’ violence as the result of terrible choices influenced by his friends. Granted, there is one occasion where he kills in self-defense. But even that killing is laced with rage and revenge. Faced with the choice between his friends and the money involved with their operations and being with Deborah, Noodles will attempt to have both. Deborah’s disapproval of the gang’s behavior – her opposition becomes more tacit as she ages – assures that Noodles retain some semblance of a conscience as Max’s arrogance permeates through all their friends. Neither fully committing to the appeals from Deborah or his friends, Noodles will lose both.

In the film, smoke or steam is usually present just before or during moments tinged of bittersweet memory. Whether emanating as puffs from an opium pipe, the steam billowing from New York City’s manholes on a frigid day, or discharges from a passenger train, it is a demarcation of an event that will irrevocably affect Noodles’ life. Potentially, due to the film’s openness to interpretation, smoke or steam may also herald moments where Noodles’ memories are most suspect – through conscious reframing of his story or opium-influenced phantasms. Either way, certain narrative threads are left incomplete, raising questions over whether those dangling characters and subplots were Leone’s original intention. Perhaps Leone here is acknowledging the voids in human memory – people and things half-forgotten. Unlike its genre counterparts, Once Upon a Time in America leaves little space for comic relief. Any levity in the film is snuffed out almost immediately due to monstrous lust, performative masculinity, or Noodles’ weariness. The elderly Noodles is stone-faced, wrapped into a world frozen in time the moment he boarded that train to Buffalo. His pain is omnipresent in Once Upon a Time in America. Even in the earliest scenes of his childhood, the years of rumination can be felt in the film’s deliberate pace. Robert De Niro and Scott Tiler, respectively, embody the older Noodles’ sorrow and the younger Noodles’ conflicted feelings.

Like American Western films, the gangster genre is rife with mythologizing and, at times, a glorification of their protagonists’ violent lives. Where Westerns over the last half-century have deconstructed their role in the American mythos, the gangster film – probably because gangster films were never as ubiquitous as Westerns at their respective pinnacles of popularity – has not done so nearly as much introspection. Before Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) and especially The Irishman (2019), Once Upon a Time in America stood mostly alone among gangster films as a rueful examination of its protagonist’s violent lifestyle. The film consistently undermines its characters’ celebrations and successes with the consequences of their prior actions. Those consequences weigh on Noodles still.

But Leone is not entirely successful in this regard. Once Upon a Time in America has two overlong rape scenes – both of which turned my stomach the longer they went on – following a fruitful robbery (this one follows an unsettling submissive fantasy by its victim) and a glamorous date, respectively. The two rapes are committed by Noodles; both scenes serve to highlight his descent into depravity rather than express a minimal concern for the victim. Once Upon a Time in America, already uninterested in developing its female characters beyond sex objects, frames Noodles as a husk of a man because of the murders and robberies he has committed, not his treatment of women. Just because the film has adopted Noodles’ viewpoint – in his childhood and young adulthood, he cannot differentiate between objectification and love – does not mean Leone and his screenwriters can wave away his misogyny as secondary to his violent tendencies. His misogyny and criminality are distinguishable, but both were learned from the same people and environment. This dynamic persists even from the first moment that Jennifer Connelly appears as the young Deborah. There, Deborah sexually teases the young Noodles in a way that neither reflects her personality as a child or as an adult. Is that the result of the opium clouding Noodles’ memory or is it Noodles’ obsession with Deborah?

Once Upon a Time in America is beautifully shot by Tonino Delli Colli (1966’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1997’s Life Is Beautiful) and edited by Nino Baragli (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West). Like a photograph that has faded somewhat but still captures the likeness and character of its subjects, the brown environments and warmly-lit interiors capture the spirit of these neighborhoods of New York City’s Lowest East Side. Life is hardscrabble here, with those born into the prevalent poverty rarely escaping from it. Their Jewishness, verbally and visually, is strangely downplayed by Leone. The film’s long takes – several last over thirty seconds – without any cuts from Baragli allow the viewer to reflect on its changing characters, internalizing the film’s scope and depth of Noodles’ introspection. For the 1968 scenes, the browns are mostly replaced by overcast grays in exterior and interiors. The colors, no longer as warm or as diverse, help the film navigate its temporal and tonal transitions.

Ennio Morricone’s powerful score does even more to strengthen the film’s emotional power. The recently-passed composer, best known for his work on Leone’s Dollars trilogy, was a classically-raised/taught, jazz-loving experimenter whose sound could be bold and brash. Upending expectations for what the Western could sound like with anachronistic electronic elements and guitar, Morricone suspends any anachronisms for his Once Upon a Time in America score. The viewer will hear an odd pan flute (not Morricone’s decision) and diegetic/non-diegetic jazz music, but the defining aspect of the score is its romantic minimalism. One does not associate minimalism with grand emotions, but the score’s romantic minimalism – encapsulated by “Deborah’s Theme” – does not preclude the pathos it evokes. The rests in the lushly-orchestrated “Deborah’s Theme” (according to Morricone himself, despite the cue’s name, it can also be interpreted as the film’s main theme) reflect Noodles’ silent longing and remorse. Even at mezzo piano with no dialogue or sound effects present, Morricone’s cues pierce the soul. As longtime collaborators, Leone respected Morricone’s talents, allowing his friend and colleague’s music to be the star for long stretches. Leone allows Morricone to envelop the viewer in its textural splendor. The orchestral renditions of “Amapola” and The Beatles’ “Yesterday” are effective in placement and arrangement. Whether it is his theme for childhood and poverty, for the film at large, or for Deborah, Morricone’s score to Once Upon a Time in America is an essential part of his film scoring career – a career that spans so many titles, that most of it has not been heard outside of his native Italy.

Before and when making this film, Leone intended to direct two films running around 180 minutes each. Convinced by his producers to whittle Once Upon a Time in America to the 269-minute version that should be sought for a first viewing, Leone was horrified to hear that the Ladd Company – frightened by the runtime and (justifiably) the rape scenes – decided to eviscerate his film. When word eventually (and inevitably) reached Leone’s North American fans that they would not be receiving a version of Once Upon a Time in America that respected Leone’s authorial voice, the film bombed at the box office and was savaged by most anyone who saw it. To some critics including the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel, Once Upon a Time in America’s American theatrical version was the worst film of 1984; in an about face for those same critics, the European cut was the best film of 1984. Eighteen minutes of footage for Once Upon a Time in America have still not seen the light of day due to continuing legal entanglements surrounding them. Leone’s ardent admirers remain hopeful for their eventual inclusion on a future print.

As he challenged the tropes of American Westerns, so too did Leone subvert what might be expected from a gangster film. Or, perhaps with a cynical grin, Leone is challenging the essence and veracity of cinematic narrative. Once Upon a Time in America is an underappreciated, imperfect movie whose reputation continues to grow the further removed it is from its botched release. America’s traditions of tall tales and melting pot storytelling make villains and bystanders of the unsavory characters contained within. Haunted by a past that cannot be changed, Noodles attempts to reclaim his life’s story from those who have written it. As the viewer, we project our anxieties and insecurities onto images spliced to make narrative sense.  Authorship disputes and the struggle between legend and fact permeate cinema. Seldom do they converge as movingly as they do here.

My rating: 9.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[lamiralami]

TMA Retro 4: Page Turner

I was touched to see some tag commentary on yesterday’s post! Honestly, it gave me an emotion - I am traditionally very anxious about engaging online, it speaks to my immense love of TMA that it brought me to Make A Post At Last. It’s very affirming and reassuring to get some response to my lunatic treatises. Y’all are all right. 💜

Anyway, grab some lighter fluid and a sturdy wastepaper basket, time to torch your haunted novel in MAG 4: Page Turner

It’s ironic that this statement is about the Vast when it is one dense motherfucker. so many dangling plot threads are introduced here, each ready to hook you and start reeling. we’ve been into the meta plot since episode one but this episode is the first time the audience is made aware of such.

seriously: Jurgen Leitner and his library, Gerard Keay and Mary Keay, Michael Crew. the figures introduced in this one thirty-minute installment loom large over the rest of the entire run

you could, your first time through, even file this away as a one-off scary story if not for the fact that Jon knows what’s going on (enjoy it while it lasts, my son). He’s heard of Jurgen Leitner. He alludes to an incident with his library in 1994. Deeper than that, he immediately takes the statement at face value and treats the claims within it as authentic, which is a complete 180° on the first three episodes

and this is such a smart story choice? Jon shapes our perspective into this universe and up until now he’s been utterly dismissive of the validity of the stories he’s telling. To go from practically rolling his eyes to scheduling a meeting with his boss about tracking down more haunted books - that tells us that Jon takes this seriously as a threat. And that makes us take it seriously too, makes us take note that strange books are dangerous things in this world. Any offhand mention of books in future statements will be enough to make us sweat

And! It starts winding the narrative tension on a character level. Why and what does Jon know about Jurgen Leitner and his library? Why does he say his name with such venom? And if he’s so sure about the supernatural nature of these books, why is he so loath to believe the other statements?

