#I think it's fair to say he is the Most Protagonist of the series (in a chorus of other competing protagonists)

[rawliverandgoronspice]

ohhh I managed to convince my potato laptop that it was indeed capable of running clip studio paint let's fucking goooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[salmalin]

My sincerest apologies and warmest welcome to my rant about FF7: Crisis Core. Or, as I like to call it,

Propaganda: The Video Game

I say this with the utmost affection. Crisis Core ranks really high up there in my favorite Final Fantasy 7 installments. I played it when it first came out, borrowing it from a friend to play on a borrowed PSP. And, the more I learn about the game and the more I replay it, the more everything lines up.

This game is not about Zack Fair.

This game is about how Capitalistic Propaganda can sink into every aspect of life to the point where it is entirely indistinguishable from reality. And it’s very overt about it. So…

Here we go.

My treatise on Propaganda’s starring role in Crisis Core.

Part One: The Timeline

Something that a lot of people gloss over due to decades of Child Heroes in media—Japanese Shonen and Shoujo series in particular—is how young these protagonists are. We’ll hand-wave a lot of stuff in non-live-action series with just a little bit of suspension of disbelief. And that’s honestly just accepted these days. But here’s the thing about those hand-waves.

Final Fantasy 7 doesn’t do that.

Now, FF7 hand-waves a lot of stuff. For example, how far you can travel in a day by foot, the distance a man weighing approximately 165lbs can jump after being genetically fused with what might as well be a cocaine demon (Jenova), and how much hairspray one can reasonably carry on a cross-country journey while on the run from the feds.

Age is not one of them.

Exhibit A: Yuffie Kisaragi.

Do I really need to say more? She acts her age. So does Zack. And Aerith, even. Most of the characters in the original lineup were over twenty for a good reason. We see several kids in the series, and they all act their age, too—both the OG and the remake. Age is not a thing that FF7 really grapples with. It’s something they take relatively seriously.

Now, to the point.

Zack is 16 when Crisis Core starts…

… and he was 13 when he ran away from home without his parents’ knowledge to join the military.

Which accepted him.

At 13.

Without a parental permission slip.

Think about that for a second.

… Or for the next several parts of this breakdown.

Part Two: The Main Character

As I mentioned in the introduction, Zack is not the main character of the events of Crisis Core. Instead, he is the focal point of the second person POV. This is not the first time Square has done this. It was done most notably with FF9, FF10, and FF12. (I’m not going to go on an Akira Kurosawa rant right now, but please check out his film “The Hidden Fortress”. FF12 and Star Wars episodes 4-6 borrow heavily from this film.) The purpose and position of this character is such that they might best witness the effects the other characters make on the world as their stories unfold, usually in the role of a love interest. For Akira Kurosawa, it may have been told this way because these people are most effected by the decisions being made.

“Well, then, Sal,” you may be asking, “who would you say is the main character? Would that be Aerith, since she’s the love interest, like in the other games?”

No, actually.

It’s the antagonist.

And by that, I mean Genesis.

Hear me out. I used to hate Genesis, for I was once young, full of judgement for flamboyancy (thanks, internalized homophobia), and was led by the narrative to believe he was mean to his friends. Then I met my Lovely beta who loved him, so I wrote a fic for her as a gift. So for that I kinda just… read stuff. Because that’s the thing about Propaganda—you gotta read stuff to navigate it. I read the in-game emails. I re-watched all the scenes I could get my hands on with him. I read his wiki and tried to track down more information about him. Then I watched the scenes in Japanese and gained a better understanding of not just Genesis, but Sephiroth’s character. And I realized that Genesis was put on this road from the start. In fact, a big part of the fact that he’s seen the way he is in Canon—only at his most hostile and lowest points—is because the story is told through Zack’s point of view.

So before we get into the breakdown, here’s the hard facts about Genesis.

1. He was a test tube baby who may or may not technically be Angeal’s fraternal twin brother, which we are not going to unpack right now.

2. He was adopted by a relatively rich family.

3. He was a child genius (which requires not only resources, but drive to achieve), and at a tender young age of like… ten or something? He decided to mess around and literally invented pasteurization. Which is incredible, and really speaks to his knowledge of the world and ability to grasp complex concepts even at a young age. But, again, this is not the time or place to unpack that.

4. He was best friends with Angeal, who might as well have been the sweetest, kindest boy to ever walk the Planet. (I’m biased. I love him.)

5. As a teenager, he became fixated on Sephiroth, who had gained national acclaim as a SOLDIER despite them being the same age. (Please see part 1 and think about that for a second.) He then goes to join SOLDIER and brings Angeal with him. And Angeal brings his step-father’s puritanical “hard work is honorable” mindset with him. (On that note, Angeal and his father’s arc really are a wonderfully scathing letter to companies that overwork their employees and how toxic/unhealthy that line of thinking is. But. Again. We are not unpacking that right now.)

6. At one point he became consumed with LOVELESS, a series of poems with heavy prose and symbolism thicker than syrup. It got to the point where he was so well known for it that there was an entire fanclub dedicated to both him and analyzing the text.

7. While he was in SOLDIER, he repeatedly had his achievements publicly accredited… to Sephiroth.

Over and over and over again.

Everyone did, really. They mention it in the beginning of the game. Sephiroth even got public credit for Zack’s raid on the castle when he wasn’t even there. How much of his legacy is real? How much of it is made up? How much of it was faked? We don’t know. No one knows. But he keeps getting credit, anyways. And when Genesis confronts him about it, Sephiroth doesn’t care. In the Japanese version of their fight scene, you could even say he indirectly implies that he wants Genesis to take his place as the “hero”. In the English, Sephiroth’s line is, “Come and try.” But in the Japanese the line is closer to, “Wouldn’t that be nice?” Which, depending on how you take his tone, can mean wildly different things—from mocking, to earnest, or even admiration—which is especially to tell because he might be annoyed with Genesis at the moment.

Fun Fact: In Ever Crisis, Sephiroth explicitly says they are making up his achievements in the press to target boys his age for recruitment. (Thus why they accepted Zack at age 13.)

My theory on this line is that he is being cynical; that Genesis doesn't understand just how harrowing and even humiliating his experience has been. This only enforces my theory that the "come and try" translation in the English not only does a disservice to a line as wonderfully heavy as, "Wouldn't that be nice?", but fundamentally misunderstands Sephiroth as a character.

8. Genesis then took the fight to Shin-Ra. Inspiring a good chunk of their staff to leave the company, he then staged multiple attacks on facilities, staff, and the main building—which also spilled out into the city of Midgar. He murdered his parents, buried them, killed everyone in town, and… Yeah. It wasn’t pretty. A lot of innocent people died simply because they were vaguely associated with Shin-Ra. These are the actions of a villain. What’s more, this is clearly a sign that he has been acclimatized to death and violence by Shin-Ra to the point where he doesn’t even consider taking hostages.

Except.

Except the entire town was a Shin-Ra town.

Banora, canonically, was a Shin-Ra built town, which means everyone there was basically an employee of the company. No one was safe. Everyone was a threat. And that…

That was how he was raised. And he finally knew the truth—that every moment of his life was touched, controlled by Shin-Ra, all the way down to his very conception. He has never known freedom. He has never known his own identity. And now that very cage was killing him, slowly and painfully, and turning him into something that couldn’t even be recognized as human. He was watching himself rot in the mirror, and it was all because of Shin-Ra’s greed. And as he searched for salvation, he sunk into LOVELESS as he always had, hinging his entire life on Minerva’s Gift because he knew he was dying and that was all he had.

9. And then he died…

10. … but then it turned out LOVELESS was actually kind of a blueprint, and he did meet the Goddess, and he did get reborn without his degradation so he was rewarded for his journey in the end.

So why wasn’t Genesis the main character of the game?

Simple.

His actions challenge the status quo without being about the status quo. It’s a story about revenge. It’s a story about retribution. It’s a story about answering mass violence with mass violence and ultimately being rewarded by it. And while, yes, the series is an action-based violence simulator, the violence in the original FF7 was a guided, tactical effort. (For all that the characters aren’t the brightest bulbs in the sun lamps.) But the biggest, most obvious shift in the narrative happened when they realized their role as terrorists—bringing mass violence to the company via bombing and open aggression—was just resulting in increasing levels of retaliation against uninvolved people. They might as well have been a child beating the ankles of a giant. The goals and themes of the game fundamentally change when they realize that answering mass-scale societal violence with mass-scale physical violence was not only unsustainable, but also wasn’t going to solve their problem.

