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addictedtostorytelling · 5 years ago

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Hello ! I just saw your reblog of a daredevil gif and, do you have an head canon on wether or not Matt and Karen would have been back together and how , if the show had been renewed ? Thx !

hey, anon!

i will admit that few things in television baffle me as much as the way the defendersverse powers that be approach romantic pairings.

don’t get me wrong: i generally like the love stories told in this fictional universe.

i just also don’t know exactly what to make of them.

usually, even without possessing any foreknowledge as to how each individual ship will pan out, i can still be relatively certain as to whether or not a given story world “believes in great loves.”

but with the defendersverse, i’m not quite sure.

that so, my short answer here is: i don’t know whether or not karedevil would have gotten back together, had daredevil been renewed. on the one hand, i feel like they were kind of set up to be endgame from the beginning. but on the other hand, i feel like as the wider defendersverse developed, there were also other viable options introduced for the both of them.

ultimately, i think it would have come down to how the powers that be conceived of the story universe overall—and whether they were interested in telling structured, trope-compliant love stories or not.

more discussion if you click the “keep reading.”

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a big part of my uncertainty regarding how the defendersverse treats romances stems from the fact that its shows end mid-story, skewing my perspective of what’s there.

none of the shows has more than three seasons to their names, and all were cancelled abruptly, without really affording the writers a chance to implement final conclusions. they all suffer for having loose strings, never to be tied.

consequently, it’s hard to tell which broken-up ships of the defendersverse were actually broken-up for good and which ones were just at a midgame impasse and might have later reconciled, had they only been given more time and narrative space in which to do so.

however, another obstacle to making this determination is not in the circumstances but in the storytelling itself, as the defendersverse powers that be tended to be fairly indiscriminate in how they used romantic devices surrounding their ships, which means that a lot of the usual “midgame” vs. “endgame” signposts in this story world are blurred.

in the first seasons of both dd and jj, the defendersverse powers create deep and compelling romantic relationships for their respective main characters, playing to all kinds of familiar “this relationship has long-term significance” tropes.

you want the jaded female superhero who’s given up on both love and the world, who then meets a guy who’s both so good and so good for her that she has to reevaluate her priorities? check.

you want the male superhero who rescues the girl-next-door in body, only to have her rescue him in soul? check again.

there’s all sorts of smiles, talk of “before you, i never allowed myself to think about this kind of stuff,” heartfelt sacrifices, expressed vulnerabilities, etc., etc., etc.

in a story world that “believed in great loves,” no one who watched these seasons could be faulted for thinking that jessica jones would be endgame with luke cage and that matt murdock would be endgame with karen page.

the question, however, is, “is the defendersverse actually a story world that believes in great loves?”

in my mind, the evidence is ambiguous.

at most, the defendersverse powers only allow these relationships to progress for one or two seasons before dismantling them—but whether they mean to dismantle them temporarily or permanently is difficult to say.

the characters lead such complicated, dangerous, and ethically fraught existences that whatever happiness they experience in love is generally and perhaps unavoidably short-lived.

as secret identities are revealed, moral stances compromised, trauma experienced and assessed, and heroic stakes raised, their relationships inevitably crumble under the pressure.

this crumbling could perhaps speak to this fictional universe being one in which all loves come with an expiration date printed on them, with none being given special narrative priority over any of the others.

however, the crumbling could also be a story component.

maybe the writers planned these breakups, knowing full-well they were temporary and that eventually the couples would get back together in the long term. maybe they’re just a midgame detour en route to the final endgame.

so cut to the next leg in defendersverse development, when tptb reshuffle the pairings between their main properties, sending character a from show 1 to be with character b from show 2. the process then continues and multiplies as more properties are added to the ‘verse, with characters spinning off into new shows and coupling in new and increasingly intricate permutations with one another.

of course, the truly interesting thing is that once these reshufflings take place, the new relationships created often prove just as deep and compelling as the relationships which preceded them and are marked by just as many typical endgame signposts.

matt murdock is willing to die for elektra and very nearly does so.

karen page repeatedly throws caution to the wind to choose frank castle over public opinion, common sense, and even her own well-being.

there are indicators to suggest that these new pairings could be endgame, just as there were with the ones before them. there’s deep connection. there’s ride-or-die stuff. there’s cuteness. there’s even potentially destiny.

so, as a trope-savvy fan, one is left thinking, “well, okay, if the first pairing wasn’t endgame, then maybe the second one will be,” but then by the next season, the second pairing has often been dismantled much in the same way that the first one was previously.

a salient example here would be claire temple’s various relationships: in s1 of dd, her involvement with matt murdock ends because his vigilantism and masochism drives a wedge between them. after their falling out, she eventually starts dating luke cage. while she and luke are devoted to each other through much of lc s1 and the defenders miniseries, their relationship crumbles at the end of lc s2, when luke’s attitude toward “justice” prompts claire to ask him for “a break.” her second relationship within the defendersverse thus ends much in the same way that her first one did: with claire stepping back from her man because she finds his intense approach to heroism unhealthy.

by the point of cancellation, the net effect is that because all of these relationships have in some ways been treated as “sacred,” none of them feels sacred overall, or at least not definitively.

i can’t really look at them and say, “karedevil is the endgame; mattlektra is the midgame”—and especially not when elektra keeps miraculously resurrecting after she’s killed—because both ships have been set up in ways which suggest lasting significance.

i also can’t look to the comics as a cheat sheet, because while most of the relationships depicted in the defendersverse do have some basis in comic lore, the shows themselves don’t strictly adhere to that canon—and, in some cases, actively go against it.

in the new avengers comics, jessica jones and luke cage get married and have a daughter, but in the defendersverse, their relationship is pretty thoroughly trashed in the aftermath of jj s1.

still, where things get truly complicated is in the way that these various relationships interact with one another within the wider defendersverse.

if luke cage is jessica jones’s great love, but he is also claire temple’s great love, then someone is bound to lose out, right? and since the audience should in theory be sympathetic to all three characters, who are we supposed to be rooting for? likewise, if matt murdock ends up with karen page, then she can’t be with frank castle, you know? so does that mean matt has to be with elektra? but what if elektra dies (and for once stays dead)? then what?

the writers are playing “musical chairs” with their ships, but, as per the game, it would seem that someone is going to be left standing at the end.

so.

all of this discussion is a very long way for me to say that i genuinely have no idea what the defendersverse powers intended for romantic karedevil.

they are initially set up using many of the same tropes and storytelling techniques that would be used for an endgame pairing—but that framing only matters if the defendersverse is one where “endgame” is actually a legitimate thing that the writers are actively working toward.

it could be that matt and karen were meant to be a slow burn endgame, but the writers got cut-off midway through telling their story, before they could be romantically reconciled after their midgame falling out.

however, it could also be that, whether they were initially interested in creating a karedevil endgame or not, by s3 of dd, the writers had moved on from the possibility of romantic karedevil altogether, being more enticed to pair karen off with frank due to deborah ann woll’s unexpectedly good chemistry with jon bernthal.

of course, maybe endgame karedevil was never even on the table at all, either because it was always meant to be a midgame ship OR because this isn’t a fictional universe that is geared toward endgames, period.

“endgame” is a concept somewhat antithetical to how comic books work, as there’s always going to be another iteration and another series and another run, and the details will change, depending on who’s doing the writing and which universe the story takes place in; maybe the defendersverse was working on a similar model, where while matt murdock has history with many women, including claire temple, karen page, and elektra, he’ll never be tied one woman forever; his love life will always be a revolving door, depending on what suits the purposes of the story.

or maybe nothing had been decided yet, one way or another.

maybe the powers were more writing from season to season, keeping their options open, seeing what was available to them.

after all, there were a lot of moving parts in play across the wider ‘verse.

who’s to say what might have happened had some of the defenders shows been cancelled but not others? who’s to say what might have happened due to the changing availability of various actors?

prior to the cancellations, rosario dawson had decided to step down from playing claire, a decision which would have undoubtedly sent ripples across the entire defendersverse, romance-wise.

up until the point when netflix pulled the plug, all sorts of possibilities were still open. there were still so many ways the writers could have chosen to swing things.

as for my personal headcanon (regardless of writer intention or what might have been), i should preface my thoughts by saying that while i enjoy karedevil, they’re not my number #1 preferred ship for either matt or karen, so i would have been perfectly happy with them as a midgame romantic ship that eventually reverted back to a platonic baseline, as per the end of dd s3.

that said, i can definitely see a road that leads to them getting together in the end.

my thoughts are these:

by the end of dd s3, matt and karen are back to being friends again after having been “fallen out” for a long time. since s2, karen has known matt’s secret identity, but now matt likewise knows about karen’s past, meaning that, in a way, the playing field is level between them.

still, their relationship is somewhat fragile.

for the first time in their history, they’ve been honest with each other, and now neither one of them can “hide” in the ways that they used to. they’re both highly aware of this new vulnerability, and neither one of them wants to screw things up. they’re still sussing out what it will mean for them to work together again.

they don’t want to leave foggy caught in the middle of things like before.

so with that in mind, i see their romantic reconciliation as a slow burn process.

of course, they’ve always had a palpable connection, and that connection would be there from the start, even when they were working hard at “just being friends.”

gradually, that connection would grow stronger and more impossible to ignore.

there would be moments when they were working late nights together (after foggy had gone home to marci) when they’d stumble on a lead in their case and start talking excitedly, finishing each other’s thoughts, drawing closer and closer together, until suddenly they realized that there was only an inch of space between their faces and had to pull back, awkward and businesslike once more.

there’d be times when their clients would mistake them for a couple, and they’d laugh and try to brush it off but both be blushing too much to truly convince anyone that they were unaffected by the suggestion.

eventually, they’d start testing the waters—matt purposefully saying flirtatious things, karen touching matt more than she had reason to.

at some point, they’d have to broach the subject.

maybe matt would have taken to walking karen home after work, and one night, after a lot of laughter and arm-holding, she’d stop on the top stair and turn back to him and say, in that breathless, incisive way of hers, “i know you can hear how fast my heart is beating. is yours beating fast, too?”

but, of course, since their relationship doesn’t exist in a vacuum, matt would probably be on the trail of bullseye or some other villain by this point, and, inevitably, these other story factors would come into play.

i don’t know exactly how everything would go down, but my sense as a storyteller is that something would have to impede karedevil’s relationship; the path to reconciliation would, by necessity, have to be a long and wending one for them.

maybe for whatever reason they’d decide not to risk their friendship by pursuing a romance.

or maybe they would pursue a romance, only to have that relationship endangered by whatever villain they’re up against OR to have some of their past interpersonal issues resurface.

(for example, maybe as matt gets deeper and deeper into whatever case he’s working, he starts to emotionally shut karen out again, or maybe karen starts to distrust matt because he’s being evasive; etc.)

hell, maybe elektra turns up in hell’s kitchen, flipping their dynamic on its head.

after all, elektra’s body was never found after the destruction of midland circle, and karen has never gotten to talk to matt about finding elektra in his bed in s2; the potential for angst would be huge.

in any case, i imagine that things would deteriorate for a while—maybe to the point where, if they were already together, karedevil might once again break up.

but, ultimately, something would happen that would remind them of the depth of their feelings for each other—one of them would be hurt or captured or undergo another near-death experience; matt might end up fighting elektra to save karen; or karen might do something to help matt, even though they’d been on shaky ground before.

i don’t think karen would ever make matt give daredevil up completely—because she understands his thirst for justice and even his recklessness, to some degree, and she doesn’t begrudge him those parts of himself—but i think that in the end, matt would have to change; he’d have to become less self-loathing and not compartmentalize his feelings to the extent he always had before. he’d have to start to care more about his own life and well-being than he had in the past so that karen didn’t have to worry about him committing passive suicide via superherodom.

dying for a cause is one thing; dying just because you can and because you don’t value your own life enough to take self preserving actions is another.

karen would also have to learn to trust that matt and not to hide things from him. she’d have to learn to be truly emotionally intimate with him, which would be difficult for her at first, considering that she’s spent her whole adult life holding back important parts of her person.

(one of the interesting things about karedevil is that even though they have this deep, implicit understanding of each other, for most of their relationship, they’ve not really known each other, as both of them have been hiding significant secrets.)

i can see an endgame for them where matt is daredevil with karen’s help and blessing, and she provides him grounding and solace, while he proves to her that, despite her prior experiences, not everyone in her life is going to reject her and send her away; he knows her, and he knows her past, and he’s staying for as long as she wants him.

of course, in all fairness, i can also see many endings for these characters that don’t involve them being in a romantic relationship with each other; this is just one of the possibilities.

anyway,sorry i can’t give a more definitive answer, anon! thanks for the question.

#answered #anon #**#let's talk shop #my meta #meta: daredevil #daredevil #matt murdock #karen page #asks: daredevil

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huntedbyacreature · 7 years ago

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into the mirror cave

“The first thing I talked about with Rian was the mirror cave . . . What are Rey’s conflicts? This image reflects a little bit of the Kylo/Rey Force connections, as well as the duality of light and dark, good and evil. Some of these were being pulled from what I knew of The Force Awakens, but also little glints of information from Rian and mirroring the cave in Empire.” — James Clyne, VFX art director, The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi

“The idea is this island has incredible light and the first Jedi temple up top, and then it has an incredible darkness that’s balanced down underneath in the cave . . . In this search for identity, which is her whole thing, she finds all these various versions of ‘Who am I’ going off into infinity, all the possibilities of her. She comes to the end, looking for identity from somebody, looking for an answer, and it’s just her.” — Rian Johnson (x)

“The idea that if there’s a Jedi Temple up top, the light, it has to be balanced by a place of great darkness. We’re drawing a very obvious connection to Luke’s training and to Dagobah here, obviously. And so the idea was if the up top is the light, down underneath is the darkness. And she descends down into there and has to see, just like Luke did in the cave, her greatest fear. And her greatest fear is [that], in the search for identity, she has nobody but herself to rely on.” — Rian Johnson (x)

Some (long, rambling) thoughts on the mirror cave sequence below the cut.