(and then it takes 80 + episodes to fully answer these initial questions. Jonny enjoys a slow roasted torment)

love that the statement giver presents, as proof of his iron-clad sanity, the fact that he works as a theatre technician. speaking as someone with an unfinished theatre degree: theatre people are feral my good buddy, try again. I mean, we refuse to say the name of one of the most famous plays in the English language because we think a ghost will trip us for the indiscretion. this is not the trump card you think it is.

a quick sidebar for the Red String Brigade: The Trojan Women is an ancient Greek tragedy that involves a baby being thrown off a city wall. The Seagull’s first published English translation was done by Marian Fell, and also a seagull is a bird and birds can fly. Much Ado About Nothing is very good and you should all watch the version from 2011 with David Tennant and Catherine Tate.

it’s interesting that these early episodes seem to take a cue from urban legends in some respects. Nathan Watts gets extremely drunk at a party and then is almost skinned by a monster while having a smoke. Joshua Gillespie is approached while engaging in a whirlwind of debauchery and has to take care of a cursed coffin after accepting money for what he thinks is a drug trafficking gig. Amy Patel regularly spies on her neighbour for her own entertainment and then has to watch him be replaced by a malevolent entity only she can perceive. and now Dominic Swain pushes past his guilty conscience to score a valuable book off an unknowing charity shop and...gets a bit dizzy and haunted by a phantom stink for a few days then gets ‎£5,000, well anyway, the point is he got spooked! spooked after doing something kind of iffy! that is pure urban legend procedure; modern day fairy tales imparting dire  consequences onto societal transgressions. in a horror story this structure offers a false sense of safety - if you’re a good person, the monster won’t come for you. I can’t recall which upcoming statement yanks the rug out from under us with the first completely random victim.

cannot comprehend how this guy didn’t start plugging the book into google translate the second he got home. that probably saved him from being taken by the book but I am still judging him for not even trying it. yeah you’d be sucked into some sort of sky hell but at least you’d know what’s in the book!! could never be me

(yes I am aware in this universe I would have been eaten years ago. I’ve made my peace with that)

grbookworm1818 slays me. I don’t know which is better, the idea of Gertude carefully curating the most sixty-five-year-old-on-goodreads username she could as a cover for her cursed purchase history, or her actual sixty-five-year-old brain just expressing itself naturally because Gertrude is a very busy woman who doesn’t have time to immerse herself in the ins and outs of internet culture, she just wants to buy the demonic tomes she’s selected for destruction and get on with her day thanks.

did Gertrude know what a meme was? which Archivist could convincingly pose as a millennial best, Gertrude Robinson or Jonathan Sims?

The Key of Solomon and its former keeper, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, are both real historical figures. the book is basically Renaissance-era magical au fanfic of the Bible, and the man was a 19th century British occultist (and likely drinking buddy of Jonah Magnus) who founded a Very Serious Secret Society. this is a picture of him whiiiiiich rather dispels any sense of menace he’s meant to invoke. what kind of cosplaying nonsense

Mary Keay is such a striking figure. “She was very old and painfully thin, but her head was completely clean shaven, and every square inch of skin I could see was tattooed over with closely-written words in a script I didn’t recognise.” a Look, a vision!

I’m guessing that Our Gerard was blasting heavy metal at 2 am to try to drown out his undead mother while waiting for her manifestation to dissipate. I like to imagine him frequenting Reddit advice posts about dealing with toxic family members, poor lad

oh my gosh Mary refers to Gerard as “her Gerard” is that where Jon got “our Gerard” from?? I feel betrayed??

whatever, I’m reclaiming it. Our Gerard is meant with affection now babey! 

the eye portrait is a bit puzzling. the inscription - ‘“Grant us the sight that we may not know. Grant us the scent that we may not catch. Grant us the sound that we may not call.”’ - could almost be read as an invocation against the Eye? But in general Gerry is fairly Eye-aligned, so...shrug emoji

(honestly my main takeaway from the eye portrait is that it’s finely detailed and near photorealistic so we can add “tortured artist” to our list of Gerard Keay traits and is it any wonder that he’s so Fandom Beloved?)

Mary is Not Good at negotiating sales. her main technique involves terrible tea, bringing up repressed childhood trauma, and getting her magic book to drop animal bones onto customer’s shoes. I’m guessing Pinhole Books was in bad shape even before the police investigation and murder charges.

hahaha, the Vast pushes Dominic down the stairs. classic. you gotta grab what opportunities are available

so did Gerard have to follow Dominic back to his flat and wait awkwardly on the doorstep at like 3 in the morning, hoping none of his neighbours would notice and call the cops

the revelation that Mary’s been dead the whole time! this episode may be more intent on world building and plot set-up but damn if it isn’t still a good little ghost story.

kind of rude of Gerry to just burn a book in this guy’s flat without asking and then steal his wastepaper basket.

Jon may not call the statement giver a liar for once, but never fear, he’s still our petty bastard man. accuses Gertrude of filing statements without reading them, has Sasha double-check Martin’s research, grumps about his general misfortune . he’s stressed from the Archives’ disorder and having flashbacks to a certain picture book but by Jove, that won’t stop him making snide comments on what’s supposed to be an official audio transcription!

[ladyherenya]

Books read in September

I fell down a couple of rabbit holes -- that’s my metaphor of choice for when I ignore my TBR list and get distracted reading other things, usually in a search for comfort reading.

Also, I clicked the wrong thing in the Kindle app at 1am and now I have a free trial of Kindle Unlimited so I decided I might as well make use of it.

Favourite cover: A Conspiracy in Belgravia.

Reread: Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, Penric’s Mission and Mira’s Last Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold and Exit Strategy by Martha Wells.

Still reading: The Princess Who Flew with Dragons by Stephanie Burgis.

Next up: Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks.

(Longer reviews and ratings are on LibraryThing. And also Dreamwidth.)

The Bride Test by Helen Hoang: Khai hasn’t found a girlfriend, so his mother arranges for a young woman from Vietnam to come to California for the summer, to see if she and Khai will suit each other. This is romance, a genre which doesn’t always share my narrative priorities -- some things are resolved too neatly, and I’d have liked more of Esme’s relationship with her daughter and of her adult education classes -- but I enjoyed reading this, so I’m not complaining. I liked how Hoang portrays Khai’s autism. He has a greater capacity for love than he realises, he just needs support to understand his feelings.

Secrets of a Sun King by Emma Carroll (narrated by Victoria Fox): I read this because I love the narrator and really liked Carroll’s Letters From the Lighthouse. This book is set post-WWI, and involves friendship, family secrets and the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Lil’s grandfather is in hospital and she becomes convinced that his recovery depends upon her solving the mystery surrounding the package sent to him by a famous and now-deceased Egyptologist. I predicted the twists, but I can see how this would strongly appeal to children who want a blend of history, adventure and mystery with a hint of fantasy. (Where was this when I was twelve?)

The Spirit Ring by Lois McMaster Bujold: Fantasy set in Renaissance Italy. Fiametta, daughter of a master mage and goldsmith, witnesses a violent coup. She flees -- and meets Thur, a guardsmen’s younger brother coming to Montefolgia for an apprenticeship. This was published in 1992, after Bujold had published several Vorkosigan books and won a few Hugos, so I wasn’t expecting it to feel so, well, rough by comparison. That said, bits of it still shine! The plot makes every detail count, the final confrontation is memorable and I liked the characters. And it’s interesting to consider this as a precursor to Bujold’s World of the Five Gods.

A Royal Pain by Meg Mulry: This turned up when I was searching Overdrive for something else (Goodness knows why, none of my search words are its title or description). It sounded like it might be entertaining, maybe a bit like The Princess Diaries. It isn’t, at least not enough for me. Two-thirds through I decided to abandon it -- and then a bit later I decided I might as well skim read to the end and see how everything turned out. I don’t feel qualified to say anything insightful, I just wandered in here by mistake...

The Enchanted April (1922) by Elizabeth von Armin (narrated by Nadia May): Four women respond to a newspaper advertisement and rent a house in Italy for the month of April. This is delightfully funny and observant, with idyllic descriptions of spring in Italy. I liked the friendships which develop between four very different women, and the way they are challenged -- or inspired -- to reconsider their opinions about others. The ending is, unsurprisingly, very tidy and conventional. (Not many options for happy endings a 1920s novelist could easily give to unhappily married women.) Reading nothing but sunshine and fairytale endings would become unsatisfying, no matter how wonderful the prose, but sometimes it’s just want one wants.

The “Lady Sherlock” series by Sherry Thomas:

A Conspiracy in Belgravia: Disgraced Charlotte Holmes has found a home with the widowed Mrs Watson and an income under the persona of “Sherlock Holmes”. Her latest case sounds simple but is complicated by connections to the wife of Charlotte’s closest friend and Charlotte’s half-brother. Meanwhile, Charlotte has a marriage proposal to consider, ciphers to crack, and a murder victim to identify. I like the way certain qualities of Doyle’s characters are assigned to different characters -- so Charlotte’s sister Livia is writing stories about Sherlock, and Mrs Watson’s niece has medical training. I enjoyed reading this and immediately embarked on the next book.

The Hollow of Fear: I could not put this book down -- the stakes are so high and personal! But in the end I didn’t find this a wholly satisfying mystery because much of the tension is the result of Charlotte concealing a lot about her suspicions and plans. It’s fun watching Charlotte in disguise, and I don’t mind some misdirection, nor Charlotte keeping thoughts to herself. That fits with her character. But the extent of it felt contrived. Disappointment aside, I liked the journey, thought one of the twists was handled with particular deftness, and I am eager to read the sequel.

The Huntress by Kate Quinn (narrated by Saskia Maarlveld): A long, complex, powerful three-stranded story about war and its aftermath. In Boston in 1946, Jordan, a teenager passionate about photography, is suspicious of her new stepmother. In Germany in 1950, war correspondent Ian now hunts war criminals. And in Siberia before the war, Nina becomes a pilot. From the beginning, this was interesting, with tense scenes. But I wasn’t strongly invested, and I was unsure of the narrative’s structure. As the story continued, I discovered that it is richer and more nuanced because of its structure --  and that I was becoming very attached to these characters. Surprisingly so.

