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glitter-stained · 4 months ago

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Damasio, The Trolley Problem and Batman: Under the Hood

Okay so @bestangelofall asked me to elaborate on what I meant by "Damasio's theories on emotions in moral decision-making add another level of depth to the analysis of UTH as a moral dilemma" and I thought this deserved its own post so let's talk about this.

So, idk where everyone is at here (philosophy was mandatory in highschool in my country but apparently that's not the case everywhere so i genuinely have no clue what's common knowledge here, i don't want to like state the obvious but also we should recap some stuff. Also if I'm mentioning a philosopher's or scientist's name without detailing, that means it's just a passing thought/recommendation if you want to read more on the topic.)

First thing first is I've seen said, about jason and the no killing rule, that "killing is always bad that's not up for debate". And I would like to say, that's factually untrue. Like, no matter which side of the debate you are on, there is very much a debate. Historically a big thing even. So if that's not something you're open to hear about, if you're convinced your position is the only correct one and even considering other options is wrong and/or a waste of time... I recommend stopping here, because this only going to make you upset, and you have better stuff to do with your life than getting upset over an essay. In any case please stay civil and remember that this post is not about me debating ethics with the whole bat-tumblr, it's me describing a debate other people have been voicing for a long time, explaining the position Damasio's neuropsychology and philosophy holds in this debate, and analyzing the ethics discussed in Batman: Under the Red Hood in that light. So while I might talk about my personal position in here (because I have an opinion in this debate), this isn't a philosophy post; this is a literature analysis that just so happens to exist within the context of a neuropsychological position on a philosophical debate. Do not try to convince me that my philosophy of ethics is wrong, because that's not the point, that's not what the post is about, I find it very frustrating and you will be blocked. I don't have the energy to defend my personal opinions against everybody who disagrees with me.

Now, let's start with Bruce. Bruce, in Under The Hood and wrt the no kill rule (not necessarily all of his ethics, i'm talking specifically about the no kill rule), is defending a deontological position. Deontology is a philosophy of ethics coined by christian🧷 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The philosophy of ethics asks this question: what does it mean to do a good action? And deontology answers "it means to do things following a set of principles". Basically Kant describes what are "absolute imperatives" which are rules that hold inherent moral values: some things are fundamentally wrong and others are bad. Batman's no-kill rule is thus a categorical imperative: "Though Shall not Kill"🧷, it is always wrong to kill. (Note that I am not saying Bruce is kantian just because he has a deontology: Kant explained the concept of deontological ethics, and then went up to theorize his own very specific and odd brand of deontology, which banned anything that if generalized would cause the collapse of society as well as, inexplicably, masturbation. Bruce is not Kantian, he's just, regarding the no kill rule, deontological. Batman is still allowed to wank, don't worry.)

In this debate, deontological ethics are often pit up against teleological ethics, the most famous group of which being consequentialism, the most famous of consequentialisms being utilitarism. As the name indicates, consequentialist theories posit that the intended consequences of your actions determine if those actions were good or not. Utilitarism claims that to do good, your actions should aim to maximise happiness for the most people possible. So Jason, when he says "one should kill the Joker to prevent the thousands of victims he is going to harm if one does not kill him", is holding a utilitarian position.

The debate between deontology and utilitarism has held many forms, some fantastical and some with more realistic approaches to real life like "say you're hiding from soldiers and you're holding a baby that's gonna start crying, alerting the soldiers and getting everyone in your hideout massacred. Do you muffle the baby, knowing it will suffocate and kill it?" or "say there's a plague going on and people are dying and the hospital does not have enough ventilators, do you take the one off of the comatose patient with under 0.01% chance of ever waking up to give it to another patient? What about 1%?", etc, etc. The most famous derivative of this dilemma, of course, being the infamous trolley problem.

This is what is meant when we say "the UTH confrontation is a trolley problem." The final confrontation at the warehouse is a variation, a derivative of the utilitarian dilemma that goes as follows: "if someone was trying to kill someone in front of you, and that murder would prevent the murder of thousands, should you try to stop that murder or let it happen?"

Now, here's a question: why are there so many derivatives of the trolley problem? Why do philosophers spend time pondering different versions of the same question instead of solving it?

My opinion (and the one of much, much smarter people whose name i forgot oops) is that both systems fail at giving us a satisfying, clean-cut reply. Now, most people have a clean-cut answer to the trolley problem as presented here: me personally, I lean more towards utilitarianism, and I found it logical to pull the lever. But altering the exact situation makes me change my answer, and there is very often a point where people, no matter their deontological or utilitarian velleities, change their answer. And that's interesting to examine.

So let's talk about deontology. Now my first gripe with deontology it's that it posits a set of rules as absolute and I find that often quite arbitrary. 🧷 Like, it feels a little like mathematical axioms, you know? We build a whole worldview on the assumption that these rules are inherently correct and the best configuration because it feels like it makes sense, and accidentally close our mind to the world of non-euclidian ethics. In practice, here are some situations in which a deontologist might change their mind: self-defense killing, for example, is often cited as "an exception to the rule", making that rule de facto non-universal; and disqualifying it as an absolute imperative. Strangely enough, people will often try to solve the trolley problem by deciding to kill themselves by jumping on the tracks 🧷 which is actually a utilitarian solution: whether you're pulling the lever or you're jumping on the tracks, you are choosing to kill one person to stop the people from being run over. Why does it matter if it's you or someone else you're killing? You're still killing someone. Another situation where people may change their answer would be, like "what if you needed to save your children but to do so you had to kill the ceo of united healthcare?" Note that these are only examples for killing, but the biggest issue is that deontology preaches actions are always either good or wrong, and the issue with that lack of nuance is best illustrated with the kantian problem regarding the morality of lying: let's say it's the holocaust and a family of jews is hiding in your house. Let's say a nazi knocks on your door and asks if there are people hiding in your house. You know if you tell the truth, the jews in your house will be deported. In that situation, is it morally correct to lie? Now, Kant lived before the Holocaust, but in his time there was a similar version of this problem that had been verbalised (this formulation is the best-known derivative of this problem btw, I didn't invent it) and Kant's answer, I kid you not, was still "no it is not morally acceptable to lie in that situation".

And of course, there are variations of that problem that play with the definition of killing- what defines the act of killing and can the other circumstances (like if there's a person you need to save) alter that definition? => Conclusion: there is a lot more nuance to moral actions than what a purely deontological frame claims, and pushing deontology to its limits leads to situations that would feel absurd to us.

Now let's take utilitarianism to its own limits. Say you live in a world where healthcare has never been better. Now say this system is so because there is a whole small caste of people who have been cloned and genetically optimized and conditioned since birth so that their organs could be harvested at any given moment to heal someone. Let's say this system is so performant it has optimised this world's humanity's general well-being and health, leading to an undeniable, unparalleled positive net-worth for humanity. Here's the question: is this world a utopia or a dystopia? Aka, is raising a caste of people as organ cattle morally acceptable in that situation? (Note: Because people's limits on utilitarianism vary greatly from one person to another, I chose the most extreme example I could remember, but of course there are far more nuanced ones. Again, I wasn't the one to come up with this example. If you're looking for examples of this in fiction, i think the limits of utilitarianism are explored pretty interestingly in the videogame The Last of Us).

=> Conclusion: there is a lot more nuance to moral actions than what a purely utilitarian frame claims, and pushing utilitarism to its limits leads to situations that would feel absurd to us.

This leads us back to Under the Hood. Now because UTH includes a scathing criticism of Batman's no kill rule deontology, but Jason is also presented as a villain in this one, my analysis of the whole comic is based on the confrontation between both of these philosophies and their failures, culminating in a trolley dilemma type situation. So this is why it makes sense to have Bruce get mad at Jason for killing Captain Nazi in self-defense: rejecting self-defense, even against nazis, is the logical absurd conclusion of deontology. Winick is simply taking Bruce's no-kill rule to the limit.

And that's part of what gets me about Jason killing goons (aside from the willis todd thing that should definitely have been addressed in such a plot point.) It's that it feels to me like Jason's philosophy is presented as wrong because it leads to unacceptable decisions, but killing goons is not the logical absurd conclusion of utilitarianism. It's a. a side-effect of Jason's plot against Bruce and/or, depending on how charitable you are to either Jason's intelligence or his morals, b. a miscalculation. Assuming Jason's actions in killing goons are a reflection of his moral code (which is already a great assumption, because people not following their own morals is actually the norm, we are not paragons of virtue), then this means that 1) he has calculated that those goons dying would induce an increase in general global human happiness and thus 2) based on this premise, he follows the utilitarian framework and thus believes it's moral to kill the goons. It's the association of (1) and (2) that leads to an absurd and blatantly immoral consequence, but since the premise (1) is a clear miscalculation, the fact that (1) & (2) leads to something wrong does not count as a valid criticism of (2): to put it differently, since the premise is wrong, the conclusion being wrong does not give me any additional info on the value of the reasoning. This is a little like saying "Since 1+ 3= 5 and 2+2=4, then 1+3+2+2 = 9". The conclusion is wrong, but because the first part (1+3=5) is false, the conclusion being wrong does not mean that the second part (2+2 =4) is wrong. So that's what frustrates me so much when people bring up Jason killing goons as a gotcha for criticizing his utilitarian philosophy, because it is not!! It looks like it from afar but it isn't, which is so frustrating because, as stated previously, there are indeed real limits to utilitarianism that could have been explored instead to truly level the moral playing field between Jason and Bruce.

Now that all of this is said and done, let's talk about what in utilitarianism and deontology makes them flawed and, you guessed it, talk some about neuropsychology (and how that leads to what's imo maybe the most interesting thing about the philosophy in Under the Hood.)

In Green Arrow (2001), in an arc also written by Judd Winick, Mia Dearden meets a tortured man who begs her to kill him to save Star City (which is being massacred), and she kills him, then starts to cry and begs Ollie for confirmation that this was the right thing to do. Does this make Mia a utilitarian? If so, then why did she doubt and cry? Is she instead a deontologist, who made a mistake?

In any case, the reason why Mia's decision was so difficult for her to make and live with, and the reason why all of these trolley-adjacent dilemmas are so hard, is pretty clear. Mia's actions were driven by fear and empathy. It's harder to tolerate sacrificing our own child to avoid killing, it's harder to decide to sacrifice a child than an adult, a world where people are raised to harvest their organs feels horrible because these are real humans we can have empathy towards and putting ourselves in their shoes is terrifying... So we have two "perfectly logical" rational systems toppled by our emotions. But which is wrong: should we try to shut down our empathy and emotions so as to always be righteous? Are they a parasite stopping us from being true moral beings?

Classically, we (at least in my culture in western civilization) have historically separated emotions from cognition (cognition being the domain of thought, reasoning, intelligence, etc.) Descartes, for example, was a philosopher who highlighted a dualist separation of emotion and rationality. For a long time this was the position in psychology, with even nowadays some people who think normal psychologists are for helping with emotions and neuropsychologists are for helping with cognition.(I will fight these people with a stick.) Anyway, that position was the predominant one in psychology up until Damasio (not the famous writer, the neuropsychologist) wrote a book named Descartes' Error. (A fundamental of neuropsychology and a classic that conjugates neurology, psychology and philosophy: what more could you ask for?)

Damasio's book's title speaks for itself: you cannot separate emotion from intelligence. For centuries we have considered emotions to be parasitic towards reasoning, (which even had implications on social themes and constructs through the centuries 📌): you're being emotional, you're letting emotions cloud your judgement, you're emotionally compromised, you're not thinking clearly... (Which is pretty pertinent to consider from the angle of A Death in the Family, because this is literally the reproach Bruce makes to Jason). Damasio based the book on the Damasio couple's (him and his wife) study of Phineas Gage, a very, very famous case of frontal syndrome (damage to the part of the brain just behind the forehead associated with executive functions issues, behavioural issues and emotional regulation). The couple's research on Gage lead Damasio, in his book, to this conclusion: emotions are as much of a part of reasoning and moral decision-making as "cold cognition" (non emotional functioning). Think of it differently: emotional intelligence is a skill. Emotions are tools. On an evolutionary level, it is good that we as people have this skill to try and figure out what others might think and do. That's useful. Of course, that doesn't mean that struggling with empathy makes you immoral, but we people who struggle with empathy have stories of moments where that issue has made us hurt someone's feelings on accident, and it made us sad, because we didn't want to hurt their feelings. On an evolutionary level (and this is where social Darwinism fundamentally fails) humanity has been able to evolve in group and in a transgenerational group (passing knowledge from our ancestors long after their death, belonging to a community spread over a time longer than our lifetime) thanks to social cognition (see Tomasello's position on the evolution of language for more detail on that), and emotions, and "emotional intelligence" is a fundamental part of how that great system works across the ages.

And that's what makes Batman: Under the Hood brilliant on that regard. If I have to make a hypothesis on the state of Winick's knowledge on that stuff, I would say I'm pretty sure he knew about the utilitarism vs deontology issue; much harder to say about the Damasio part, but whether he's well-read in neuropsychology classics or just followed a similar line of reasoning, this is a phenomenally fun framework to consider UTH under.

Because UTH, and Jason's character for the matter, refuse to disregard emotions. Bruce says "we mustn't let ourselves get clouded by our emotions" and Jason, says "maybe you should." I don't necessarily think he has an ethical philosophy framework for that, I still do believe he's a utilitarian, but he's very emotion-driven and struggling to understand a mindframe that doesn't give the same space to emotions in decision-making. And as such, Jason says "it should matter. If the emotion was there, if you loved me so much, then it should matter in your decision of whether or not to let the Joker die, that it wasn't just a random person that he killed, but that he killed your son."