Rian certainly took a page from the heroine’s journey and mined some Carl Jung here. In this post I’ll discuss the mirror cave and hut scenes and how they trace the “crossing the threshold” and “wedding the animus” steps. In a future post I’ll discuss Rey’s confrontation with Luke as the “confronting the powerless father [figure]” step.

crossing the threshold: descent to “a dark place”

“There's something else beneath the island … A dark place.”

“You went straight to the dark.”

“That place was trying to show me something.”

For an excellent read on the heroine’s descent, see “The Descent: the Heroine’s Journey in The Force Awakens” and “Bride of the Monstrous: Meeting the Other in the Force Awakens” by @ashesforfoxes.

the heroine’s journey and the animus figure

A quick summary of some relevant Jungian concepts follows.

While the male hero goes on an active quest as a rite of passage (involving some physical feat like slaying the monster), the heroine goes on a more inward-focused quest (reconciling the monster within). The heroine’s journey involves an awakening within herself, by descending to a place where she can liberate her inner goddess.

In The Feminine in Fairy Tales, Jungian scholar Marie-Louise von Franz reminds us that this journey within is fundamental to the process of the heroine’s individuation, that it is “a time of initiation and incubation when a deep inner split is cured” by descending into the unconscious.

In The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdock describes this descent as a “journey to our depths” that “invariably strengthens a woman and clarifies her sense of self” because it is a process of “looking for the lost pieces of myself” or seeking to complete oneself. As Murdock writes:

Persephone is pulled out of the innocence (unconsciousness) of everyday life into a deeper consciousness of self by Hades. She is initiated into the sexual mysteries … She becomes Queen of the Underworld.

Similarly, Rey is compelled to descend to that dark place underneath the island where she is pulled into a “deeper consciousness of self” mediated by her Force bond with Kylo. “That place was trying to show me something.” Note, “dark” here is not “evil” but it can show us something about ourselves (for instance, our greatest fears) as it represents the unconscious part of our psyche.

Persephone’s descent into the underworld is when she faces the unknown and matures. She had to leave her family and the familiar, namely the world above ruled by her mother Demeter in which she was kept in an infantile state of girlhood. The world below with Hades is where she accesses what Jungians call the animus and actualizes her selfhood as a woman.

So what is this animus? The anima and animus are “soul-image” archetypes projected onto a person typically of the opposite sex. The animus represents the masculine aspects of the female psyche. As von Franz tells us in The Feminine in Fairy Tales, the animus “has to do with ideas and concepts” and in fiction is typically represented by a man. In her essay “The Process of Individuation” in the Jung anthology Man and his Symbols, von Franz notes:

A vast number of myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, turned by witchcraft into a wild animal or monster, who is redeemed by the love of a girl—a process symbolizing the manner in which the animus becomes conscious. ... Very often the heroine is not allowed to ask questions about her mysterious, unknown lover and husband; or she meets him only in the dark and may never look at him. The implication is that, by blindly trusting and loving him, she will be able to redeem her bridegroom. But this never succeeds. She always breaks her promise and finally finds her lover again only after a long, difficult quest and much suffering.

The parallel in life is that the conscious attention a woman has to give to her animus problem takes much time and involves a lot of suffering. But if she realizes who and what her animus is and what he does to her, and if she faces these realities instead of allowing herself to be possessed, her animus can turn into an invaluable inner companion who endows her with the masculine qualities of initiative, courage, objectivity, and spiritual wisdom.

The animus, just like the anima, exhibits four stages of development. He first appears as a personification of mere physical power--for instance, as an athletic champion or “muscle man.” In the next stage he possesses initiative and the capacity for planned action. In the third phase, the animus becomes the “word,” often appearing as a professor or clergyman. Finally, in his fourth manifestation, the animus is the incarnation of meaning. On this highest level he becomes (like the anima) a mediator of the religious experience whereby life acquires new meaning. He gives the woman spiritual firmness, an invisible inner support that compensates for her outer softness. The animus in his most developed form sometimes connects the woman’s mind with the spiritual evolution of her age, and can thereby make her even more receptive than a man to new creative ideas. It is for this reason that in earlier times women were used by many nations as diviners and seers. The creative boldness of their positive animus at times expresses thoughts and ideas that stimulate men to new enterprises.

Fairy tales from the female individuation perspective are all about wedding the animus or reconciling with the monster, which is deeply identified with the heroine’s innermost self. This part of the journey is necessary to heal that inner psychic split, to become whole. Reconciling her animus in a positive way allows the heroine to access new ideas and concepts and achieve her creative potential. Rey must acknowledge and integrate her positive animus to “become what you were meant to be” (more on the positive vs negative animus below).

(Edit: See also this wonderful meta by @skysilencer elaborating on the anima and animus as parts of the psyche.)

rey’s mirror cave journey and kylo ren as her animus

Following the beats of the heroine’s journey and Jungian concepts, Rian has given us what many of us have predicted all along: Rey joining with Kylo Ren as her animus on her journey of self-discovery.

Rey descends through a black hole that pulls her into the ocean depths beneath the island. When she emerges at the mouth of the mirror cave, her hair is undone. This is the first step of her growth from girlhood to womanhood and the liberation of that inner goddess.

Rey kept her hair tightly coiled in those signature three buns all her life on Jakku because she clung to the infantile hope that her parents would return and recognize her. We now know that this hope was a fiction she fabricated to give herself a reason to live. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Rey imposed her own rosy narrative on a harsh reality in order to survive. “Child . . . you already know the truth.” Indeed, as Maz correctly intuited, Rey already knew the truth: her parents were nobody and they were never going to come back for her.

Rey’s loosened hair represents letting go of that past and uncoiling that fictional narrative that was holding her back.

The new undone look also signifies a sexual awakening.

And who should be there, listening patiently, as a companion to Rey’s awakening? Rey narrates her mirror cave journey to none other than Kylo Ren, who is with her on that journey as her animus.

Recall, the animus first appears as “mere physical power” but in a higher form gives the woman “an invisible inner support” as mediator of a meaningful spiritual experience. At first, Kylo appeared to Rey as a creature in a mask, a manifestation of mere physical power. Through their Force bond, Kylo certainly manifests as a “muscle man” particularly when he refuses to throw on something to cover those gleaming pecs. Later, he becomes a source of spiritual support when he assures Rey “you’re not alone” after she confides to him she had never felt so alone as in that cave where she sought answers.

Also, recall, the animus has to do with ideas and concepts. Kylo represents the idea of “let the past die” on Rey’s path to self-actualization. Rey needs to hear this in order to move on from her disappointment at being so casually tossed aside by her parents. While Rey clings to the past (her parents, Luke the legend who she says the galaxy needs, the myth of the Jedi and the Jedi “page-turners” she takes on the Falcon), Kylo wants to throw it all away. Kylo wants to tear down the curtains, just as those red velvet curtains in Snoke’s throne room burned away to reveal the black void of space around them. Kylo wants to live in that black void of cold reality where Luke and the Jedi are demythologized and deconstructed, where he can see clearly Rey’s parents for who they were as opposed to the childish way Rey put a curtain over the truth with her own make-believe tale (“they’ll be back … one day”). Rey needs a cold splash of that demythologization to grow up.

As Rian Johnson tells us in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, there’s “a sin in venerating the past so much that you’re enslaved to it.” Yet the idea is not so simple, as Rian also acknowledges the need to reconnect with the past (and implicitly the need to re-construct myths by which to live):

If you think you are throwing away the past, you are fooling yourself. The only way to go forward is to embrace the past, figure out what is good and what is not good about it. But it’s never going to not be a part of who we all are.

We become “enslaved” if we go too far in either direction, whether venerating the past too much or wanting so badly to desecrate and “kill” the past. The extreme and destructive way in which Kylo seeks to “kill it” represents the negative animus. That side is, paradoxically, too emotionally tied to the past (and fixated on perceived past wrongs), unwilling to simply let go of the anger and resentment. To integrate her positive animus, Rey needs to acknowledge and learn from the past by looking at it in an objective way, which requires distancing herself instead of letting the past rule her emotions. Both Rey and Kylo need to embrace the past and the fact that it is part of who they are, in order to move forward.

Let’s distinguish the positive animus from the negative animus, which can be identified with the heroine’s shadow. The negative animus often appears as a sort of “death-demon” or murderer (“murderous snake” for instance) and “personifies all those semiconscious, cold, destructive reflections that invade a woman in the small hours” according to von Franz. Bluebeard would be an example of the negative animus: a seducer who is ultimately destructive and must be overcome. The negative animus can be that inner critic reinforcing feelings of worthlessness.

In what ways is Kylo a negative or positive animus?

Negative animus: Kylo who embraces the monster role (“Yes, I am”). Kylo who says “you have no place in this story . . . you’re nothing” and resents the past. Kylo who is filled with so much self-loathing he stabs in the heart the man whose heart he has too much of (“You have too much of your father's heart in you, young Solo”) and wants to blast out of the sky the “piece of junk” in which he was conceived. Kylo who rages against the galaxy, who wants to impose a new order on the galaxy.

Positive animus: Kylo who says, “But not to me. Join me. Please.” Kylo who responds to “Ben” and who Rey sees turning in the future (“If I go to him, Ben Solo will turn”). Kylo who desperately needs to make peace with the past. Kylo who tells Rey, “You’re not alone.” Kylo who fought side by side with Rey, perfectly in sync. Kylo who we are rooting for to ultimately make peace with the galaxy.

Kylo has the potential to be Rey’s positive animus, but at the end of the film she cannot reconcile with him yet because he has not yet transformed from the murderous negative animus to Rey’s positive animus.

rey’s search for identity

“Who are you? … What’s special about you?”

Here, I digress a bit to discuss why Rey “nobody” is the perfect reveal and try to address some of the criticisms about the jarring sequence in the cave.

First, the way this sequence is filmed and narrated is superbly meta. Just as Rey is pulled out of her “everyday life” into another realm of consciousness, so are we as the audience pulled out of the immersive experience of the breakneck-paced dramatic narrative into a more self-reflective space. Some have criticized this moment as violating that rule of immersion, breaking the fourth wall and taking us out of the film. Reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s popular Infinity Mirrors exhibit, Rey’s mirror cave scenes evoke the experience of being in a modern art installation. You are part of those infinite possibilities. It is you, the audience, who create those infinite selves. This is entirely intentional and I believe indicative of Rian Johnson’s brand of auteurism: entirely self-aware and humbly transparent about his intentions. We are meant to reflect on our own assumptions about Rey. We are meant to question, does it really matter who her parents are? Why do we think it matters? For the fans who wanted her to be blood-related to a legacy Star Wars character: what does that say about you and your view of a character’s worth? your view of what builds character?

In The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rian explains that he wanted to explore, “What do you keep from the past and what do you not? What is the value of the myths you grew up with? What is the value of throwing those away and doing something new and fresh?” In a very meta way, his treatment of Rey’s struggle with her past in The Last Jedi also led the fandom to question: What is the value of the mystery box?

So much criticism has been leveled about the “empty mystery box” and how anti-climactic it is to show us Rey’s own reflection at the end of the corridor of infinite selves after teasing us with those murky shadows behind the glass, as if mocking fans for their intense speculative interest in her parentage, which was arguably one of JJ’s deliberately constructed mystery boxes.

Did Rian totally deconstruct and wreck that box? Well, not exactly, because the point of the mystery box was never to yield a white rabbit like a simple magic track. From JJ’s TED talk:

The thing is that it represents infinite possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential. And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential. And I realize that mystery is the catalyst for imagination. Now, it's not the most ground-breaking idea, but when I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge.

The mirror cave itself is a representation of the mystery box and Rey’s infinite potential. Rian, in a sense, preserves that mystery, that infinite possibility.

JJ goes on in his TED talk:

And then, finally, there's … the idea of the mystery box. Meaning, what you think you're getting, then what you're really getting. And it's true in so many movies and stories. Look at "E.T.," for example — “E.T." is this unbelievable movie about what? It's about an alien who meets a kid, right? Well, it's not. "E.T." is about divorce. "E.T." is about a heartbroken, divorce-crippled family, and ultimately, this kid who can't find his way … When you look at a movie like "Jaws," the scene that you expect … she's being eaten; there's a shark …The thing about "Jaws" is, it's really about a guy who is sort of dealing with his place in the world — with his masculinity, with his family, how he's going to, you know, make it work in this new town.

So many thought Rey was Luke 2.0 and that this story was about her going from nobody to somebody by virtue of discovering she belongs to an elite bloodline. So many thought The Last Jedi would be about passing the torch to the next Jedi. Well, it’s not really about the next Skywalker or the next Jedi. This story is about a girl finding her place in the world, who can’t find her way because she kept telling herself a lie about her past that trapped herself in her own mystery box, a box of her own making that allowed her to live with hope and at the same time limited her growth and kept her all alone. She told herself “they’ll be back … one day” when she knew her parents were never coming back. This story is about a girl who feels so alone. She meets a boy who feels this too: “You’re so lonely.” When Rey and Kylo are Force bonding together, their scenes are marked by silence, stripped bare of the noise and the sturm und drang of an epic-scale John Williams score, stripped down to the intimate-scale essence of their story: “You’re not alone.” “Neither are you.”