The “Dear Professor” series by Penny Reid

Kissing Galileo: The description made me curious, so I looked at the sample chapters... and, unexpectedly, was convinced I should read this book. Because it’s smart and funny! And I liked how the characters deal with an awkward and potentially very problematic situation. (Emily works as a lingerie model, and when her professor visits the store, he doesn’t recognise her.) I really enjoyed the progression of their relationship -- how obviously they like each other’s company and care about each other, how they have an intellectual connection that goes hand-in-hand physical attraction, how they learn to understand each other better.

Kissing Tolstoy: The first book is about Emily’s friend Anna, who signs up for a Russian literature class, unaware that the professor is someone she accidentally had an almost-date with. This is a shorter than Kissing Galileo, nearly novella-length, and because I read them back-to-back, suffered somewhat in comparison -- it’s less complex, and features a professor who doesn’t deal quite so well with being attracted to one of his students. I wasn’t so convinced their relationship was a good idea. But there’s some entertaining awkwardness and people being opinionated about Russian literature. I liked Anna’s nerdy interests and her friendship with Emily.

Marriage of Inconvenience by Penny Reid: I was curious what else Reid has written and sometimes I like fake relationships stories.  This book makes a convoluted set-up feel plausible. I liked how Kat and Dan’s relationship developed, I liked the ratio of romance to plot, and I liked how involved and supportive all their friends were. But my enjoyment ebbed as I read, which is probably a reflection on what I want from this sort of story rather than on this book’s merits. I don’t find the corporate city setting very interesting or appealing.

Dr. Strange Beard by Penny Reid: I enjoy stories where characters are passionate about their interests.  In this, one of the characters is a vet but his job had no real presence in the story. What a waste.

A Desperate Fortune by Susanna Kearsley: Sara accepts a job decoding a ciphered diary from 1732. The diary is written by Mary, a half-Scottish woman raised in France, who agrees to disguise an Englishman by pretending to be his sister. I like how these two stories sit together. There’s a gentleness to Sara’s, as she discovers things she likes, including the sensory delights of winter in France and people who accept her. In contrast, Mary’s is full of danger, deception and the discomfort of travel. But there’s also subtle, common threads running throughout: life-changing choices and trusting people. I liked so many things in this book.

Echo in Onyx by Sharon Shinn: Brianna becomes the maid for the governor’s daughter, who has three “echoes”. When one of Marguerite's echoes is killed defending Marguerite, Brianna disguises herself as the echo so that they can conceal the incident. The concept of echoes is unusual and Shinn has clearly given careful thought to how they would affect society and daily life for those who have them, as well as reasons for their existence.  I wasn’t surprised by the final twists, because I know how Shinn usually deals with injustice, but parts were still quite tense. And I liked Brianna’s attitude -- so sunny and resourceful and loyal.

A House of Rage and Sorrow by Sangu Mandanna: I really liked A Spark of White Fire so I was surprised by my reaction to this sequel. Halfway through, I was pushing myself to stay focused and just wanted to cross it off the list. So I left it there. I don’t know if there was something in the pacing or the first book’s ending which stopped me from caring -- or if I just wasn’t in the mood to read about rage and sorrow and things going to hell in a handbasket. I might try again one day. I did like the first one.

[deadblog0416]

Trigger warning for discussion of sexualisation of children.

I think I finally grasped what irks me about Ami’s portrayal (like she would be a really cool character in theory, but in reality her treatment is basically just a rapid succession of yikes) in Lupin III, part V.

Said aspect is her character design:

which is eerily similar to the way child Fujiko looks in a Woman called Fujiko Mine:

The resemblance is probably one of the key sources of this ‘irkiness’ (I am unsure how to phrase it in a better way).

There is a difference between the two and due to the fact that the reason behind this difference is ridden with spoilers, if one hasn’t watched A Woman Called Fujiko Mine, I recommend scrolling to the Tldr section.

Essentially, A Woman Called Fujiko Mine used this element of the ending sequence - where the design appears- to build up a tragic backstory for Fujiko (a cliche commonly associated with the femme fatale trope that Fujiko is a near embodiment of) and then subvert: it by revealing in the final episodes that this backstory never existed. It was artificially implanted into Fujiko making her, herself, believe that her actions and penchant stealing were results of tragedy. After Fujiko realised that this wasn’t the case, she reveals that she steals and acts the way she does because she wants too. Furthermore one of the last shots in the anime, is her enjoying the way of life that she chose.

This isn’t true in Ami’s case. Rather than subverting the idea of a prerequisite tragic backstory as a source for a given female character’s motivations, like A Woman Called Fujiko Mine does, part V appears to embrace it (from what was shown in the first episodes and promotional material). Not only does Ami’s tragic origins story as a victim of child trafficking is true, but sexualisation of her character design is played straight (for titillation) - rather than being used to create a sense of discomfort.

Additionally this choice for Ami’s character is unusual as she is treated by the narrative as Lupin’s surrogate daughter rather than a love interest (phew). If the production crew wanted to pay a homage to A Woman Name Fujiko Mine (a very underrated instalment in the franchise), they could’ve used a different character design of child Fujiko (well, a design that fullfils its visual role as looking like Fujiko might have looked like as a child).

Not only does it not possess any sexualised elements, but it’s also very cute and with a brighter palette it would fit the aesthetic of Part V perfectly.

And while I sincerely hope that Ami’s portrayal improves as the series goes on (as Lupin III is one of my favourite franchises and I sincerely hope that it will be able to change and adapt to modernity), so far, what was shown doesn’t quite indicate this. This is a shame as creative installements in the franchise (like the aforementioned A Woman Called Fujiko Mine) showed what can be done within it realms- such as telling interesting and empowering stories.

Tldr: One of the uncomfortable aspects of a character in Part V of Lupin the Third franchise might be a result of it paying a homage to design - that was meant to criticise the sexual treatment of children in narratives - without realising that the design is a piece of metatextual criticism.

[amandaaa-pleasee6-blog]

While I am usually a huge fan of Buzzfeed, their quizzes are my largest form of procrastination, I was extremely disappointed in Woodward’s article entitled “How Taylor Swift Played the Victim for a Decade and Made Her Entire Career.” The bias present throughout the writing is seen as early as the first paragraph when she says, “She told him that they didn’t matter to her. But she had an idea.” By saying this, she is indicating that she has evidence to back up such a claim, yet no one really knows the full truth behind the Kanye Taylor Famous debacle. Woodward has absolutely know way of knowing what was going through Taylor’s mind during that phone call, and she has no right to put words in her mouth. I think it’s interesting that she mentioned how fans threatened to boycott Kanye when the song was initially released because to me it proves that, even if Taylor did okay the lyrics, the song itself is still extremely sexist. Yet, now that Taylor has been “exposed” people seem to have forgotten about the misogynistic tendencies of the lyrics and just sing along without a care in the world. She then went on to discuss the infamous microphone stealing debacle that sparked their original feud. She expresses her disdain for the fact that the society saw it as “the ‘threat’ of an ‘angry’ black man terrorizing the ‘innocent’ white woman.” However, I feel like this statement, and the majority of the article for that matter, is just a hyperbole. To me, I didn’t view Kanye’s interruption of Taylor as a threatening black man. Instead, I simply saw an egotistical asshole who didn’t know the proper time or place to bring up a serious issue regarding intersectionality. Kanye may have had good intentions when he stepped onto that stage, but his execution was deplorable. The same goes for his Famous video. He did show good intentions by initially calling Taylor and requesting permission, yet his execution of the video itself, or of handling the disagreement was inappropriate. Moreover, by claiming that his stepping on stage is what made her famous not only discredits the fact that she had just won album of the year, but also implies that he isn’t sorry that he did it to begin with. 

Swift is also commonly criticized for her music surrounding her love life, specifically the break ups that she has endured. Woodward admits that this theme is a common trope in pop music, but claims that Swift has used these lyrics to position herself as a victim. First of all, common trope is an understatement. The attached link is a video playlist that includes every break up song released thus far in 2018. The playlist already includes 200 songs, in just 4 months. Swift is successful at writing about heartbreak from her point of view, so why does that make her a manipulative sell out? I’ve been a competitive dancer since I was 2, but as I got older I realized that I excelled at hip hop much more than tap, so I specifically focused the majority of my energy into those style routines. We are always told that if we are good at something we should continue pursuing it, it just happens that people don’t like the thing that she’s good at. In all honesty though, her songs are relatable to teenagers and that’s why they’re so successful. Woodward specifically names Picture to Burn as one of the first songs were she takes on this psycho girlfriend persona. However, if 16-year-old me got cheated on, I would have the same reaction, and my dad would most definitely show him how sorry he’d be. How many girls throw things out a window, destuff a bear, or even set fire to their stuff? These examples are seen constantly throughout mainstream media, so either every woman in America is psychotic or Taylor’s is simply seen as worse.