FF7 is about change and learning when violence—and what kind of violence—is appropriate in the face of different threats.

Genesis’ arc undermines all of that, and making him the main character would contradict the very heart of the OG game.

So, instead, we are positioned as Zack, connected to him through a mutual friend. From there we see all the damage and horror this vengeance brings to those living under the status quo.

But also, that plotline’s a major downer in a lot of ways, so they needed to lighten things up a bit to keep audience involved. And that’s why Zack is, well…

Part Three: Zack is a Himbo

Please, for the love of all that is holy, keep in mind that everything I say here is with the utmost affection.

Zack is dumb as a rock.

He is a charismatic, enthusiastic sixteen year old jock who ran away from home at thirteen years old to join the military. Which, please know, why I say “military” I mean “private security guard force with a standard-issue Death Baton and a license to kill”. The first scene in the game is him being excited that he gets to murder a bunch of people in a simulation, which he is immediately scolded for by his mentor. He is a glorified, souped up private security guard who is canonically only in it for the glory at first. He wants to be a “hero”, but doesn’t seem to fundamentally know what that means. And, over the course of the story, the definition of that clearly changes for him.

Which tracks, because the story takes place over a period of time with high stress.

Occasionally I see people saying they wish that Zack had more complexity to him, and honestly? The game. Would be. SO. BAD.

Full Disclosure: I am not the biggest fan of Zack specifically because he lacks a lot of nuance. I wish he was a bit more complex, too. But I also know that would break the game. What’s worse, if he was still on Shin-Ra’s side because he understood Shin-Ra’s mission… Well… That would make him a villain, or a cog at best. That’s not main character material. It would make the ending more messed up, though.

Anywho, Zack was thirteen when he left home. He had no formal education. He didn’t tell anyone what he was doing. He even joined without a permission slip from his parents. This means that Shin-Ra was accepting thirteen, possibly fourteen year olds into the military. (Some people will say this tracks because you can get a job at fourteen in many parts of Japan. But, and this is important, you aren’t allowed to be a security guard until you’re quite a bit older, and you need a specific license for it, much like in the US.) Clearly they didn’t teach this boy critical thinking skills. Not because he’s a himbo, but because having their Super-Powered Private Security Force With A License To Kill think independently would explicitly go against their interests. (EX: Genesis.)

Shin-Ra needs SOLDIERs to follow orders or the company would no longer be able to function. Seconds and Thirds aren’t even allowed to reject missions. (One could argue that sending certain someone on back-to-back missions would be a good way for them to eliminate undesirables within the ranks by sending them to their deaths, which… would make an incredible fic idea, actually.) We already know that First, Second, and Third Class rank assignments do not actually reflect the power of the SOLDIER. This is canon. I would instead argue that those who make the rank of First Class aren’t necessarily the most powerful, but are instead the most visible in the media, thus the easiest to market, and/or the easiest to manipulate and control. (For a great example of this, see The Umbrella Academy.)

The point is, Zack may have been elevated to his position as a first specifically because he is malleable and single-minded. Even after all he saw with Genesis, he stuck by the company to the very end, with the exception of the time Sephiroth was literally guiding him to fail a mission. Zack allowed himself to take Shin-Ra’s side every time, taking down their enemies and following their orders, preserving his “honor as SOLDIER” as he had been taught. The only thing that made him stop…

… was literally getting put in a jar.

It was when he was no longer a SOLDIER.

Part Four: Honor

There is no such thing as SOLDIER Honor.

I repeat: There is no such thing as SOLDIER Honor.

It is a fictional thing that is borne of an ideology based around hard work. It only has power because it is believed in. It is an intangible social construct similar to the law, mathematical order of operations, and gender roles. So why are Angeal and Zack obsessed with it?

Pretty simple.

Angeal’s step-father followed it.

Now, we know three things about Angeal’s step-father.

1. He was chill with the fact that Gillian was already pregnant when they started dating.

2. He was a very good father.

3. He worked himself to death trying to pay off the sword he bought Angeal.

This, of course, says a lot about Angeal considering he rarely uses the sword. He essentially sees that sword as the symbol of his step-father’s life. Everything he uses it for, he sees as more important than his step-father’s life. That thing is usually Zack.

Zack, who is the child who joined the military based on stories of heroes.

Zack, who rises against Angeal in the name of his own step-father’s ideology and tries to talk him down, even at the very end. But Zack fails because he fundamentally doesn’t understand what’s going on, partially because “Soldier Honor” is just one more aspect of this narrative he was given. It is a narrative that Angeal has had to step away from, even though he doesn’t want to leave the memory of his step-father behind. He was a good man. He was a good, hardworking man.

And that is why he died.

Corporations will use you up until there is nothing left, then honor your memory/sacrifice. Shin-Ra was doing the exact same thing the company his step-father worked for did; using up SOLDIERs until they outlived their usefulness. And Angeal was horrified to realize that his “SOLDIER Honor” wasn’t honor at all.

It was willingly submitting to control.

But, unlike Angeal, over time, this meaning changed for Zack. Partially because he didn't understand it fully in the first place. It became about acting with integrity. It became about helping people. It became about not lying down and watching the abuse Shin-Ra handed out in exchange for literal money; for maintaining the status quo.

At the very end, Zack understood what it meant to be a hero.

Part Five: The Conclusion

To sum up, Zack believed in and idolized the propaganda spread by Shin-Ra at such a young age, and was so convinced by it, that he ran away from home at thirteen to join the military.

He was their target demographic, so they happily took him into their ranks. What’s more, people think this is normal enough that we see no one opposing this, because the only people who oppose Shin-Ra are “extremists” or “violent terrorists”.

Zack then became their loyal puppy, groomed to fill his role as super-powered attack dog to sick on anyone they deemed appropriate, and he filled the role. He believed he was doing good. He didn’t think they were invading another country, because that’s not what he was told.

He went after Genesis, because that’s what he was told, and he wouldn’t let Genesis’ actions shake his faith in the company.

Then he went after Angeal, hoping to get answers, only to become more confused. Angeal taught him about SOLDIER honor. He taught him about a higher calling. He was the one who made Zack truly loyal to the company. This challenged everything Zack knew.

He went with Sephiroth, planning a small rebellion of their own (a white lie on paperwork) to get answers, only to find things he wasn’t ready for and couldn’t fully understand.

Zack is shaken by each of these events. Horribly. At times, we even watch him grieve. But time and time again, he doesn’t leave the company. He sees the damage they do first hand, and he doesn’t leave the company. The company isn’t the problem, to him. He reads their emails, does their dirty work, and “maintains his SOLDIER honor”.

Zack swallows what they give him right up until what they give him is torture.

Zack swallows what they give him until he becomes their victim.

Every step of the way, Zack is fed a story of how the world is. He was raised on it. He lived it. He became part of it. He was paid peanuts to enforce the status quo Shin-Ra installed in the world by force, and he was proud of it because it was, to him, something to be proud of.

Zack believes the propaganda whole-sale, and we get to watch, from the point of view of an outsider, as it slowly destroys his life before killing him.

Propaganda has the power to make suffering normal. Propaganda has the power to make murder righteous. Propaganda has the power to take a thirteen year old boy out of his home so they can give him a sword, and when they point him in the direction of their enemies he charges of his own volition, because they made him believe in their cause. And he believes in their cause because he believes that it makes life better for everyone.

But that’s not what’s actually happening.

That’s just what he was told.

Crisis Core is about propaganda, and the depths to which it can affect our lives. It changes our belief systems. It changes our perceptions of reality. And when it’s torn down around our eyes, it can make us go insane. It can make us violent and unreasonable as we realize just how much violence is being forced upon us—violence other people just plain do not see. It's just a a piece of paper. It's just a law. It's just a job.

It's just a war.

Final Fantasy 7 was about Fascism.

Crisis Core is about the propaganda that built it. It is told from the point of view of a boy, then a man, steeped in it. He watches until the people suffering around him—Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal—are twisted into villains by the truths and lies around them. Genesis and Angeal are tortured by truths, Sephiroth is transformed by lies, and Zack is subsequently hunted down to conceal them.

Crisis Core is Propaganda: The Video Game.