What Rian gives us is what we were really going to get all along: the revelation that the real substance is not in the box’s contents (the answer to the mystery of Rey’s parentage) but in that negative space around the mystery box, which is about two kids dealing with their loneliness.

So what do we make of Rey gazing at her own reflection, disappointed and alone?

Some have criticized the mirror cave sequence as an indulgent interlude emblematic of the vanity endemic to today’s narcissistic navel-gazing “me” generation—both the vanity of the auteur as well as the vanity of the film’s populist self-empowerment message. The mirror cave with its echo chamber and mirrors do bring to mind Echo and Narcissus. When Rey snaps her fingers, she hears nothing but her own sound, infinitely echoed. When Rey looks into the mirrors, she sees nothing but herself, infinitely reflected. (Edit: To be clear, I’m not agreeing with the “me” generation assessment. Also, it’s true that there are covert narcissists who feel vulnerable and neglected and that a deep-seated sense of insecurity or lack of self-esteem is at the root of narcissism. Rey and Kylo both exhibit some of this insecurity.)

Yet Rey is the opposite of a Narcissus. She doesn’t worship her own image or hold a grandiose view of herself (or lack empathy for others for that matter). Rather, she must learn to love herself instead of seeking love and validation from stand-in parental figures. As Kylo says, “Your parents threw you away like garbage. But you can’t stop needing them. It’s your greatest weakness. Looking for them everywhere, in Han Solo, now in Skywalker.” Here, unlike Narcissus who needed to detach himself from excessive love for his own image, Rey must come to embrace herself as worthy and self-sufficient. (Edit: Also, here, Rey is horrified rather than delighted to see her own reflections. See also Reyflections of Existential Horror from @and-then-bam-cassiopeia.)

As Rian tells us, her greatest fear is that she has nobody but herself to rely on. She must face that fear head on and realize she is enough, that all she needs is right in front of her nose (as Yoda might say).

She also comes to realize: “You’re not alone.”

wedding the animus: “when we touched hands”

“I thought I’d find answers here. I was wrong.” Yet the mirror cave does show Rey something vital to her search for identity: her own duality. At the end of that seemingly infinite hall of mirrors, Rey sees two shadowy figures walking forward behind the glass who then merge into one to form her own reflection. The shadows evoke a masculine figure and a feminine figure.

The “Kylo Kira Force Mash” concept art and its placement together with the mirror cave concept art on the same page in The Art of Star Wars: The Last Jedi suggest to me that the two shadows merging into one and emerging as Rey’s reflection is supposed to represent both (1) the duality of masculine and feminine within each of us, in particular Kylo and Rey wedding into one as Rey assimilates Kylo as her animus, and (2) the duality of light and dark within each of us.

Recall, the idea of wedding the animus is that we need to reconcile and integrate both sides (both masculine and feminine, both light and dark) to become whole.

The mirror cave scenes are followed by a “wedding the animus” scene. After Rey narrates her mirror cave journey to Kylo, sitting with him in the hut through their Force bond, she proceeds to engage in perhaps the most intimate act we have ever seen in Star Wars (or Disney for that matter). She extends her hand, and the camera zooms obscenely close to Rey and Kylo’s bare fingers making contact.

In this moment, as she gasps, she sees a future with Ben. She sees him turning against Snoke. (Yes, he does turn against Snoke, but her vision is incomplete as he doesn’t turn against the First Order yet.) Likewise, he sees a future with her: “When the moment comes, you’ll be the one to turn. You’ll stand with me.” (I do think that in Episode IX we will see Rey standing with Kylo and turning to help him in some way, but Kylo’s vision is also incomplete in that she rejects his plea to join him in the throne room and does not turn against the Resistance.)

Yes, this moment is more intimate than a simple kiss or other physical act of intimacy, because Rey and Kylo are envisioning future lives together, standing side by side. Wedded to each other by the Force. The Force theme begins to play at this moment, as if underscoring the divine inevitability of this union.

Why does Rey fail to see clearly that Kylo would not yet turn in the throne room? “Ben, when we touched hands, I saw your future. Just the shape of it, but solid and clear.” Here I’m reminded of those shadowy figures again, and these verses from Corinthians 13:11 and 13:12 much referenced in literature and film:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Rey is somewhat naive, like a child. In the mirror cave when she touches the glassy surface and in the hut when she touches Kylo’s hand, she sees through a glass, darkly. Rey’s knowledge of herself and her past is imperfect. Rey’s knowledge of Ben and the future is imperfect. Her vision is obscured by her naiveté and hope, by her optimistic insistence on clinging to rose-colored glasses and red curtains.

Chapter 13 in Corinthians is about love (sometimes translated to charity). What is a theme throughout Star Wars? Compassion. As Joseph Campbell points out, this means to suffer together, to feel someone else’s suffering as our own and wish to relieve that suffering.

Kylo began to feel compassion for Rey in the interrogation room when he discovered her loneliness. “You’re not alone.” Her suffering at Snoke’s hands likely contributed to his resolve to conceal his true thoughts from his master and slay Snoke at the right moment. When Rey is cut on the shoulder by a Praetorian Guard, Kylo glances towards her anxiously, further evidencing his compassion for her. However, he lacks compassion for her concern with her friends and the plight of the Resistance. He is still thinking in terms of “you’ll stand with me” instead of “we will stand together” working towards a shared goal.

Rey begins to feel compassion for Ben Solo through their Force bond, when she sees that fateful temple-burning night from Kylo’s point of view and learns that Luke lied about how he behaved. She also feels Ben’s loneliness. “Neither are you.” She extends her hand out of compassion. However, she didn’t ship herself to the Supremacy for Ben Solo, she went there to save her friends, and he understands that when she turns to the window port and demands, “Order them to stop firing!” Recall Rey’s reasons to Luke before flying off on the Falcon:

If he were turned from the dark side, that could shift the tide. This could be how we win.

Rey too is thinking about her own agenda, as opposed to what Kylo wants to accomplish: “We can rule together and bring a new order to the galaxy.” Kylo’s proposal to Rey, which involved a future together, is met with what he might have perceived to be an attempt on his life, though Rey’s grab for the lightsaber might simply have been her way of sending the message: you are not worthy of this yet. Neither of them are truly able to see from each other’s point of view; each has more to grow to reach that common ground and to truly love and suffer together.

At the end of the film, Kylo remains a negative animus who has not yet fully processed and embraced the past as part of who he is, full of murderous rage (“blow that piece of junk out of the sky!” and “more! more!”). His rage masks his true misery and self-loathing, which is pitifully obvious from the way he looks at Rey through their Force bond at the very end of the film, then slowly closes his fingers around the projected gold dice as he realizes despite his ascension to Supreme Leader he truly holds on to nothing. He's not angry and resentful in that moment. He's heartbroken and sad.

But … Ben Solo will turn. The structure of the heroine’s journey mandates that Rey will somehow reconcile with her positive animus.

#tlj spoilers #mirror cave #the art of star wars: the last jedi #my scans #tlj meta #carl jung #marie-louise von franz #heroine's journey #heroine's descent #rey x kylo ren #kylo ren as animus #negative animus #positive animus #wedding the animus #tlj art book #my meta

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elizabethrobertajones · 8 years ago

Text

“What, are you gonna look up more anime, or are you strictly into Dick now?”

A lengthy exploration of Dean Winchester as a consistently queer character, thank to themes he embodies with his core characterisation of occupying both sides of binary traits.

(aka the reason why I lazily shove random things into my “Dean vs cake” tag with no explanation, written out while on a 8hr train journey)

The writing of Dean is of a character split between endless examples of duality, moments of characterisation which have stark opposites (either generally accepted or made up into a false dichotomy by the show) where he appears to embody elements of both at all times. Generally, the less-expected or pleasant part is something he resists admitting liking or labelling himself as.

He may be described as a killer while being shown to be the most compassionate character by his actions in the same episode; his projection of himself as a dumb grunt has been so successful that we have to scrape up lists of dozens of examples to prove his intelligence in arguments, despite one of the most-used examples being in only the fourth episode but is cited all the time to prove he’s not the stupid brother in contrast to Sam’s college-educated introduction leaving a lasting impression there; a lesser example of Dean wobbling between sides of a duality includes his strict favouritism of pie being shown in stark contrast to cake as if he must surely hate it, having declared himself for pie; and of course his frequently shown interest in women is contrasted with extremely consistent queer subtext implying that Dean is attracted to men as well.

This last duality seems to be the most persistently hard to reconcile (meanwhile Dean was happily eating croissookies by the middle of season 10 after getting over his problem with cake). Despite the common interpretation of Dean as a bisexual character with numerous textual moments to back up the reading, moments of him expressing his interest in women are sometimes seen as the writing trying to deny the queer side of his character outright, even by some of the same people making this interpretation as we struggle with text and intent over subtext and implication and how deliberate the suggestion is. While to others the existence of his attraction to women is more than enough to prove definitively that Dean is a straight character and any attempt to read queer subtext into his story is inaccurate, despite an entire catalogue of examples and analysis by those who make the reading across the entire length of the show to date. A regular argument that Dean can’t be bi is for the person denying it to attach dozens of gifs of Dean blatantly expressing/exercising his interest in women as if this definitively proves it, despite only being one side of the both ways he’s suggested to swing.

A similar state of disbelief exists for real life bisexual people or those with similar orientations, with a mentality that they should either pick a side or are really one thing or the other, depending on their most obviously expressed orientation/gender, usually based on their current partner or obvious behavioural cues (especially ones society favours or would find easiest to read). Reading a fictional character who can’t talk for himself to answer it, who can only continue to be written and portrayed on screen following various patterns, and going through storylines which may or may not answer anything, of course makes it all the more impossible to reach a definitive reading, as it is entirely subjective and down to the viewer and how they understand what they see on screen. Dean being written with all this duality in his behaviour can lead to extremely contradictory readings, which is also a smaller symptom of the show’s broad appeal playing successfully to multiple audiences.

Of course people can like a varied selection of music or dessert treats in real life and it is generally considered a mark of a balanced and well-rounded individual to cultivate varied tastes in things. No one trying a croissookie for the first time should be a stunning moment of character development. In storytelling, associations and traits are made easily known by small details with larger social or tropey coding in order to quickly get to know them, and subconsciously access a wealth of implications about how else they might act/feel or their backstory. Characters are defined by often seemingly meaningless distinctions which make it difficult to imagine something perceived as an opposite trait to it, as something the character could also occupy. The trait is used as a shorthand to convey a great deal about the character, from which assumptions can be made about the rest of their personality, and it allows for false binaries where it makes understanding a character confusing when they’re shown enjoying something they previously seemed to hate; with a rigid definition to help us understand them to start with, the character acting in a contrary way becomes suspicious, breaks immersion, or requires analysis to work out why they’d change their behaviour, as we are aware they are a fictional construct and need to be explained and interpreted, and that someone is creating it all deliberately to some end for our entertainment.

Dean is a controversial character to define in part due to his projected façades he creates either for the job or for personal and emotional security, including façades he keeps for Sam’s benefit and therefore will be persistently shown on screen due to their interaction in every single episode. Many of the episodes about their childhood expose these vulnerabilities by showing the characters before their modern day dynamic was fully established (3x08 especially as it had so much of them interacting as kids), or by exposing that there is a great deal Sam doesn’t know about the ways in which Dean has protected him from harsh truths about their upbringing and father (9x07 springs to mind there and “the story became the story” to explain how Sam ended up never knowing certain things about Dean’s childhood or the way John was as a parent to him). 10x12 and 12x11 explored Dean returning to a childlike or innocent state, further revealing the ways in which he creates – or rather, curates – his seemingly generic surface personality for Sam’s benefit.

By changing the rules of how Dean is written they can expose him having different tastes or behaving in entirely different ways which betray the gruff and macho exterior for what it is - a part of Dean but by far not the only part. 10x12 showed Dean enjoying cake and Taylor Swift while briefly in a teenage body - the joke being that his mind remained entirely intact to his current age. At the end of the episode Dean enjoys Taylor Swift on the radio and then starts eating croissookies or wanting cake in later episodes. 12x11 again makes Dean vulnerable in front of Sam and almost the first thing he does as a sign he’s no longer remembering to project for Sam, is admit to liking Dory and therefore watching Disney movies, betraying yet another part of his tough exterior which something like catching a Pixar movie on the down low would be entirely opposite to the personality he wants to project.

(As an aside I’ve seen wank recently that the performing Dean meta is because people want to get rid of Dean’s surface layer entirely and entirely remove this part of his personality, which is a misunderstanding that of course it’s a part of Dean’s personality but he would be happier and more well-balanced if he would own to the other parts. Moments like admitting he likes chick flicks are actual genuine huge progress to unravelling this persona and have not drastically changed who Dean is - only allowed Sam to go from a suspicious outsider to someone on the inside where he and Dean now share the knowledge Dean likes chick flicks openly and without aggression or deflection, meaning they can be happier and more comfortable. When they actually watch a chick flick together with Jody in 12x06 Dean can’t exactly complain about doing it and Sam is utterly comfortable teasing Dean to Jody because it’s no longer hostile territory... Obviously that’s an ideal way to resolve all their other issues without making some weird hypothesis that now Dean has to do nothing but watch chick flicks and cry about them in his down time since this admission... He can just be more comfortable embracing both sides of the duality of his interest in movies - the random box of socially acceptable stuff to Dean’s eyes, and the stuff that he’d be embarrassed to admit liking for reasons rooted in the toxic masculinity that informs a lot of his shell.)