 Furthermore, Swift is criticized for controlling her own narratives and for writing riddle-like lyrics. In the age of social media, anything you say can be easily misconstrued, so why should we blame her for trying to use that to her advantage? Everyone makes mistakes, and no one ever wants to own up to them, so is it really that insane of an idea that she wants to make herself appear better to the outside world than she actually is? Don’t we all want to do that? The fact is, Taylor is criticized for every single thing she does, so I don’t blame her for wanting to control whatever she can. Woodward denounces Swift for her use of “mostly black dancers” in her Shake it Off video pictured below. Yet, from my point of view, the ratio seems pretty equal. While I will admit her outfit choice may not have been the most culturally appropriate, I think trying to make an issue out of her backup dancers is an overstep. If every dancer was black, people would claim appropriation, if every dancer was white, she would be called racist, and here she is with a mix and people still aren’t satisfied. Swift has been in the spotlight since she was 15 and I can only image how this constant disapproval of everything she does has morphed her beliefs. She is constantly put into no win situations. For instance, when she gave advice to bullied teens people claimed that it was because she wanted to increase her image. It was immediately assumed that there must be a motive, but, even if there was, WHY DOES IT MATTER? Simply put, most celebrities don’t reach out to their fans as directly or as often as Swift does, yet no one discusses that. Why can’t people just appreciate that a little girl who looked up to Taylor Swift stood up to a bully because of that conversation?

Lastly, Woodward specifically condemned Swift for invoking sexism while not identifying as a feminist, but these two ideologies are mutually exclusive. Even if I don’t choose identify as a feminist, it doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize injustice. There are thousands of people who, for their own personal reasons, choose not to label themselves as a feminist, but that doesn’t meant that they don’t have the right to speak up about sexist behavior. Additionally, the sexism she experiences is seen as inferior to that of other people simply because she’s white and rich. Yet, just because it isn’t the sexism you experience, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t still sexism. Swift is seen as this villain because she doesn’t claim to be a feminist and engage in political activism, but why does she have to? We don’t talk this negatively about artists like Britney Spears, Amanda Bynes, or Amy Winehouse - all women who have used drugs, gone to jail, or spent time in rehab. Swift has never been linked to anything of the sort, yet her releasing a song for the 50 Shades Darker movie was seen as scandalous. While she may not be the feminist icon you want her to be, she still shows that you can be successful without having to rely on drugs, and for a girl who has been in the spotlight for as long as she has, that’s amazing in itself. So, my ending question to Woodward is this. If a feminist is defined as someone who fights for the equality of all women, wouldn’t your berating of Swift’s character be anti-feminist?

[jellybi]

Let’s Rate the Ayakashi Sisters!

I’ll be rating the Ayakashi Sisters as a unit because I’m not their biggest fan and it took me so darn long to get through their arc that the ones who stand out to me less have almost entirely faded from my memories. I know they come back near the end of the series, but I’m going to rate them now before I completely forget the things I still have in mind!

Personality:  ★ ★     I could probably only tell you the personalities of Berthier and Petz -- not to say the other two had nothing going on, but their personalities didn’t resonate with me enough to stick. I liked Berthier and Petz for opposite reasons -- Berthier has a pretty common personality archetype: sweet and delicate about things as a thin veneer of cuteness over blatant ruthlessness and cynicism. It’s overdone, perhaps, but I really enjoy it! With Petz, I liked her hard edges. She’s played as the older, bitter, angrier one, and there’s an enjoyable lack of delicacy to her. For Koan, I felt like her personality shift was way too extreme and uninspired. She went from Generic Wicked Witch we mainly see menacing a child to a saccharine-sweet victim -- the tragic innocent maiden whose pure love was used against her. If there was connective tissue between the two, I missed it in the length between episodes in my rewatch. Calavaras -- I honestly don’t even remember what Moments she might have had that showed character, except that I enjoyed her reaction to two of her sisters changing sides -- sort of a fearful curiosity and doubt while trying to pay lip service to unquestioning loyalty.

In the early episodes, maybe as a placeholder before anything more specific got thought up, all the sisters except Petz seem to have a shared personality trait--obsession with beauty and makeup with a lot of infighting about it. This was kind of... boring and unfortunate and not enjoyable to me, but I did appreciate that they got to keep the beauty obsession when they were made ‘good’ -- since they otherwise became pretty bland and it would have made kind of a sexist statement if goodness had “cured” them of their love of makeup.

Style:  The sisters all have very different styles and I’m going to rate them independently. The ratings are complicated because I have complicated feelings. Koan:  -★  I have invented a negative star for Koan because I hate her style so much that I am pretty sure it has unfairly impacted my impression of her as a character. The full-body feathery tutu with thin vertical stripes and high heels. The incongruous, absurd cat-ears that make no physical sense! I just want someone to go in and fix it all! I even find her attack animations to be awkward and weird-looking. Whatever they were trying to do with her didn’t work with me at all, unless they were trying to make her absurd and off-putting. I think the cat ears were actually a 90′s anime mistake of sorts based on manga image ambiguity and that the cat ears are supposed to be triangular odangos. Triangular odangos would be 100% legit and totally suited to the show. But the idea that she had whipped her hair into peaks like a meringue and then wandered around lecturing strangers about the importance of taking care of your appearance just caused my brain to reject her and all the weird aesthetic sensibility she stands for.  Berthier:  ★ ★ ★ This outfit is fine. It’s basically a monochrome swimsuit with boots and gloves, so it’s on the boring side, but given that Koan is so over-the-top, understated is probably a good direction to go in for other members of the group. She does a good job adhering to her ice theme in dress, personality and manner, while also being asymmetrical from the others in doing this (I couldn’t tell you the others’ elemental themes offhand), which is satisfying and makes her feel unique. Calavaras:  ★ ★ There’s nothing strictly wrong with Calavaras’s outfit. It seems to be inspired by a roman soldier uniform, except with a little skirt and what may be an armored bow. But why? Galaxia’s outfit is similar, but is in harmony with Galaxia’s personality, which is cold, commanding, and militant. Calavaras’s personality is cutesy and feminine, but her aesthetic is severe... with a bow on it. It winds up giving her an Ugly Stepsister vibe like Koan -- someone vain and looks-obsessed who is nonetheless Doing it Wrong by taking her look to weird extremes for the audience to side-eye. Petz:  ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / ★ ★ If you just took the fricking eyeballs off her boobs this would be one of my favorite female villain costumes in the series. But... but.... the eyeball boobs. They break my heart. They remind me of the weird gimmicky sexual stuff going on with the youma. Does anyone ever talk about the youma and their weird boob cannons and such?  If we pretend for a moment that she doesn’t have eyeball boobs, I love the  shoulder feathers, the short hair/updo thing she has going on, the sleekness, and the dark color scheme. She has kind of an ominous, mysterious, regal style that seems to bolster her forbidding personality.  I don’t even think the colored boob highlights looks bad in themselves, just don’t literally put eyes on them, what is wrong with you guys. Civilian Costumes:  ★ ★ ★ ★ When they turn into good guys or are in disguise, the sisters all look great and the costumes do a much better job of selling them as image-obsessed! I feel like the fact that they were designed to die so swiftly in the original manga led to some goofy costume experimentation that the anime showrunners felt compelled to be faithful to (although they were faithful to nothing else). When allowed to improvise, they made decisions that seemed to fit better with the personalities the Sisters had been given. Backstory: ★ ★ What even is their backstory? They used to be regular women until Rubeus recruited them... maybe? Or maybe not. Did they grow up brainwashed by Wiseman’s magic? Is everyone on their planet/moon whatever brainwashed? Some of these questions might be answered later in the season. Petz has a history with Sapphir that is probably the best-foreshadowed thing in the series -- they throw it in so many episodes in advance of the reveal that I can’t help wondering if it was an accident or coincidence. If nothing else, maybe the reference to an ex spurred the pairing idea, not the other way around. But knowing about it in advance doesn’t seem to add anything to it (it’s not like she gives early hints about Sapphir, or even the relationship’s specifics), so I still feel like this is a low-star situation. Hero Relationships: ★ ★ ★ I love villain heel-turns. This is a weird case where they gave me all I might have dreamed of and I didn’t appreciate it. The writing in the Rei/Koan episode was just so inconsistent and confusing. What were they even talking about? What lesson were they teaching one another? Why did Koan’s situation move Rei’s heart in particular, besides the fact that it was a Rei feature episode and Rei happened to be there?  Ami and Berthier going head-to-head as rivals was less emotionally driven, but more narratively satisfying. Their extremely brief connection made me contemplate What Could Have Been -- imagine if Ami had gotten to have a smart, sweet, yet competitive and slightly conniving friend.  Villain Relationships: ★ ★ ★ While overall I didn’t find their relationships that compelling or memorable, they did have some nice moments. I loved that the show broke its symmetry to have Koan reach out to Berthier rather than having the inner senshi line up and each convert a sister to goodness. It was also interesting to see the show cop to and address the toxic infighting of the group as something that was actually kind of tragic for all of them and should be fixed. No one had to really learn any lessons of course, because it was treated as something caused by an invisible evil force, but it was nice to have the show step back and be like “actually it’s kind of super sad that the only people this lady has in the world are snarking about how she might fail at her mission and die.” That’s a level of self-awareness I always yearned for in the DK arc and ended up having to inject into it via fanfic. Likeable/Love to Hate:  ★ ★ ★ There were variable levels for each of the sisters, so I’ll round them out to a “satisfactory.” As I mentioned above, I found Berthier and Petz to be the most likeable, and disliked Koan in a non-fun way. Although I maintain a regretful curiosity about her because I feel like the show LOVED her and treated her emotions with a lot of reverence toward the end of her arc and sometimes I wish I “got” it so I could appreciate something that obvious love and effort was put into.   Resolution: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ If I am willing to take the Sisters as they are, I couldn’t have asked for much more from the show than to redeem them, keep them around and participating in the senshi’s lives and storyline for multiple episodes, and even bring them back for an encore episode long after the audience thinks they’ve been discarded, for a surprise tie-in with another character’s tragic death. Well -- okay, actually, I could. Make the redemption deeper (don’t just turn them into generic Nice Sweet Girls in a flash of light) and commit to keeping them around long term to deepen their connections to the senshi. But to really dig into that, I think they’d have needed to focus on just ONE character to do it with (Berthier would have been my choice).  But I give it five stars because it’s probably the most ambitious villain redemption the show ever attempts and I think it exceeded anyone’s expectations for continuity in a monster-of-the-day, villain-of-the-week show. Overall: ★ ★   Eh... fairly or not, these guys were one of my least favorite villain groups. I always spend their arc kind of waiting for the show to get on with it. Their aesthetic seems deliberately unsettling, and mixes poorly with their group identity as beauty experts. The twists some of them take from scary to sweet seem a little cheap, and I wind up wishing that their redemption arc had gone to other characters. On the other hand, NOT dying tragically means they never had a chance to wring the kind of audience pity that makes one wish for second chances and alternate plotlines. Maybe if they had died I’d be in here writing about how I have this brilliant idea, wouldn’t it have been great if they’d gotten to live and peacefully sell makeup as offscreen BFFs to the senshi, maybe even cameo at the end of the season... I guess you never know how you’d feel about a plot if it had gone differently.