[thebroccolination]

CHARACTER ARCS IN THAI BL (featuring examples from SOTUS, Be My Favorite, and The Ex-Morning)

So, Krist's done two BL series so far with another one on the horizon, and it looks like The Ex-Morning is going to have the same thing that made SOTUS and Be My Favorite so strong: The Character Arc.

One of my biggest complaints about Thai QL series is that most of their protagonists don't want anything. They just kind of walk on camera, act cute, and fall in love. Some sad stuff happens to them, and then the good stuff happens to them again, and then the story ends.

We all know these series are made as a vehicle for the actors. They include just enough fluff or spice (or spicy fluff) to trend, then companies lean on the ensuing hype to sell sponsored products, concert tickets, merch, ten-minute fan calls, fan signings, fan meetings, and top-spender events.

But most series lose me when their protagonists don't even want something that drives the story. And then there's no obstacle to that want.

Want: Arthit wants to hide behind a persona. Obstacle: Kongphob wants Arthit to allow him behind the persona.

I think SOTUS is such a successful slow-burn because it's a well-crafted story of push and pull between two well-developed characters in direct conflict with each other (in personality, philosophy, life experience, class, etc.).

And that conflict builds with each of the three installments:

The conclusion in SOTUS happens once Arthit is fully himself around Kongphob: shyly smiling and laughing while he does a dramatic reading of Kongphob's written account of his hazing experience.

The conclusion in SOTUS S happens once Arthit allows himself to be seen as Kongphob's boyfriend by the outside world (represented by his coworkers).

And the conclusion in their Our Skyy episode—as well as their story overall—happens when Arthit allows the world to see him as Kongphob's fiancé (represented by a ton of passersby in an airport).

By contrast, a lot of other series feel to me as if they haven't been edited or explored beyond a first or maybe second draft. It's difficult for me to get emotionally invested in a story when the characters are just pretty people who say things to each other. And I mean, in all fairness, considering the breakneck speed these are made and released at, writers probably don't have enough time to make anything more profound than that.

That's why I admire Be My Favorite director Waasuthep for requesting more time to work on his script. He was so passionate about that project, and he says to this day that it's his favorite of his works. He basically took apart the original novella's plot, carved it down to a handful of elements, and built it anew from scratch. Last year, he said on a podcast that fans were complaining because they wanted to see the series as soon as possible, but when presented with the choice of "make a worse series faster to appease fans" or "take as much time as possible to craft the story as it deserves to be told," he bravely, boldly, and correctly chose the latter.

As a result, Kawi has arguably the most dramatic and well-executed character arc of all the Thai series I've seen. In episode one, he's self-isolated, timid, avoidant, and selfish. In the last episode, he's a confident, openly queer, and affectionate member of a found family he built alongside the person he loves.

And even better than just having a want, Kawi has a conflicting need.

He wants to be with someone (Pear, then Pisaeng). But what he needs is to be vulnerable enough to let other people love him. Pisaeng tells Kawi in episode two that he's being bigoted against other people for assuming they won't like him and automatically shutting them all out. Then Pisaeng reinforces that point later by telling Kawi that people would like him…if he actually showed them who he is.

And since Kawi's want is at odds with his need (he wants to skip the vulnerability part, which leads to his ruinous potential future with Pear), he's not just externally challenged by his father's illness, his lack of social skills, Not's general unpleasantness, and the inherent dangers associated with changing time, he's also challenged by himself every step of the way.

Seeing Kawi go from self-isolation, in which he assumes the worst of everyone he meets, to warmly hosting a cheerful Christmas party with the beloved people he chose is immensely satisfying as a viewer.

And now in the upcoming Ex-Morning we have an entire series seemingly focused on Pathapi's character arc of challenging the person he's become in order to rekindle his broken relationship with Tamtawan. I've been craving a good exes-to-lovers plot, and I love that it's KristSingto who'll deliver that to me.

Ultimately, it delights me that in all three of Krist's BL series so far, his anxious, reactive characters are forced to self-examine and become calmer, gentler, and happier. SOTUS and Be My Favorite are just as much about self-love as romantic love: Arthit is happiest when he's self-confident, Kawi is happiest when he's vulnerable, and we'll see what Pathapi's whole deal is soon.

Ex-Morning director Lit (who also directed the first SOTUS installment) said in a recent podcast that in the early days, Thai BL directors used to only compete with each other, but they're well aware that their work is on a global stage now. Considering the amount of work that's gone into the script for The Ex-Morning, I'm tremendously excited for the story he helps to create. \:D/

Strong, nuanced characters are what I need from a series, and for them to be at their strongest and most nuanced, they really need that character arc to land.

[ankh-morporkianpostalworker]

Anatomy of a Hero - Samuel Vimes

He wanted to go home. He wanted it so much that he trembled at the thought. But if the price of that was selling good men to the night, if the price was filling those graves, if the price was not fighting with every trick he knew... Then it was too high. History finds a way? Well, it would have to come up with something good, because it was up against Sam Vimes now.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch

Fantasy has created some truly remarkable characters, and it's fair to say that Samuel Vimes of the Discworld series is among them - and he's a personal favorite.

This is the first in a (sporadic) series of posts analyzing my favorite fantasy protagonists and what I think makes them work as characters and how they fit into their stories.

Samuel Vimes is the protagonist of eight of Terry Pratchett's seminal Discworld novels - specifically, Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, Jingo, Fifth Elephant, Night Watch, Thud!, and Snuff. These novels make up what is colloquially referred to as the City Watch series, and they answer the question "what if the city guard in a fantasy series got stuff done?"

Vimes is the head of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch and starts off as a parody of the drunken watch captain, literally waking up in a gutter at the start of Guards! Guards!. While it's obvious from the start that he has a sense of justice and a desire to see justice served, years of being beaten down by a city that doesn't need him anymore has left him at his lowest point. In fact, Guards! Guards! is about him getting her proverbial groove back and solving his first real mystery in ages.

We then see Vimes grow into a respected member of the community, transforming the City Watch from a joke (at the start of the series, it's four people) into a pillar of the City, an institution in its own right.

Vimes himself struggles with addiction throughout the series with the help of his wife, Sybil, and members of the Watch (especially his right-hand man, Carrot), going from alcohol to cigars to bacon sandwiches by the end of the series.

We also see how Vimes fits into the central theme of the City Watch - social inequality and the importance of overcoming it. Sam starts the series with a... not-great view of the non-human residents of the city of Ankh-Morpork (although this view is better described as general misanthropy than racism, with him distrusting anyone who isn't his wife or a member of the Watch). This view is changed as the series progresses - between the first two novels, a coalition of minority groups successfully sues the city of Ankh-Morpork for employment discrimination in government positions and Vimes is forced to allow non-human people into the Watch. He comes to recognize that these people are, well, people with value not only as people but as law enforcement officials. Twice, Vimes uses his social power to advocate for downtrodden species to be treated as people, with full rights and protections under the law - for golems in Feet of Clay and goblins in Snuff, and the City Watch becomes the most diverse organization in the entirety of Discworld.

The last thing I'll talk about is Vimes' aforementioned desire for justice. Night Watch gives us a view into the life of an early Sam Vimes (Vimes is sent back in time to just before the Glorious Revolution, a now-forgotten struggle against a despot) - indeed, in his youth Sam was a revolutionary, inspired by Sgt. John Keel (whom Vimes takes the place of after finding Keel dead). During this Revolution, young Sam Vimes witnessed a number of things that would impact him for the rest of his life, including the torture chambers of The Unspeakables, a secret police force who committed horrible crimes in the name of the public good and who act as the antagonists of the novel. The quote that started this essay comes from near the climax of the novel, and I think it really encapsulates that desire for justice and why Sam Vimes works as a protagonist - one of the best in fantasy.

[ilikekidsshows]

Since you mentioned the name several times now I looked up who Nikki Maxwell is. From the basic description of her on her wiki page I can kinda see some similiarities to Marinette and now I wonder if you have some more in-depth comparisons between the two to share that would explain your remark on Marinette beeing a copy of her. I think the description of the character doesn't make her seem particularly unique and a character-type I'd expect to appear often in these kind of youth novels.

---

Sure thing! Here's some fun facts about the Dork Diaries series, one of the most best-selling kids’ books of the 2000s, that have been translated into 50+ languages, including French:

Nikki's iconic look is having her hair in pigtails.