And Bruce is very much doubling down on this mindset of "I must be stronger than my feelings". He is an emotionally repressed character. He says "You don't understand. I don't think you've ever understood", and it's true, Jason can't seem to understand Bruce's position, there's something very "if that person doesn't show love in my perspective and understanding of what love is then they do not love me" about his character that I really appreciate. But Bruce certainly doesn't understand either, because while Jason is constantly asking Bruce for an explanation, for a "why do you not see things the way I do" that could never satisfy him, Bruce doesn't necessarily try to see things the way Jason does. And that's logical, since Jason is a 16 years old having a mental breakdown, and Bruce is a grown man carrying on the mission he has devoted himself to for years, the foundation he has built his life over. He can't allow himself to doubt, and why would he? He's the adult, he's the hero, he is, honestly, a pretty stubborn and set-in-his-ways character. So, instead of rising to the demand of emotional decision-making, Bruce doubles down on trying to ignore his feelings. And Jason, and the story doesn't let him. Bludheaven explodes. This induces extremely intense feelings in Bruce (his son just got exploded), which Jason didn't allow him to deal with, to handle with action or do anything about; Jason says no you stay right there, with me, with those emotions you're living right now, and you're making a decision. And there's the fact Bruce had a mini-heart attack just before thinking Jason was dead again. And there's the fact he mourned Jason for so long, and Stephanie just died, and Tim, Cass and Oracle all left, and the Joker is right there, and Jason puts a gun in his hands (like the gun that killed his parents)... All of that makes it impossible for Bruce to disregard his emotions. The same way Jason, who was spilling utilitarian rhetoric the whole time, is suddenly not talking about the Joker's mass murder victims but about he himself. The same way Jason acts against his own morals in Lost Days by sparing the Joker so they can have this confrontation later. That's part of why it's so important to me that Jason is crying in that confrontation.

Bruce's action at the end of the story can be understood two ways:

-he decides to maim/kill Jason to stop the insupportable influx of emotions, and him turning around is his refusal to look at his decision (looking away as a symbol of shame): Bruce has lost, in so that he cannot escape the dilemma, he succumbs to his emotions and acts against his morals.

-the batarang slicing Jason's throat is an accident: he is trying to find a way out of the dilemma, a solution that lets him save his principles, but his emotions cloud his judgement (maybe his hand trembles? Maybe his vision is blurry?). In any case, he kills his son, and it being an accident doesn't absolve him: his emotions hold more weight than his decision and he ends up acting against his morals anyway.

It's a very old story: a deontologist and a utilitarian try to solve the trolley problem, and everyone still loses. And who's laughing? The nihilist, of course. To him, nothing has sense, and so nothing matters. He's wrong though, always has been. That's the lesson I'm taking from Damasio's work. That's the prism through which I'm comparing empathy to ethics in Levinas' work and agape in Compté-Sponsville's intro to philosophy through.

It should matter. It's so essential that it matters. Love, emotions, empathy: those are fundamental in moral evaluation and decision making. They are a feature, not a bug. And the tragedy is when we try to force ourselves to make them not matter.

Anyway so that was my analysis of why Damasio's position on ethics is so fun to take in account when analysing UTH, hope you found this fun!

#dc #jason todd #dc comics #red hood #under the red hood #anti batman #anti bruce wayne #(< for filtering)#jason todd meta #neuropsychology meta #now with the philosophy extension!!#once again having very intense thoughts about Under The Hood #me talking about the “killing goons” part: this comic is so infuriating #me talking about the final confrontation: this is the greatest comic ever 😭😭#winick stop toying with my emotions challenge #anyway I put a couple of pins on some of the ideas in there don't worry about it #also i was told that color coding helped with clarity so hopefully that's still the case!

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despazito · 1 month ago

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The planet of the bass guy's screamo parody is spot on musically but I do have a bone to pick with his character. He calls himself a communist. Granted I was born in '97 so perhaps I was just less involved in political spaces during peak emo but from my personal experience there really wasn't a strong socialist movement in the '00s normie emo sphere. Maybe there was in the more hardcore early emo subculture in the 90s but your average mainstream hot topic goer really wasn't engaged. I think Kyle is fusing screamo with Green Day pop punk and some more political Nu Metal attitudes.

There was nowhere near the amount of political awareness in the scene compared to its 2010s counterparts, if emo kids wanted to be socially rebellious they were more likely to declare themselves atheist or maybe Satanist and occasionally generic "anarchist" aka just wearing a pin with the anarchy symbol. Sharing a pic of two deathly pale white boys almost kissing was about the extent of teens voicing pro-LGBT sentiment in 2007. I don't think half of them even knew what a lesbian was, bisexual and pan was the most extreme label you could give yourself. Remember a significant contribution to emo and what would become scene came out of the Midwest and not hotspots for radical movements you see on the coasts, I think a lot of us were milquetoast liberals and wholeheartedly believed Obama could fix the United States (remember most of this era was also pre-2008 recession).

It wasn't uncommon for emo or scene kids to also listen to some more political stuff like American Idiot or SOAD and RATM but I'd argue most kids were engaging more with the aesthetics than any political message deeper than "bush sucks". I would argue that most Rawr XD teens were actually listening to considerably more christian bands on their ipods than bands who explicitly aligned themselves with communism.

2000s Emo and Scene was incredibly introspective, the focus was on the self and immediate relationships moreso than systemic injustices and certainly not in depth material analysis. If anything it was very individualist, lamenting that you felt othered and distant from the rest of society or something was fundamentally different about you. It wasn't at all uncommon to run into people who were deeply conceited and misanthropic in a way you'd associate with the 2010s Enlightened Atheist movement. Throw in maybe some complaining that you live in a shit town and perhaps a very vague anti-war stance and occasional concern for the Anonymous Global South or animal rights and that was about as radical as the average american emo kid got.

Anyway that's my nitpick, +100 points tho for namedropping kingdom hearts which more than makes up for this minor inaccuracy.

#yeah im conflating emo/screamo/scene into one subculture but growing up it did feel like they all intermingled considerably #you will find folks who were vocal about the fashion distinction of emo vs scene but i think their belief system was pretty interchangeable #im not talking about the music and fashion itself so much as the people in those spaces

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maradevi · 2 months ago

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The Unusual: A Character Analysis on Bomb (And OJ, sort of)

Introduction

Wanted to make this post seeing as Bomb's been getting discussion again after the recent remaster episode. It goes without saying that Bomb is a complicated character. He, as with many problematic aspects of II1's story - was undeniably crafted as a mean-spirited ableist stereotype, that was consequently "scrubbed clean" off the face of the series up until the recent season two finale and remaster. And it's true. He is evidently a “writer's regret,” severely lacking in modern relevance, and compared to the intentionally-done stories of Suitcase and Knife - critically underdeveloped as a character.

And yet - I'm drawn to him anyway.

It's hard to argue Bomb is as deliberately written as most of the fuller, modern characters are. Frankly, a large portion of his depth likely wasn't thought about at all, even now - but there is something horribly, and ironically complex about the character he is given. Something that I haven't yet seen discussed in this fandom, or concretely acknowledged by even the canon source. The "overly anxious, bumbling idiot" trope II intended to portray him as, ironically became a self-referential character that has experienced nothing but ableism from other characters, became shaped by his discrimination, and is consequently now a reversal of everything his stereotype limited him to be: affable, easygoing, interpersonally skilled - even teasing and sassy at times.

I want this essay to humanize a character that is so critically overlooked by both his writers and this fandom. I want this essay to show him in a completely different light than what we're used to seeing - Bomb has grown since season one as something more than just "The Unusual". And while no one needs to like him or enjoy him - understanding Bomb, at the bare minimum, is critical to understanding the arcs of plenty of other well-loved characters (namely OJ, who will get his own analysis section in this essay).

There will be obvious mentions and descriptions of ableism throughout. Please take care of yourself while reading. I also want to emphasize that although I try to analyze only what has been consistently established, I also acknowledge that a LOT of Bomb’s scenes generally lack intentionality and there is always the likelihood II could eventually release some episode that completely subverts everything about his character. But what he has now, as of the time of writing this, means a lot to me - and that’s what I want to focus on.

"FALSE ALARM": What it Means, and Why It Fits

There is one other tagline that II gives Bomb beyond "The Unusual"-- and it's "FALSE ALARM,” crudely written on his corpse in the midway point of the season two movie.

And I think, at his very core - this is fundamentally what Bomb is meant to be. It is inherent to his object, even - he is a weapon that harms others, in mass quantities. The whole (initial) purpose of BFDI’s Bomby is to mass kill characters when necessary and freak out when his fuse is lit. And technically, on a surface level, Bomb appears the same way. He blows up when it's funny, his arrival in Idiotic Island causes mass panic, and he screams at the top of his lungs when he sees MePhone's plane fly by at the beginning of season two. But these scenes actually make up only a fraction of his dialogue - and the interesting irony of Bomb is an almost meta-level of self-awareness of what he is, and his attempt to break out of that when he has the autonomy and power to do so.

"Double Digit Desert" in particular points to Bomb's general preference for non-violence and passiveness (or at least, violence that does not involve him blowing up and hurting a bunch of people). Despite clearly having the physical strength and prowess to destroy the desert/his obstacles, his first instinct is to… verbally threaten the fence to move. He is willing to use physical skills to help his ally (OJ), yet interestingly, he abstains from doing so if it would possibly hurt himself or others. The post-ending scene of "The Crappy Cliff (Remastered)" is ESPECIALLY on-the-nose with this - he is aware that yes, he can blow up and kill everyone with ease, but will only do so under the circumstance it helps everyone's problems (that is, getting them out of falling for non-existence). He knows he is made to be a weapon of mass destruction, but actively refuses to live up to that unless given the “yes” from everyone else. His explosions, at least when done of his own will, pretty consistently happens in a controlled environment where it generally won’t harm others/it’s actually needed, in this case.

Yes, Bomb does have plenty of scenes where he DOES blow up and it’s a big freakout scene - but it's incredibly interesting how none of these examples are done out of his own will or to intentionally harm others, despite being an object that could easily get away with it in the same way Knife is justified for being violent... because, well, you'd expect a knife to do that. And you'd expect Bomb to do that too... but he doesn't - because it’s part of him being a “false alarm.” Funnily enough, as pointed out by a dear friend - there’s also a layer of irony that possibly the only scene where Bomb is actually feared is the one that consequently frees everyone from Idiotic Insanity.

Similarly, a great deal of his lines point to Bomb perhaps being way more introspective and socially aware than what we'd expect (or what the ableist stereotype WANTS us to expect) for the "goofy idiot.” His very first line in "A Lemonly Lesson" is him speaking up about Balloon treating Taco aggressively and calling him out for it (and interestingly enough, in the remaster - OJ, the "nice guy character" actually encourages Balloon to treat Taco awfully right after that - acting as a very interesting foil to Bomb). He becomes saddened and seemingly ashamed when Pickle wordlessly admonishes him (for his literal disability) in “War de Guacamole.” In later episodes, he picks up on OJ not caring about him as a person - he just wants to satiate his own savior complex, hence why the whole ""betrayal"" arc happens (more on that later). In spite of it all, he’s even able to separate strategic plays in the competition from his personal relationships (throwing OJ aside to win the challenge - which I want to quickly clarify that characters like Silver Spoon do things like this all the time without it being seen as a reflection on their personal relationships, so I see no reason why this logic can’t also be applied to Bomb) - something OJ actually HADN'T developed yet, hence why Bomb gets confused when OJ takes the betrayal so harshly. And when OJ continuously treats him awfully throughout the rest of season one, he eventually has enough and sassily votes for him in "The Penultimate Poll" (even mocking OJ's self-victimization).

Even his little scenes in the finale further this characterization: he leads Cheesy directly into a pun and beats him at his own wordplay, showing that although the characters around him take him as incompetent or socially inept - he is actually, perhaps, way more socially mature than a great deal of characters.

But at the same time, it’s also INCREDIBLY important to me that Bomb is also, at heart, incredibly sweet and gentle. Obviously he has his moments in season one, but literally every single II1 character was bigoted and/or really mean for no reason (consequence of being written by 13-year-olds, I guess). He did genuinely care about OJ and did plenty to help him, up to a certain point (when OJ admittedly generally did not reciprocate this level of asssistance). He didn't want to be violent against a fence for crying out loud. He openly mourns the death of his best friend by trying to play his favorite game in his honor, his first question about the whole situation being to ask about Pickle - even after he was left in the dark about what exactly happened to him. And even though he was one of the few people who would have legitimate reason to not like Balloon - he (alongside Pickle) was the first person of the II1 cast to invite him to hang out again.

This even applies to OJ (although it's very unlikely Bomb and OJ are really "friends" as much as they are just on passive terms nowadays) - this guy was so, so terrible to him in season one, and yet Bomb shows no sign of what would be very justified bitterness or hurt past that little bit of sassiness in "The Penultimate Poll.” He's a VERY big forgiver in a way while still being pretty firm about not letting himself just get run over (which becomes a very interesting parallel to Paper later on!). So much of his interactions revolve around wanting to assist or help others, too - trying to uplift Cheesy during the redline game or putting everyone out of their misery at the end of II1 remaster, namely. Bomb is one of the characters (like Cabby) that would have every single right to be angry and hurt at the way he's been treated by virtually everyone, even to this day - and yet, he isn't. He is happy. He is gentle. And he likes plants - that just shows how easygoing he is, right? (/silly)

And he can be blunt, just as he can be sassy: he can choose when to be silly and when to be serious. He is NOT as emotionally volatile as his stereotype wants him to be - even his background scenes in season two supplement this, as he quickly puts a pause on his silly dances/reactions to watch Balloon as he enters the hotel in "Rain on Your Charade." Yeah, Bomb definitely has some strange reactions at (admittedly most) times in season two - but so much of his more serious scenes point to this being a choice he makes deliberately, rather than something he just... does because "goofy guy!” I'll get more into why I personally think he does this, but the point ultimately is that Bomb is surprisingly very evenly-tempered as a character, and is perhaps way more socially intelligent than AE even intended him to be taken as.

It all leads back to his coding: being a false alarm. We expect a bomb to be one step away from lighting its fuse and blowing up. We expect Bomb (as a character) to be volatile, reckless, violent. But none of that ever happens. He is composed, soft(er)-spoken, passive, well-meaning - and certainly thinks and speaks much more carefully than what the people around him expect.