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  8 minutes (2,233 words)

On the cover of Susan Sontag’s 2003 book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others, her last publication before her death, is a Goya print from his graphic 19th-century series The Disasters of War. It shows a reclining soldier passively taking in a dead man hanging from a tree, a body in a row of indistinguishable dangling bodies. Its pain — and the indifference with which that pain can be met — is the perfect illustration of Sontag’s book, which was her response to the query, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” She questioned whether the representation of suffering has any hand in ending it. “For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war,” Sontag writes. 

Is that why American Dirt, a sensationalized, stereotype-ridden piece of telenovela exploitation written by a self-identified white (later Puerto Rican–grandmother identified) woman, was met with a seven-figure deal and trumpeted by a publishing industry — Oprah’s Book Club most notably — that ignores countless Latinx stories? Is that why On the Record, a documentary initially backed by Oprah about various women accusing Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct, premiered at Sundance when so many other films about women’s oppression have not? Both of these works have been held up in the tradition of pain iconography and as part of a wider culture that both defers to and is let off the hook by Oprah, its designated high priestess of compassion. An indigent black girl from the rural South, she was an exemplar of one of the most neglected demographics in America. That this capitalist society made her a billionaire for inspiring a cultural bloodletting has immunized it from the sort of criticism levied when white men like Jerry Springer (or white women like Gwyneth Paltrow) do the same thing. 

But the merciless critique Oprah has received both for her support of American Dirt and lack of support for On the Record points to a framework that simultaneously benefits her and uses her as a shield. This empathetic entrepreneur’s predictably myopic choices — just like her acolytes’, from Dr. Phil to Reese Witherspoon — may not serve the majority, but they do serve the system that lets her take the fall for its larger failures of representation. Oprah is one of the most salient testaments to capitalism. 

***

  “People want to weep,” Sontag writes. “Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.” She may have been referencing war photography, but the sentiment applies to all narrative forms of suffering, which “are more than reminders of death, of failure, of victimization. They invoke the miracle of survival.” This almost superhuman transcendence of misfortune, this ability to raise yourself out of your primordial pain toward the heavens, is the prototype for the American Dream. It is also the perfect paean to plutocracy. Oprah is the prime example: teen mom, child sex abuse, teen pregnancy, drug use. While working her way toward a journalism career, she was told early on that she was too emotional while anchoring the news. It was here that she found a gaping hole in the market: Oprah turned her “failure” into a touchy-feely talk show, eventually netting herself a cult of personality and an empire approaching $3 billion. Her triumph over her past imbued her with the authority to turn beleaguered strangers’ private torment into public good and served as testament to a hierarchy of success founded on flagellation. “There is nothing greater than the spirit within you to overcome,” she said on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “You and God can conquer this,” conquering here implying profiting. She was proof that it worked. Oprah may not think you are responsible for your own misery, but she does believe you are responsible for flipping your misfortune, just like she did. As she told a women’s economic conference in 1989, “There’s a condition that comes with being and doing all you can: you first have to know who you are before you can do that.”  

Her suffering was transformative, a brand of anguish Sontag defines in her book with an unintentionally spot-on characterization of how Oprah, who referred to her talk show as her “ministry,” secularized (and capitalized on) a pious approach to hardship. “It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation,” Sontag wrote. The people Oprah chose to interview (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston), the books she chose to plug (Toni Morrison, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces), and the films she chose to produce (Beloved, Precious) — all followed this same general trajectory from trauma to some semblance of deliverance, hewing with her own personal experience. They also served to convince the most downtrodden members of the population that the system was only failing to work for them because they failed to plumb their own souls deeply enough. If capitalism was unprofitable for them, it’s because they weren’t doing the work — not in the industrious sense, but in the therapeutic one.

Oprah’s recent projects fall well within that tradition, including On the Record, the Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering documentary she was executive producing for Apple TV+ (it will now air on HBO Max), which centered around a group of women accusing Russell Simmons of sexual abuse. (He has been accused by at least a dozen women in total and denies all the charges.) The question is why this high-profile film by multiple-award winning filmmakers that already had a distributor was playing at a highly sought-after festival, when a struggling independent film could have used that rare opening to seek distribution? Instead, the news out of Sundance focused on whether Oprah, who pulled out of the film at the last minute over creative differences, was siding with Simmons or not — whether she was betraying not only her own race, but her own brand (the enabling of struggling black women to claim their due). “In my opinion, there is more work to be done on the film to illuminate the full scope of what the victims endured,” she said in a statement. This reads to me as uncomfortably on brand, Oprah squeezing as much as possible out of a desperate situation — particularly if it’s at the expense of another capitalist success story, in Simmons’s case — to get maximum returns. But this isn’t all down to her own prurience. It’s the industry around her (including Apple) that encourages her to do this, that pays her excessively for it — the same industry that doesn’t even consider the marginalized stories that do not comply with those standards (standards upheld by a black woman, remember).

Having said all of that, it is also a function of technology that our culture expects us to bleed out to survive. The more intimate media becomes, Sontag argued, the further our shock threshold moves. “The real thing may not be fearsome enough,” she wrote, “and therefore needs to be enhanced or reenacted more convincingly.” This is where you get a situation like Jeanine Cummins’s “trauma porn” American Dirt, the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick, about a Mexican migrant fleeing a drug cartel across the border with her son. “I’m interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship,” Cummins writes in her author’s note, “in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma.” It was a direct dial to Oprah, and in particularly unfortunate timing, she expressed her support for this hyperbolic yarn about a fictional woman of color’s pain on the same CBS morning show in which she discussed pulling her support from a documentary full of actual women of colors’ pain. In a video posted on Twitter, Oprah held up the Cummins book, with its cover of watercolor birds and barbed wire, and gushed: “I was opened. I was shook up. It woke me up. And I feel that everybody who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom.” Her description reminded me of Sontag’s portrayal of graphic battle imagery: “Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!” American Dirt was another in Oprah’s Apple streaming projects, part of her ambition to make “the world’s largest book club,” and it showed a level of outdated hubris that was revisited tenfold upon her mentions.

While the flesh-and-blood migrants who are dying at the border have not been much of a priority to the world of capitalist enterprise, the literary industry’s corner offices have been effusive in their tone-deaf praise for American Dirt, which last year celebrated its release with — no shit — barbed twig centerpieces. The hypocrisy was too much for the Latinx community (and social media) to bear. They balked at a non-Mexican woman who claimed her husband was undocumented (he’s Irish) and painted her nails with her book cover (more barbed wire) being edified for a cheap piece of Mexican cultural appropriation, while their own perhaps less uplifting (see less white) stories were serially overlooked — Oprah’s Book Club has never chosen a Mexican author. “The clumsy, ill-conceived rollout of American Dirt illustrates how broken the system is,” wrote Mexican American author and translator David Bowles in a heavily circulated New York Times op-ed, “how myopic it is to hype one book at the expense of others and how unethical it is to allow a gatekeeper like Oprah’s Book Club to wield such power.” He pointed out that a bestseller doesn’t just happen; it’s deliberately made by big publishers sinking money into its promotion and rallying press and booksellers around it. One book’s immoderate gain is then every other book’s loss: For three months in the wake of Oprah’s book announcements, other books’ sales plummet. This is a clear impoverishment of culture, but, more importantly, it limits the dissemination of ideas that do not serve big business’ hierarchical ideals. Trauma is valued as long as it’s sanctioned by the small number of powerful people who maintain an overwhelming amount of sway over the capitalist system they uphold. The voices that are ultimately projected are their own, serving their interests and no one else’s. As Drew Dixon, the woman at the center of the Simmons doc, said, echoing Bowles: “Oprah Winfrey shouldn’t get to decide for the whole rest of the world.” More importantly, the machine that created her shouldn’t get to either. 

***

“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering,” Sontag writes at the end of her book. “Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.” In the case of Oprah, it proclaims hers while hiding the main accomplices. Once among America’s most oppressed populations, her triumph is not only immune to interrogation, so is American plutocracy for having anointed her as its apostle. Oprah gamed the system that once neglected her, and her success lends it a veneer of progress and perpetuates it into the future. With her accumulated power, she shifted taboos and secured the first black American president approximately 1 million votes. But Oprah’s $2.7 billion net worth, her $25 million private jet, her empire — none of these are incidental. They are emblems of a world which has traded millions of people’s poverty for a handful of people’s riches, millions of perspectives for one authority. Oprah may still be full of good intentions, but good intentions are no longer as significant as actions, and every one of us is now accountable — and not just for ourselves. It is not enough anymore to ask people to lift themselves by their bootstraps now that people are aware that those straps are all rigged to snap.