She often babysits a small girl with pigtails.

She is a good artist.

She is, despite her poor self esteem, very talented in many areas.

She is extremely clumsy and prone to getting into embarrassing situations.

She gets overly embarrassed about the most inconsequential things.

She has a tendency for highly exaggerated panic spirals, where she comes up with imaginary scenarios that are full of fantastical events and are often illustrated in an anime/manga style.

She gets mad easily and it can take her a while to get over perceived slights.

She’s a bad liar but people believe her anyway.

She is a huge hypocrite, who often does things she claims to not do. (Unlike Marinette, her internal narration almost always points this out.)

She has a crush on a boy in her class, mostly based on the fact that he is nice, and her rival in school also likes him.

Brandon, said crush, is very popular but still a loner, and socially awkward.

MacKenzie, Nikki's rival, is a rich blonde bully who wears diamonds often (and very familiar-looking sunglasses at one point). Despite her vast resources, she always loses against Nikki in whatever they're competing in.

MacKenzie is a more classic “queen bee”, than Chloé, but does get called such canonically.

MacKenzie eventually transfers schools because she stopped having power and prestige over her classmates.

Nikki's biggest character flaw is a lack of communication, where she puts off telling people things she thinks they won't like hearing. (Unlike Marinette, she actually has to make it up to people when they find out she's been lying to them.)

A typical plotline in Dork Diaries is that, despite being well-liked, having devoted friends and caring parents, Nikki often hides her problems from them and struggles needlessly.

Nikki eventually gains a secondary love interest, André, who looks eerily similar to Luka in illustrations, in addition to having Astruc's favorite French guys' name.

Nikki's classmates include characters named Max, Chloe and Zoe, with Chloe and Zoe being closely associated with each other. (You know what I always say: two is a coincidence, three is a pattern, and we're now counting four same names.)

Many of these things are, to be fair, very basic school drama protagonist cliches. However, when it's this much similarity between two supposedly unrelated characters, especially with some of the highly specific similarities here, like the animesque imagine spots, it's a pattern and not a coincidence. Is the pattern that there's some template both Nikki and Marinette are based on (like how Vegeta and Hiei’s similarities are because they’re both based off the same older character), or did Astruc copy his protagonist from a mega hit of children’s, especially girls’, literature to try to copy that success? Who knows. It's not like we can expect Astruc to be honest about whether or not he copied Marinette's personality from literature.

I know Astruc hasn't actually read the stuff he claims to have read, so that's a point in favor of Astruc being a too lazy reader to copy someone else's work. However, he must have grown familiar with all these tropes somehow. You can’t hit this many hallmarks of a genre without being somewhat familiar with it, and this genre is the most prolific in literature, and there is research data showing that children often prefer either books or television, so he could reasonably expect the audience not to realize how copy-pasted Marinette is.

Miraculous and Dork Diaries share DNA. How directly they’re related I can’t tell, because I’m not that knowledgeable about the school drama genre.

[kyouka-supremacy]

hello!

I saw your recent post and you hinted that Atsushi is actually kinda twisted and that yoh don't agree with his morals?

If its alr with you, do you mind elaborating? ❤️

Alright, to be fair, I *am* self aware enough to realize a lot of what I say about Atsushi is probably fairly detached from canon. When push comes to shove, he's just a guy trying to get through. A polite dude. I like to stretch on how a lot of his well-mannered behaviour and his desperate attempt to prove himself good are moved by deeply selfish reasons of validating his own right to live, but that said, that doesn't make him inherently evil, either.

Atsushi's double morality is something that comes up a lot, so please check out these posts!! (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8). But overall... Is a good action that is done for deeply selfish reasons, still good? I'm not sure. But when I watched the anime for the first time, and in episode 8 it turned out that Atsushi was not helping the train passengers out of spontaneous inclination to help people in need, but rather just due to a self-interested aim to validate his own right to live... Idk, it didn't positively impress me? I was even less positively impacted by the later line “people can't live unless someone tells them ‘it's okay to go on’! ” The thing is, both scenes feel like more of the author's underlying worldviews that end up being conveyed through the series' protagonist, and that's a consideration to be made by its own– it's not an issue I have with Atsushi specifically, as much as me fundamentally disagreeing with most of bsd's perspectives on the world, as I've already said before.

But that doesn't change the fact that Atsushi is fundamentally selfish¹, does it? The difference is - I think - that for the author, more or less all people are, while to me no one is born selfish. But that still makes Atsushi not really morally virtuous, and I think that's narratively interesting to explore by its own!!! What if there was a character who only did good because (he thinks) that's the only way he has the right to live? What if there was someone who believed the right to live had to be owned in the first place? After having overcome the admittedly jarring sentiment I felt when first engaged with the character, I must admit those are some compelling concepts to explore, even despite disagreeing with the underlying morals.

At the end of the day, it's just a complex nature of the character? I like to emphasize on Atsushi's uncommendable selfishness especially as opposite to Akutagawa's hidden selflessness; but all said, a man who tries to do good despite it not being his first nature is a better man than any of us, isn't he?

¹ And Atsushi is profoundly selfish. I think that Beast in particular proves that he's ready to commit evil just as much as in canon he is to do good, if it's to pursue the goal of his own survival. The first thing we see him do, at the very start of the series, is, symbolically, contemplating robbing other people for his own survival (though in real life I would never judge someone's morality in life and death situations... But maybe since this is fiction, that can still hold narrative value). He will stop acting good as long as it's no longer required of him (each of his interactions with Akutagawa). Maybe it's a little pessimist way to interpret the manga, but perhaps still a consistent one?

[horizon-verizon]

Much has been talked about the “portrayal” of Sabitha Vypren Frey (and rightfully so, what the show did to her was horrible) but I’m also extremely miffed about the portrayal of Sabitha’s husband, Forrest Frey. In Fire and Blood, Forrest is meant to be a subversion of the Freys that we see in the main series, and he is meant to represent everything Walder and his descendants are not: young, handsome, gallant, loyal, chivalrous (drank that respect woman juice) vs treacherous, ugly, old, a fair-weather friend. Yet here in hotd, they decided to make the Freys scheming, demanding Harrenhal (despite it being on the other side of the riverlands from the twins) just so that show locals will froth at the mouth when they see a Frey being unpleasant.

But I really shouldn’t be surprised. The reason that all of Rhaenyra’s allies are being drastically changed is a result of the show completely dropping the ball when it came to Rhaenyra’s search for suitors back in season 1. In the show, Rhaenyra was rude and dismissive towards her suitors (even choosing to encourage bullying behavior and incite a fight between the Blackwoods and Brackens for shits and giggles, probably the most insulting scene to me personally), and didn’t try to build alliances and friendships with the lords that where courting her, and didn’t even visit them in their castles like in the book. There’s a reason why in the book, most of the realm sided with Rhaenyra without any ulterior motives or without demanding anything in return… because she was the realm’s delight. Now because the show kInD oF fOrGoT to give reasons why anybody would want to support her, they decided to make stuff up and so we get shit like the Freys demanding Harrenhal, the allowance of Blackwood war crimes, Starks always honor an oath (show locals: omg guyz that’s just like the Starks in the other show!) and not any other, more important reasons, the Arryns only agreeing because of dragons (and not any other, more important reasons) and others. It can’t just be because Rhaenyra made a good impression on the Freys, and that her cause was filled with people who were noble and cool and charismatic, because the show failed to give reasons why anyone cool would support her.

I talk abt the marriage tour HERE, where I say that it wasn't really the sort of marriage tour that you see in the show where the men line up to present their suits of marriage so directly...rather it was a silent hope underneath the purpose of Rhaenyra being more acquainted with some subjects for support similar to how Aegon I, Aenys I, Rhaena & Aegon (his kids), and Jaehaerys I/Alysanne all made progresses to make themselves "available".

In their minds, I think that they are creating obstacles & fallbacks she will eventually go over so she doesn't present as having things go too easy for her and risk people lose interest and or even accuse her of being some sort of Mary Sue, even as some also say she is terribly incompetent. That's what I'm getting, that this female protagonist must have more stacks against her for the payoff that will later swing again back away from her.

[violetasteracademic]

I hope the translation won't let me down.

I've only been in the fandom not long ago, but in that time I've been shocked by the amount of hate and criticism towards Elain. I have my own "why" for in this regard. But what do you think?