Bombjay: It sucks, and that's why we love it (+ a smaller analysis on OJ/Paper)

Of all things Bomb is probably most utilized or known for in this fandom - it's specifically his dynamic with OJ. And for very, very good reason. Bomb and OJ are, undoubtedly - a toxic and power-imbalanced relationship (in the context of canon). It gets to the point that even the writing pretty explicitly blames OJ for everything that happened. That's even the biggest point of criticism Pickle has against OJ during "The Penultimate Poll" - and while OJ acts like the catalyst was Bomb's "betrayal," in my eyes at least - their relationship was actually doomed from its very conception. So long as Bomb's disability began to "inconvenience him" (in other words, just exist at all) - it was never going to mesh well with OJ's self-centered savior complex. It's, although depressing, a golden example of how people very often prop up and parade around with disabled people to feel "good" about themselves for allegedly "saving them" from their lives.

At his core, OJ is a caretaker/provider who is VERY obsessed with being the perfect example. He does not care if you don't want his help - he knows best, and is the most "rational" guy on the team, so it's his “saving” you'll be dealing with for the rest of your life. It's part of what makes his character as the "hero of II" so complicated and nuanced: there are times his heart is truly in the right place, just misguided by true ignorance/not knowing any better. And there are plenty of times he convinces himself his heart is in the right place, when he is in reality being nothing but condescending and snarky. And there are other times where he is just outright rude and cruel to people knowingly, but gives himself a pass because "I'm good everywhere else. It’s fine if I’m mean just this one time.” But the worst part is - OJ is technically validated in his way of thinking. He isn't immediately wrong about being one of the more rational characters. There really isn't any other character in II that would so willingly want to create communal housing for the others or have the willpower to actually maintain it. He knows he is good at what he is doing, and he exploits the hell out of that.

Except Bomb did not validate that way of thinking, and that's exactly where the fallout happened.

OJ showed signs very early on his care for Bomb was incredibly conditional - all the way back in "4Seeing the Future,” he notably gets irritated when Bomb accidentally throws his cookie into the air (rejecting HIS gift!). He happily lets Bomb talk to him when it’s validating his opinions about Balloon in "Sugar Rush," but when Bomb tries to explain how he returned in "Double Digit Desert" - OJ immediately cuts him off and tells him to "forget it." Anything Bomb tries to say that takes longer than two seconds to listen to is immediately brushed off by OJ, who, evidently - is only interested in how he can "save this pitiful guy" to make himself *feel* good. He's not interested at all in what Bomb himself has to say, and that's something Bomb evidently starts to figure out himself toward the end of "Double Digit Desert."

And this is ultimately what leads up to their big fallout at the end of the competition. Of course, Bomb himself isn't a golden standard of niceness (as most II1 characters are) - but I think it's often overlooked that Bomb had only loosely suggested that he should win when OJ immediately retorts that it should be him, because "he's smarter." OJ doesn't think for a second - his ally, who had previously helped him all throughout the challenge - might possibly be deserving of the win, and, while obviously cruel, absolutely shows very explicitly how OJ's tolerance of Bomb was just that: conditional tolerance. Bomb giving even the slightest suggestion that he might not fit perfectly into OJ's savior fantasy instantly shattered any hope of their friendship succeeding past this point.

Coupled with OJ's vaguely ableist-sentiment doubting Bomb's intelligence - I do believe that's exactly why Bomb ends up shoving (and killing) him. It clicks in his head this guy does not care much about him - but interestingly, at the same time, Bomb initially doesn't seem to perceive this act as a betrayal as much as it was maybe a minor disagreement, if not just a strategic way of winning a competition. It's exactly why Bomb gets so confused in the following episode, where he happily goes up to OJ and calls out for him - only to be immediately shut down by OJ, berated, and then ditched for Paper.

So funnily enough - it's not really Bomb's actions that hurt OJ. It's OJ constructing a false image of Bomb in his mind, and when that helpless image of Bomb got broken - OJ betrayed himself, and consequently hurt his own ego.

OJ effectively door slamming on Bomb as soon as that perfect little image got shattered is another HUGE indicator their alliance was, at best: conditional. The moment OJ no longer needs to play into the role of being Bomb's "savior,” he goes completely mask-off in his ableism. He outright states this himself: "I accepted you for who you are!" When Bomb tries to explain himself, he refuses to hear him out and jumps to Paper instead (actually making it a point to state he's only allowing Paper to be with him to "get back at Bomb", in a way). Then, funnily enough, he exhibits the same immediate withdrawal tendencies to Paper themself later on in the episode when he tells them "Between you and Bomb, I feel like I'm in a mental hospital." It conspires all the way to Bomb's elimination, where OJ just HAS to get the last word in about how Bomb "deserves" it for ""betraying"" him.

The slightest bit of resistance, from someone that isn't expected to "resist" - instantly seems to absolutely destroy OJ's world. Every interaction he has with Bomb throughout the rest of the season is literally just OJ trying to make it a point "you did something bad and you should feel bad for me."

All this to say this isn't meant to be an attempt to demonize OJ - it's actually a very critical point of his character development, and understanding exactly where his savior complex later on comes from. Bomb possibly suggesting that his "saving" isn't exactly helping questions his very existence - and it thus results in OJ having an extreme meltdown that leads to him self-victimizing himself, because if Bomb isn't the one in the wrong - then HE is, and that can't be possible, because he has to be a good person. He needs to be the hero. OJ is VERY horribly ableist to Bomb, but in a way, it may even be internalized ableism to himself - not addressing his fixation on being a hero is, in fact, unhealthy and incredibly damaging for his esteem.

But this is where Paper comes in - and is exactly why Bomb and Paper, surprisingly, have two incredibly interesting parallels. Paper is set up as the “same formula, different answer” side of Bomb - their relationship begins in eerily similar contexts. The Paper/OJ alliance starts out with Paper literally below him. It's not Paper giving OJ a chance - it's OJ giving Paper the opportunity of "okay, prove you're better than Bomb." Then when EP/Looseleaf comes into the picture, it evolves into "now how can I save YOU?". I do believe OJ's intentions with EP are more genuine than it was with Bomb - but at heart, it is still the same thing of OJ wanting to save someone. Only, because Paper is much more vulnerable and ""newer"" to socializing, in a way (than Bomb is at least) - they let him. They actively need someone to rely on, and OJ seems to fit perfectly into that mold. Getting rid of EP seems like a good answer to both of them - and when Paper does "overcome their evil alter!!!", OJ gets the self-validation that look, he DID help someone! And now Paper should be indebted to him.

"The Tile Divide" is an all but explicit parallel to "Double Digit Desert": only Paper is a doormat. Their imbalanced relationship with OJ has made them subtly become the “inferior,” and so their solution is to fawn/play into that, rather than Bomb's solution of "I should stand up for myself." Tile Divide is a test to determine whether or not Paper/OJ is going to last beyond the competition, and by Paper allowing OJ to win - and, most importantly, accepting and framing it as "punishment" for them not helping him earlier with his orange juice problem - is exactly what made Payjay last and Bombjay fail. OJ tries to project his fear/insecurity of a similar ""betrayal"" happening again (by calling Paper a traitor/backstabber for trying to go help Taco with her lemon problem), but rather than pointing out that's a silly idea - Paper buckles to the idea instead. They unintentionally cement OJ's perspective as them being "inferior," but they also cause OJ to become very attached to them because they eased his fears about not being needed. It makes their relationship, in the same stroke it destroys it - at least until this power imbalance gets formally acknowledged in "The Reality of the Situation."

Bombjay is complicated. It's messy. But it's a huge part of why both characters are the way they are (and is even fundamental in setting up Payjay, I'd argue). And all of this is largely why I believe Bomb and OJ can never truly become close again - it's likely very similar to how OJ (apparently) sort of just accepts Taco is around again post-finale, even after her “evil reveal.” He gets too busy to care or think too much, although the "betrayal" probably still stings. And in Bomb's case - all that ableism and belittling radically shapes how he starts to act in season two and onwards - but he still isn't nearly petty enough (beyond sassing OJ in "The Penultimate Poll") to carry on their rivalry. And so they both set season one aside, even though the wounds are still there, and they still hurt - but maybe, those wounds sting slightly less if they just keep their space away from each other - and that means not acknowledging the problem anymore as well.

Bomb and... everyone else (and how it shapes him)

Unsurprisingly, it's not just OJ that treats Bomb poorly, though.

It's hard to talk about Bomb without separating him from his stereotype - the writing, both currently and back in II1 - does not treat him well. Everyone sees him in a condescending way. Even the writing sometimes tunnel visions him as just some "goofy guy" that can't do much else but make silly expressions. I don't want to blame the characters as much as I do the writing - but it's hard, when Bomb is pretty much universally seen in an "inferior light" and is very notably treated differently in the plot from everyone else. But at the same time, it's undoubtedly a huge part of why Bomb progressively becomes more passive, quiet, and less outspoken in the later series.

I think "War de Guacamole" is probably the most mean-spirited about this: they very overexaggerate his stammer, and all of the characters stop to stare at him in disdain. Pickle even makes it a point to stare down at Bomb and glare like he's a misbehaving child - over a disability he can't control. II2 becomes more subtle with it, but undoubtedly other characters continue to treat Bomb like a chore/hassle more than a person. Soap proclaims she "shouldn't have to worry about Bomb making a mess" in the first edition of the II comics. When Microphone notices the TV wasn't unplugged in "Through No Choice of Your Own," she jumps to accusing Bomb of plugging the video game back in - and although her assumption isn't illogical, her groaning and tone of voice when scolding him in a manner similar to a child - evidently hints at a condescending attitude that is VERY different from how characters normally address each other. When most other characters get a moment to mourn their loved ones, Bomb is virtually left in the dark about what happened to Pickle as Baseball doesn't reply to his question about his death - while none of these are likely deliberate on any of these character's parts, it becomes a depressingly recurring pattern of Bomb being brushed aside, seen as a problem, or just... not important. It's incredibly similar to the Thinkers infantilizing or treating Yin-Yang like a child/animal - only Bomb gets much less closure in that regard, as he's evidently still seen as a problem.

Personally, I have a lot of beef with how Bomb is written from a meta-perspective still. Too much of his relevance in the finale is just lightly (or sometimes seriously) scolding him for doing "something out of line." He apparently acts out about the video games, he freaks Cheesy out during the red line game, so forth. He has less... normal interactions, and more so needs to be scolded or kept in line by others. And while it's very likely his emotional maturity previously established was just unintentional implications - it goes pretty depressingly against what we've seen prior.

But meta criticisms aside, this ultimately leads me to my main point: Bomb, as established by him sassing OJ, knows what ableism is. He recognizes when he is being treated poorly, and he reacts accordingly. And in this case, it's largely why I interpret his involvement in season two as becoming deliberately quieter and reserved to avoid being belittled. I don't really have as much concrete evidence for this as much as it is just how I personally interpret it. Thus:

The Unintentional Implications/Interpretations of Bomb

I view post-II1 Bomb as a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. He has become so used to being relegated as the goofy guy people find tiring - that he plays into that to an absurd degree. We've seen in little background scenes that Bomb is very capable of controlling how he reacts to things, meaning his sillier/absurd moments are likely much more conscious than we think. And because it's conscious, it leads to me interpreting this as Bomb avoiding the ableism that's plagued him all his life, by almost trying to play into it. Obviously, he won't stand for someone being as blatant about it as OJ - but it's much easier to not be made fun of if you just... be silly about it, and be quiet.

And in some ways, perhaps it isn't really a conscious decision on Bomb's part to play into this role - maybe it's the ableist treatment of him that has actually locked him into being seen as just a silly guy. Cheesy being shocked that Bomb could actually out-pun him shows that people really don't expect much wittiness from him, Mic/Soap have both established Bomb is seen as a liability at times, etc etc. So even though Bomb acting "ordinary" and "aware" is actually what his personality consistently is (as demonstrated numerous times!), it comes off as a shocker to everyone else because they just assume he's the weird guy. Maybe that is also part of his coding as a false alarm - his coding might not necessarily affect him, as much as it does affect everyone else - warping their perceptions to perceive Bomb as an absurdity or a threat, when in reality he’s just some guy.

But this discussion is largely speculative. The II1 remaster will have a lot of things to add to Bomb, and I don't want to make conclusive statements about anything until it finishes Bomb's story. I will say from what we have so far, however - their rehandling of Bomb definitely plays a lot into Bomb truly being more of an ordinary, sweet, and level-headed guy - just surrounded by a bunch of people who aren't very kind to him.

Concluding Thoughts (Why I Love Bomb - And You Should, Too)

Bomb isn't well-written. I will say that very point blank: he is not.

But he is complexly written (...at least with OJ). No matter how unintentional, talking about his nuance is interesting. His arc is perhaps one of the most important in II1, if not the greater II as a whole for how it builds up OJ in particular. His character is treated cruelly, and yet in that cruelty - I resonate with him, and that's exactly why I think generating discussion about him, well-written or not - is so critically important and fun to me.

And although his current base is not great, I have faith in the II1 remaster for a perhaps kinder depiction of Bomb. I greatly enjoy the additional supplementation they have given thus far - generally leaving his lines alone, but giving his character more weight and intentionality in what he does. He becomes recognized and written for being Bomb - not for his disability (as a mean-spirited joke, that is).

But even without the remaster, I still truly believe Bomb deserves much more than being perhaps the least talked-about character of II1 (second to maybe Salt or Pepper?). OJ is a great part of his character, and Bomb is a great part of OJ's in turn - but both are so deeply complex by themselves that discussion like this can be generated for either in great length, separately. I know a large majority will likely not agree with my more favorable opinion of Bomb, but so long as he might become something more for some person: that is the goal of this essay, at the end of the day.

He is a flawed character, but he, ironically enough - becomes an even stronger character within these flaws. And in my eyes: any character that can generate this amount of discourse in length, has done something right enough to be compelling, even if it’s to just one person.