In the midst of American Dirt landing at No. 1 on the Times bestseller list, its publisher acknowledged mistakes but also announced its epic book tour, the one which elbowed out so many other more worthy books and authors, was being canceled over safety concerns. The move proved that Flatiron — also publisher of five Oprah books — fundamentally buys into the notion that when the country’s marginalized populations interrupt the capitalist machinery, it’s a risk to the country itself. The Hispanic Caucus has since requested a meeting with the Association of American Publishers. Bowles, meanwhile, praised the director of a border library — Kate Horan of Texas’s McAllen Public Library — for declining to be part of a pilot partnership with Oprah’s Book Club. Sontag writes that a transformative approach to suffering like Oprah’s is “a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed.” But Horan’s response to the question “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” is neither Oprah’s nor the opposite — it is to reject the war itself. Oprah serves up war stories to the system that is responsible for them — her response is to meet suffering with suffering. The Latinx community sees the paradox even if Oprah, in her prism of privilege, cannot. “We’ll never meekly submit our stories, our pain, our dignity,” writes Bowles, “to the ever-grinding wheels of the hit-making machine.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[omegasupremeconservative]

Is The Media Making American Politics Worse?

A Response To Mainstream Journalism

I recently read this vox.com article that was trending in which the author Ezra Klein discussed the state of affairs in our country, whether the media is making American politics worse and the rise of Donald Trump. Ezra Klein suggests that the media is failing not because they aren’t doing their jobs but that the world around them is changing. He claims that “President Trump is the most successful media hacker out there, but he’s not the only one.”

It’s interesting that he believes Trump is using the media to “fracture American democracy”. I think this really boils down to belief systems and perspectives. In today’s society if you are a Democrat, liberal or progressive your perspective on President Trump is probably similar to the following:

Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election through fraudulent means because 17 intelligence agencies all confirmed that there was an attempt to hack our election system.

Trump has sexually assaulted multiple women and shouldn’t have been allowed to be President of the United States.

Trump filed for bankruptcy twice he doesn’t know how to run a successful business, he’s a fraud.

Trump took advantage of individuals through his Trump University program where he told people they would be taught how to make money in real estate and they spent tens of thousands of dollars and did not receive the training and information they expected.

Trump’s wife is a former prostitute.

Trump is a racist and his family has ties to Nazi Germany.

Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election.

Trump is a fake billionaire he never shared his personal tax returns like every other Presidential candidate.

Trump is a mean racist who hates Mexicans.

“I hate Trump’s orange hair.”

The list of things to hate Trump for expands everyday..

The average conservative does not automatically trust the media like your average liberal. Over 90% of all news agencies are left leaning so that inherently builds trust and authority with progressives and Democrats. Often times the liberal media does not simply report news with a left slant they write and report about Republicans and Conservatives in an unfriendly hostile way that has helped build distrust among the American public that Republicans are racist evil people who only care about themselves. As a result conservatives view the mainstream media as an adversary and never expect the media to tell the truth especially when it comes to understanding their point of view and what they believe in.

Your political and personal philosophy your upbringing, and economic status have a lot to do with shaping your belief system and perspectives. The modern day media has shown us they have very little diversity of thought and understanding, the media has proven to us that they can only serve people who closely share their own beliefs.

The Media Believes What They Are Doing is Heroic

The journalist who wrote this article claims the media has been heroic in their investigations into Donald Trump’s finances, the #MeToo movement and war zone coverage. It’s interesting that the media believes that investigating Donald Trump’s finances is something that will serve the general public when at least 50 million people voted for him. If you took a poll you would find that the only people who care about Trump’s tax returns are his political opponents in the media and unhinged angry Democrats who will stop at nothing to GET RID OF TRUMP. Getting access to Trump’s taxes does nothing for the country it only helps a certain segment of the population in their quest to try and impeach Trump. I don’t see anything heroic about trying to impeach a duly elected President especially when we still don’t have a sliver of proven evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia in order to win the Presidency.

The Media Was Anti-Trump From The Beginning

From the beginning of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign in 2016 the press has not displayed any amount of fair and balanced coverage. If you are going to investigate Trump why haven’t other people who are worthy of investigation had the same treatment? Many Americans believe the Clinton Foundation deserves looking into but these investigations by the “heroic media”never take place. Millions of Americans would like to know what was the extent of the Obama Administrations spying on the Trump campaign and why, but there is little curiosity among liberal journalists to ask and answer those tough questions.

Most Americans agree that sexual assault and rape is abhorrent but when people see Keith Ellison getting a pass and Brett Kavanaugh framed as a gang rapist and a drunk with no corroborating evidence this doesn’t build any trust for the mainstream media among conservatives. Republicans strongly believe there is a double-standard in the press.

Does The Media Understand Donald Trump? Do They Want To?

I can’t name any person on planet earth right now that gets destroyed more in the media than Donald Trump. Any objective observer would have to agree the media has gone out of their way to present a negative image of many things Trump does. There are entire books written on the subject of Trump vs The Deep State, Trump vs The Media, The Russian Hoax and much more. Here are some books that can help you get up to speed with a completely different perspective than what you will ever see in the liberal press:

Notice: these are affiliate links if you purchase through these links I may receive a commission from Amazon. I would appreciate it if you do decide to buy one of these great books you buy through my link.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway “Trump vs. the Media

Ann Coulter “Resistance is Futile: How the Trump-hating Left Lost It’s Collective Mind

Jason Chaffetz “The Deep State: How an Army of Bureaucrats Protected Barack Obama and Is Working to Destroy the Trump Agenda”

Jeanine Pirro “Liars, Leakers and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy

Gregg Jarrett “The Russia Hoax” The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump

Dan Bongino “Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump

There is an equal amount of books on the left-wing side of the isle but they are all mostly hit pieces not much different than the coverage you see on the cable news networks everyday.

Donald Trump is the first Republican President in a long time to fight back and defend himself against what he believes is unfair inaccurate or fake news. President George W. Bush was treated with contempt by the media as well but he never fought back he just took it on the chin. The media isn’t used to a Republican fighting back, they are used to being able to write one or two stories about you and ruin your career as a politician.

The Obama Administration actually spied on journalists but can you imagine the uproar if the Trump Administration was doing that? https://theweek.com/articles/464430/why-did-obama-administration-spy-associated-press. It’s very hypocritical when today’s media core talk about how Trump is waging war and trying to silence a free press when President Obama literally did try to silence the media, spy on the media and take down his political enemies.

Modern Day Media

The cable news networks no longer own and control the narrative, there are many YouTube channels with more active subscribers and viewers than some of the traditional cable news stations. The Web and Social Media have given people more choices now.

Patriotic Americans who didn’t even vote for Trump are turned off by the constant Trump bashing. While Trump and his communication team try to get the message out to the general public about important policies and changes to our laws that will impact our country, the mainstream media seems to dedicate much of its time on the next anti-Trump hit piece.

The Media Blames Itself For Trump’s Rise

Ezra Klein says “we’ve become very critical of Trump, but I’m not sure that we have really thought through our culpability in his rise.”

The press based on their own writings see themselves as saviors and/or adversaries who have the job of stopping Trump, making him ineffective in his role as President.

The Role Of Journalists

Jay Rosen makes a comment in the article “I don’t think our journalists have learned how to angle their work so that they can defend democratic institutions.” I honestly don’t think journalists should be defending democratic institutions I think they should be providing the public with all the facts and then letting politicians do all the defending unless your an opinion journalist or a pundit.

The article then mentions Amy Klobuchar as one of the most popular Senators in the country, I don’t know if that is true or not but for the sake of argument let’s say it is. She is a Democrat Senator from Minnesota and I think the reason she is popular is because she has the ability to be respectful to the other side.

Just recently we’ve had President Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, CNN and several other prominent figures sent pipe bombs in the mail. None of the bombs went off but I would like to highlight the response from the media framing Trump as being responsible for the pipe bombs.

CNN Headline MANHUNT FOR SERIAL BOMBER GOING AFTER TRUMP’S TARGETS

Manhunt For Serial Bomber

The narrative agents at CNN decided to frame this story in a way that the victims of this incident were TRUMP”S TARGETS, that he in some way was responsible whether in rhetoric, tone or action in influencing someone to put a pipe bomb in the mail. This is quite a stretch but one that the media is never afraid to make when it comes to Donald Trump.

When Republican Congressman Steve Scalise was shot and nearly killed in a 2017 Congressional baseball event by a left-wing activist who was a Bernie Sanders supporter you never saw headlines suggesting Sanders had anything to do with the shooting. When Republicans and conservatives see this hypocrisy in the media they never forget it.

Divisive Comments From Democrats Go Unchecked

Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have received zero push back from the media for comments they have made.

Democrat Senator Cory Booker says “Get Up In The Face Of Some Congresspeople”

Kamala Harris makes a joke on the talk show Ellen:

“If you had to be stuck in an elevator with either President Trump, Mike Pence or Jeff Sessions who would it be?”

“Does one of us have to come out alive?” Harris asked, to a roar of cheering from the audience. Even Degeneres applauded the senator’s wit.”

It’s no big deal to the press, Kamala merely “ruffled some feathers” by suggesting that her political enemies should die.

If Donald Trump makes a joke about a man body slamming a reporter he is inciting and encouraging violence against the media. Such hypocrisy by the media.