Is it that she's is not courageous enough by the modern trend of female protagonists? Or is it that she's just not worthy of Azriel? I've had many discussions about this, as well as many discussions about why I believe Elriel is endgame.

Hello friend! The translation was perfect!

I must disclaim that this is 100% an opinion post. I stay as far away from Elain hate as humanly possible, and I do not want to seek out or share screenshots of upsetting things I have read or seen. But- I had a similar experience to you. I finished House of Flame and Shadow and noticed so many little Elain coded details throughout and hints for Elain and Azriel. I became so outrageously hyper fixated, finally joined the online fandom and, well...

We all know how that story ends.

I do think there are a couple of different things at play. Some are completely benign, some are sinister. Some reflect deeper parallels of unhealthy dynamics that many women and female identifying people live every single day. I have friends that are some of the best people I've ever met that either don't like or aren't obsessed with Elain, and their reasons are fair. There are women who dislike Elain for violently misogynistic and saddening reasons that are unfair. The reasons are vast and wide. But I'll start with the easy stuff first.

Benign reason number 1: Elain is extremely subtle in the books. There is not a single person I know (myself included!) that fully picked up on everything in a first read through. My first run, I didn't even ship Elain with anyone. I mean, this was years ago and I didn't realize we were supposed to be shipping anyone with anyone. I didn't know she'd be getting a book, I was just reading and vibing with the story at hand. I didn't dislike her at all, but I also didn't catch much of her development. Then on a second re-read, once I was very much aware she was getting a book, I was like OMG! Az and Elain are obsessed with each other and look at all these little cool details about her and now I can't wait for her story!

The same thing happened to my best friend who just read the books for the first time last month. I asked what she thought about all the sisters at the end and it was: Loved Feyre. Hated Nesta until her book. I don't really have an opinion on Elain yet because I feel like I don't know enough about her. I think that's probably the most common reaction.

Then, like many of us, she tried to move on to a different book series and was like- nope. It's not hitting, just gonna reread ACOTAR. All of the sudden she's texting me going- wait, Madja said a mate would know what was wrong and Azriel was the one who knew- does that mean Azriel and Elain are mates somehow? I totally missed that before. Is L/ucien's eye broken and he needs to get it checked out and that's why he's seeing a mating bond? (Yes that was legit her theory and I'm obsessed with her for it.) Wait- Elain stepped OUT OF A SHADOW? How did I miss that? Did Azriel help her? Can she use his powers? Wait- Elain is taking lessons in stealth from Azriel and the wraiths, is she gonna be a spy? Allllll of this happens on a second or third read through. There are a massive number of people that do not frequently re-read books or have not read ACOTAR more than once.

There are also a massive number of people who don't read novellas in any series, not just SJM. People widely say it's okay to skip ACOFAS. This feels like a crime, but I myself have skipped novellas in other series.

25 percent of readers skip prologues. What!?

Elain is subtle. She is going to get missed by a large number of readers who skip novellas, who maybe would skip a prologue, who read or listen at a very surface level and don't deeply process everything they are seeing or hearing. I think this is really common, especially in areas where people are just trying to have fun and be entertained. But I think, outside of the microcosm of the most aggressive fans online, this is probably the most common thing happening. People haven't noticed her yet. They don't see her. They don't get her. But they *see* and *get* their favorite men or G/wyn.

But once you see Elain, it's like the storm clouds break and angels sing and you realize what a deep, nuanced, and fascinating character she is and how INSANELY epic her story stands to be. And then you probably go talk about it on Tumblr every day and write hundreds of thousands of words about her in fanfics (if you are me.)

Bummer but still benign reason number two: So many us are Elain, and that can have a negative impact when it hits too close to home. Elain represents a lot of emotional, domestic, and mental load labor. With the addition of her visions, I cannot even imagine her mental load. I had a very beloved friend explain to me: I am Elain. I don't want to read a book about myself. That doesn't help me escape.

I am Elain as well (in large part but not entirely) and I see the potential in her story and connect with her deeply. But I understand this sentiment. I can't say for sure, but I think a lot of people who are Nesta's for example realized they were after her book and had to actually see her journey before they could identify with it. Mirrors are uncomfortable if you don't like what they are reflecting. I think these women who feel like Elain hits too close to home in a way that makes them feel on edge *might* change their mind after her book, but if not, that's okay.

I remember during the peak of the pandemic all of these COVID movies started coming out and many TV shows were incorporating it into their story lines. I was so stressed out and traumatized that I was like- why would I watch a show or movie about a global pandemic killing millions of people with a virus I'm terrified of while I'm living it. I intellectually understood that many people felt it could not be ignored, or they were processing it by making art about it. But I did not want anything to do with COVID movies or shows. It was too close to home. I could not indulge in entertainment about something that was too real at the time. Some women feel this way about Elain. She is almost too real to them and hasn't had her chance to become more than the quiet girl who gardens and bakes and self isolates while her own family expects that she isn't strong enough to handle anything. So this I understand.

Now for the sinister reasons. I could write a dissertation about the internalized misogyny, the sexism, the insidious vitriol towards characteristics that are considered feminine and the veneration of characteristics that are traditionally masculine. But if there is one thing that I would do anything to heal in our society that hardly ever gets talked about, it's this: The world can only handle one type of woman at a time. In books, in movies, in celebrities, women are treated in lather/rinse/repeat cycles. Jameela Jamil does some incredible work breaking down the "life cycle" of women in media consumption.

Women are treated as trends. Our bodies. Our hair. Our face shape. Our personalities. And when one type of woman is on trend, all other media representations will try to ride those coattails instead of asking society to enjoy or at the bare minimum tolerate a variety of women. I have seen this cycle play out over and over and over again.

I'm going to hold your hand when I tell you this- but Bella Swan and Alina Starkov are the same character in different fonts. In the early 2000s the popular YA ingenue archetype literally had to be a mousy brunette that was kind of socially awkward and not very noticeable, not that pretty, ect ect. That was required. They were trying to tap into the antithesis of the "popular girl" whether it was a high school romance about humans and vampires or a Ravkan war. People could not tolerate YA female leads as being too pretty or too good at everything or even socially adept. They almost had to get the attention of boys for no discernable reason. *eyes roll into back of head and drift into space*

Celaena was groundbreaking for her time. Please understand I am not saying SJM was the first or only one to do it, but it is still to this day historic and iconic to have a fucking hot young woman lead a YA fantasy series that loved pretty clothes and spending her money on perfume and lingerie and in general looking good when she wasn't assassinating people. That was not accepted on a large scale. For years female YA leads were not allowed to be too pretty or interested in feminine things. Then Celaena Sardothion was like- no shit all of these ungodly hot men are simping after me because I am ungodly hot.

Female characters have been archetypes for years. Men as well, but the difference is that when you hit the level of massive popularity that only some book series hit, only one type of female character can be popular and tolerated at a time en masse. Once the masses grow sick of it, they'll replace her with someone else. The cycle of replacing women plays a huge role here. Elain is not just disliked. She is being actively replaced.

And listen, Elain is not the only character that faces sexism in the fandom. All of SJM's women are separated into archetypes: the soft and unassuming types like Elain and Elide and Yrene, who are not warriors but strong in other ways. The Nesta's and Manon's and Lidia's. We break women down and categorize them to the point where we also start to assign belief systems to ourselves and others based on what type of woman we like.

As someone who pretty much loves all of SJM's women, I can't spend a single day in this fandom without seeing a think piece on how if I like Nesta it means this, this, this, and this about me as a human being. So although I think Elain takes a lot of hits, it is disingenuous to say that when it comes to women despising certain archetypes and only liking one at a time, Elain is not the only one who suffers.

Which leads me to my final point- Because Elain hasn't had her book yet, all of her stans are based on her perceived potential, whereas the other female characters have already shown us their potential. And en masse, women, unlike men, have to show why they are worthy and likeable first. *Eyes still rolling through space* Feyre, Nesta, G/wyn, Emerie, Amren, Mor, all the women in the ACOTAR universe have shown us what they can do. For many, they have shown us what is inside their minds.

Because Elain is a seer, and SJM has called her a walking spoiler, she was unfortunately primed to not give us as much as she could have to win people over to her potential story. And as far as the shipwars, people just don't care about Elain as a character the way that do about G/wyn, who has quite literally already climbed her mountain. Who has had a full story told. Who has gotten the chance to speak fully and truthfully on her trauma and the things that were done to her and how she overcame it. And because people also unjustly hate Morrigan, they don't realize that G/wyn is to Nesta what Morrigan is to Feyre. The women who were brutalized and harmed in unspeakable ways, but through their own journey of strength, helped the protagonist find her own strength.