Anyway, unpacking a balanced understanding of Dean’s personality is difficult (and finding things people agree on even about what the surface layer means or is for), as many things he says or does will be taken as fact, and therefore meant to convey the entire understanding we should have about Dean, meaning every action or statement contrary to the initial interpretation becomes bad data that is easily discarded, or one off moments that lend no greater understanding to his character. This is not helped by the multitude of writers who have contributed to his creation, throwing in disruptions or unexpected approaches to his portrayal which to some may seem too far to credit even for such a multifaceted character (and of course what it is and who it bothers among the various factions caused by these readings change depending on the moment, as different concerns about his characterisation arise... But seriously can we all agree that Dean apparently having never even heard of It’s a Wonderful Life even through pop culture soak (which is 90% of his personality) in 9x03 is clearly a step too far).

Differentiating what seems like a poorly considered character beat from intentionally contradictory portrayals of his behaviour, that can be reasoned out or understood for what they were attempting to convey more in tune with the wider picture, does not always happen smoothly. This leads to interpretations of Dean that can be extremely hostile to each other and seem to discuss starkly different characters as certain readings take their place in the wider story as they interpret it and the intentionally ambiguous writing of the show fosters many layers and different interpretations throughout. The reading of Dean as a queer character or not is only the most contentious of these entirely different narratives people find in the story.

Examining the different presentations of Dean and his sexuality can be an enormous task with twelve seasons of discussion and imagery, metaphor and both textual and subtextual displays of interest Dean expresses that would need to be analysed (not always to the obvious gender when assuming Dean is textually portrayed as heterosexual and subtextually bisexual – for example in 8x13 Dean has his humorous misunderstanding with Aaron, who he calls his “gay thing” rather fondly to Sam, and takes absolutely no pains to establish to anyone that he wouldn’t have been interested after being caught out by and unable to lie about his interest in a proposition that Aaron had expected to only scare him off).

Setting aside the smaller episode to episode instances which lend to a bigger picture but are hard to discuss to get the sense of a larger narrative (as there’s too many, and each one would need to be described), I’m just going to go for a few big obvious examples which can be used to describe Dean in relation to this framed binary of interest one way or the other by briefly examining some of the more prominent relationships Dean has that I think represent both sides of his interest in men and women.

Buried in the subtext of the show since season 9 or 10, Dean ended up having a physical relationship during a brief “summer of love” with Crowley, since then and to date portrayed clearly as a relationship and them as exes, with varying amounts of fondness, embarrassment and knowing innuendo about their activities and history. It’s about as close to textual as any relationship Dean’s had with a male character and there’s now 3 seasons of content between 9x11 and 12x15 relating to it.

There is also Dean’s most popularly shipped and most firmly subtextually embedded but constant relationship with Cas - waffling about angels aside, a male bodied and identifying character. The evidence for the queer subtext of their relationship dates back to Cas’s arrival in the fourth season. Narratively, as a clear example, being played against Ruby, and the way that relationship with Sam was used in the story. Though Anna is introduced to have Dean’s relationship to the divine directly paralleled to Sam’s relationship to the demonic, with a 2 episode romance arc to allow a parallel of both brothers hooking up with their respective sides, Cas and Ruby play as narrative foils to their Winchester and the other’s relationship all season, and to greater emotional and plot effect than Anna, whose personal relationship to Dean is non-existent after she becomes an angel again. Dean and Cas continue to have romantic subtext for the entire time Cas is on the show (and even while he was supposedly written off and dead).

Dean’s longest lasting romantic relationship on the show (with most flings being the “girl of the week” in Dean’s words) was with Lisa, between seasons three (where she was used to demonstrate the normal life he’d never get but suddenly really regretted never having and was acutely aware of missing) and six (where after the apocalypse they end up together as a year break from hunting for Dean), ending in non-fatal tragedy after a mutually acknowledged break up earlier in the season, after which she plays no further part in the story.

His sexual and romantic history with Lisa does not invalidate his romantic connection to Cas, nor his sexual history with Crowley (though of course it has more textual grounding even than his fling with Crowley hardly being a secret or subtle or “Destiel” having been name-dropped in the show). Likewise, the relationships with Cas and Crowley don’t invalidate the time he spent with Lisa as a meaningful and fully desired part of his life. (And of course Dean continued sleeping with women after and during his elopement with Crowley...) All of these elements exist within the story and never ask you to choose between them. Even the Crowley and Castiel parts complement each other, taking the form of Dean in a love triangle of sorts with the demon and angel on his shoulders, again another binary that Dean is in the middle of, between angel and demon, Heaven and Hell, the dynamic of which reliably plays out since season nine when Crowley’s seduction and muscling into their previously established romantic subtext began.

Though these are the eye-catching examples of relationships as a demonstration of Dean’s ability to share his affection, of course looking deeper reveals that Dean has been a queer coded character since the start, and no examples of long relationship arcs would be necessary to argue that Dean’s bisexuality exists in the subtext, even just in the way the show discusses and frames his character (and some people do identify with him in general as a bisexual character, without caring about ships but rather through his experiences and the way he’s written). Dean just has a relatable state of existence that specifically seems to describe him as bisexual, with general queer coding subtext.

So as a starting point (and I’m not going to go season by season because one: we’ve been there done that and B: I’m only stuck on trains for 10 hours, I can’t elaborate on the bi Dean subtext in every season in detail), the first season plays Dean thematically against Sam’s psychic abilities (that arc more traditionally played as a queer metaphor with lines such as “don’t ask, don’t tell” uttered about Sam’s powers – from Dean, of course). Dean meanwhile is presented as feeling like a freak and outsider himself with a sense of estrangement and otherness from society which plays as an easy metaphor for a queer character (1x06 overtly having his feelings described this way; 1x08 also has him expressing discomfort about suburbia and normal life, for example). This backdrop of the sort of framing of his character is assisted with moments of flirtation with male characters (in very specific contexts which leave room to argue it’s one thing or another and would make up the surface reading, such as Dean feeling threatened and flirting to deflect - the two off the top of my head are the saucy comments to police in 1x01 and 1x12, and snark-complimenting the random (later revealed to be evil) villager in 1x11); presenting Dean’s general insecurity with gender and sexuality, a running theme that gets increasingly explored as time goes by but the roots of which are especially visible with hindsight; and ambiguously presented moments with extremely suggestive implications (for example Dean’s missing hour in the bathroom in 1x15 immediately after what seems to be a flirtatious wink past Sam to some of the people playing pool behind him - mostly men, of course). Dean’s immersion in the world of hunting, itself in general a culture presented with a metaphorical suggestion relating it to queer culture despite its overt hypermasculine and assumed conservative social structure (hand in hand with monsters sharing this metaphor), is another sense of coding Dean as belonging to a culture within but separate from the normative culture, and the fact he embraces it in a way Sam doesn’t in season 1.

Played in contrast to Sam, it’s an interesting picture. Sam is given a starting point with an attempt at building a “normal” life which of course includes a girlfriend he intends to marry and one day hopefully have a family with. Though this is all ripped away from him in the first episode, Sam still wishes for a normal life, and at several points consistently throughout the show expresses this interest and the idea that he still would dream for it as his ideal life; that he only continues hunting because it’s the family business and his brother is still in it, for example, as his line in season 10/11 when bringing it up, and in season 12 Mary wins him over to the BMoL’s world without monsters pitch with a reminder of what a normal life might be for him now.

Dean meanwhile expresses that the normal life is not for him many times, and when he attempts to have it with Lisa, as the one example of him living as a civilian since he was four years old, it’s a compromise for his life taking him away from hunting and expressed as such, while Sam generally cuts himself entirely off from their world and can live as and imagine himself being a civilian, having a history of running away as a child, a break for freedom at college, and another attempt as an adult when he ran out of family to continue the family business with between season 7 & 8.

Unlike Sam’s attempts to leave the life behind, Dean is shown still using the symbols of that culture, warding the house, laying down salt, and keeping a gun and holy water under his bed, that last image of which the montage at the start of season six ends with, showing vividly how his bed and normal life still has the world of hunting and monsters under it. This life quickly draws him back in with the return of Sam from the dead and back into his life, and he tries to exist in a half-in half-out state until various disasters show the problem with their set up, as Dean’s connection to this other culture upsets the balance of the home life he had with Lisa. This also is shown as a tragedy and a negative reflection on Sam and Dean’s, that they couldn’t make the compromise work.

Similarly one of the darkest moments in the brothers’ relationship is when they pick each other over Sam’s once hopeful way out and chance at a normal life on the other side of all their eight seasons of accumulated trauma, Amelia (and Riot the dog), and Dean’s (of course ambiguously coded) relationship with Benny, and it seems awful that they’ve given up so much and chosen such an extreme, clearly over their own happiness and desires, because of their obligation towards each other and their job. In the example of 8x10, Sam gives up total normality while Dean gives up an emotional connection within their world.

On the surface the fact both Sam and Dean are disrupted out of normal life, especially by each other’s presence, and would continue hunting because of the other, seems an identical conflict of interests between them and a normal life. But their actual attitudes towards it are again presented as opposite. Dean expresses many times that he sees no end to hunting for him, and that he would happily die doing it; later attempts to suggest possible endgames include possibilities of considerably more settled lifestyles still within the hunting culture, again for Dean a hybrid life where he may occupy two ends of a spectrum simultaneously, and that he might be allowed to emotionally settle while still being able to identify as a hunter and to be a part of their world.

Sam might also wonder about settling down with someone in the life as a possibility he never seemed to consider until 11x04, but it comes with precisely none of this baggage, connected instead to different arcs in Sam’s development. Sam’s interest in the normal life comes with assumed and unchallenged heteronormativity, and the desire to have an eventual wife is implicit (while for Dean since season 10 all his discussion of an endgame has repeatedly used gender neutral phrasing that he may settle down with someone). Sam is also shown with few long-term love interests, the only notable positive one since Jess being Amelia (Ruby was never going to be a settling down white picket fence thing, but again, different story being told over there where Sam has no queer subtext but other struggles). Again in (or, before) season 8 he settled down with the full intention to leave the hunting world behind, including letting go of the burden of following leads from the newspapers that would have taken him onto a case, and ditching their phones instead of at least putting himself on standby in case Kevin or someone else got in contact needing their help. Mary’s return in season 12 contrasts this all the more by showing even after she was married and settled and had already had Dean, the prospect of a hunt could still tempt her out of the house. In many ways Mary’s outlook on life and hunting has been paralleled more closely to Dean’s and “a world without monsters” is antithetical to their true desires; that they will always be somewhat between worlds, while it is genuinely tempting to Sam to leave it all behind and get married.

Very little is made in the text of Sam’s interest in women in the sense of his interest being, well, interesting. He never makes sexual comments, rarely checks women out, and is rarely depicted wishing for casual sex, something he also extremely rarely engages in except for times when he’s been soulless or drinking demon blood, giving him clear and dramatic changes in his psyche. An incidental moment where he and Dean sign a virginity pledge in 9x08 leads to an accidental unbroken “virginity” until 11x04 for Sam (and he says he’s going to go research and sounds like he means it when he leaves and stumbles into his hook up, paralleled to Dean intentionally looking for a hook up but seeming to strike out after a bad night... or - well, that moment is itself ambiguous and had a ton of discussion of exactly what “mistakes” Dean made after blowing all out of proportion an attempt to hook up with a female hunter he already knew was never going to happen when he brought her up). Of course in 9x08 Dean breaks the same vow within the episode, as well as it being obvious to Sam he would, and the way it happens playing into a long thread of pointing out Dean’s interest in women and his varied tastes in porn (Chuck had never seen so much on one computer...). Dean’s sexuality has a much greater focus in general, whether it’s his interest in women or the subtextual coding of him as bisexual. Whether it’s subtextual or Dean openly discussing sex and being shown seeking it out, a fairly consistent discussion continues within the text about his sexuality. Showing his overt interest in women leads to a more general picture of all of Dean’s interests and contributes to an ongoing depiction and thematic discussion of Dean’s interests and desires.

And so to the chosen quote for the title – Sam’s fascinating challenge to Dean about his computer usage in 7x12, combining Dean’s stated interest in watching anime porn from 7x01, implied to be about female characters (based on the sound effects coming from his laptop in the only incident where he’s actually shown watching it and - ew) and the endless Dick jokes of season seven (“Who would choose to be called Dick?” Edgar wonders about him, hanging a lampshade on the season’s desire to just make as many Dick jokes as they could). Sam once again suggests there’s a binary – in this case because you can’t really do both at the same time for reasonable multi-tasking issues. Of course metaphorically it seems to be a jab that Dean has transitioned his interest in the heterosexually coded anime porn to a strict homosexual interest in “Dick” – an innocuous jibe from Sam who has lived in close quarters with Dean for long enough to be fairly certain of his interest in women.

Still, it illustrates the binary that this sort of thought operates in: that even when Dean is shown and known to have a multifaceted range of interests, in this case literally coded as a metaphor for his sexuality rather than coding suggestive of it as well (like the cake/pie thing), it’s an either/or despite that we know he could reasonably want the laptop to do either (though not in this context as he genuinely did want to help with the monster of the week case which was an entirely other thing outside of the binary and not relevant - you know, until 10 minutes later Dean’s fangirling over Eliot Ness and rotating to check out a soldier in the street). The end of 7x12 shows Dean is still “into Dick”, continuing his research for the obsessive revenge mission as the last beat of the episode; Sam displays that he’s perfectly aware of how multifaceted Dean is years later in the season 12 episode where he gets to tease Dean for being “an animated Japanese erotica chick” - never mind that in that case it was a binary between “chick flick chick” and that, and riffing off the pilot episode’s “No chick flick moments” (establishing the first binary of stated text and implied subtext about Dean), at the end of season 11 Sam finally managed to get Dean to admit that he loved chick flicks, so again he knows full well that he’s ascribing a false binary to Dean when he operates in both.