#inanimate insanity #bomb ii #ii bomb #oj ii #ii oj #inanimate insanity bomb #inanimate insanity oj #long post #character analysis #rhea rambling #object show community #osc #i MIGHT delete this lol im nervous about sharing my thoughts but i got encouraged to post this #if someone says im just making stuff up/demonizing oj i will just Cry #i literally dont hate oj i LIKE his complexity #but the thing is everyone already KNOWS he's a good guy #we don't need talk on that as much as we do him being bad #if its not obvious: i LOVE season 1. a lot. please talk to me about it

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no1onepiecefan · 3 months ago

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zoro & luffy and the historical doctrine of the divine right of kings.

the divine right of kings, the idea that a monarch's 'right to rule is derived from divine authority.' the idea that kings are chosen by god. while not to the letter because i don't know the concept well enough, the idea of luffy, a god, picking zoro, a king, is something i find impossibly fitting.

initially, to frame the analysis, the only strawhat that luffy ever sought after and wittingly picked with foresight is zoro. luffy chose zoro with only the knowledge of his name, like something unconscious within him needed to. furthermore follows zoro's uncharacteristic acceptance to join luffy, like something innate clicked within him too.

then, fundamentally, zoro only unlocked supreme king haki at the approximate time luffy became sun god nika, on the same night. to zoro nothing is more simple than the knowledge luffy is his king, yet suddenly, the subject of his worship became something more. zoro became a supreme king happily, because there is something a king can still follow. he can still be unquestionably loyal, harmoniously devoted to his captain, because his captain newly transformed into something even more than a monarch; a god.

the idea of the divine right of kings often goes hand in hand with the concept that a monarch's actions are the will of god, that they are acting out the intentions of a higher being, and their actions are justified this way, "by the grace of god." and while i definitely won't speak for real life applications of this notion, the idea that zoro acts out the will of his god is shockingly accurate. zoro is the strawhat's swordsman, he is their blade. zoro is the execution of the strawhat's intentions, he is the consequence that follows luffy's actions. zoro does act out the intentions of a higher being; each battle he faces is as a result of luffy, for the betterment of them, and to reach closer to their dreams.

then, even more, the divine right of kings says that a king will not answer to any human, assembly, etc. the only body in which said monarch would listen to would be their god, otherwise they are unanswered, untameable. and gosh, that's one of the fundamentals to zoro's character; that he only answers to luffy. near every other character pre-timeskip questions zoro's devotion, why and how, every fan marvels at how only luffy could make zoro into a worshipper. zoro only answers to luffy, he is only content following his direction.

lastly is their inhuman connection. hypothetically, a god picking a king would give the two respective entities an unparalleled understanding. that divine authority must have certain faith in the figure they enacted, their goals must align so uncannily, and their trust must be unwavering. zoro and luffy's bond is unearthly, it was instant. the day they met one another, zoro stopped an axe from meeting luffy's head while luffy stood unflinching. the depth of zoro and luffy's relationship is unfathomable, intrinsic and terrifying. they are soulmates, completely aligned, and that is a requirement of the historical doctrine. for a king to be chosen by a god, they must be aligned just the same, and zoro & luffy are.

#one piece #one piece analysis #one piece meta #roronoa zoro #monkey d. luffy #monkey d luffy #zolu #luzo #but not necessarily if you don’t like! platonic or romantic

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kenomacreature · 2 months ago

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ELYSIUM ESSAY: KILLERS OF THE FUTURE

On the pale's connection to nihilism, and their shared theological origins.

This essay contains spoilers for Elysium Corona Mundi; that is to say, the video game Disco Elysium (2019), as well as the novel Püha ja õudne lõhn (2013), better known as The Sacred and Terrible Air.

My interpretation is heavily informed by the analysis of the pale outlined in ghelgheli’s incredible Introductory Entroponetics. Though it is not strictly required reading for this essay, there will be resonances between the two, and I heavily recommend reading it to gain a better understanding of the pale as both a diegetic and thematic element in the storytelling of Elysium.

Introduction

This is where nihilism leads. It is no longer what could be, or what could not be. It is. [1]

So says Ambrosius Saint-Miro, Elysium’s final innocence, in the ninth and titular chapter of Sacred and Terrible Air, shortly after declaring an atomic war explicitly aiming to expand the pale across the planet’s (?) entire surface. The following chapters depict a world in the process of being wiped out. Nihilism succeeds, it seems – in what Ambrosius would have one believe was an inevitable victory. But though we know now where nihilism leads, one is conversely compelled to wonder: from where did it originate?

Here in our world, nihilism is often thought of as a phenomenon of modernity, a vague force that’s risen to prominence in an increasingly secular and existentially reflexive world. The pale is treated in much the same way by most analyses of Elysium; people suppose it to be an allegory for some offspring of our modern (or postmodern) world. Interpretations differ; some point to the above-mentioned conceptualization of modern nihilism, others might think of Mark Fisher’s concept of capitalist realism and hauntology, others still might have an extremely specialized (and limited) metaphor in mind like social media. Many combine and blend together these various readings to their liking, but most seem to agree on the fundamental point that the pale’s function as a narrative device is to communicate something about the cultural condition of modernity. While it’s doubtlessly right that the pale is used for such narrative purposes, what's at risk of being forgotten here is the fact that the pale is distinctly not a modern phenomenon in the universe of Elysium. In fact, it seemingly predates recorded history. How do we make sense of that fact?

To be clear: I'm not looking to explain what the pale is - you can read ghelgheli's brilliant essay for an attempt at that - what I wish to do is propose an explanation for how the pale developed through Elysium's history to encompass two-thirds of the world. To that end I will be looking at the pale through its association with the concept of nihilism, a connection repeatedly emphasized in the text, and to explore its historical character I will be delving into the thought of what was arguably its first major theorist.

Nihilism and Morality

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed beneath, masked by, dressed up as, faith in “another” or “better” life. Hatred of “the world,” condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, for respite, for “the sabbath of sabbaths” [2]

Nihilism really became a *thing* in the 19th century with Russian nihilism, a radical socio-political movement grown from a milieu of moral and epistemological skepticism, seeking to tear down enshrined institutions and cultural values. While I don’t intend to explore the subject in depth right now, it bears mentioning that Elysium’s portrayal of Current Century nihilism as more of an organized political movement rather than the vague dispositional boogeyman that nihilism is so often conceptualized as today takes some clear influences from the history of the early nihilist movement in Russia; Martin Luiga’s Full-Core State Nihilist depicts the countercultural movement in the process of transition into state hegemony following Ambrosius’ ascent to power. Nevertheless, though lines were often blurry between nihilism and more radical political activity here in our world, by itself the former tended to lack a constructive side: it was a movement centered on negation above all. [3] The name ‘nihilism’ was popularized by Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, where it was used to describe a disillusioned younger generation, and that sense of disillusionment is what has persisted in the image of nihilism to this day.

Eventually, Friedrich Nietzsche incorporated the concept of nihilism into his philosophy after hearing reports of the Russian movement, and it's arguably his interpretation of the concept which has really had the most influence both academically and colloquially. I won’t concern myself much with whether or not Nietzsche’s formulation is truly accurate to the historical character of the original movement; while he may have played fast and loose with the term, I do believe it’s his idea which ultimately reflects the core of Elysium’s nihilism.

Something Nietzsche held, in stark contrast to the understanding of nihilism as an exclusive phenomenon of modernity, was that it was not something new. Rather, it was only the most recent form of a far older idea. To Nietzsche, nihilism was immutably tied up with Christianity, and to what he called slave morality.

Nietzsche had postulated something of an (abstracted) origin story of morality. [4] He starts from the idea of two groups: haves and have-nots, masters and slaves, the powerful and the weak – and he traces the beginnings of morality to the concept of the “good.”

Well, what is good? To Nietzsche, the idea of the good begins simply as that which is synonymous with one’s nature. Or in more immediately intuitive terms, perhaps, what is good begins as what is good for oneself. A way of reflecting yourself in the world around you; all is good that is conducive to your own justice, your own benefit, your own power. This is to say that the concept of the good was affirmative, positive, constructive. The bad, by contrast, was an afterthought; it was simply a word to describe all that was not good, or worse yet hostile to that which was good. This affirmative morality was the domain of those who held power: indeed, its very conception was an act of power and domination. Their conception of the bad encompassed the character of those lower than them on the social hierarchy; the powerless and enslaved masses. Importantly, the condition of being enslaved was what was seen as bad – slavery as a social relation was not. And importantly, “bad” for the masters did not have any inculpatory dimension: people’s badness was not ontologically wrong, it did not call for punishment, it did not rouse one to righteous anger. Far from it; a predator does not resent its prey for being weak, after all.

Contrasting this, Nietzsche describes another sort of morality which takes as its basis the exact same content of that which is good in the masters’ morality; only, it no longer goes by the name “good.” This morality has reversed the traditional axes of valuation – but what was previously “good” is not just called “bad” now, either. The negative axis, which the masters termed bad, is substituted for a new concept: evil. The slaves, weary of life and helpless in fighting their oppressors, develop a deep-seated resentment for the masters which festers inside of them and can only be expressed through an imaginative capacity. It is thus that the slaves (in collaboration with a similarly impotent priestly faction of the masters) mendaciously turn the dominant morality against itself. Everything synonymous with their masters becomes evil: intrinsically, immutably wrong, and blameworthy. And its opposite – the good – is an afterthought: being good simply consists in not being evil. In this way, slave morality is premised on negation. This is Nietzsche’s (very truncated and simplified – because this essay can only be so long) psychological explanation for what eventually is crystallized in Christianity.

The idea of ressentiment is core; a hateful, vindictive, yet impotent desire for revenge. Also important is the promise of relief. Not only is satisfaction taken from the fantasy of one’s oppressors burning in Hell for eternity, but also in the idea of eternal reward, eternal rest, eternal peace. All that which one could not have in this life, bequeathed infinitely. Those are the engines which power slave morality for the next centuries. Though it achieves cultural victory with the coming-into-power of Christianity, Nietzsche describes these opposed modes of valuation duking it out on the battlefield of History for thousands of years; through different ages and societies, the dominant morality was invariably some uneasy mixture of the two. Slave morality is eventually perfected in the bourgeois class and achieves victory and dominance with the French Revolution, before culminating in its own self-immolation. The search for Truth uncovers the illusory quality of God – and from his rotting carcass, secular nihilism emerges like a butterfly from chrysalis, its theological shell cast off. While God and the afterlife may no longer be sustainable ideas, the rejection of the material world remains for the nihilists. Life-denial remains.

On the supposed innocence of Innocentic Rule

What if a symptom of regression were inherent in the “good,” likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present was possibly living at the expense of the future? The desire for a unio mystica with God is the desire of the Buddhist for nothingness, Nirvana - and no more! [4]

How are Nietzsche’s ideas relevant to Elysium? We should be careful in applying them since, after all, Elysium’s history developed differently to ours. That said, it can’t have been too differently. Communism is a thing, along with its associated historical materialism, which means that the development of classes proceeded along more or less similar lines – from the specialization of labor, civilization is birthed in antiquity alongside class distinctions, slavery emerges from civilization's necessities, serfdom becomes dominant as slavery declines, the merchant class of the bourgeoisie comes into tension with the aristocracy, and finally the proletariat is born from the decline of serfdom. Likewise, we have evidence of slave morality: life-denial as virtue which secures a better afterlife, [5] the heaven and hell dyad [6] and the monotheistic god [7] are all ideas we see crop up from time to time. And, of course, overt nihilism becomes dominant near the end of Elysium’s history, a situation which Nietzsche viewed as a sort of end state for slave morality.

To get to the root of how slave morality might’ve developed in Elysium, it seems prudent to travel back to the beginning of its recorded history, to the Perikarnassian. Indeed, we find that 'Pius' is said to have invented the idea of the monotheistic god and the equality of all men before it; [8] a surefire sign of slave morality. Now, to be fair, the Perikarnassian and Elysium’s antiquity in general is shrouded in mystery, and it’s dangerous to presume too much about their beliefs. Given that 8,000 years ago is remarkably early for the invention of a monotheistic god compared to our world (where Judaism and Christianity only came to prominence ca. 2,500 and 2,000 years ago respectively) it may even be that this is an historical revision of some sort.

Regardless, Perikarnassianism is always emphasized as a theology, [9] and the one thing we can (with relative certainty) say they founded is the innocentic system. The true novelty of the Perikarnassian, thus, was the view of History as finite and teleological; the future no longer a ceaseless, unknowable onslaught on the present, but a distant destination, a promise. Potentialities erode; in the ecclesiastic view, events move along a fixed track. God has a plan and the innocence carries it out.

Let’s inquire into the name innocence for a second. What does it actually mean? Ambrosius has something curious to say about it in his speech to the citizens of the world: “I am innocent, and now you are too.” [10] What this connotes to me is a certain psychological function for those who accept innocentic rule. The Perikarnassian must have emerged from a society of widespread suffering, presumably abounding with slavery and other brutally pronounced forms of class domination, with no relief in sight. Unlike the communists of modernity, a working class revolution was literally unthinkable for the laborers of antiquity, since surplus extraction was absolutely vital for the functioning of ancient civilization. What is left but to reject the world and place faith in death itself? Such (I postulate) was the Perikarnassian zeitgeist; rejection of material existence. Nietzsche always emphasized that people can suffer through anything, so long as they believe that suffering to be meaningful. And I think this is precisely what the idea of the innocence provided: a meaning for one’s place in the world, in history. It said: you are okay. You suffer now, but that suffering is necessary. Your existence is not arbitrary; it is positioned on a path that is proceeding righteously towards liberation. The basic idea behind the innocentic system is that people defer responsibility for their own existence to an innocence, which redeems it as necessary (and thus innocent) by virtue of their own inherent necessity (thus innocence). I also believe (assuming that the Perikarnassian really was the first monotheist) that followers were assured that upon their own death, they would be reunited with God, and that the destination of History was a universal reunion in divinity, a perfectation; in other words, I think the Perikarnassian faith developed Elysium’s first robust eschatology.