Based on SJM's formulas, I think we'll get a pretty big reveal of trauma Nuala and/or Cerridwen have lived through as well, and they will help Elain find her strength by being a beacon for her the same way Mor was for Feyre and G/wyn was for Nesta.

And then there is the final reason, which is just terrible freaking timing. At this point, Elain has been on the page for over eight years and we are still waiting to fully see who she is and what she is capable of. That is a long time to wait. I believe a decent majority of SJM fans are more accustomed to high output romance authors, and less accustomed to fantasy authors that take decades or longer to finish their series. This is not a judgment at all, just based on my seeing a lot of people say they haven't picked up a book in years and then they picked up ACOTAR and now they are on booktok which is just like- consumption consumption consumption.

Elain has now had eight years to consistently be the most subtle character on page, while the two men she is in a love triangle with have developed absolutely rabid and feral obsession. (I include myself in this statement. It's not normal or chill how I feel about Azriel.) And then before Elain got the opportunity to have her book, a side character in her sisters became more beloved than her because it locked into our subconscious societal act of replacing women. And now even that character will have lived for at least four years, giving people way too much time to obsess and let their negative feelings towards Elain grow and grow and grow because she's either "in the way" of their favorite man ending up with a woman they like or "not being nice enough" to the man they are obsessed with.

*My eye roll is still travelling through space, avoiding an asteroid belt as it reaches the edge of the Milky Way*

I will admit that 8 years is a long time to have created such a build up around Elain's situation which has taken the driver's seat over her personal journey and character. I don't like it, but I also don't think it's completely shocking that it happened.

This is how women are treated. And it's not even just the characters, it's the authors. For fucks sake, do you know how many times I have seen a headline or comment that says Rebecca Yarros is going to dethrone Sarah J. Maas as the queen of romantasy? Like- what the fuck? Are we seriously saying there can only be one massively commercially successful female fantasy author at a time? Even though RY and SJM literally could not be more different as writers. There is hardly anything at all to compare between them.

That's exactly what people are saying.

Because people can only tolerate one woman at a time. SJM isn't writing fast enough or posting on instagram enough? Replaced. Elain hasn't done enough yet and revealed her character quickly enough before her book with Azriel? Nope. Replace her. I like G/wyn better. Replace, replace, replace.

Meanwhile George RR Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, and Scott Lynch just get to chill and vibe and take all the time they want and no one is threatening to replace them with another man. Their male characters get to live as long as they want them to and do whatever they want, good or bad, and audiences are not looking for a "better male character" or love interest to replace them with.

The only solution to this not continuing to happen is by not treating women as trends and only tolerating one type of woman at a time or only one woman's success or personality at a time.

It feels very, very far away.

And now I'm sad.

Sorry if I made you all sad.

I can't wait for Elain week tomorrow either way! 🥹😭

[peaterookie]

Most of us know by this point that the Lupin III manga series doesn't particularly have the best reputation, but why is that?

Is it simply because of the content itself, or is there more behind it?

It is August 10th, the 56th anniversary of the og manga, and I will be exploring the causes of the manga's poor reputation in the Lupin community with as most detail as I can try to be.

Bluntly put, I will not hide the fact that the manga series as a whole contains extremely problematic elements. All three series, OG manga, New Adventures, and Shin Lupin III all contain instance of Lupin and other characters raping and sexually assaulting women.

It certainly gets better as the series goes on. At the last three major arcs of Shin Lupin III, Lupin becomes almost entirely sexless, with some instances of plain pervertedness. However, it is not an issue that cannot be glossed over and it is the by far biggest burden that this series has to carry over its 56 years of existence.

OG manga is the biggest culprit of this, barely two chapter goes by without an instance of Lupin pulling his sexual advances onto random women and succeeding. Those moments of the manga are extremely gross and uncomfortable- and it really makes our protagonist extremely unlikeable, which brings me to my next point:

The fact that the OG manga is the first of the three manga series contribute heavily to its poor reputation.

"Aiee!! No way that the biggest manga preacher in tumblr is slandering the manga! Isn't that out of character!?"

It quite is, luckily I can think. As someone who has spent about 5 months reviewing almost all of the chapters, I can say that I know quite a bit about what it does right and what it does wrong... and it sadly does many things wrong.

Of course, the main thing is the sexual violence, but it is also the series with the least interaction between each member of the Lupin gang, who are characters people already come to really like. Lacking that element takes away what many people regard to be the best part about the series.

The beginning chapters of the og manga are also poorly paced. A bunch of things are going on, and the panelling certainly makes it hard to follow as well.

And to even add to the original issue, the english translation provided by Tokyopop also fucked everything up too!! Many of the extreme dialogues that you come across, including ones that make jokes at Monkey Punch's expense, are done by Tokyopop. Tabbiewolf explains this much better than I can:

"Just remember: a LOT of the…more offensive stuff in the manga is from the TokyoPop translations. I’m not excusing ALL of it, mind you — it was the 1960s and this was an adventure/spy manga marketed at cisdudes, after all — but the script writer for the English version was extremely, uh, artistic, with his localization of the translation."

"it was the early 2000s, manga was trying to appeal specifically to people who didn’t read it: teenaged cisboys who watched South Park, basically ;) So a fair amount of the stuff was very much the new English script, NOT the creator ‘s original work! Some plots got changed entirely just because the Japanese slang from the time didn’t translate."

First impressions matter, and the OG manga makes a very bad impression for people attempting to get into the manga series. Many readers are most likely taken back by how different it is from what they are used to, and they are definitely not going to like the problematic elements.

Those who still try to give it second chances are going to be met with disappointment when they find out these glaring issues are only partially fixed further into the series. Believing that it won't get better, they end up dropping the manga altogether and generalizing the rest of the manga series as depraved nonsense.

And I can't simply blame Monkey Punch for all these issues!! It was the first of what's to come, and he was not aware at the time just how big Lupin III would become in Japan and eventually worldwide. The og manga is very experimental, and you can tell he was only trying to figure out what works. I also cannot blame the people that dislike the manga. People naturally dislike something that is problematic and different.

Heck, most manga fans feel indifferent about the og manga as well, with the majority of them liking Shin Lupin III much better.

I have the statistic right here!!! It's not a lot of people, but there's an obvious majority choice here.

(By the way, if you're enjoying reading this so far, you should totally join my Lupin III server ahem cough cough nudge nudge)

So not even the manga fans love the OG manga. In my opinion, I would definitely not recommend people to read that as their first Lupin manga either. It is the type of media that if you really love the source material in general, then it'd be ok to read.

It is quite a shame to say that the series that does a better job at getting people in the manga, is the third one of the bunch. Most people aren't going to know that however, and they end up reading something that is going to likely give a bad image of the manga.

Ok so I dont have a good segway to the second part of this post so have a panel.

Now I'm gonna talk about how the fandom itself screw up it's reputation!!

(Before you get further I have to say that I have nothing against anime fans, if I do sound like I don't like them it's just sort of poor wording on my end)

Many fans of Lupin III start with the anime, if not probably all of them at this point. This causes a huge skew in public opinion, where those who are pre-exposed to the anime are probably going to view the manga as something lesser than its animated counterpart.

This can be seen particularly in CloudConnection's video of his manga analysis, which is concerningly just a portion of this 18 minute video, but I'll look over that. The portions of the video where he analyzes the manga contain a large amount of negative opinions about it.

A lot of his points are very good, and a lot of them I agree with, like his issues with the rape and sexual assault and how its a good time capsule but definitely not something that people should start off with. But a rest of the points seem a bit unreasonable to make and rather biased, like how the characters feel inconsistent, the bad pacing, and really emphasizing how dark and grim the manga is (it is very goofy and nobody ever talks about that)

And I have to state- It's totally valid for someone to prefer one thing over the other, but my point is that when this opinion is overwhelmingly the majority, it is going to cause the general public's opinion to unfairly be against something, ignoring what it does good and pinning the focus on what it does bad.

That video example was very popular, and I know someone personally that got the wrong memo from it and hated the manga without reading it for a long time, so you can see how it can probably effect the rest of the people that viewed that video.