(Robbie’s season 7 seemed to be full of this because 7x20 also has a totally fake binary for the sake of subtext - Charlie can’t flirt with the security guard because she’s only into women, not even in an emergency... Dean, of course, is happy to help out... Immediately not playing into the arbitrary rule established about functional flirting on the job vs sexuality - or playing right into it and revealing another side of himself to help Charlie, just as Sam reveals how deep his Harry Potter nerdiness runs.)

So, thematically, where does this all go and why is it important?

In season 10 when Dean is a demon and off “howling at the moon” with Crowley, during their subtextual elopement and honestly I would say textual sexual tryst (triplets comment in 10x01, implication Crowley knows how much Dean can stick up his butt in 11x23, “maybe I’ve rubbed off all over you” in 12x15...), their official break up is marked with Crowley yelling at Dean to “Pick a bloody side”, after Dean spends the episode overtly struggling between being a demon and a human. Of course this phrasing mirrors sentiments real life bisexual people can have to deal with from intolerant people. In the end of that particular episode Dean accepts he’s a demon, but on his own terms, not being bound to Crowley’s desires for him, after the King of Hell runs out of interest to Dean as a source of free drinks and no consequences fun as he starts making demands of Dean to work for him. Sam and Cas pick a side for him shortly after to cure him of being a demon, and then again at the end of the season to cure him of the Mark of Cain, the root cause of his transformation, after Dean had spent most of the season adapting to living as a hybrid human and Knight of Hell.

This arc resolves at the end of the next season metaphorically, when Dean restores harmony to the universe by reconciling light and darkness in Chuck and Amara, picking neither side in a binary which has been causing conflict by one overpowering the other since the dawn of time and currently threatening the existence of the universe when Dark attempts to destroy Light. Dean is described by Chuck as “the firewall between light and darkness” in 11x21, emphasising he has a place of cosmic importance in occupying a middle ground between two binary choices. He is both a “virile manifestation of the divine” (so says a server in a hippy cafe in 7x07, but there’s more to his words than he knows), and a worthy bearer of what turned out to be a mark of primordial darkness that made him a conduit of Amara’s power. Dean doesn’t need to pick a side, and occupying ground from both sides makes him stronger. Not for nothing, Chuck also is revealed to be bisexual during his return arc, clearly stating he had had both girlfriends and boyfriends while hanging out incognito on Earth.

By the end of season 11 then, it is clear through these textual statements and actions that Dean is a character linked to this pattern of a strong connection or implication of one thing and also to something that is presented as an opposite or opposing force to it in the narrative, and that he represents a middle ground embodying both. He is the croissookie.

Though the show leaves a lot to be desired in textual representation when it comes to Dean’s bisexuality, the subtextual thread of the story is filled with imagery and suggestiveness directly relating to this depiction, and this exploration is only a small part of the way Dean is surrounded by the queer subtext of the show. This particular imagery relating to Dean is a regular, important and eventually universe-saving part of his characterisation, and discussion of the imagery of him occupying a dual nature can be applied to many of the other ways the show explores and divides his psyche without making it into a discussion of his bisexuality at all - these divided aspects of his personality have been fuelling discussion of his character for years. And as he has a separate and extremely detailed queer reading, applying this facet of his character to his bisexuality specifically creates a fascinating reading of the depiction of this in the text.

Standard disclaimer none of this proves anything but I love looking at Dean this way and it completely informs my reading of him.

#Dean is bi #my stuff #things I wrote on the train while really really bored #long post for ts

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avelera · 8 years ago

Text

“The Lying Detective” Analysis

Sherlock 4.2, putting it below the cut!

---

Oh that was MUCH BETTER!

Oh that episode was such a relief!

So I had to go read some other people’s thoughts on 4.1 before writing my own because frankly... I didn’t really like. In retrospect, that’s because it was “putting to bed” season 3, wrapping it up and since that was overall a rather disjointed season, the episode was disjointed. But I suspected that we were heading towards a reset and boy howdy was I right. Talk about a reset!

Because that, ladies and gentleman, was a fantastic reinvention of Season 1, episode 1 of Sherlock.

In the starring roles:

Mary Watson as Afghanistan

Culverton Smith as The Cab Driver

Moriarty as Eurus Holmes

The Cane in a returning role as itself AND as a symbol of their relationship

I could go on, but the send offs to previous GOOD episodes were very, very interesting.

A few quick observations:

The moment I realized we were truly doing my heart’s desire of a reset episode was when Culverton began to confess, perhaps I was a bit slow on the uptake that it took so long. BUT he really was less of a Trump figure than I feared he would be (thank god, I really am sick in anticipation of how much we’ll have to rehash that particular figure in the coming years as every artist out there reacts) and actually much more of the Study in Pink Cab Driver. I liked the discussion of how a wealthy serial killer would get away with it, in fact I’m surprised they didn’t bring up the suspected royal family member who some believed was Jack the Ripper for the very reason that there was no trace so it must have been covered up. BUT I actually gave a round of applause at the call back to the Holmes Murder House of the 19th c. (and another one JUST NOW to the Eurus Holmes murder house of the psychiatrist, very nice!).

So I expected to hate Culverton’s character as a pithy, 2-dimensional reference to current events and was very pleased that he was really more of a further exploration of the Cab driver’s particular brand of serial killer who needs an audience. The salvation scene of 1.1 was also reinvented in fun and interesting ways that gave me a tear of nostalgia.

On to the next topic, Mary. As I discussed, Mary has struggled to fit into the Sherlock narrative for all that she’s a fantastic woman, she hasn’t quite fit into the dynamic. Mary the Ghost, however, is a fantastic use of the character. For several reasons:

- We don’t have to wonder why she isn’t coming on cases. She can add her wonderful sardonic insights without real world logistics.

- She is quite literally now the war John carries with him. She is his new Afghanistan. John was recovering from a horrible loss in 1.1 when he went to Sherlock, and now we’ve had a very real reset there but in a way that adds depth and shows the passage of time.

- The plot device of Ghost Mary allows John to make deductions. Watson in the ACD books makes explicit that he’s actually not as dumb as his fictional counterpart, mostly he can keep up with Sherlock but he dumbs down his own character in order to explain the deductions to the audience. John is not stupid. John by virtue of being a doctor AND being Sherlock’s colleague for so long, is quite probably the second best detective in the world right now. But he doesn’t allow himself to believe it. The Ghost of Mary making deductions is John making deductions, John freeing himself from his view of himself and how others see him to actually exercise a his very well-trained brain. It’s absolutely delightful to behold him coming into his own in that respect. Interesting too within the context of him seeing himself as a better man in her eyes.

- As I said in my previous analysis, it’s too soon to dissect her “Go to Hell” comment, or John’s infidelity, or anything else because we didn’t have the whole picture yet. Very pleased to be vindicated (albeit on what should have been a very obvious point IT’S A CLIFFHANGER FOR A REASON FOLKS).

- On to other characters, Mrs. Hudson kicked ass in the most delightful way, I’m so glad for the call back to her husband being a drug dealer, I love that it’s her car, loved every second she was in the show. Loved too how she was the one who was first able to crack John’s wall with Sherlock because she knows him.

- I was incredibly relieved that Eurus not Moriarty is revolving into the season’s villain, it’s a great character to pick, and knowing it’s almost certainly not Moriarty means we can start focusing on the real clues.

- For example, people assumed Sherlock’s slip up with missing “daughter” instead of son was because Rosie doesn’t exist. But I’ve always taken issue with that. If you want to show a character is an unreliable narrator in film you use their lens. You make sure that a certain event or person is never seen outside that person’s perception. However, we had multiple scenes where Rosie was discussed when Sherlock wasn’t in the room, between characters we know are real and not in any way impaired. So the daughter thing was a good catch by theorists about Rosie, but really it’s about Eurus, which I love. Also as a side note, the Rosie thing probably came out of viewers who worried over how the baby logistics will work out, but the show has already mostly dismissed them in the same way they dismiss John’s need to make money by being a doctor.

- (As the writer of Bilbo having a child he can’t handle though in No Heir of Durin, I was particularly proud of how similar were my depiction of Bilbo and John over being parents who can’t currently handle raising a child after a romantic partner has died.)

- I’m also proud of deducing that we shouldn’t leap to conclusions about John’s affair as of 4.1, and that it was indeed a trap. What blew my mind was that it was all the same actress between the therapist, “Culveton’s daughter” and the Eurus. Was it the same actress? I’m blown away if so!

On to shippy things!

- Ok so A Study in Pink is really the episode that launched Johnlock, so it’s one more reason I’m delighted because we really, really need these two to reconcile and they finally, finally did. And literally just as I was thinking they were going all heteronormative with the Irene talk, I mean my heart was really sinking, all of a sudden Sherlock didn’t call her and my Johnlock feels were like

- I’m going to have to go back and watch it again but it certainly felt like all that talk of infidelity, “it’s just texting” “we’re only human” etc was really very much about John, Sherlock, and the women in their life vs. their own relationship (and its exact nature). As we recall, Irene said John and Sherlock were a couple.

- John insisting that Sherlock not let love with Irene get away from him as an expression of his anguish over Mary was wonderfully poignant but also interestingly desperate. As if daring Sherlock to go seize a woman’s love now that John is unattached himself. Also interesting that texting was the nature of John’s infidelity, but it was also his infidelity towards Mary while planning their wedding, when he was constantly texting Sherlock (and she was fine with it, btw, as she is very fine with Sherlock and John being together even in John’s head).

- And really, Sherlock saying that there’s nothing between him and Irene, that it’s “Just texting” is really him saying “I’m not having an affair, and I’m not interested in her.” It’s his birthday, so she sends him a cheeky text. He doesn’t text back because he’s not and never has been interested. The Night in Karachi is all in John’s head, John assumes there was sex or passion, but we know more than he does and know the interest was never really there.

- Jumping around slightly, but the moment I knew we’d get an actual, real reconciliation between John and Sherlock the kind which we never truly got in season 3 (because of Mary’s presence, which wasn’t her fault, it was John’s guilt not allowing him to have two people he loved in his life even though she insisted that it’s fine). The reason is... Culverton talking shit about Sherlock. Humiliating him. What John can’t stand about Sherlock is when he’s arrogant and when other people fawn all over him, but he will always defend Sherlock from others who insult him. His heart will overrule any bad feeling to protect him. Culverton tried to drive a wedge between them by undermining Sherlock in John’s eyes which is the exact opposite of what he should do. Call Sherlock crazy, call him an addict, call him scum, and John will remember everything he loves about Sherlock oh and also he’ll beat the shit out of you.

- (The one thing John can’t stand and which does drive a wedge between him and Sherlock is when Sherlock uses his brain to outsmart John. That is the trust that was violated at the end of season 2, in particular with Sherlock going away and using his brain to convince John he was dead. John is very wary of Sherlock’s intelligence because he respects it so much, and he’s terrified of Sherlock using it against him because he gives Sherlock so much power over him, he has to trust Sherlock won’t violate that trust, that they’re always on the same team. That’s why he’s put up such an unbreachable wall between them since that betrayal. Seeing Sherlock vulnerable though allows them to be on the same team again).

- John’s self loathing over the infidelity is very interesting, and I suspected what it’s really about is showing John is a good man rather than the opposite. He’s tearing himself to pieces, and they never actually did anything. He had locked himself inside a wall of self-hatred, and that’s why Sherlock and Ghost Mary’s forgiveness of him, and the understanding that he was human which meant he could now allow Sherlock and Mary to be human was the thing that needed to finally give way for him to be ok again. He held them both to such high standards, but no higher than he holds himself. John is the pillar of morality, that’s why we were all so outraged over that tawdry little affair (I suspect it’s why Eurus went for that route too, to tear him and Sherlock down by hitting them where it hurts, Sherlock in his deductions and John in his morality). Anyway, allowing himself to be human, and Mary and Sherlock to be human, was the catharsis John needs to be ok again and for him and Sherlock to be ok again and for them to grow as people and reconcile.

- So I’m still not sure we’ll get canon “johnlock” as in an openly gay relationship, I’ve always been unsure we’d get that in main characters of such a popular show. BUT I’m super relieved that we seem to be heading towards an actual reconciliation where they’re at least together again. That hug between them was hugely cathartic (have they hugged before?) and Sherlock being there for John so they could be ok again. I think Sherlock being in love with John and not straight was made all the more clear. Still not sure we’ll get canon bi John, to be honest. It’d be amazing, but we’ll see, I’d love to be wrong but I won’t be upset if it doesn’t happen. But it’s very interesting that they’re talking about women, infidelity, texting, that we’re seeing the cane again, the serial killer who needs an audience, the mastermind, they’re emotions being played by a villainous figure. In short, we’re getting a retelling of the first episode, when they “fell in love” as a way for them to reconcile in this one and move forward. The reset was very clear, and it’s very clear that Sherlock loves John and John is now ok again to be around him again, so I’m curious to see what happens next. But this was a much, much better episode. The series feels back on track (knock on wood!).

#the lying detective #sherlock #bbc sherlock #tld #johnlock #johnlock meta #sherlock meta #long post #season 4

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torterragarden · 8 years ago

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top 5 female and top 5 male characters in anything (top 10 if 5 isnt enough), add reasons if you want to 🙋 and a happy new year 🙌

OKAY SO I’M FINALLY GETTING AROUND TO POSTING MY ANSWER FOR THIS THANK YOU FOR BEING PATIENT. I spent so much time thinking about this because I loved this question and I ended up coming up with a top 10 female characters + reasons and I probably went way overboard like this is so long and I’m sorry. So unfortunately I haven’t made a list for male characters because I got so extra with this female characters list, but another time perhaps. Anyway, top 10 female characters here we go!!