We know that the pale was first studied in Perikarnassian antiquity. But there’s something peculiar about the information we get: study of the pale only reaches back 6,000 years, 2,000 years after the Perikarnassian was appointed innocence. 2,000 years is a long time. We know that by the time the pale was being studied, it surrounded the Perikarnassian super-isola, even if its inhabitants were only aware of it to the west. [11] But did the same apply when the Perikarnassian was coming into power? My proposal is that the first major expansion of the pale was the result of the invention of innocentic rule. Through a rejection of material existence, and belief in its eventual end, possible futures were narrowed down, feeding the pale. In a world like Elysium’s where thoughts have extra-physical properties, it perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise if the first step on the road towards apocalypse was the widespread belief in its inevitability.

Nihilist Universalism

Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. [12]

The nihilists of Elysium's modernity understand themselves to be rebels, breaking with the past in radical fashion. I suspect they’re really anything but. They are, rather, the culmination of the past 8,000 years of cultural development. Ambrosius Saint-Miro understood this fundamentally, and though we should be careful not to just take him at this word, I really can’t disagree when he positions himself as the inheritor of the innocences’ historical legacy. The widespread belief in an inevitable reckoning made it a reality; Ambrosisus was simply the one who ended up fulfilling that long-held desire.

I really think that in Elysium, nihilism should be understood as a latent principle pervasive throughout human history, present from its dawn and structuring most of its hegemonic culture as it develops into the perfected form that materializes at the end. It contaminates everything. Moralism seems like its opponent – the Moralintern talks of its duty to protect humanity from eschatologians, [13] and Mesque street nihilists talk of moralf*gs [14] – but really, they are united on the question of humanity’s future: there is none. The main difference is that the moralists believe that humanity already achieved its highest level with Dolorian humanism, whereas nihilists believe there to be one more step. The moralists enable the nihilists, because no one could be satisfied with the status quo they reify as humanity’s final form. By closing off alternative paths, they leave people with only the same choice as the ancient Perikarnassians: to reject the world entirely.

The line is likewise thin between communism and nihilism. In-universe theorists have framed communism as a secularized version of Perikarnassian theology, [15] and in our world similar comparisons have been drawn with Christianity and Judaism. The communist view of history is, if not teleological, then at least perilously close. It likewise dreams of future liberation, made inevitable by the laws of history. The difference is that in spite of its arguable origin in slave morality, communism rejects it. Communism conceives of a future beyond liberation. Its hope for the future is nearly limitless, the plans for a post-revolutionary humanity are too many to count, and it's all possible in this world, by ordinary human hands, if only we fight. [16] That is the difference; absolute negation is replaced by sublation. Communism isn’t the end, it’s a new beginning. As the ghost of Ignus Nilsen sums up: “Communism is the morning, it is jubilation!” [17] This is why Sola is actually, in spite of what some Yugo nationalists believed, a truly communistic innocence. Paradoxically, it was only by rejecting the innocentic system itself, undermining its credibility and power, that she could ever truly embody the revolutionary spirit.

One day, I was scrolling through reddit when I saw this meme posted on the subreddit r/nihilism, which I guess the algorithm thought appealed to me.

It’s a very simple, typical kind of antinatalist sentiment, but I found it illuminating. This is just suicidal ideation universalized. Instead of non-existence being preferable to one’s particular set of circumstances, non-existence is placed above existence itself. And really, this is what almost all organized religions amount to; it is the basis of slave morality.

I haven’t talked much about the ressentiment that so majorly factors into Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality and nihilism, but if we look at Zigi, Elysium’s nihilist par excellence, we see very well the consequences of a worldview based entirely on negation. Zigi’s attraction to communism extends only to its destructive potential, its utility in tearing down the middle class. Zigi’s not motivated by any kind of hope for a better world, only by his hatred for everything in it and especially those on the rung above him. As the text colorfully puts it, he wields the communist tradition’s numerous terms for the bourgeoisie “like a butterfly knife” [18] and before long is hallucinating Ignus Nilsen egging him on as he promises to rape and murder them. Zigi himself is not oblivious to his own motivations, at least not twenty years later; Ignus asks him, “Why have you been with me all these years if you don’t believe in communism?” and Zigi answers, “Because of anger towards those who’ve had it better in life.” [19]

Nihilism doesn’t discriminate. As we see with Zigi, communism can easily be bent towards nihilistic ends. So can fascism: Ambrosius comes to power by weaponizing nationalism in a similar way. [20] Nor are moralism or ultraliberalism or any other ideologies off-limits. Ambrosius understood that nihilism is anti-sectarian; people can find relief and comfort in anything as long as it's incubated in the warmth of memory. Maybe it’s the mass optimism of revolution, or the splendor of a royal parade, or the extravagance of boiadeiro movies, or the power of Dolores Dei radiating off the stained glass. “I don’t pretend to know what terrible beauty is to you. The secret to your heart.” [21] Ambrosius positions entropolism as the realization of heaven on earth, by swallowing material existence in its own memory. But is this right? When Zigi spouts Miroan philosophy, the narration tellingly informs us that the hall is filled with his “half-truths.” [22] One is compelled to ask: who will be doing this remembering? Who will be there to live in the past? Ambrosius certainly does not make a distinction between annihilation via the pale or via atomic explosion. Nihilism lays bare what apocalyptic faith has always been beneath the obfuscations: at heart, a desire to be unborn.

Death -- but for the universe.

List of references

1 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 9. Group Ibex translation

2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “An Attempt at Self-Criticism”, preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Walter Kaufmann translation

3 Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche, pp. 140

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (which the discussion of Nietzsche's metaethical theory in "Nihilism and Morality" is primarily drawing from)

5 “One should live virtuously in this life to live better in the afterlife…” (FAYDE)

6 “The passage between heaven and hell…”

7 “God is dead…”

8 “It’s said he *invented* God…”

9 “Perikarnassian theology…”

10 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 9. Group Ibex translation

11 “The study of the pale reaches back 6,000 years…”

12 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism. Philip Mairet translation

13 “Protecting it from ideological highwaymen and eschatologians…”

14 Martin Luiga, Full-Core State Nihilist

15 “It replaces faith in the divine with faith in humanity’s future…”

16 “All the other plans we had. To love. To colonize the pale…”

17 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 16. Group Ibex translation

18 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 12. Group Ibex translation

19 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 16. Group Ibex translation

20 “An especially nihilistic strain of nationalism…”

21 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 9. Group Ibex translation

22 Robert Kurvitz, Sacred and Terrible Air, Chapter 12. Group Ibex translation

#elysium corona mundi

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sporesgalaxy · 2 years ago

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me when the ship fic is not also an in-depth thesis with multiple cited sources proposing an analysis of one or both characters' psyches down to the most fundamental level

#SORRY I STARTED OUT WITH ACE OF TOURNEY FANFICTION. AS IF ITS MY FUCKING FAULT #adddna #'why dont YOU just write the character analysis' I HAUVE COVIDDDDD. IM TOO SLEEPY RIGHT NOW. I NEED SOMEONE ELSE TO BE INSANE FOR ME SO BAD #'is this about--' YES ITS ABOUT ZORO AND SANJI OKAY FUCKING WHATEVER .#•••

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kob131 · 3 months ago

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So, I just got done watching Superman vs. The Elite. Long story short, I saw a former friend call it the 'God's Not Dead of Superman stories' (don't bother asking who, I won't answer). And having heard basically the exact opposite, I wanted to check it out for myself.

Overall, the comparison has some merit. The movie (which I watched, not the comic) is about Superman and his interactions with the Elite, a group of superheroes who deny the ethics of Superman and classic superheores to proclaim that acting as if their strength gives them the right to act above the law and above the people, like killing without due process. The major point of the movie is that Superman is an ideal, a symbol of what could be. And that what he stands for, the modern philosophies of law and order are good so they shouldn't be thrown out the window. This is similar to God's Not Dead and its story of an atheist being proven wrong about his beliefs, the major point being that God exists and that atheism is bad. The point is obvious and even stated that neither story is willing to entertain the opposition and accept the valid criticisms they have, making them look insecure.

But there's a lot of major problems with this, all culminating in the fact that the comparison just...isn't true. First off is atheism/theology and Superman are basically philosophies, schools of thought to guide people through life, but Superman is also meant to be a story. Something to entertain people. It's not going to give an in depth analysis and debate about the ethics of morality vs. pragmatism and it's not meant to be one. It's not presented that seriously; it's not aiming for that level of prestige and in turn it's not held to that level of scrutiny. It's not a school of thought; it's someone's message about their beliefs at best.

Now, the movie does make a philosophical argument: that being "Things like truth and justice are good concepts and we shouldn't compromise them. And compromising Superman as an ideal of these concepts is bad." And there are flaws with the argument, in that they can't always apply. The film actually showcases why people would think this way: Villains rampage and kill others in the movie, including a government official who had defended Superman in front of his son. The main antagonist, the leader of the Elite Manchester Black, is the victim of parental abuse and first manifested his power to save his sister. And despite his flaws and the movie's fundamental disagreement with him, culminating in his arrest at the end: he's not a villain. At worst, he's an anti-villain who echoes real world sentiments and beliefs. He's a utopian who thinks that by killing villains and threatening violence, they can achieve peace. That is true.

This actually ends up exposing another issue with comparing the two movies: All of this DOESN'T apply to God's Not Dead. The atheist professor in that movie is never given the credit that Manchester Black is given. He's not well intentioned like Manchester Black: he's just lashing out about his mother's death. Manchester does lash out over his upbringing...but that's more implied and the film instead focuses on his philosophy and argument rather than the process that brought him to that point. And he's given more credit in the film than God's Not Dead gives to the professor.

Now, to return to the discussion of philosophy: that person I mentioned before brought up Superman: Peace on Earth as an example of what the movie should have done. For those who don't know, Peace on Earth is a comic about Superman attempting to fix world hunger but failing because he's simply one man and can't solve such a situation on his own. That the people of Earth must do this for themselves and all he can do is show them the way. That is questions Superman and accepts flaws in his concept so that's what Vs. The Elite should have done. Issue is that Peace on Earth, while poking a hole in Superman's status as 'the solution to all of Earth's problems'- that isn't integral to Superman as a character and concept. He can fail and still uphold the purpose his story is meant to. You wanna know what you can't have Superman do? Have him go 'Yeah, killing people to save the world is the tits!'

Superman, as a concept, is built around the ideal of what people could be. He's a super version of humanity. It's baked into his very concept. You can't compromise that. You can't compromise an ideal everyone is meant to follow because then what's the point in following the ideal? What's the point in trying to be Superman if you go 'Yeah, Superman sucks/Superman is wrong'? It's like trying to argue for the existence of God's benevolence and going 'Yeah, God's probably evil.' If you lower a standard- why would you follow it?

I know this has gotten off track from the God's Not Dead comparison so to bring this back to the movie on last time: God's Not Dead doesn't really make an argument for the existence of God. The only argument given is that 'The Big Bang is unexplained so God' whereas the whole movie is basically an attack on atheists. Superman Vs. The Elite does actually make a counter argument: that Superman shouldn't engage in unilateral justice because you can't stop him. In the final fight, Superman pretends to play by the Elite's rules and DECIMATES them. He supposedly poisons one member in an instant, rushes around the group so fast that he creates a vacuum that sucks the air out of the lungs of another, slams the third so hard that they couldn't even react and even lobotomizes Manchester Black so his powers stop working. He applies their philosophy against them and suddenly they're not fans as they become powerless against him. In-universe, Superman uses this to demonstrate the sheer horror their philosophy would cause and why he can't do it for real: because the moment he does, his tone goes from a noble example to an invincible tyrant. A point that just about every single evil Superman, from inspirations like Homelander and Omni-Man to ACTUAL evil Clarks, make. And it in turn shows why the Elite's philosophy doesn't work: it would quickly devolve into the guy with the biggest stick ruling over everyone else. And NO ONE, not even the Elite themselves, wants that.

At the end of the day, God's Not Dead is a strawman film that doesn't actually present the arguments about the subject nor does it actually defend its position. Superman Vs. The Elite does. Manchester Black sounds like real people and echos sentiments that I have seen for myself. And the comparison was always very shallow and short sighted.

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bumbled-bees · 3 months ago

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Lily’s Surface-Level Analysis: A Shallow Approach to Media

Lily’s media critiques are often shallow, reactionary, and plagued by her fundamental incuriosity and black-and-white thinking. Rather than engage with deeper themes, allegory, or metaphor, Lily tends to take everything at face value. This refusal to explore nuance not only weakens her media analysis but also reflects her broader pattern of impulsiveness and her need for clear-cut narratives where she’s always right.

Incuriosity and the Demand for Simplicity

Lily’s incuriosity is one of her most defining traits. She’s openly hostile to recommendations from her audience, dismisses ideas that challenge her perspective, and refuses to put in the effort to understand concepts that aren’t immediately obvious. This mental laziness extends heavily into her media analysis, where she consistently refuses to dig beneath the surface.

She’s shown time and time again that she’s uninterested in doing the work to engage with complex narratives — unless they’re spoon-fed to her in the most direct, unambiguous terms. If a story requires thoughtful interpretation or subtlety, Lily will reject it as “poorly written” rather than admit she overlooked key themes.

Misunderstanding Metaphor

A prime example of this is her infamous take on Steven Universe, where she criticized the series for “locking Ruby and Sapphire inside Garnet,” arguing that it erased their relationship. This fundamentally misunderstands the entire point of Garnet’s character — that Garnet is the relationship. The show’s creators didn’t "lock them away"; they used Garnet to symbolize the stability, love, and partnership between Ruby and Sapphire.

Lily’s inability (or unwillingness) to grasp this metaphor speaks volumes about her approach to media. Rather than engaging with the emotional depth and symbolism, she dismissed it outright because it wasn’t spelled out for her.

Black-and-White Thinking and Binary Judgments

This shallow thinking also ties into Lily’s intense black-and-white worldview. For her, stories must be explicit and direct — anything that requires interpretation risks being twisted into something “bad.” She’s deeply uncomfortable with ambiguity, which limits her ability to analyze complex narratives.