Trump Supporters Are Mindless Followers According To The Media

Jay Rosen in the last paragraph of the vox article says “there’s a core of Trump supporters who at this point disbelieve the Voxes and Washington Posts and New York Times of the world on principle because they’ve been instructed to do that.” Actually Republicans in general have known there is a double standard in the media for quite some time, since George W. Bush was in office. The distrust of the media didn’t just start with Donald Trump.

Headlines like these are why conservatives tend not to trust the media:

WAPO Trump Complicit Hurricane

Look at this headline that was printed just after Billy Graham died by the trusted Washington Post:

Billy Graham WAPO Article Headline

The Washington Post with more fake Russian news, we are supposed to believe with zero evidence that Trump gave the Russian diplomat pictured below classified information, WOW.

WAPO Russian Trump

Here goes a New York Times hit piece intended to damage Nikki Haley but it turns out she had absolutely nothing to do with spending $50 grand on curtains, it was the Obama Administration that spent the money. The New York Times was forced to issue a retraction on the story but most people never see the retractions, so fake news is easily spread and believed because people tend not to return back to rereading an article they have already read.

Let’s take the fictional article on the New York Times where they actually fantasize about Trump getting assassinated https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/clay-waters/2018/10/24/disgusting-ny-times-publishes-trump-assassination-fantasy-fiction.

Its no problem to fantasize about assassinating President Trump, liberals don’t find this alarming but if Trump jokes about body slamming a report that is alarming to them. If Trump supporters chant “CNN SUCKS” at a rally that is divisive to the media, but it’s not divisive to dream about Donald Trump getting killed. These are clear examples of the media’s double standard.

Understanding Trump

Donald Trump has always had a flair for exaggeration, it comes with the territory when your a person who thinks big and always wants and strives for the best in life. Exaggeration doesn’t equal lying, lying is usually when you intentionally mislead someone in a way that will negatively impact them.

For example if President Trump says that his policies have brought back our economy the media will say NO it’s because of what President Obama has done previously so in their minds this is ANOTHER LIE by Trump.

If President Trump says a new company is moving into Ohio and it’s going to bring in over 50,000 new jobs the media will say its only reported to bring in 45,000 jobs and to them IT’S ANOTHER LIE, to them “TRUMP LIES EVERYDAY IN THE OVAL OFFICE.”

Trump said he would help bring in more jobs to the country and he did, this is how Republican, conservatives and Trump supporters see it and the media can’t refute that fact so instead they obsess over exact details not getting the point that any amount of new jobs is a very good thing for American citizens.

The Media Can’t Stop Trump

The media can’t prevent the rise of Donald Trump, there is no way to separate Trump from his supporters unless he stops fulfilling his campaign promises to them.

When will the media learn that after many years of lying, misrepresenting, omitting key details, being hostile to Republicans and blatantly creating fake stories that it wasn’t going to help bring the country together.

Donald Trump is doing exactly what HIS SUPPORTERS WANTED HIM TO DO this is why his supporters will never leave him. They voted for him and he won, this is the way our system was intended to work.

The media has chosen to de-legitimize the 2016 Presidential Election which has caused great damage to our country. Half of America hates the President simply because of media reporting, half of America hates the media, half of America thinks Trump supporters are racist, and half of America thinks that Democrats, liberals and progressives are evil.

The media has done very little to create harmony among Americans with differing points of view. Most Republicans believe the mainstream media is a separate arm of the Democrat Party.

Trump doesn’t have to hack the media, they hack themselves by having a closed mind. The world is changing and the media is incapable of changing with it.

The post Is The Media Making American Politics Worse? appeared first on Alternative News Source, Research and Analysis.

source http://ugetinformed.com/politics/is-the-media-making-american-politics-worse

[masterstrading]

You said you didn't like the 2004 movie, do you have any dreamcasting for a remake?

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate it; the cinematography was absolutely stunning, the aesthetic was gorgeous, I admired the very intricate detailing, costumes were grandiose & lush, Patrick Wilson made an absolutely stunning Raoul. Overall, I just found Emmy & Gerard a little lackluster. Although, Gerry had some amazing acting but let’s be honest that deformity was pathetic & his singing needed some work. Emmy, however, was a bit dull in regards to both singing & acting. However, I blame that mostly on A.) she was 16 when cast + recorded the singing, 17 when she filmed, & 18 upon its release. B.) she’s an amazing actress in quite literally everything she’s starred in prior & after it, same as Kristen Stewart in “Twilight,” so I think it had to do with Joel Schumacher’s directing.

Personally, as much as I’d love a musical movie, I don’t exactly want a remake of the ALW musical per se. I’d like a Leroux accurate adaptation.

First off no Phantom & Christine having sex. Nope. Nuh-uh. Bye. No way. Not happening. I enjoy E/C (sometimes even ship it) too but he is a grown ass man & took a grieving, emotionally vulnerable girl & manipulated her into a relationship she didn’t want. He was cruel. We aren’t blaming her for trying to escape her abuser either. She’s allowed to fall in love & find healing. She doesn’t owe anyone a relationship. Her life, her autonomy, her choice, she’s in charge of her own narrative. Back off. Stop victim-blaming the survivor. Like can you end the glorification & romanticism of abuse? Erik’s past trauma isn’t an excuse, yes he’s tragic, but he’s not just misunderstood; he’s been isolated for so long he doesn’t comprehend proper articulation & expression of emotion, he was dangerous, he murdered several people. No possibilty of LND, none. Like whatsoever. At all.

Cast;

The Phantom, Erik: Gary Oldman; Do I really need to say anything about this legend?

*Also wouldn’t mind having Aidan Gillen as The Phantom. They are both very intriguing, deep actors that carry so much talent within them & are very versatile. Actually, I almost put him there, but felt two GoT stars was a bit of a reach let’s be honest.

Christine Daaé: Emilia Clarke - Boy, I really love her work. She’s just so nuisanced & subtle in her deliveries. I want a sweet, naïve, gentle, loving Christine that isn’t afraid to show her backbone. I feel she’d really encompass her strength in such an elegant, cunning, charming way. I’m tired of vapid, doe-eyed, spineless Christine’s. They’re wonderful in their own right. But I just have a spot in my heart for these soft delicate Christine’s that radiate warmth, joy, compassion, & grace with such tenderness whilst remaining to have an equally fiery, dynamic, powerful, passionate performance. In my wildest dreams, she could reuse one of her 4 blonde Daenerys wigs & have it styled similarly to either the West End (ala Celinde Schoenmaker’s, Harriet Jones’s, Amy Manford’s pre humidity or Sierra Boggess’s Classical Brit award wig), Moscow/World Tour, Hamburg, or the traditional Degas way.

Vicomte Raoul de Chagny: Aaron Tveit - Ugh, he just makes me heart swoon. Really, he’d be splendid in the musical too. Can’t you imagine it? I mean I can! Ah he’d just be so serious, strong, heroic but kind & serious with a warm sympathy in regards to Christine. None of that abrasive, violent, aggressive bs in the restaged tour. I just want his fine little behind to be the innocent & somewhat awkward knight-in-shining-armour Raoul whom actually isn’t perfect but is still nobly chivalrous & well intentioned. I don’t want pompous arrogance or being irritated with her. No, just no. It’s reasonable for him to doubt her mental health, but being rude & toxic is not okay. Boyish with a cavalier manner, sincere, devoted, protective but not controlling, grounded, & frightened just as much as her. Boy would Aaron nail this. *Drools*

Count Phillipe de Chagny; Paul Wesley - Man, he is such a looker. Paul is so suave & handsome, plus quite the poignant actor, he seems like he’d be a nice Phillipe.

The Daroga aka Nadir or Tu; Shaun Toub - he’s actually Persian & he’s established himself as a talented actor with quite the impressive list of work under his belt.

Madame Giry; Mariska Hargitay - I feel like this sounds weird. Well, Mariska is so extraordinary & I think she would just further develop an already ambiguously multifaceted character. Plus, she has similar heritage & traits as Violetta, they look as though they could be related to me so…. ‘Cause Olivia Benson. Enough said.

Meg Giry; Violetta Komyshan - A young, classically trained ballerina & is quite beautiful. She’s of Bulgarian + Romani descent (love me my Roma representation) & is absolutely gorgeous. She’s naturally very dark-haired & dyed it slightly lighter, but I think she’d be a very fitting Meg.

Madame Valérius; Sarah Brightman - I don’t care if she’s not elderly, I love this woman more than my life & if it wasn’t for her POTO as we know it wouldn’t be what it is today. I really just want some appreciation for this icon & a few little appearances

*I would of loved to have Misty Copeland as Meg but alas she’s too old & I couldn’t figure out a Madame Giry to play opposite her if she was of age.

-

Crew & Design;

Costumes/Sets; Maria Björnson- Literally keep all of Maria’s original design, maybe with a few touches of Alexandra Byrne’s flair, with slight alterations for film. Make it grand, vibrant, historically accurate. But not too bright, like the Phantom’s lair in the 2004 movie.

Cinematography; Sam Esmail - his lighting work behind the camera is simply riveting.

Score; Maybe Daniel Hart? Very underappreciated film composer.

I honestly don’t have a director in mind.

-

Thanks for the really interesting ask!

[lodelss]

Regarding the Pain of Oprah

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2020 |  8 minutes (2,233 words)

On the cover of Susan Sontag’s 2003 book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others, her last publication before her death, is a Goya print from his graphic 19th-century series The Disasters of War. It shows a reclining soldier passively taking in a dead man hanging from a tree, a body in a row of indistinguishable dangling bodies. Its pain — and the indifference with which that pain can be met — is the perfect illustration of Sontag’s book, which was her response to the query, “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” She questioned whether the representation of suffering has any hand in ending it. “For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war,” Sontag writes. 