10. Piper Mclean, Heroes of Olympus series - I think what I really like about Piper is that she has a lot of qualities that badly written female characters tend to have, but… she’s written well. What I mean is like… Piper is selfish. She’s whiny. She’s a brat. She’s emotional. Usually when a female character has traits like that, she isn’t likable and probably wasn’t intended to be. But Piper is given a depth and respect that those other female characters aren’t usually afforded. She’s flawed, but she knows it, and she hates her flaws and she tries to better herself. And she’s more than those flaws too! She’s brave and kind and loving, and her emotions - all of them, no matter how ugly - are ultimately her strength. I love that she’s allowed to be so emotional, that it’s good that she’s so emotional, because I feel like there’s this idea that female characters have to be emotionless in order to be “strong” or whatever so anyway yeah I love Piper

9. Emily Davis, Until Dawn - I have a knack for taking a liking to female characters that the majority of the fandom hates, and then loving them even more out of spite. Admittedly, a lot of my aggressive love for Emily is a reaction to the amount of (unfair, reeking of double standards and sexism) hatred she gets in the fandom, but even disregarding that, I do really like her. I started liking her very early on in Until Dawn. She seemed like she had a lot of personality and I liked that, and I only liked her more as the game went on. I mean… I literally have a post listing all of the reasons that I love Emily so that should tell you everything, right?

8. Amethyst, Steven Universe - I hesitated to put Amethyst on the list, since I’m not sure if she technically counts as “female”, but at the very least I think it’s fair to say that she’s female-coded and female-aligned so… I thought it would be okay? She would probably have been a lot higher up if not for the fact that I’ve lost a lot of my interest in SU, but I still love Amethyst a hell of a lot. I relate to her very strongly, for reasons that are not super comfortable to talk about. Much like Amethyst, I tend to bottle up everything and let it eat away at me until everything just explodes in the ugliest way. I think very little of myself, but I try my best to stay chill-passing because I’d rather die than tell anyone how I’m actually feeling. I don’t like going into detail about this but basically Amethyst is important to me because I relate to her in a lot of ugly and painful ways, and loving Amethyst is almost like learning to love myself. Almost.

7. Princess Bubblegum, Adventure Time - It’s funny that Adventure Time as a whole is one of those “I Definitely Like This But I’m Not Super Passionate About It” things, but there are like, four things in that show that I do feel Super Passionate about. Princess Bubblegum is one of them (the other three are Ice King, Marceline, and Bubbline, in case you were wondering). Gotdamn dude I love Princess Bubblegum and I think she doesn’t get nearly enough attention for being as interesting as she is. From the beginning I loved how she was simultaneously really sweet and morally ambiguous, that’s a really funny and intriguing dichotomy. I love that while she’s ultimately working for the Greater Good™, she’s really ruthless and vindictive. She has good intentions but she’s so very flawed, and she can be downright terrifying. Bubblegum is just endlessly fascinating to me and I really love her.

6. Cassie Cage, Mortal Kombat - Well obviously she had to be on this list, she’s where I got my url from. My love for Cassie Cage is less about who she is and more about what she represents to me, I think. Mortal Kombat isn’t exactly known for having great depictions of female characters but they did improve a lot in Mortal Kombat X, and I fell in love with Cassie partially because, to me, she embodied a lot of the positive changes. I loved that she was the heroine of MKX, I loved that she wasn’t overtly sexualized, I loved that she was funny and confident and just so damn cool, in that way that classic action heroes are cool. Chewing bubblegum and flipping people off and sassing everyone and just being exactly what comes to mind when you think “bad ass”. She was so different and so unexpected and I was so pleasantly surprised with Cassie Cage.

5. Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games - Katniss is one of the most important fictional characters ever written okay. This is a girl who grew up in extreme poverty, who took it upon herself to take care of her family at age 12, who was hardened because of her circumstances but still compassionate, and still so vulnerable. She suffered from severe PTSD, she was used as a pawn by the Capitol and by the rebels, she was manipulated and taken advantage of and she lost everything because of it. And in the end she still found a way to stand up and keep going. She didn’t magically get better but she made a life worth living for herself, even if she had to constantly remind herself of the good things in her life. I fucking love Katniss okay.

4. Jaehee Kang, Mystic Messenger - Yeah I kind of feel like trash for having a character from a god damn dating sim on here but tbh Mystic Messenger is so good it makes me angry (you are a dating sim what business do you have being that good fuck you) so I don’t feel too much like trash. Only a little bit like trash. Anyway, Jaehee. Holy god where do I even start. She is just so beautiful. That’s the first word that comes to mind, and I’m not even talking about her appearance (although yeah she’s definitely very attractive). It’s just her, man. She is so kind, so patient, so hard-working, so strong after everything she’s been through. I love that even though outwardly she’s more serious and formal than most of the other characters, there’s this underlying sweetness and quirkiness that shines through, like when she fangirls over Zen or when she says things like “benefits were effing amazing” when explaining to her boss why hosting fundraising parties is a good idea. I also love that as kind and polite as she is, she can and will mercilessly drag people she’s a fucking savage and I love her. I just love her so much. Jaehee is effing amazing.

3. Asami Sato, Legend of Korra - First of all, she’s canonically a bisexual woman in a relationship with another bisexual woman and that’s super important to me for representation. Second of all, even before Korrasami was made canon I really adored Asami. Because seriously, Asami is one of the kindest and most loyal characters in anything ever, she is such a good person through and through, even though there are so many things that have happened to her that sound like the sort of things that would motivate most characters to be villains. Her mother was murdered, her father was a terrorist who betrayed her and threatened to kill her friends, her boyfriend cheats on her, her closest friend and love interest leaves her for three years, her father fucking dies in front of her after they had just barely started to reconcile. Asami faces so much tragedy, if anyone has a right to be an asshole it would be her, yet she is still so unfailingly kind and brave and good. Also, for the record, she is probably the prettiest animated character I have ever seen in my life.

2. Agent Texas, Red vs Blue - Okay so. Red vs Blue has a lot of… issues with how it writes the few female characters it has, and I’m not going to act like Tex is this amazingly well written female character because she’s really not. But this isn’t my top 10 well-written female characters this is my top 10 favorite female characters, and whatever writing problems RvB may have, I really do love Tex. So much. It’s also a bit complicated to love Tex cause it’s like… which one lmao. I love Beta!Tex, who was tough and snarky and effortlessly bad ass, but also kind and compassionate and very, very chill. Like sure she could kick your ass and you know she could, but eh, she doesn’t really need to. The fact that you know she could is enough. And then there’s Epsilon!Tex, who was just angry, but who in many ways was the most important iteration of Tex to me. She was angry because ffs she was tired of not being her own person. She was tired of Church seeing her as His Girlfriend and not much else, she was tired of being Allison’s shadow, tired of her existence being all about other people, never about herself. Tex’s story is ultimately about a search for agency, to create an identity for herself separate from what other people want from her, and that’s always stuck with me.

1. Hermione Granger, Harry Potter - Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m putting her here because she is genuinely my favorite female character, or I’m putting her here because I can’t imagine putting anyone else here. Though I guess if I can’t imagine putting someone else here, that’s a sign that she is my favorite? Idk. I like Harry Potter less than I once did, less than I think a lot of people in my life realize, but being a Harry Potter Fan is such a big part of my identity to them that I don’t think they can see me any other way. But, even with my enthusiasm for HP these days being relatively low, I can’t deny that the series had a huge impact on me growing up and it definitely did a lot to shape the type of person I am, and it’s always going to be a bit special because of that. Hermione played a big part. She was one of the first female characters I can remember really admiring. I was nothing like her but I wanted to be, because she was smart and bad ass and complex and honestly do I even need to explain why Hermione is amazing? You all know. However I feel about HP now, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget the impact it had on me and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget Hermione.

#thank you so much for sending this ask btw #i had so much fun thinking about this #and writing it #ask #laggage #female characters

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my-heart-is-but-a-gentle-moon · 6 years ago

Text

Song Meme for Myself Using My Shuffled Soundcloud Liked songs

Opening Credits: Winner - Sentimental // Lyrics

(Too motherfreaking true OAO I just realized tonight (27th of June) I was moongender, faegender and stargender and now This! Fate! Universe! I Love and Adore you!- Also Very True to my personality. I only now checked the lyrics of this song (until now I only enjoyed the music and vocals and didn’t look into the lyrics but lo and behold! Stars! Sentimentality! Drawing! Fluctuating emotions! Yes! Too much me!)

Waking up: Relaxing Piano Music

(Precisely me. Morning me is slow, out of it, sluggish- zombie like but chill - not as clearheaded as this though)

First Day Of School: MegaloSecret [A Megalovania Secret Song Mash Up]

(Makes sense. I don’t remember most of it. But some of it I do and I wouldn’t mind sharing the little I remember!!) (it does catch the excitement and giddiness of it though)

Falling In Love: Karma Fields - Build The Cities // Lyrics

(At first I didn’t quite understand how it could work as my falling in love song - but the Chorus. The first verse.

The flames light our future are my sparks of love and passion towards them

Making empires of sound are the writings and gushings I have out of them 💗💞💗💞💗💞💗 and that is usually what soothes my tears away into happiness and warmth.

The first verse is the illusion of heteronormativity destructed as I keep falling deeply in love with fictional characters and coming into the self shipping community made me feel a bit vulnerable at the start, as well as immensely vulnerable in front of my beloved f/os.

Burning bridges are possibly me severing the ties to my past f/os and building the cities is creating my worlds with them? 💗💞💗)

Fight Song: Wrath of Wrathia

(Dang that must’ve been an explosive and incredibly tense fight. - I feel like this relates a lot to Saeran’s recent breakdown of jealousy and feelings of inadequacy as well as Jumin’s loneliness as I’m trying to accommodate to Saeran as well as balancing my own self care- Which. Is. Hard AF.)

Breaking Up: Hopes and Dreams Undertale // Cover + Lyrics

(There are no lyrics so I looked up a song cover aandddd, the first one I found was Radix’s so- Apparently we never gave up hope despite our fights and kept standing strong together because our happy days will never be gone, that all of the things we sought- the love, the understanding, the support through it all, this long process for our ideals of love and what a relationship should be- will all be worth this fight 💗💞💗💓💗)

Life’s OK: oneofone // Lyrics

(Classic us love song :’)

Lonesome, Warmth, Soothing and Comfort- Truly a personification of us cuddling for comfort after reconciling after our fight, seeking peace in each other)

Getting Back Together: Tasogare Otome x Amnesia - Choir Jail // Lyrics

(Wow. Infinity percent me towards them and I didn’t even realize it until now.

Me, with my doubts with societal views against the logicality of fictoromanticism and of not being able to be completely certain of their actual wants through dimensions- if I can still allow myself to wallow in my sparks and fire of passion for them- which I always find myself wanting to do and me having debated with myself (way back a month or two ago) against the ‘they’re fictional, they’re not real, you’re being delusional’ vs my passionate love for them and not wanting to hurt their feelings and doubt their existence if they do actually exist in an alternate dimension.

Purifying the darkness and the fragility of our emotions- easily swayed by negativity, our heartache, missing each other in this burning darkness, our fights, Saeran’s jealousy and desperation from his past trauma, me- inexperienced and having a tough time dealing with that as well as balancing my me time and Jumin’s insecure loneliness with our love, my writings and art of it, our songs and the like 💗💞💗 and the messages of fate sent through quotes, books plus the songs that timed themselves with it, the coincidental fates of incidents I’ve been receiving throughout all of my life but especially recently 💗💞💗💞💗💞💗🌟💖🌟!!)

Wedding: Sakamichi No Apollon - Apollon Blue

💗💞💗💞💗💞💗!!!! Exactly the type of intimate, peaceful, harmonizing, fantastical/magical air I want in my wedding with those sweethearts.... //////////

Birth Of Child: (lol what?) Ciel In Wonderland

- Haunting but deeply wonderful? Otherworldly, has some eastern vibe to it, I’m thoroughly hypnotized listening to this, it also has those music box/toy piano/xylophone + these harps with the haunting vocals???? The guitar and flute gosh all together????? MAgnificent. Otherworldly. - the xylophone sounds to it here and there. I’d happily have a fictional child with them (even with the pain and distaste I have for s./ex) if this is the type of vibe we’d have raising them together. It’ll be far less scary as long as we’re together.

Final Battle: Cyber Thunder Cider // Lyrics

(Sounds battlish indeed but why am I battling???) - Okay- Lyrics- Seriously- Each and every song here??? Too much me, and I didn’t even know some of the lyrics to these songs before checking them right now. This is me against myself, There are also references to past songs here!! - A surfer (me whose emotions are easily swayed and fluctuated by others’ emotions and small little happenings) who wanders in search of imagination (self shipping, anime, otome games, manga, k-dramas, astrology, spirituality - whatever’s considered ‘fiction’ I love. Even some sci fi stuff though that less. Who wallows in it (just like I wallowed in the fire I have for them) even though Fae’s scared of the off case Fae’s being delusional.