If a creator attempts to convey themes through subtext, Lily often assumes they’re being “cowardly” or “lazy.” She demands that stories explicitly state their messages and avoids narratives that require patience, thought, or introspection. This leads her to label media as “bad” simply because it doesn’t align with her narrow expectations.

Her fixation on absolutes further weakens her critiques. If a creator compromises with studio executives, Lily will dismiss their work as inherently corrupt or “selling out.” She’s openly stated that she has “no sympathy” for creators who face pushback from their studios, claiming they should “just fight harder” — a statement that reveals how little she understands real-world creative industries.

Impulsiveness and Superficial Analysis

Lily’s impulsive nature — her tendency to act without thinking or planning — also shapes her shallow media critiques. Much like her frequent lies and contradictions, her media takes are driven by gut reactions rather than careful thought.

This was especially evident during her Dragon Age video series, where she skipped through key dialogue, ignored lore, and then confidently declared the series poorly written — despite missing crucial information that would’ve explained the very things she criticized. Instead of admitting fault, she doubled down, presenting her shallow interpretation as if it were objective truth.

Her impulsive style means she’s often unwilling to revisit her initial conclusions. Once she’s decided something is “bad,” she rarely reflects or revises her stance — even when presented with evidence that she misunderstood the material.

Control and Refusal to Learn

Lily’s refusal to engage deeply with media is also tied to her need for control. Just as she manipulates conversations, cuts off critics, and deletes inconvenient evidence, her media critiques are an attempt to dominate the narrative. By presenting herself as an authority while ignoring key details, she ensures her audience can’t challenge her without directly calling her out — something she actively discourages.

She also actively dissuades her viewers from seeking out additional perspectives, framing her own takes as the only valid interpretation. This echoes her tendency to erase conflicting narratives in her personal life — like her shifting stories about Stockholm or her manipulation of events to paint herself as a perpetual victim.

The Result: Shallow, Performative Criticism

Lily’s incuriosity, binary thinking, and need for control culminate in media “critiques” that are ultimately performative rather than insightful. Instead of exploring themes, dissecting symbolism, or considering alternative perspectives, she relies on surface-level reactions designed to reinforce her own biases.

Her fans — conditioned to take her word as gospel — rarely push back, further encouraging Lily’s lazy analysis. And when those who do understand the material criticize her, she dismisses them as “obsessive stalkers” or deliberately misrepresents their arguments to avoid accountability.

In the end, Lily’s shallow critiques reveal far more about her own flaws than they do about the media she discusses. They reflect her refusal to challenge herself, her desperate need for control, and her unwavering belief that her first impression is always correct — no matter how ill-informed or incomplete it may be.

#lily orchard #cd-call #lily orchard analysis #lily orchard critical

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sagevalleymusings · 3 months ago

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An Overly In-depth Analysis of Spinning Silver Many Years Late

`When I first started writing this in 2022, I had recently finished reading Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver for the first time. I wanted to remember a particular quote in the book, and stumbled upon some reviews from 2019, when the paperback was released.

The quote I was looking for: You will never be a Staryk Queen until you make a hundred winters in one day, seal the crack in the mountain, and make the white tree bloom.

The reviews:

…read Temeraire and Uprooted at least ten times, but couldn’t reread this. The relationships between the two main men and two main women are abusive. Certainly, there’s trauma involved, but it’s not a woman’s job to heal men’s trauma through sacrificing themselves…

…I adored Uprooted (had some issues, but still loved it completely), however Spinning Silver just felt off – not as magical, terrible “romances”, too many POVs, etc. All in all, it just wasn’t as gripping. I liked Miryem’s character, but the other two protagonists were very bland “strong female characters…”

I hate this. I hate this so much. I hate this enough that I’m going to write an excessively long post defending Spinning Silver for three years. For everyone that doesn’t want to read a masters-student dissertation of an essay or who hasn’t read the book yet and wants to go into this spoiler free, here’s the TL:DR version. There are no romances in this book. The two reviewers above are trying to apply the enemies to lovers tropes they loved so much in Uprooted to a grimm fairy tale about politics, feminism, and Jewish persecution. There are no romances in this book. This is hard to grasp, because two of the main characters are married, and that marriage is a major part of the plot, but no one in those marriages including the men wanted the marriage in the first place. To call it “abusive” is to read modern expectations onto a historical political marriage that, while not inaccurate, fundamentally misunderstands the point and the context in which the story takes place.

Also, I would recommend the audio book, if you have trouble with multiple points of view. They are all in first person, and although it starts out with just two, we add more and more POV until there’s 5 or 6 total. The reader Lisa Flanagan does an excellent job distinguishing POVs which will make this aspect of it easier. Read the book, particularly the audiobook. But if you are reading this book looking for romance, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s still one of the best if not the best re-imagined fairy tale I’ve ever read. Here’s an excessively long post about why.

The Introduction

The very first thing we’re introduced to is Miryem as our narrator explaining that stories aren’t about “how they tell it” but getting out of paying your debts. So how do “they” tell it? The introductory story is about a girl having sex out of wedlock who is left in the lurch because the “lord, prince, rich man’s son” has a duty.

It’s about saving yourself for marriage. Even in how “they” tell it, who the man is doesn’t matter and no one is in love. Your duty to your family comes first.

This story is not about romance. The story this story is subverting is not about romance. Even in how “they” tell it, romance isn’t a good thing.

In actual fairy tales, not Disney princess stories, romance often has nothing to do with it. These are stories for little children to get them to obey their parents. Rumpelstilskin is about ingenuity and perseverance. Even in a story like Cinderella, the romance is entirely incidental - the story is about hard work, strength through adversity, and moral superiority. The marriage itself isn’t romantic in the sense that the two main characters fall in love. These stories are older than the modern concept of love. For authors with a strong sense of familial duty and nationalism, writing about something as subversive as romantic love would go against their goals.

This is the setting that Spinning Silver takes place in. It’s a modern fairy tale set in a regency era. The fairy tale Miryem tells in our introduction paints romance as a bad thing. You marry out of duty.

But Miryem from the start tells us that filial duty isn’t what the stories are really about. They’re really about paying your debts. Within the first 2 minutes of this book, it’s already told us three times that this story isn’t about romance. Once in the setting of a fairy tale about filial duty, once in the denial of how they tell it, and once in the revelation of the real interpretation.

The Power of Threes

The power of repetition and specifically of threes comes up over and over again in the book. In many cultures across the world, three has special significance. From the fairy tale side of it, Rumpelstilskin itself contains layers of threes within threes. Rumpelstilskin makes a bargain for the miller’s daughter on the third night. The queen has three days to guess Rumpelstilskin’s name, and guesses three names each day.

It’s likely that these repetitions of threes in fairy tales come from the Christian backdrop they were written in, which at times focuses on the third path in the middle of two binaries, or the significance of building power, though it’s difficult to make any sweeping, central claims about why three is significant because fairy tales are so widespread across countries, time, and religion. But it’s important that Novik is writing this from a Lithuanian Jewish perspective, so there’s a subtle shift in the interpretation and meaning of the rule of threes. I’m not Jewish, so what specifically this is as grounded in Novik’s ancestry is something I can’t be clear on.

During my research, one explanation that seems to resonate with the symbolism of this book is a Chabad interpretation. From chabad.org: The number three symbolizes a harmony that includes and synthesizes two opposites. The unity symbolized by the number three isn’t accomplished by getting rid of number two, the entity that caused the discord, and reverting to the unity symbolized by number one. Rather, three merges the two to create a new entity, one that harmoniously includes both opposites.

Lithuanian Judaism is majority non-Hasidic, so this is just one tangentially-related explanation of the importance of threes. I’m sure there’s other interpretations I’m missing because I can’t possibly begin to know where to look. But I like this explanation for grounding the story because I think it fits well with the symmetry of our protagonists and their husbands (or lack thereof), and the way the story is building to their creating something new.

So when the very first thing we are shown within the first two minutes of the book is a thrice denial of romance, we need to take Naomi Novik seriously when she says that the book is about getting out of paying your debts. Or, at the very least, this is what Miryem thinks the book is about. The way in which the characters grow and change does reveal some of the original cynicism in this thesis, but ultimately this is a story about what we owe each other, and how that debt comes for us if we don’t pay it. And on top of that, Miryem describes the love interest of the miller’s daughter as “lord, prince, rich man’s son” (3 possibilities). Who this love interest is doesn’t matter in the slightest.

All this to say that within the first two minutes of the book, if you are still reading this expecting a romance, you aren’t listening to the author.

Jewish Heritage

Also within the first few minutes of the book, we learn that Miryem is a Jewish moneylender in a fantasy version of Russian-occupied Lithuania some time in the Middle Ages. I’m not going to get too deep into this. I am, as I said, not Jewish, and these characterisations edge very close, on purpose, to deeply anti-Semitic tropes. But understanding what Novik is saying about her heritage and her family’s persecution is critically important to understanding the book.

Naomi Novik is a second-generation American. She’s Lithuanian Jewish on her father’s side, and Polish Catholic on her mother’s side. In many ways, Spinning Silver has been treated as a spiritual successor to Uprooted. Uprooted is set in a fantasy version of Poland, Spinning Silver is set in a fantasy version of Lithuania. Both stories are about Novik’s heritage, and the stories from her ancestors. Spinning Silver is a lot more obvious about this, but there’s a non-zero amount of Catholicism in the way the Dragon structures his magic, and in the older folk magic that lives in the trees.

Spinning Silver is much more explicit, and Novik has said as much, that Miryem’s family is supposed to reflect her father’s family and his experience as a Lithuanian Jew.

Our book takes place in a fantasy version of Lithuania in 1816. That’s a very specific date I’ve picked out for a book that otherwise appears to be ‘the ambiguous past.’ How did I come to that conclusion?

I did a little bit of research to try and determine when and this is what I came up with: Lithuania didn’t exist until the 13th century. Lithuania didn’t have a tsar on the throne until Russian imperialism in the late 1700s. Restrictions on Jews’ ability to work in craft or trade began around 1100 in Europe, and began to wane around 1850. In Lithuania, this fluctuated depending on the specific time period, so we can a little further narrow the timing down to after the mid 1600s but before the 1850s, probably during early Russian imperialism. Leadership is religious, either Eastern Orthodox or Catholic, who at the time believed that charging interest was sinful, so employed members of other religions, specifically Jews, to do their money lending for them. Because of the association with sinful, dirty work, and previous oppression as a religious minority, this led to a significant rise in anti-Semitism, coming to a head with a series of Jewish pogroms in Russia from (officially) 1821-1906, leading millions to flee and thousands of deaths. So we can narrow our estimation down to about 80 years, between 1820-1900.

Then my historian partner started reading it with me and exclaimed, "is that a reference to the Year Without A Summer" so actually 1816, but you can also see how easy it is to narrow that date down even as an amateur just by examining the exact flavor of anti-Semitism in the text. Which is why, even after I learned about the year Without A Summer, I left my aimless searching in.

Most audience members probably don’t know this much detail about history, but Spinning Silver is very clearly written with an audience understanding of this history in mind. We’re supposed to see the rise in anti-Semitism throughout the book which adds a layer of tension because at any moment, the politics in the wider world and rising anti-Semitism might catch up to our protaginists, and Miryem and her entire family could be killed.

That’s it, book over. Anti-Semitism sweeps through, destroys everything it touches, and none of the clever problem-solving of any of our heroines matters. It’s over.

This dark possibility looms over the story like a storm cloud the entire time. The most explicit reference is when Miryem uses the tunnel her grandfather dug.

“I pulled it up easily, and there was a ladder there waiting for me to climb down. Waiting for many people to climb down, here close to the synagogue, in case one day men came through the wall of the quarter with torches and axes, the way they had in the west where my grandfather’s grandmother had been a girl.”

The fear of persecution isn’t just something of the past. It is something that people in this community are actively thinking about and planning contingencies for.

We’re five pages in and I’ve barely gotten through the first five minutes of the book. I could do this for literally the rest of the book if I wanted to - five minutes later, Miryem as narrator starts talking about a festival at the turn of the seasons between Autumn and Winter, which she calls “their festival” and resents the townspeople for it because they’re spending money they borrowed from Panov Mandelstam on it. Meanwhile, Panov Mandelstam is lighting a candle for the third day of their own festival, when a cold wind sweeps in and blows the candles out. Her father tells them it’s a sign for bed time instead of relighting them, because they’re almost out of oil. Panov Mandelstam is reduced to whittling candles out of wood because, “there isn’t going to be any miracle of light in our house.” I didn’t catch this the first time around, because I’m an ignorant goyim I wasn’t thinking about this book as an explicitly Jewish fairytale. But Novik is obviously making a reference to Channukkah, and the fact that Panov Mandeltam doesn’t relight the candles for Channukkah is powerfully unsettling. And then on the eigth day, Miryem takes up her father’s work and collects the money he’s been neglecting, and there is light in their house for Channukkah after all, but the miracle is hard work, not magic. The entire book is like that, layers upon layers of meaning with every sentence. Subtle clues before the curtain is pulled back. I want to teach a seminar using only this book on the definition of “show, don’t tell.”

Good and Evil

But at some point I’m going to have to move on, and so let’s talk about trauma, poverty, and morals.

Novik introduces the townsfolk as Miryem sees them, but not all the townsfolk. Each person introduced by name winds up coming back later, enacting some kind of harm. But it seems to me that this harm is foreshadowed in each instance.

First, we’re introduced to Oleg. Oleg’s wife is described as being Oleg’s “squirrelly, nervous wife.” This isn’t the only time it occurs to me to wonder if Oleg beats his wife, but I think the description is intentional. Oleg eventually tries to murder Miryem, for explicitly anti-Semetic reasons, but I think this violence is foreshadowed in the way we see him interact, in brief flashes, with his wife and son, and how they’re always described as being a little withdrawn, a little afraid of Oleg, and not very sad that he’s gone, except in the part where this is going to be a financial burden on the family.