So what can we learn from this?

We now understand that two of major reasons responsible for the manga's bad reputation is one: the unfortunate circumstance of the OG manga being the first series, and the overwhelming public opinion being unfairly skewed against it.

To wrap this up, I ask you to please give the manga a chance!! Read Shin Lupin first, and be aware of its flaws while also appreciating what it has contributed for the franchise and anime as a whole. I hope you enjoyed this little essay I wrote, and happy birthday Lupin III!

[racefortheironthrone]

Kinda of random but what do you think of Alan's Moore comments about people liking comic book movies could lead into fascism? Seems like bitter old man territory but what do you think?

I think it's fair to say that fascism has been something of an obsession of Alan Moore's and a recurring although not omnipresent theme in many of his works.

While Miracleman is technically an expy of Captain Marvel, I would argue that the series is Moore's most extended commentary on Superman instead and especially the idea of the ubermensch. In Miracleman, our protagonist is initially thought to have been made into a superhero by a benevolent enlightened scientist, but eventually we learn that Miracleman is the product of an Operation Paperclip Nazi science project called the Zarathusa Project designed to create the literal Nietzschean Ubermensch, complete with a fixation on "blond gods" and a eugenicist breeding program. A superhero fight in the midle of London causes mass civilian casualties on the scale of an atomic bomb going off. Ultimately, Miracleman effectively overthrows Thatcher's government and rules as an enlightened despot before eventually leaving Earth for space.

Likewise, I think Watchmen is Moore's most extended commentary on masked vigilantism and thus on Batman. In Watchmen, the phenomenon of vigilantism is repeatedly associated with right-wing politics: Hooded Justice is a German circus strongman who has pro-Nazi politics; Captain Metropolis wanted his superhero teams to target "black unrest," "campus subversion," and "anti-war demos;" and the Comedian is a brutal nihilist who ultimately joins the U.S security state where he cheerfully follows orders to assassinate JFK and Woodward and Bernstein, commit atrocities in Vietnam, kill protesting hippies, etc. Finally, there's Rorschach, Moore's most famous mis-interpreted creation - Rorschach is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who's an anti-communist, anti-liberal, militant and militaristic nationalist, homophobe, misogynist, and avid follower of the John Birch Society-like New Frontiersman.

And then there's V for Vendetta, which I would argue is Moore's attempt to create a masked vigilante superhero with his own anarchist politics. In this story, the vigilante isn't a crimefighter but rather a revolutionary who seeks the overthrow of a fascist state and the creation of an anarchist utopia.

Moreover, his more recent comments about comic book movies being linked to fascism are arguably just part of his much longer-running commentary that superheroes as a concept are at the very least proto-fascist.

Having read a lot of Moore's work and interviews on the subject, I don't find his critique compelling. I think his definition of fascism is far too loose, I think his lens on the superhero genre is overly narrow, and I think his mode of analysis tends to neglect the vital area of historical context.

Definitions

So let's start with Moore's definition of fascism. I think Moore tends to really over-emphasize the whole idea of the Nietzschean ubermensch and the use of force to solve problems, and more recently he's been on this weird kick of saying that nostalgia and a childlike desire for easy solutions leads to fascism. I have several problems with this definition:

the first is that, as I've talked about in the past, fascism is a very complex historical phenomenon that can't be boiled down to a single idea, and in particular the idea of the ubermensch is a pretty small part of the German case (and even then how do you balance it against Nazism's more anti-individualistic aspects, like the mass party and the mass party organization).

the second is that the idea of a larger-than-life individual using physical prowess to solve problems is not unique to fascism. After all, during the 30s, you also had the Soviet Union promoting the heroic ideal of Stakhanovitism and the depiction of the heroic male factory worker in socialist realism. More importantly, the idea of a "larger-than-life individual using physical prowess to solve problems" is basically the same description for any number of literary figures from pulp cowboys to the Greek heroes of the Iliad and the Oddessy to the epic of Gilgamesh.

the third is that I think Moore's definition overlooks the actual drivers of the rise of contemporary fascism. Anti-semitism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, misogyny - all of these are real social and cultural forces that are actually motivating people to join the ranks of the alt-right, to commit massacres, to riot at the Capitol, and so forth. It is incredibly self-involved to think that superheroes and superhero movies are worth discussing in the same breath. At the end of the day, they're harmless entertainment compared to the real political issues that need to be tackled.

Moore's Model of Superheroes

Here's where I'm going to say something that's going to be a bit controversial - I don't think Alan Moore has read widely enough in the superhero genre to make an accurate assessment of its relationship to fascism. If we look at his comics work, and we look at his writings, and we look at his interviews, Moore's mental model of the superhero really only includes two figures, Superman as the representative of the superpowered ubermensch and Batman as the representative of the masked vigilante crimefighter. Notably, Moore hasn't really touched the last of the Big Three - Wonder Woman, a superhero with a strong legacy of radical left-wing politics. I do think we have to mention, given Moore's somewhat troubled history when it comes to issues of gender, that Moore's model of the superhero doesn't include any female superheroes (or for that matter, any superheroes of color or queer superheroes). (EDIT: I should clarify - Promethea is Moore's version of Wonder Woman, but she doesn't really come up in his discussions of fascism, and her thematic profile has more to do with Moore's interests in magic.)

And other than Captain Britain, Moore never worked with any Marvel character and basically ignores them.

To me, this is like having a career as a painter and never working with colors. Moore's model of the superhero leaves out the Fantastic Four and how their flawed psychologies revolutionized the industry and the whole idea of the superhero-as-explorer, it leaves out Spider-Man and the idea of the superhero-as-everyman whose central struggle is about work-life balance and altruism, and most importantly it leaves out the X-Men and the idea of the mutant metaphor.

If as a critic you're going to make grand pronouncements about something as morally evil as fascism, I think it really is incumbent on you to have read and analyzed widely rather than cherry-picking a couple of case studies. Especially if you have something of a tendency to mis-characterize those case studies by ignoring historical context.

Historical Context

So let's talk about Superman and Batman and their emergence in the 1930s. One vital bit of context is that the U.S experienced a significant crime wave in the 1920s and 1930s as Prohibition encouraged the rise of organized crime and then the Great Depression spurred the rise of kidnapping and bank robbery gangs. Moreover, municipal police forces tended to be wildly corrupt, accepting bribes from organized crime to let them operate with impunity, while not letting up in the slightest in their brutal oppression of workers and minorities.

In this context, I think the idea of vigilantism - while it has an undeniably racist legacy dating back to Reconstruction - is not purely a conservative phenomena. It's also an expression of a desire for help from somebody, anybody when the powers that be are of no help. And at the end of the day, unsanctioned use of force can equally be traced back to left-wing self-defense efforts from the Panthers back to the Communist Party's streetfighting corps to unions packing two-by-fours on the picket line - so I don't think we can simply equate punching a bad guy with racist lynch mobs and call it a day.

So let's talk about Superman and the ubermensch. I think Moore has a bad tendency to focus on his nightmare scenrio of a godlike being tyrannizing and destroying hapless humanity, while minimizing the actual ideas of Siegel and Shuster. He tends to take their use of the Nietzschean as a straighforward invocation instead of the clear subversion it was intended to be - rather than a blond god who imposed tyrannical rule with horrific violence, Siegel and Schuster made their Superman a dark-haired Moses allegory, who rather than solely fighting crime acted to stop wife-beaters, war profiteers, and save the life of death row inmates, and whose secret identity was of a crusading journalist who uncovered corrupt politicians.

To be fair, Alan Moore admits that Superman started out as "very much a New Deal American” - but because this kind of does near-fatal damage to his argument, he quickly minimizes that by saying that Superman got co-opted and thus it doesn't count. This is some No True Scotsman bullshit - Moore knows that his example just imploded so he tries to wriggle out of it by arguing that Superman sold out to the Man. If we go back to the actual historical evidence, we can see that at the outset of the Red Scare, the Superman radio show went on a crusade against the Klan, and throughout the conservative 1950s, Superman was used to propagandize liberal values of religious and racial equality:

So much for selling out.

On the other hand, Batman is a tougher case, given that his whole deal is being a masked vigilante who wages an unending war on crime to avenge his murdered parents. So is Batman an inherently fascist figure, a wealthy sadist who spends his time brutally beating the poor and the mentally ill when he could be using his riches to tackle social issues? I would argue that this version of Batman is actually pretty recent - very much a legacy of the work of Frank Miller and then the post-9/11 writings of Christopher Nolan, Johnathan Nolan, and David Goyer - and that there have been many different Batmen with very different thematic foci.