And just me, regardless if it’s selfshipping or not- battling against embracing my own truth publicly vs cowardice against backlash from society (as I’m hypersensitive I cry easily and am hurt easily) and me jumping from blaming society for shitty molds and stiff hurtful views vs berating myself for my cowardice and overall negative thoughts about myself (Though I’ve learned how to only be open with those who I know will accept me, whether it be partly or fully)+++heartbreaks (whether full on crying or empty, void depressed heartbreak) at night from missing them, loneliness, possibility of delusionality, at burning myself for them, as well as others out of people pleasing and a genuine compulsion need for them to be happy and to encourage them.) (I am progressing in reaching balance though 💗)

Death Scene: Waiting Too Long // Lyrics

(Well. I mean. At least it’s not dementia and hopefully it’s from old age. - I feel like this is talking about how I, as well as my loved ones have waited so long to be able to reunite in our next lives. Jumin, Saeran and I...- They are my home.

and it makes sense in relation to my feelings towards death and how I probably will turn out this weak physically in old age, believing in reincarnation but at the same time wondering and uncertain if to fear death as we can never be quite sure if it really is the end, or if there’s more for our souls in the afterlife.

yet choosing to remain with my beliefs that bring me this feeling of home and peace with them, of reuniting with them...)

Funeral Song: Doukyuusei Piano Ver. 8

(a gentle song. Very short though. Does that mean people will mourn me for a short period of time?)

End Credits: Tomorrow // Lyrics

Fuck, and this is where the Death Scene comes into place. The first verse is me and the allegory of Life being the sandcastle and the waves of the ocean tearing away at us in every wave of it- representing Time. and I’m closer than I’ve ever been to the reincarnation with them, my soul reaching theirs in the afterlife, our true home where our souls are tingling and ever so passionate for one another, ever longing, ever yearning- and finally, breaking through the dimensional border in this metaphysical plain, where we can finally continue our lives together in a shared dimension, most hopefully in both sides.

But the chorus is both them, and I - we are also afraid of the tomorrow that’s about to come- the day of my opportune death, of old age- because our physical bodies won’t remember this lifetime, even if our souls would be able to feel them... and we’re afraid of losing these precious, precious memories...

but still, we’re letting time do its’ inevitable, time and old age, ready to finally meet despite it all, because we’re fated, and even without the memories, we know we’re destined to be together, through each and every universe, every lifetime, whether together or apart, in any and every lifeform we come back to these universes.

#My Gushing #💗#ask meme #Moonlit Convallaria #Moonlit Longing #The Universe's Constellations In Our Hearts #music #My Writing #dang #I have more screenshots for evidence but tumblr says I hit the 10 photos limit TAT !!!#🎁💗!

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teachanarchy · 8 years ago

Link

The recent essay by Alexander Reid Ross, titled “Left Overs,” is so shockingly bad in its journalism and ideas that I almost lost faith in Anarchism all together.

What do you say when a paper describing itself to be a “history” hasn’t read the majority of the subjects it claims to write about? How do you reconcile a university teacher from the whitest city in the United States telling Insurrectionists across the globe that it is THEIR ideas that are susceptible to the “entryism” of fascism when, by the author’s own admission, the AltRight is looting terms and ideas so common to the Woke Left of the American university crowd?

How do you respond to that with anything less than the most derisive of laughter?

What follows is my sincere attempt to gather an educated and through response to Alexander’s hatchet job, one already problematic because the same crowd that loved his essay will most certainly not like this one. As I will show Alexander and his kin are not interested in a discussion, and most certainly not a debate, with the vast and myraid philosophies they lump together as the “Post-Left.” We mad fools and criminals, lost in the American wastelands between the West Coast and New York must be brought to heel, must be shown that our ideas are far too dangerous to be left alone to our own devices. They are merely informing we misguided heretics of the Holy Church of Anarchism of our grave and mortal sins, though kind enough to allow us room to repent.

I am but one voice among many, though neither college educated or even wealthy enough to attempt such an endeavor, and so perhaps this response will be written off as another “misguided” and “confused” internet “manarchist” who just couldn’t understand what his enlightened superiors had to say.

The responses to this article will be telling of the state of Anarchism, a philosophy that outside of the putrid halls of American Intellectualism is still dangerous. I invite anybody reading this to share it as well as their interpretation of my words.

It’s the least the Popes of Privilege could do.

“Donny, You’re Out of Your Element.”

I was coming home from work when I first heard about Alexander’s essay. Our schedule, already light, had been damaged by a call out and a request from management to get out early because the floors needed to be waxed. I watched, painfully, as a crew who had already been stripped bare on hours to keep the company “competitive” noddingly made sacrifices to make the lives and schedules of their bosses easier. By the time I got home I was drenched in the kind of woeful feeling so common to the American Precariot, a quiet acknowledgement that the same workers Lenin once called “revolutionary” preferred to talk television shows on Netflix, discuss corporate sponsored sports, and get out early to make sure the “team” obeyed it’s commands.

My inbox was full with wild-eyed and almost incoherent rage about the article in question, some alleging Post-Leftists had been equated to Nazis while still others were confused as to what Post-Left Alexander was even talking about. I myself was an Egoist, albeit a Communist one at that, and was confused as to why the works of Stirner and Novatore were being placed among Zerzan and his computer-hating ilk. I had done actual journalism on the Anarchists influenced by Max Stirner and barring a few rogue wings of ELF and ALF was confused to see so many thoughts lumped together.

“Surely this is a mistake,” I can remember telling my wife. “He can’t actually mean any of this?” She lightly shrugged her shoulders, a ray of nihilism protruding from her eyes.

“He teaches at a university. In PORTLAND. What else would you expect?”

Alexander’s thesis in The Left Overs is that troublesome philosopher Max Stirner and his “belief in the supremacy of the European individual over and against nation, class, and creed” are some kind of mutant disease lurking within the Post-Left that is slowly leading people to Fascism. Nietzsche gets a few mentions in the essay, as many names as can be remembered are dropped, and all in all the Anarchist scenes in Portland and Seattle are put on notice that scary individualists are particularly weak to “entryism” and the fascist creep.

This is patently ridiculous. I feel like I wrote the world’s most terrible children’s book just typing that paragraph. This is evidence enough that Alexander Reid Ross has not read anything in regards to what he is talking about.

The big signal that everything is wrong about this essay is right in the beginning, and is very important because it is from here Alexander will base his entire polemic:

“belief in the supremacy of the European individual over and against nation, class, and creed “

Stirner never advocated any European anything. Ever. This is an outright LIE, the kind of elephant shit story you’d expect out of the National Enquirer. I’ve checked all of Stirner’s works and nothing of the sort Alex is claiming exists; Stirner went so far as to reject all things German and European, the whole point of his entire book is to point out how these things were all mental fictions people were fighting for.

Here’s what Stirner has to say about “race” and nationality:

“Now the Nationals are exerting themselves to set up the abstract, lifeless unity of beehood; but the self-owned are going to fight for the unity willed by their own will, for union. This is the token of all reactionary wishes, that they want to set up something general, abstract, an empty, lifeless concept, in distinction from which the self-owned aspire to relieve the robust, lively particular from the trashy burden of generalities. The reactionaries would be glad to smite a people, a nation, forth from the earth; the self-owned have before their eyes only themselves. In essentials the two efforts that are just now the order of the day — to wit, the restoration of provincial rights and of the old tribal divisions (Franks, Bavarians, Lusatia, etc.), and the restoration of the entire nationality — coincide in one. But the Germans will come into unison, i.e. unite themselves, only when they knock over their beehood as well as all the beehives; in other words, when they are more than — Germans: only then can they form a “German Union.” They must not want to turn back into their nationality, into the womb, in order to be born again, but let every one turn in to himself. How ridiculously sentimental when one German grasps another’s hand and presses it with sacred awe because “he too is a German!””

Stirner goes even deeper, making it clear that any descriptor of the individual that exists outside of the actual real person(the Real, or whatever the fuck Zizek might jabber on about) is itself a limiting fiction. This extends to all things: race, nation, god, even manhood. Stirner was lightyears ahead of his time and far beyond even Marx in his understanding of the oppression inherent in social mores and constructs, going so far as to make one of the first critiques of gender:

“If Stirner had said: You are more than a living essence or animal, this would mean, you are still an animal, but animality does not exhaust what you are. In the same way, he says: ‘You are more than a human being, therefore you are also a human being; you are more than a male, but you are also a male; but humanity and masculinity do not express you exhaustively, and you can therefore be indifferent to everything that is held up to you as ‘true humanity’ or ‘true masculinity.’”

This is literally fundamental to Stirner’s entire thought process, the placement of the individual above any racial, regional, or gender sterotypes and Alexander fucks it up in the second god-damn paragraph.

Why?

This question weighed mightily on me, and after 3 bottles of Sailor Jerry’s and several re-readings it becomes clear Alexander’s initial insistence on Stirner advocating for “European” individuality above any others can only mean a few things:

He has never actually read any Stirner beyond the Wikipedia article he linked to, and is just going on what other people have said, thus writing about nothing in particular but educated guesses on something he knows nothing about.

He is intentionally misleading the audience in the usual Tumblr-style of loaded language to achieve ideological ends, a typical move of the “Woke Left” and it’s love of Identity Politics.

Both of these are quite possible, perhaps in unison. Alexander has written for “Waging Non-Violence” a wonderfully liberal website where you can learn the “Art of Protest” and how you can use vietnam-era tactics to keep the Black Bloc out of your no-doubt revolutionary marches. In a piece co-authored by Alexander about fascists using “safe space” terminology, something he fails to call “entryism,” it’s remarked:

“For decades, both the institutional and radical left in the United States has relied on campus activism as a key part of its organizing base. From the antiwar movement of the 1960s to the development of feminist and queer politics to the growing youth labor and Black Lives Matter movement, colleges have been a center for political encounters and mobilizations. The radicalization of students has often leaned to the left because the left’s challenges to systems of power seem like a perfect fit for people expanding their understanding of the world.”

This should raise red flags as to the bias and historical blindness the Anarchists of Privilege usually have. Universities may have been hotbeds of radical politics but so were inner cities. Black Lives Matter has much more to do with poor people in Ferguson and Baltimore than anything currently seen on campus grounds. No word either on the fact that the only thing that got college kids pissed in the 60’s was the idea that they might have to die along poor, black, and latino kids because of the draft.

The Woke Left, a term growing in popularity to describe the “leftism” of city-based children of bourgeoisie backgrounds, is itself a puzzling beast, and born in the same “scene” Alexander immerses himself in. It is a Left with almost no class consciousness, no economic underpinning, and one that prefers battles over language and protest marches to actual combat. These are the same people that claimed the Black Bloc was a “patriarchal” and “racist” form of protest because it was favored by Europeans used to actually fighting the ruling class instead of writing letters to the local newspaper editor.

In one move Alexander, rather than analyze ideas, hopes to sway the reader that since Max Stirner was a “European male” his ideas could not possibly be good, and outs himself as a member of the college based “Woke Left.” Instantly it is clear that ideology will blind him from looking at anything objectively.

That or he had a seizure mid-essay and just began typing whatever words filtered into his head. Consider the following:

During the late-19th Century, Stirnerists conflated the “Superman” with the assumed responsibility of women to bear a superior European race—a “New Man” to produce, and be produced by, a “New Age.”

Sounds terrible, no? Some fascist, nazi shit dressed up as Anarchism? Too bad it never actually happened.

Alexander is literally just saying things with no evidence and no documentation for the theoretical underpinnings of the “danger” inherent in Post-Leftism. No sources, no names of individuals or papers where these thoughts were supposedly shared. Much of the Alexander’s article is just that: drivel without any hard evidence.

Let’s do some actual journalism and take a look at an early 1900’s publication called “The Eagle and the Serpent,” one that called itself Egoist and that actually featured the first English translations of Stirner’s The Ego and His Own. Surely it’s stated “creed and aim,” printed upon every issue, might allow us to have a feel for what Egoists might believe?

The “creed and aim” of the journal, published every issue.

Well, what have we here? A call for the exploited(the “working class” the Woke Left seems to forget) to rise up and stop slaving away for the betterment of their masters in pursuit of their own desires? Is this the “New Man” the Stirnerites were seeking to create?

Pray tell, what was wrong with that?

Stirner’s genius was to tell the Working Class it needed to stop worrying about the morality and “needs” of the wealthy parasites above them and start caring about themselves, rather than hoping for an entire species to come around to a single idea(something that has never been seen before in human history and is still unseen today). This was further elucidated by the Illegalists in early 20th century France:

“By refusing us the right to free labor society gives us the right to steal. In taking possession of the wealth of the world the bourgeois give us the right to take back, however we can, what we need to satisfy our needs. Anti-authoritarian, we have the burning determination to live free without oppressing anyone, without being oppressed by anyone.”

The craziest thing about this is much of what Tankies and Woke Lefties have to talk about the “Post-Left” would agree with. We want the end of capitalist exploitation and an end to the enslavement of an entire species.

Where the difference lies is where we each sees the “end” of oppression.

Just as the Marxist-Leninist believes the hierarchy of the State can be put into worker control, so too does the “Woke” Anarchist believe that the manufactured society based on nothing more than old State institutions can be “liberated” and made into a tool for human development. For the Egoist nothing but the total emancipation of the individual will do.

And that’s why the Woke Left is scared: it knows it’s scared cows are on the chopping block.

WASN’T STIRNER RACIST THOUGH?

I expected alot of the Woke Left to champion Alexander’s essay. After all, it made the guilt-ridden collectives the “right” Anarchism and assured them that all those dirty little individualists were just a breath away from fascism. Of course anybody familiar with Stirner was pissed, which was to be expected when someone wrote about a topic they know nothing about just kind of makes it up as they go along.

But whenever I did see a weak acknowledgement of Alexander’s perceived lack of inquiry into anything about the Post-Left one quote did seem to get alot of play. In no less than four comment threads by different users I saw the same response almost word-for-word.