Next introduced is Kajus. Kajus who had borrowed two gold pieces to establish himself as a krupnik brewer (the krupnik he brews would lead to Da’s alcoholism). His solution to Miryem banging on their doors is to offer her a drink. Clearly getting people hooked and indebted to him is a tactic he’s used to success more than once.

The last person introduced in this sequence is Lyudmila. Again, we are given a set of three. Lyudmila is different. Lyudmila never borrowed money. She doesn’t have a direct reason for despising the Mandelstams. Or at least, she shouldn’t. And yet, her distain jumps off the page. Lyudmila is the quiet, insidious voice spreading lies and rumors about the Jewish family in town. Her violence is not explicit. But it is the same.

The last person we’re introduced to, given an entire separate section to his own, is Gorek.

Good and Evil part 2 - is Wanda’s Da an evil character?

Gorek, who’s better known for the rest of the book as Wanda’s Da, is also introduced to us first as a borrower trying to get out of paying his debts. Gorek is a violent drunk. This is established repeatedly. Gorek is not a good man.

But is he evil? Certainly he seems to be the antagonist of Wanda’s story, and there’s no love lost when he dies. But I think it’s interesting that even Gorek, in many respects, is sympathetic. He’s not very different from any of the other men in this town. Oleg is violent. Kajus profits off the many people in the town that drink their troubles away. Gorek is not uniquely awful even if he is particularly awful. And even for Gorek, the text takes pains to remind us that he buried his wife and five children. His life is hard. Their plot of land is sat next to a tree where nothing will grow. How much rye did they waste before they learned that lesson? And when Mama was alive, they had enough to eat in the winter, but only because she was very, very careful to divide everything up. On his own, Gorek couldn’t make that math add up, even before he started drinking his troubles away. Gorek is facing a life where unless something drastic changes, he and his children will slowly starve to death, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

So he sells his daughter for one jug of krupnik a week. Gorek has made his bed; he doesn’t want to keep living. He’s drinking himself into the grave he dug for his wife. But in the meantime he does still need to take care of his children.

I don’t say this to forgive his actions; I do think Gorek’s actions are unforgivable. Some people cannot be redeemed, they can only be defeated, and Gorek is one of those people. But at the end of the book, Wanda and Sergei and Stepon still bury him when they go back to Pavys, next to the rest of their deceased family.

Gorek is a product of his environment, and that environment is cruel and cold. The people it produces are by and large cruel and cold. No one in the town bothers to bury Gorek. No one stops him from hitting his wife and children. There’s nothing at all strange, according to the rest of the town, about his selling his daughter for drink.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Gorek is not evil, but I also think that this book is taking pains to present with sympathy the kind of environment which creates people like Gorek. Like our Staryk king, who was entirely prepared to force himself onto Miryem even though neither one of them wanted it. Like Mirnatius, who did not himself commit any acts of violence, but who was perfectly willing to benefit from the violence being committed with his face. The world is cold and cruel, and it is very, very easy to become cold and cruel from it.

The Power of Threes revisited: Miryem’s magic

Even Miryem says that she’s had to be cold and cruel to be their family’s moneylender. We don’t see very much of this. But she does after all agree to have someone work in her house for essentially no pay. We don’t necessarily realize it, because it comes at our own turning point, but Miryem has to learn empathy just as much as her Staryk king does. When she agrees to allow Flek and Tsop and Shofer to help her with her trials.

I read Novik’s new anthology Buried Deep and Other Stories and in that collection she says it’s a line from the Staryk king about Miryem’s magic that made her want to expand what was originally a short story into a full book. “A power claimed and challenged and thrice carried out is true; the proving makes it so.”

Fairy tales are about hard work. This line from the Staryk king isn’t just a way of constructing magic, it’s just literally true. If I get a job as an accountant, despite not knowing anything about accounting, and I don’t fail, then by the end I will be an accountant. I love this, that the magic in Spinning Silver is just hard work.

Miryem’s magic is another rule of threes. The Staryk king challenges her to turn silver into gold three times, to make the magic true, and she does it – with mundane means, through ordinary hard work, but it’s done. She barters freedom for a day by turning three storehouses to gold, and she does that too – with wit and hard work, but it’s done. The Staryk king challenges her that she’ll never be a Staryk queen, unless she can do three feats of high magic, and she does each one. Or rather, each one gets done, and Miryem has a hand in it. But the first feat of high magic requires the assistance of one other person. The second – the assistance of three. Much like each trial before it grew in magnitude – first 6 coins, then 60, then 600 – so too do all three stories grow in magnitude. It would stand to reason then that the third test of magic would require at least three upon three people. But Miryem is not the only protagonist in this story.

Circling back to Romance: Arranged Marriage is Bad That’s Obviously The Point

In addition to the rule of threes woven repeatedly in Miryem’s story, the entire story itself is a Triptych. One story is the story of the girl who could turn silver into gold. One story is the story of the children who find themselves lost in the woods and stumble onto a witch’s house full of rich food. One story is the story of the duke’s misfit daughter who marries a prince. They are all of them different fairy tales. And at the end of the story, they all come crashing into each other. The white tree belongs to Wanda’s story, bought with six lives.

Three sets of three people in each story

There are many, many examples of threes woven throughout this story, but it was only three years into writing this essay that I realized that the marriages themselves are a set of three as well. After all, only Irina and Miryem get married, right?

But Wanda is offered a marriage proposal. In a story with less magic, Wanda would have married Lukas, and been yet another generation of poor, miserable women that died in childbirth. But Wanda says no, a thing entirely unheard of in this era. Women didn’t say no to marriages arranged by their fathers.

And at the end of the story, Wanda is still unwed, with absolutely no indication that this will ever change. Wanda’s agency, this rejection of marriage, is treated with the same weight as the marriages themselves. Saying no is just as valuable as Irina’s political marriage, or courting for a year and a day and marrying for love, as Miryem eventually does.

And Miryem does marry for love. She originally has no choice in the matter, but that contract is rendered void when the Staryk king is forced to let her go. We don’t see the year’s worth of courting because it’s not relevant to the story because this is not a romance but I really don’t want to lose this point because I think Wanda’s story sometimes gets forgotten precisely because it doesn’t have a marriage. But Novik is explicit about this through Wanda’s story. Irina had no choice, not really. So it never occurred to her to say yes or no. She kills the man who sought to marry her – Chernobog wanted to marry Irina, not Mirnatius. Irina murders her would-be husband, Miryem divorces hers, and Wanda says no. Yes, the arranged marriages in this book are abusive – Novik knows that and tears them down one by one and rebuilds them into something with far more agency, that our women protagonists chose.

The Story

So we’ve come all this way and learned that Spinning Silver is not a romance, not really. The married couples in the story do come to love each other, after a fashion. But that love blooming was not the point. The point was…

Well it was about getting out of paying your debts, wasn’t it? Novik told us very explicitly that it was about getting out of paying your debts right on the first page. It’s not how they told it. But she knew.

Miryem spends the entire book making her fortune from nothing. Wanda takes over the work from her. Stepon takes over after Wanda. The debt that the town owed to Josef was a major thread over and over again throughout the whole story. Oleg tries to kill Miryem over it. The Staryk king seeks Miryem’s hand because of it. Raquel had been sick because their dowry had been spent. Wanda comes to their house to pay off the debt. Nearly everything in the book can be traced back to the debt against Josef Mandelstam.

And then, in Chapter 25, Josef sends Wanda with many letters to the people of the town forgiving all the remaining debt that was owed. The people of Pavys get out of paying their debt.

But… how do they get out of it? Not through any trickery of their own, not really. There is a stated implication that fear was a big part of it. Sending Wanda with letters of forgiveness would mean that they would not be harried or harmed while they were wrapping up affairs in the town. But Josef also doesn’t need the money. They have a home of their own, many hands to make light the work, blessings from the Sunlit Tsar to establish their place in the world, and blessings from the Staryk king that will ensure their safety even through a hard winter. They want for nothing, so they do not seek to reclaim what is theirs.

And in a way they got all those blessings through paying their debts, but in a way they did not. The Staryk way of paying their debts teaches us something very important about what a debt really is. The Staryks don’t keep debts. They make fair trade. And if they can’t make fair trade, there is no deal. Or at least, they say they make fair trade. They didn’t trade for the gold they steal from the Sunlit world, though I suspect they would argue that the pain that is caused to the people of that world is trade for their putting a monster on the throne. And Miryem rightly points out that they had been raiding for gold and raping the people of Lithvas long before Chernobog sat on the throne. They make fair trade. But only with those they view as their equals.

But the Sunlit world is even worse. The Tsar doesn’t make fair trade. He spends magic like water and steals the lives of people that didn’t bargain with him to pay for it. In the Sunlit world, people take as much as they can with as little return as they can get away with. Not everyone, of course. But it is of particular note here that in this story, Jews are vilified particularly because they ask for fair trade in return. And the people they loan money to don’t want to give it to them.

But fair trade can only go so far. The Staryk king is trying to make a road back to his kingdom, and he can’t, because there is nothing of winter that they can find in the warm summer day. And he cannot take Stepon’s white tree seed, because it was bought with six lives, and given to Stepon alone, and there is nothing that the Staryk king can barter with that would measure against a mother’s love. But Stepon wants to see the white tree grown, so they find a way to plant it. Irina digs hard soil in apology, and the Mandelstams sing a hymn to encourage growth, and although none of this was done for the Staryk king, he still uses the work to create his road.

Sometimes, fair trade isn’t enough, and one must trust that it is to the benefit of all to aid each other.

The truest way of getting out of paying your debts… is to abolish the concept of debt.

That’s right, motherfuckers, eat your kings and burn the banks to the ground, love is the anti-capitalist manifesto we made along the way!

This section was going to be a little bit of a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it really isn’t. Miryem’s magic makes wealth meaningless in its magnitude. Wanda’s magic is having food and shelter to spare. And Irina’s magic is having just leadership that rules for the people, not for power. Novik’s fairytale ending is collectivism. She tells us three times, through three stories of hardship. And it isn’t even about becoming a princess, because Wanda marries no one, and lives in a magical house that seems to always have everything they need. So long as they do what they can to take care of it.

The real magic is community. Doing for yourself what you can, and reaching your hand to another when you can spare, so that they might do the same. And so long as we all do that together, the darkness cannot come in to feast.

#disk horse #media analysis #naomi novik #spinning silver #literary analysis #okay this one's long even for me #also it took three years to write #five thousand words #nine sources #and two pages of notes

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fmluder24 · 3 months ago

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The X Files Loves Dead Jews (Part 1/4): Fetishization of Jewish Trauma in the Early Myth Arc

This multi-part meta, starting with an analysis of the “Anasazi”/“The Blessing Way”/“Paperclip” segment of the myth arc, is a look at the ways in which Jews and Jewishness are treated in TXF canon, and the ways in which we (or at least a version of us) are fundamental to the story as it is actually told in canon, and simultaneously made invisible by, frankly, bad writing and a fandom that missed a good deal of rich and difficult subtext.

The title is a reference to the book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn. The basic thesis of the book is the way in which Jews figure in discourse and are exploited for political and rhetorical ends in pop culture and arguments about many topics, without anyone caring about living, breathing Jews, and how dehumanizing that is. Basically, this quote from the Wikipedia page just about sums it up.

“Author Dara Horn recounts an inspiring event for the book was at a Nashville quiz bowl tournament in the 1990s. Horn shared a room with two Mississippians, who stayed up late watching Mister Rogers. The Southerners were utterly convinced that Rogers was speaking directly to them through their TV screens — just like they absolutely knew that Jesus loved them. They waited for Horn to concur. When she instead mumbled something about synagogue, they looked, stunned: "I thought Hitler said you all were dark." Reflecting on that experience, Horn would realize that what people knew about Jews is that people killed them.”

Jews are fundamental to TXF, but really only in the pervasiveness of negative tropes about us, and that people like to kill us. No living, breathing expression of Jewishness is firmly found within the show, although as this meta series will explain, there is an ambiguous one lying in plain sight. We will get to him in time. Much of what can be said about the poor writing around Jewishness in canon can be applied to how other marginalized communities are written of by a really ignorant writing team, and I will mention some of that throughout this series of metas, but will focus on the treatment of Jews overall. I’m not the best person to speak to the other components of racist lore, but I hope this project inspires people to write and read other meta on these themes.

For the purposes of this meta “early myth arc” refers to the pre-cancer arc phase of lore. As the show went on, it became more and more about sexual violence towards Scully in particular. Of course, at this point Scully’s abduction was a major part of the lore, but the way in which it would consume her character arc and the way in which the myth arc would center on her more and more tightly was yet to be revealed. This shift in TXF was to the detriment of both the myth arc and the character of Dana Scully. The topic of the horror of the medical rape(s) and how badly it was treated in canon is the subject of countless metas and internet articles, so this meta will focus on a different aspect of the myth arc that I don’t see discussed as frequently or in as much depth as the (white) feminist angle.

Disclaimer: I have only watched the first 8 seasons and first movie of TXF. I have never heard a single good thing about the rest of the show or the second movie, so I will not watch it. This meta series only touches on events in the first 8 seasons.

Let’s get into a summary of this segment of the myth arc. If you don’t need a blow-by-blow replay, you can skip to the analysis section.

Episode Summary

This is a jam packed series of episodes. I have 1200 words worth of notes, so I’m going to summarize the plot beats briefly so this meta can focus on the problems I am setting out to describe. They use Navajo throughout the episode, but my research says that community prefers Diné, so I will try to use that throughout. If that’s incorrect, my apologies!

Let’s start with “Anasazi.” We start with breakfast with a Diné family that we can guess is a grandfather (Albert Hosteen), father (I cannot find his name anywhere which is… interesting. If y’all know it sound off in the replies) and son (Eric Hosteen). Eric is going riding. The boy returns later with an alien corpse Albert says to put back.

We see a hacker get into the state department files about UFOs. We see a bunch of what we can assume are people in The Syndicate or involved with it calling each other about the hack and something they are calling the MJ file. The Lone Gunmen show up at a sick Mulder’s house and tell him the hacker is now on the run and wants to meet him. Mulder meets with the hacker, who apparently didn’t take any precautions or think through what he was doing before doing it. A Chris Carter self-insert, I see.