Is that why American Dirt, a sensationalized, stereotype-ridden piece of telenovela exploitation written by a self-identified white (later Puerto Rican–grandmother identified) woman, was met with a seven-figure deal and trumpeted by a publishing industry — Oprah’s Book Club most notably — that ignores countless Latinx stories? Is that why On the Record, a documentary initially backed by Oprah about various women accusing Def Jam cofounder Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct, premiered at Sundance when so many other films about women’s oppression have not? Both of these works have been held up in the tradition of pain iconography and as part of a wider culture that both defers to and is let off the hook by Oprah, its designated high priestess of compassion. An indigent black girl from the rural South, she was an exemplar of one of the most neglected demographics in America. That this capitalist society made her a billionaire for inspiring a cultural bloodletting has immunized it from the sort of criticism levied when white men like Jerry Springer (or white women like Gwyneth Paltrow) do the same thing. 

But the merciless critique Oprah has received both for her support of American Dirt and lack of support for On the Record points to a framework that simultaneously benefits her and uses her as a shield. This empathetic entrepreneur’s predictably myopic choices — just like her acolytes’, from Dr. Phil to Reese Witherspoon — may not serve the majority, but they do serve the system that lets her take the fall for its larger failures of representation. Oprah is one of the most salient testaments to capitalism. 

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  “People want to weep,” Sontag writes. “Pathos, in the form of a narrative, does not wear out.” She may have been referencing war photography, but the sentiment applies to all narrative forms of suffering, which “are more than reminders of death, of failure, of victimization. They invoke the miracle of survival.” This almost superhuman transcendence of misfortune, this ability to raise yourself out of your primordial pain toward the heavens, is the prototype for the American Dream. It is also the perfect paean to plutocracy. Oprah is the prime example: teen mom, child sex abuse, teen pregnancy, drug use. While working her way toward a journalism career, she was told early on that she was too emotional while anchoring the news. It was here that she found a gaping hole in the market: Oprah turned her “failure” into a touchy-feely talk show, eventually netting herself a cult of personality and an empire approaching $3 billion. Her triumph over her past imbued her with the authority to turn beleaguered strangers’ private torment into public good and served as testament to a hierarchy of success founded on flagellation. “There is nothing greater than the spirit within you to overcome,” she said on The Oprah Winfrey Show. “You and God can conquer this,” conquering here implying profiting. She was proof that it worked. Oprah may not think you are responsible for your own misery, but she does believe you are responsible for flipping your misfortune, just like she did. As she told a women’s economic conference in 1989, “There’s a condition that comes with being and doing all you can: you first have to know who you are before you can do that.”  

Her suffering was transformative, a brand of anguish Sontag defines in her book with an unintentionally spot-on characterization of how Oprah, who referred to her talk show as her “ministry,” secularized (and capitalized on) a pious approach to hardship. “It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation,” Sontag wrote. The people Oprah chose to interview (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston), the books she chose to plug (Toni Morrison, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces), and the films she chose to produce (Beloved, Precious) — all followed this same general trajectory from trauma to some semblance of deliverance, hewing with her own personal experience. They also served to convince the most downtrodden members of the population that the system was only failing to work for them because they failed to plumb their own souls deeply enough. If capitalism was unprofitable for them, it’s because they weren’t doing the work — not in the industrious sense, but in the therapeutic one.

Oprah’s recent projects fall well within that tradition, including On the Record, the Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering documentary she was executive producing for Apple TV+ (it will now air on HBO Max), which centered around a group of women accusing Russell Simmons of sexual abuse. (He has been accused by at least a dozen women in total and denies all the charges.) The question is why this high-profile film by multiple-award winning filmmakers that already had a distributor was playing at a highly sought-after festival, when a struggling independent film could have used that rare opening to seek distribution? Instead, the news out of Sundance focused on whether Oprah, who pulled out of the film at the last minute over creative differences, was siding with Simmons or not — whether she was betraying not only her own race, but her own brand (the enabling of struggling black women to claim their due). “In my opinion, there is more work to be done on the film to illuminate the full scope of what the victims endured,” she said in a statement. This reads to me as uncomfortably on brand, Oprah squeezing as much as possible out of a desperate situation — particularly if it’s at the expense of another capitalist success story, in Simmons’s case — to get maximum returns. But this isn’t all down to her own prurience. It’s the industry around her (including Apple) that encourages her to do this, that pays her excessively for it — the same industry that doesn’t even consider the marginalized stories that do not comply with those standards (standards upheld by a black woman, remember).

Having said all of that, it is also a function of technology that our culture expects us to bleed out to survive. The more intimate media becomes, Sontag argued, the further our shock threshold moves. “The real thing may not be fearsome enough,” she wrote, “and therefore needs to be enhanced or reenacted more convincingly.” This is where you get a situation like Jeanine Cummins’s “trauma porn” American Dirt, the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick, about a Mexican migrant fleeing a drug cartel across the border with her son. “I’m interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship,” Cummins writes in her author’s note, “in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma.” It was a direct dial to Oprah, and in particularly unfortunate timing, she expressed her support for this hyperbolic yarn about a fictional woman of color’s pain on the same CBS morning show in which she discussed pulling her support from a documentary full of actual women of colors’ pain. In a video posted on Twitter, Oprah held up the Cummins book, with its cover of watercolor birds and barbed wire, and gushed: “I was opened. I was shook up. It woke me up. And I feel that everybody who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom.” Her description reminded me of Sontag’s portrayal of graphic battle imagery: “Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle!” American Dirt was another in Oprah’s Apple streaming projects, part of her ambition to make “the world’s largest book club,” and it showed a level of outdated hubris that was revisited tenfold upon her mentions.

While the flesh-and-blood migrants who are dying at the border have not been much of a priority to the world of capitalist enterprise, the literary industry’s corner offices have been effusive in their tone-deaf praise for American Dirt, which last year celebrated its release with — no shit — barbed twig centerpieces. The hypocrisy was too much for the Latinx community (and social media) to bear. They balked at a non-Mexican woman who claimed her husband was undocumented (he’s Irish) and painted her nails with her book cover (more barbed wire) being edified for a cheap piece of Mexican cultural appropriation, while their own perhaps less uplifting (see less white) stories were serially overlooked — Oprah’s Book Club has never chosen a Mexican author. “The clumsy, ill-conceived rollout of American Dirt illustrates how broken the system is,” wrote Mexican American author and translator David Bowles in a heavily circulated New York Times op-ed, “how myopic it is to hype one book at the expense of others and how unethical it is to allow a gatekeeper like Oprah’s Book Club to wield such power.” He pointed out that a bestseller doesn’t just happen; it’s deliberately made by big publishers sinking money into its promotion and rallying press and booksellers around it. One book’s immoderate gain is then every other book’s loss: For three months in the wake of Oprah’s book announcements, other books’ sales plummet. This is a clear impoverishment of culture, but, more importantly, it limits the dissemination of ideas that do not serve big business’ hierarchical ideals. Trauma is valued as long as it’s sanctioned by the small number of powerful people who maintain an overwhelming amount of sway over the capitalist system they uphold. The voices that are ultimately projected are their own, serving their interests and no one else’s. As Drew Dixon, the woman at the center of the Simmons doc, said, echoing Bowles: “Oprah Winfrey shouldn’t get to decide for the whole rest of the world.” More importantly, the machine that created her shouldn’t get to either. 

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“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering,” Sontag writes at the end of her book. “Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.” In the case of Oprah, it proclaims hers while hiding the main accomplices. Once among America’s most oppressed populations, her triumph is not only immune to interrogation, so is American plutocracy for having anointed her as its apostle. Oprah gamed the system that once neglected her, and her success lends it a veneer of progress and perpetuates it into the future. With her accumulated power, she shifted taboos and secured the first black American president approximately 1 million votes. But Oprah’s $2.7 billion net worth, her $25 million private jet, her empire — none of these are incidental. They are emblems of a world which has traded millions of people’s poverty for a handful of people’s riches, millions of perspectives for one authority. Oprah may still be full of good intentions, but good intentions are no longer as significant as actions, and every one of us is now accountable — and not just for ourselves. It is not enough anymore to ask people to lift themselves by their bootstraps now that people are aware that those straps are all rigged to snap.

In the midst of American Dirt landing at No. 1 on the Times bestseller list, its publisher acknowledged mistakes but also announced its epic book tour, the one which elbowed out so many other more worthy books and authors, was being canceled over safety concerns. The move proved that Flatiron — also publisher of five Oprah books — fundamentally buys into the notion that when the country’s marginalized populations interrupt the capitalist machinery, it’s a risk to the country itself. The Hispanic Caucus has since requested a meeting with the Association of American Publishers. Bowles, meanwhile, praised the director of a border library — Kate Horan of Texas’s McAllen Public Library — for declining to be part of a pilot partnership with Oprah’s Book Club. Sontag writes that a transformative approach to suffering like Oprah’s is “a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed.” But Horan’s response to the question “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” is neither Oprah’s nor the opposite — it is to reject the war itself. Oprah serves up war stories to the system that is responsible for them — her response is to meet suffering with suffering. The Latinx community sees the paradox even if Oprah, in her prism of privilege, cannot. “We’ll never meekly submit our stories, our pain, our dignity,” writes Bowles, “to the ever-grinding wheels of the hit-making machine.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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