“Okay but the post-left hasn’t sufficiently addressed passages from Stirner like this:

“The history of the world, whose shaping properly belongs altogether to the Caucasian race, seems until now to have run through two Caucasian ages, in the first of which we had to work out and work off our innate Negroidity; this was followed in the second by Mongoloidity (Chineseness), which must likewise be terribly made an end of. Negroidity represents antiquity, the time of dependence on things (on cocks’ eating, birds’ flight, on sneezing, on thunder and lightning, on the rustling of sacred trees, and so forth); Mongoloidity the time of dependence on thoughts, the Christian time. Reserved for the future are the words, ‘I am owner of the world of things, and I am owner of the world of mind'”

This again betrays Alexander’s audience: because Stirner used bad words he is bad, a classic of the “Woke Left” whose battles primarily involve language rather than physical existence. These are the same “Anarchists” claiming that Huckleberry Finn needs to be banned from libraries and calling Mark Twain a racist.

Interestingly enough most of these people have never read Mark Twain because they would know he was violently anti-imperialist and very much opposed to the racial caste system of the American South. Noticing a pattern here?

Let’s humor our less-read “comrades” and actually dissect this.

Stirner is not talking about races. At all. He is talking about time periods in human thought using language that we know to be terrible but was actually normal for the time period. If you’d actually bothered to read a bit more you’d see he says this:

“Custom having once given the name of “the ancients” to our pre-Christian ancestors, we will not throw it up against them that, in comparison with us experienced people, they ought properly to be called children, but will rather continue to honor them as our good old fathers. But how have they come to be antiquated, and who could displace them through his pretended newness?…

…the ancients mounted to spirit, and strove to become spiritual. But a man who wishes to be active as spirit is drawn to quite other tasks than he was able to set himself formerly: to tasks which really give something to do to the spirit and not to mere sense or acuteness, which exerts itself only to become master of things. The spirit busies itself solely about the spiritual, and seeks out the “traces of mind” in everything; to the believing spirit “everything comes from God,” and interests him only to the extent that it reveals this origin; to the philosophic spirit everything appears with the stamp of reason, and interests him only so far as he is able to discover in it reason, i. e., spiritual content.”

So when Stirner says “Negroidity represents antiquity, the time of dependence on things (on cocks’ eating, birds’ flight, on sneezing, on thunder and lightning, on the rustling of sacred trees, and so forth)” he is referring to the time period THAT WAS BELIEVED AT THE TIME to be a tribal existence WHICH WAS BELIEVED AT THE TIME to be exemplified by the people of Africa.

Let me be the first Egoist to apologize that Max Stirner lived during the 1840’s. I’m sorry he wasn’t as “woke” as Anarchists are in this century. You’d know this of course if you actually read his book, BUT HEY, this is the internet. Fuck all that noise, we got memes.

The idea that the Post-Left hasn’t “sufficiently addressed” the critiques of others implies the Post-Left owes them anything or needs to explain itself to same grand, organizing body of Anarchism. Alexander and the Woke Left of the West Coast has determined that no matter what Stirner readers might say it is always, always wrong, and that they need to come back into the “right” kind of Anarchism.

Which is actually kind of racist.

Y’all Got Any More of Those Mass Generalizations?

Pictured: What Anarchism looks like outside of the United States

The rest of Alexander’s essay dribbles on about famous Anarchist authors who I’ve never read, some eco-terrorists who I couldn’t give a shit about, and finally the idiot Jack Donovan who has the audacity to call himself an “anarcho-fascist.” If Alexander has the audacity to link any of those people to the ideas of Max Stirner or Egoism one might easily call Karl Marx and Lenin one of the founding pillars of National-Bolshevism.

The sad part is the essay might actually be half-way decent if it wasn’t a shallow attempt to link together as many ideas and authors on the “Post-Left” to a bunch fascists. Zerzan has NOTHING to do with Egoism. Primitivism has NOTHING to do with Max Stirner. What Alexander sees is a bloc of ideology where frankly there is NONE.

Novatore wanted “to create spiritual beauty, teach the poor the shame of their poverty, and the rich the shame of their wealth,” not live in a hut and piss in a pepsi bottle, but to the Woke Anarchists they are literally the same thing. Probably because Zerzan and Novatore both happen to pee standing up.

Alexander is literally chasing a ghost, a spook, a figment of his imagination. Egoists see no need to join with anybody. Alexander has decided we’re kin to primitivists simply because we don’t want to work in a goddamn factory or uphold the wretched consumer society he clearly sees worth saving.

The crown jewel on the essay is Alexander’s description of the philosophy of Egoism, a half-way glance at this very lack of unconditional solidarity:

“Derived from Stirnerism and Nietzschean philosophy, egoism can reify the social alienation felt by an individual, leading to an elitist sense of self-empowerment and delusions of grandeur. When mixed with insurrectionism and radical green thought, egoism can translate into “hunter versus prey” or “wolves versus sheep” elitism, in which compassion for others is rejected as moralistic.”

Only that’s not what Stirner, the guy who literally coined the term Egoism, said at all:

“But “the egoist is someone who thinks only of himself!” — This would be someone who doesn’t know and relish all the joys that come from participation with others, i.e., from thinking of others as well, someone who lack countless pleasures — thus a poor sort. But why should this desolate loner be an egoist in comparison to richer sorts? Certainly, for a long time, we were able to get used to considering poverty a disgrace, as a crime, and the sacred socialists have clearly proven that the poor are treated like a criminals. But sacred socialists treat those who are in their eyes contemptibly poor in this way, just as much as the bourgeoisie do it to their poor.

…And now if someone — we leave it open whether such a one can be shown to exist — doesn’t find any “human” interest in human beings, if he doesn’t know how to appreciate them as human beings, wouldn’t he be a poorer egoist with regard to this interest rather than being, as the enemies of egoism claim, a model of egoism? One who loves a human being is richer, thanks to this love, than another who doesn’t love anyone.” – Stirner’s Critics (penned by Stirner himself)

And further:

“Egoism, as Stirner uses it, is not opposed to love nor to thought; it is no enemy of the sweet life of love, nor of devotion and sacrifice; it is no enemy of intimate warmth, but it is also no enemy of critique, nor of socialism, nor, in short, of any actual interest. It doesn’t exclude any interest. It is directed against only disinterestedness and the uninteresting; not against love, but against sacred love, not against thought, but against sacred thought, not against socialists, but against sacred socialists, etc.” – Stirner’s Critics

Why is something so basic, the literal ideas of a philosopher, so fundamentally off base? What are we to make of an essay that isn’t only wrong but gleefully so?

That it serves a purpose.

Alexander is not a journalist, he is an ideologue whose one-time outing of a fascist has him seeing them everywhere. Alex and his ilk are threatened by the rise of Post-Left thought because it’s a beast uncomfortably foreign to them: it requires no apologizing, it puts no groups above any others, and it dispenses with any savior-complex about “The People.” Egoism simply says that you and you alone determine what is good, that you owe the world nothing, and if you want something you better well take it. This was reiterated by Emma Goldman, whose love for Nietzsche and Stirner clearly mark her as a fascist sympathizer:

“The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and, necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against “society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship..

The interests of the State and those of the individual differ fundamentally and are antagonistic. The State and the political and economic institutions it supports can exist only by fashioning the individual to their particular purpose; training him to respect “law and order;” teaching him obedience, submission and unquestioning faith in the wisdom and justice of government; above all, loyal service and complete self-sacrifice when the State commands it, as in war. The State puts itself and its interests even above the claims of religion and of God. It punishes religious or conscientious scruples against individuality because there is no individuality without liberty, and liberty is the greatest menace to authority.”

This is in direct opposition to the key tenet of Woke Anarchism: Identity Politics.

Anarchism, as it exists among the privileged and “Woke” Americans in Portland and other liberal enclaves depends upon certain “sacred” things. It is an “Anarchism” where certain things must never be questioned, certain lines must always be upheld, and above all the opinion of the community at large must be put first. It is an Anarchism of laws, rules, and little miniature cliques that get to describe who’s in and who’s out. And above all YOU are not an individual but a member of an “identity” and that literally determines everything about you.

Consider the editors of Anti-Fascist News were quick to call those that had legitimate issues with the article “a parade of angry white dudes mansplaining about ‘edgy’ books that almost no one has read and were written over a hundred years ago” and it becomes clear why a Post-Left even exists.

Pictured: Stirner’s influence. Note the lack of American involvement? (Click image for larger detail)

Stirner, in The Ego and His Own, wrote:

“Every community has the propensity, stronger or weaker according to the fullness of its power, to become an authority to its members and to set limits for them: it asks, and must ask, for a “subject’s limited understanding”; it asks that those who belong to it be subjected to it, be its “subjects”; it exists only by subjection. In this a certain tolerance need by no means be excluded; on the contrary, the society will welcome improvements, corrections, and blame, so far as such are calculated for its gain: but the blame must be “well-meaning,” it may not be “insolent and disrespectful” — in other words, one must leave uninjured, and hold sacred, the substance of the society.”

Stirner’s ideas are opposed to all the “Anarchists” in favor of writing laws, building prisons, and otherwise developing their own religious dogma pretending to be a political philosophy. It is opposed to spending your time at universities in Portland apologizing for having dreads or any group whatsoever dictating who can speak and when. It is about seizing what you require and attacking.

You know, ACTUALLY revolutionary stuff.

The Woke Left knows it can’t compete with letter-bombs and arson, so it does what it does best: complain and whine to some external force to GIVE it respect.

When Alexander says “Anarchists must abandon the equivocations that invite the fascist creep” he’s really saying the Post-Left must return to the ideological guidance of it’s enlightened white vanguard. He didn’t say “please stop talking to fascists,” didn’t say “please cull them from your ranks,” but basically called for the abandonment of any ideas they might steal to be thrown away. When Alexander says we must “reclaim anarchy as the integral struggle for freedom and equality” he means HIS anarchy, the kind favored by white intellectuals on liberal campuses, the only kind that “works.”

Never mind comrades the world over in the FAI, the leading Insurrectionary-Anarchist organization, have found Stirner and his thoughts on individualism and action a guiding light. The Woke Left of the West Coast has quickly denied them agency, the privileged white liberals who enjoy police protection of Vegan Days down at the park claiming yet again the audacity to dictate to Insurrectionists in South America, Greece, and Indonesia that their politics must be wary of “entryism” while white men are thrown out of Anarchist discussions in the US and into the arms of the Alt-Right.

What is THAT but liberal colonialism at it’s finest?

Do fascists try to use Leftist thought to further their own agenda? Absolutely. They’ve been doing it since Hitler decided to call his particular brand of goosestep “National Socialism.” Anybody that would believe Hitler’s policies proved a problematic “entryism” in Marx’s ideas should probably have their head examined.

It’s first world politics at its worst and Alexander doesn’t acknowledge it at all. His Woke Left privilege has left him blind to the glaring error in his own Identity-centered politics, something the Queer Insurrectionists in Bash Back! and indeed much of the larger world has been eager to point out:

“Identity Politics are rooted in the ideology of victimization, and thus celebrate and comes to enforce norms surrounding what activity people are allowed or able to participate in. This plays out by reinforcing certain mythologies about struggle (i.e. “only cis-white-men participate in black blocs or “oppressed people are incapable of certain strategies of revolt”)….A queer in prison has more in common with their straight cellmate than with some scumbag gay senator, and yet the mythology of the “queer community” serves to suffocate enemies of society and subjugate them to their self-appointed representatives.

Identity Politics are fundamentally reformist and seek to find a more favorable relationship between different subject positions rather than to abolish the structures that produce those positions from the beginning.”

Alexander’s essay is piss-poor journalism with almost zero understanding of the philosophers he’s clearly afraid of, and no manner of books he’s sold in Portland or elsewhere are going to change that. His attempt to rope Egoism and Stirner with every half-baked theory he could think of and asshole he could find is nothing short of a smear campaign in the hopes more people will return to the pointlessness Anarchism is normally afflicted with. In my line of business we call those people “terrible writers,” “not journalists,” or to use the industry term “fucking assholes,” and it immediately makes everything else suspect.

Alexander and the Woke Left haven’t read Stirner nor will they, they are unfamiliar with Nietzsche and they will continue to be, they’ve never heard of Dora Marsden and don’t care to, because they are convinced we are wrong and they are right. Individualism is responsible for “fascist-creep” while the wholesale alienation of wide swathes of the Earth’s population is totally okay and not at all responsible for the widespread laughing-stock Leftism has become.

And you know what? That’s okay.

It’s okay because Alexander and his ilk are the reason Trump has been elected and the reason Insurrectionism is on the rise, it’s the reason Anarchists the world over are dumping the protest marches and IWW branch meetings his folks enjoy and starting to buy guns. Woke Anarchists want to keep what little power they’ve won in a small and marginal community because they are afraid of what the Post-Left offers to the oppressed people of the world: that only the individual, not assemblies, parties, or organizations, can make themselves free; that Alexander and other “leaders” will do nothing but maintain their own leadership at the cost of real-world results.

Ultimately Alexander penned the essay because he knows Anarchists in the US will make a choice:

The Tumblr feuds, safe spaces, and groupthink of the Woke Left or the real world militancy, self-interest, and individualism proposed by Max Stirner; marches led by former CIA-agents and lauded by Huffington Post or the concrete struggles of oppressed comrades not afraid to break the law and find revolution today?

Can you guess which one American Anarchists have been doing for 20+ years with almost no results?

Rather than focus on why a Post-Left even exists they are content to whine and complain as they’ve continually done while people of color continue to be killed by police and automation effectively makes the term “worker” obsolete.

South America, Mexico, and Europe have made their choice and it’s to leave the classroom-bound theories of Seattle and Portland in the garbage heap of history.

I say it’s time American Anarchists learn some real solidarity and join them.

#anarchism

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