Mulder shows Scully the files, which he then freaks out about because he thinks they’re gibberish.

Dude.

Scully has a brain and says she thinks it’s Diné. In the next scene, Skinner confronts Mulder about the files. Mulder denies having them and takes a swing at Skinner, who bends Mulder over his knee and spanks him, metaphorically. Scully then has to come to a disciplinary meeting about Mulder’s behavior, and the meeting basically sets up that he’s going to be fired for this. We then see Bill Mulder and CSM talking at Bill’s house. Basically, everything has gone to shit because of the hacker, but CSM is still trying to protect Mulder.

Scully goes to Mulder’s apartment and wakes up a sick Mulder. She’s worried they are going to get fired, and wants reassurance that this is worth it, so Mulder puts up the X in the window to summon Mr. X. Scully goes to research about the Diné language and eventually gets put in touch with Albert Hosteen, who was a code-talker in WW2.

Mulder’s dad calls him and asks him to come. Mulder leaves his apartment, Scully shows up and someone shoots at her, ostensibly thinking she is Mulder. At Bill Mulder’s house, he says some cryptic shit to Mulder about never throwing in with other people’s politics, how he did it and regrets it. That Mulder’s going to find out terrible things about him. God, how I wish he would just tell him something useful. But this is a Chris Carter episode! Mulder’s dad goes to the bathroom and Krycek kills him. Mulder finds the body and calls Scully, who lowkey thinks he did it but tries to convince Mulder to leave the crime scene so he won’t get arrested. He comes to her apartment because she tells him she got shot at at his apartment and sleeps there.

Scully steals his gun to run ballistics on it to clear him. Mulder is pissed as hell over this. Scully’s doing her best, but I get why Mulder took it wrong. Scully figures out that the water in Mulder’s apartment is being poisoned and that’s why a woman shot her husband of thirty years earlier that day. In the parking lot of Mulder’s apartment, Krycek sneaks up on Mulder, but Mulder beats the shit out of him. Scully shows up and shoots Mulder to keep him from killing Krycek, who gets away.

Scully takes Mulder to Albert Hosteen in New Mexico. He tells them the files are about an international conspiracy about aliens that started in the 1940s, and apparently Scully’s name is in them. Hosteen talks to Mulder about the Anasazi being abducted by aliens. (Eye roll). Eric takes Mulder to the area where he found the alien body. CSM calls Mulder and tells him Mulder’s father authorized the project, which he doesn’t explain. Mulder climbs down into a buried box car and calls Scully to tell her about the pile of gassed alien corpses he found. Scully tells him the documents are about Axis powers in the U.S. doing human experiments. Eric closes the lid suddenly as a helicopter with the CSM lands. The CSM’s underlings don’t see Mulder in the bunker. I’m pretty sure the implication is that he hid in the pile of bodies. This… is certainly a choice we will discuss later. The underlings toss a bomb in the bunker. End of episode.

On to “The Blessing Way,” and I will try to go faster this time. Hosteen has a monologue about “Indian” sayings about history and memory that we will return to later as well. After this, we learn with Scully that the government men beat the shit out of the Hosteen family for not telling them where Mulder is, as the government men did not find his remains in the boxcar after throwing the bomb. Scully goes to look for him in the boxcar, but when she leaves the area, she is intercepted by a helicopter and the files are taken from her.

Scully is being put on leave for missing a meeting with Skinner. The two argue about what is going to happen next and what Skinner is able to do about it. Scully goes to the basement office, but the digital copy Mulder hid there is gone. Cut to the CSM trying to convince the rest of The Syndicate the Mulder is dead. Cut to the Diné finding Mulder and starting a ceremony to resurrect/resuscitate him. Frohike goes to Scully’s apartment and tells her the hacker has been killed.

The Diné ceremony leads to Mulder having these terribly written visions of Deep Throat and his father. I rewatched this scene three times and I simply retained none of the atrocious dialogue. During Deep Throat’s monologue, Mulder has a vision of the aliens being gassed with *hydrogen cyanide* and clawing against the walls, eventually finding a little hole they tried to get out of. This is ostensibly how Mulder survived the bomb. This vision is very important to the point I will discuss below. Bill Mulder has a stupid ass monologue about fate and choices and this is when I rolled my eyes so hard they fell out of my head. So many words to say nothing at all!

Scully goes to Skinner to tell him the hacker is dead, which is somehow going to clear Mulder’s name? Skinner pretty much shuts her down and just wants the tape which she doesn’t have. Cut to Scully just now finding out about the chip in her neck??? How would she not have known??? She tells Melissa about the chip and Melissa thinks she should go to therapy to unlock her memories. She tries, but it gets very intense, the therapist startles her and she leaves. Poor Scully :(

Cut to Mulder, who is fine now due to appropriated mysticism and plot armor. Scully, randomly, sees Skinner leaving her apartment building. She goes to bed and has a vision of Mulder telling her he’s back from the dead and ready to do the work together.

Scully goes to Bill Mulder’s funeral, where the Well-Manicured Man basically tells her people are after her and might send someone she knows to kill her.

Mulder goes to his mom’s house to show her pictures of The Syndicate and ask her questions, but she keeps refusing to look and saying she doesn’t remember. Scully leaves her apartment to go to Melissa’s, but Skinner intercepts her to talk and they go to Mulder’s apartment together. She pulls a gun on him because she’s convinced he’s there to kill her. Cut to Krycek shooting Melissa because he thinks she’s Scully. Boo, Krycek. Tomato tomato tomato. While Scully interrogates Skinner at gunpoint, she gets distracted for a second and he pulls a gun on her too.

On to “Paper Clip.” We are almost done. We get another monologue from Hosteen, this one is about a white buffalo that is a good omen.

Mulder burst into his apartment and instantly sides with Scully and pulls a gun on Skinner. LMAO. LMFAO even. Maggie is at the hospital with Melissa, who is gravely injured but still alive. Cut to The Lone Gunmen filling the audience in on “Operation Paperclip,” where Nazi scientists came over to the U.S. to work for the government. This was a real thing, but TXF is fictionalizing it. The guy standing next to Bill Mulder in the photo is Klemper, who is a fictional Nazi who did terrible experiments on Jews in particular. The shudder that passes through Duchovny as Langly explains this— me too, bro, me too. I am not confident that was an acting choice, as opposed to Duchovny being uncomfortable, but it’s very compelling. In this alternative history TXF is offering, the project continued into the 70s. Frohike tells Scully her sister was shot and Scully wants to go see her, but Mulder convinces her it’s too dangerous.

Mulder and Scully go to meet Klemper. Scully confronts him about some of the terrible shit he did, which was nice to see from the token conservative of the duo. Klemper tells them where the photo was taken and the mathematical equation to use to get into the files. He then calls the WMM to tell him Mulder is alive.

Cut to Hosteen at the hospital with Maggie and Melissa. Cut to Skinner trying to strike a deal about the tape. Cut to Mulder and Scully finding Scully’s file in the archive, then Samantha’s file, which used to be Mulder’s apparently. They get split up, goons show up to kill them, and eventually they sneak out the back.

Skinner, Scully and Mulder argue in a diner about what to do about the tape. Scully decides that Skinner can start negotiating, but not actually give up the tape until Mulder says. Hosteen monologue time. The calf is sick and its mother died. This is bad. Skinner goes to the hospital and follows a mysterious man who was standing outside Melissa’s room. The man and Krycek jump him and steal the tape. Krycek escapes a car as it blows up. I still don’t know why? It doesn’t matter.

The WMM, Mulder and Scully meet at Klemper’s, who is now mysteriously dead. The WMM fills them in on what Mulder thinks was the plan to create an alien human hybrid. Scully says this isn’t possible because DNA wasn’t discovered yet. (Once again, Carter’s attempt to write a smart person fails catastrophically because he is not a smart person). She thinks the WMM is feeding them a lie to prop up the Nazi agenda of human tests. That wasn’t the Nazi agenda— the Nazi agenda was a master race, but ok, Chris. Scully storms off.

The WMM tells Mulder Samantha was taken as insurance to keep Bill Mulder from revealing the truth, and now Mulder is in danger. Krycek calls the CSM to tell him he’s alive. Teena tells Mulder Bill is the one who picked who would be insurance. Skinner tells the CSM Hosteen used oral Diné tradition to teach a bunch of men the contents of the file, so destroying the tape won’t do anything. The plot hinging on the U.S. government not killing a bunch of Native Americans is… exasperating but I suppose it is science fiction. Melissa dies.

Analysis

The invocation of the history of the Nazis for a sci-fi myth arc dehistoricizes the Nazis, making them into campy fictional villains rather than real people who harmed real people. Of course, the Nazis went after many groups, but it is absolutely undeniable that antisemitism and anti-Roma racism was fundamental to the entire project of Nazism and not a quirk of history. This problem is not isolated to these episodes— the later episode titled “Herrenvolk” also invokes this history. There is a similar critique to be made of “731” and “Nisei” and dehistorization of Japanese WW2 war crimes. In TXF’s telling of events, the legacy of German fascism is some goofy alien nonsense, and not the nationalistic fascism of the modern day. Of course, we live in a different time politically now, but it still creates this alternative history where the legacy reads totally differently and is removed from the actual historical legacy that we must constantly grapple with.

Furthermore, the imagery invoked in the gassing on the aliens, desperately clawing at the concrete wall to get out of the small room they are trapped in is a conscious invocation of gas chambers. The decision to use hydrogen cyanide is deliberate. I only wonder why they didn’t go even further and label the canister Zyklon B, but we must be thankful for small mercies.

The writers might not have always known the tropes they were playing with, but in my opinion, this is too extended a sequence to be a coincidence. Surely even CC isn’t this ignorant. (He might be though. I do not believe he is a smart man.) To then add to that imagery by having Mulder (who we will get to in the final installment of The X Files Loves Dead Jews) hide in the pile of gassed corpses from the government who is trying to kill him is to reinforce Mulder’s association with these tropes. To what end is Mulder constantly martyred in ways that invoke historical Jewish suffering? We will get there.

There is another element to this arc that I’m not sure they totally thought through and that’s the division of the concepts of memory and history. Here's a quotation that starts off "The Blessing Way."

Hosteen: There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth.

There is something frustrating about things like “ancient Indian saying” rather than attribution to whichever actual community this idea comes from, assuming it comes from one at all and not CC’s brain. As I stated in the front matter, the problems in the portrayal of Jewishness are not isolated to Jewishness; they frequently apply to other marginalized groups, women, and general, deeper issues with CC’s writing in particular. Nevertheless, the concept of peoples who trust memory against peoples who trust history and seek to eradicate memory is quite poetic to me, and it’s actually a division that also exists in the Jewish world. There is a quote from the Chabad website by Mendel Kalmenson that encapsulates quite well the dynamic I am speaking of.

“Put differently: History is made up of objective facts, and memory of subjective experience. As you might have guessed, Judaism is less interested in dry facts than in breathing experiences. It is for this reason that much of Jewish tradition and ritual draws on reenactment. We don’t just commemorate, we remember. We don’t just recount someone else’s story, we relive our own.”

The idea isn’t that history isn’t true or important, rather that memory captures something history does not. Accordingly, in Hosteen’s monologue and this Chabad quote, we see that some treat history as something that is past and fixed, and some, in their valorization of memory, treat history as something living and dynamic.

I don’t necessarily think CC is educated enough about Judaism to be invoking a discussion of memory standing in opposition to history and being given a moral value above it, but he nevertheless wrote it. Native Americans (CC’s versions at least) and Jews, (and Mulder judging by how the camera pans over where we just saw him during Hosteen’s monologue— we will get there) are two examples of peoples of memory. The U.S. government, Nazis, and other related historical forces are peoples of history. These malevolent sources use history to eliminate the truth and will eliminate peoples of memory to do so. At the end of the episode, it is memory that ultimately saves the day when Hosteen and company memorize the files.

Paired with the intentional invocation of the Holocaust, we see this way in which marginalization is woven into the story of the U.S. governments involvement in what we learned in “Colony” and “End Game” is the impending alien colonization of the planet. Taking real life historical traumas of colonization and genocide and making it the sprinkles on your Bad Sci-fi Sundae is really dismissive of the actual human beings this shit happened to. I’ve only ever seen this talked about extremely briefly on the podcast “The MSR Files,” but hopefully more fans can understand soon how this is a major issue. One of the ways that it’s a major issue, as discussed with the above summary of People Love Dead Jews, is that it doesn’t include anything about these dead marginalized communities and what they were/are like while alive. That’s the crux of the problem. Not only is suffering reduced to a background ornament on the overall story, the real people this happened to are erased.

This is the point of my argument and this meta. Dead Jews, along with other dead and suffering marginalized people, are something TXF loves to waive around without any of the dignity and respect necessary for those conversations. The fandom tends to not understand this very well, reproducing the same dynamic in fics. As the myth arc evolved to focus on sexual/reproductive violence, many criticisms of the myth arc tend to focus on the violence against mostly white women, starting and ending with our girl Dana Scully. These criticisms are really important, but they tend to overlook the way in which the myth arc, especially early on, is a racialized eugenicist project, which is just as important to remember as the feminist criticisms of the arc. Of course, the villains doing racist things, as well as sexually violent things or things that remove someone's reproductive autonomy, could have been a good story despite being morally reprehensible, as depiction is not endorsement, but the lack of dignity given to real world victims really makes it plain that this is not about telling a meaningful story. This is about shock value.

The next installment of this meta will move from the Jews-as-Victims framing to the Jews-as-All-Powerful one, by moving on to everyone’s favorite elite globalist [redacted] cabal— The Syndicate! In the meantime, I’ve written other meta that touches on this subject. Here’s my meta about Mulder and antisemitic tropes, my meta about Pine Bluff Variant, and my meta about Drive.

Thank you for reading!

#txf #the x files #fox mulder #fandom #txf meta #txfldj #tw antisemitism #antisemitism in media #the x files myth arc #people love dead jews #the x files loves dead Jews

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