For example, the early Batman was as much a figure of horror as he was of superheroics - he fought Frankensteins and Draculas, he killed with silver bullets, etc. Then in the 40s and 50s, you got the much more cartoony and light-hearted Batman who pretty much exclusively fought equally oddball supervillains in such a heightened world of riddles and giant pennies and mechanical T-Rexes that I don't think you can particularly describe it as "crime-fighting." Then in the 1960s, you have the titanic influence of the Batman TV show, where Adam West as Batman was officially licensed by the Gotham P.D (so much for vigilantism) and extolled the virtues of constitutional due process and the Equal Pay Act in PSAs and episodes alike. You can call the 1966 Batman a lot of things, but fascist isn't one of them.

Conclusion

I want to emphasize at the end of the day that I'm a huge Alan Moore fan; I've read most of his vast bibliography, I find him a fascinating if very odd thinker and critic, I've even tried to read his mammoth novel Jerusalem (which is not easy reading, let me tell you). At the same time, it's important not to treat creators, even the very titans of the medium, as incapable of error. And in this case, I think Alan Moore is simply wrong about fascism and superheroes and people should really stop asking him about it, because I don't think he has anything new to say about it.

[iwanttobeliv]

Betty, la fea: la historia continúa

Episode 1 – Reunited (but it doesn’t feel so good)

I can’t begin to explain how excited I was for this. That we would be able not only to see our beloved characters again after so very long, and most of all, that we would be able to see Betty and Armando together again.

At first, there was a lot of speculation about the series' plot – and not much information to go on.

And the problem with that is that the longer the wait, the bigger the expectations. And boy, were they big!

Ever since the wave of revivals became a thing, I’ve seen my fair share of them, and I knew that lowering my expectations would probably be for the best. I mean, adjusting it to something better than ‘Ecomoda”, but likely not as great as YSBLF.

Even though there were some very positive aspects such as how much the cast and production team seemed to love this project, or how happy they looked to get back to it, and also how much better JEA looks these days, there were other factors that I couldn’t help but think would likely be an issue.

First of all, the length of it. We all knew we wouldn’t get 335 episodes. That’s not how TV works nowadays, especially streaming services. And then, when I found out there would be only 10, I thought, oh well. At least we get to see them for 10 episodes, that’s something… Better than not all, I guess. 

But then, I didn’t realize just how much this format would affect the story. Which is a lot, something we can feel right out of the gate.

YSBLF was fundamentally what fic readers describe as slow-burn. Which can be great for character development. But that also requires a lot of fillers, subplots, and sharp writing skills so that the audience won’t just get fed up and quit the show before it’s over.

Given how the target audience of the new show was mainly fans from YSBLF, I guess they didn’t have to worry much about that. We already know and love the characters – most of all the protagonists.

But, then again, it has been over 20 years.

So, back to episode 1.

The previously on? Loved it! They did a fairly good job summarizing the main bits, though I’m not sure it would have worked alone hadn’t I watched YSBLF time and time again.

I love that they start with Betty’s voiceover. Having a special insight into what was going through her mind was such a fundamental part of the story in the first place. Through Betty’s diary, we got to know all the vulnerabilities that Betty had learned to keep inside, protected from a world that had been far too cruel to her. While with Nicolas we got to see her using humor to fend for herself, at night, in her strangely decorated room – I think all those dolls were meant to symbolize Betty’s innocence and youth and remind us that she was a young girl, and therefore lacked the experience and malice to understand where she was headed to until it was too late. But it also looked like a grandma’s room, and a very dark one, so, yeah, not great. I get it, it was a low-budget production, but did her room have to look like a place where one would find a captive? My guess is no. – Anyway it was through her precious diary that we got to hear Betty sharing her thoughts and dreams, memories and fears. So, when I heard Betty speaking, it just felt familiar and wistful. And I guess I was too distracted by that to be bothered by the wordplay they did there, trying to create a suspense that would only have worked if we hadn’t watched the promo 150 times, give or take. I never thought I would say I missed Hugo, even in YSBLF I didn’t care much for his character but he had me at the ‘Dead Poet Society’ reference.

I’m still trying to understand Betty’s wardrobe choices there, I mean, even though her ‘current’ style seems like a far cry from wearing Don Hermes’s old sweaters, this one feels like it's too much and nothing like the woman we supposedly knew.

But I digress. 

Betty shows up and we get Armando looking at her with puppy eyes and standing up for ‘su Betty’ right away, and well, I am only human and completely understand why Betty’s knees would go weak and nearly throw her into Roberto’s grave.

So yeah, Roberto is dead, something we were aware of from the promo, but what does it mean to Ecomoda? And why was Betty gone until this moment?

That’s where things start to get messy.

I can’t say I was surprised that Armando and Betty aren’t together. While I hoped they still loved each other after all this time (and I still do), a relationship lasting this long must have a solid foundation. Which they didn’t really have and we never got to see... I think they truly loved (and love) each other, but trust isn’t something easy to gain and it’s even harder to regain after it's lost. The lies, the miscommunication, the tempers, all of it would inevitably create conflict. And there’s no good story without that.

(This reminds me I really want to take a closer look at Armando and Betty as individuals, but I think I might save this for another time)

That being said, we get a bunch of info dumped on us in a very short time, and I had to watch it more than once to make sense of the whole thing. Let’s make a list:

Roberto is dead. (And so is Margarita)

Betty was gone and not by her choice, according to her. But then Armando says they are not together and that *is* her choice, so what then?

I really really like the way Armando looks at Betty when she asks him how he is. It screams familiarity with a hint of fondness (?) Oh these two…

Don Hermes shows up and I’m intrigued. He uses his famous catchphrase while dragging Betty away from Armando and when he stands next to his daughter, it makes me think he too is aware of Betty’s situation with her 'ex', and I don’t know, but whatever happened, it made him forego the sanctity of matrimony, which seems like a big thing to such a traditional man like him.

Hugo hasn’t changed a bit.

And Betty is still the clumsy, self-conscious Betty under all that fur.

There is a camera and suspense. Not my cup of tea, but ok.

Marcela seems a bit more civil around Betty, which is to be expected after so long, but still her (by now more than comprehensible) resentment seems to be alive and well.

Don Hermes mentions leaving fresh flowers to Dona Julia, but it’s such a short comment that it barely registers.

Patricia is apparently married to a mummy called Francisco Santamaria (Wasn’t there a lawyer with that name in YSBLF?) which is not particularly surprising given her life aspirations.

I guess when we have only ten episodes there’s no escape but to break the rules of “show and not tell”.

Next: A controversial topic, Mila Mendoza.

[sketch-guardian]

TW FOR MOVIE SPOILERS AND MASSIVE WORD VOMIT

On the horror movie thing I’d feel like hush,your next,purge and the strangers would most likely disturb them in a sense cause all of those movies show what people do with out reason and what they’re willing to do out of greed

In hush the protagonist says to the killer (around the middle or beginning) she’ll keep her mouth shut and not telling anyone cause she doesn’t know the killers face the killer in return just takes off his mask so he now has a reason to kill her

Your next would probably be a movie Uriel would like cause the protagonist makes good decisions however near the end of the middle (it’s been a while since I watch it forgive me if the timing is wrong) we find out it’s all a planned thing between the protagonists boyfriend(?) and his younger brother to get more money out of the life insurance and any money the parents had from their company

Purge is well purge people will do whatever the fuck they want the moment they realize there won’t be consequences they’ll kill,torture kidnap etc each movie of the purge series constantly shows how depraved people can and will become if they had no punishment for their crimes

The strangers would definitely be one of my fav movies cause you never know who is at the door in both movies the killers do it without reason just for fun or in how one of the characters said “because you were home”/“because you answered the door” (this happened in the first or second movie around the ending of the movie I think) cause at the end of the day they kill for fun

Each if these killers have some sort of sadistic joy out of killing

Or hellfest for example is another movie of a smart protagonist (kinda) but we’re not gonna focus on the protagonist much on this one at the end of the movie you see the killer coming home to his daughter which makes it a lot more realistic since you don’t know who it could be it could be since most killers are mundane when they aren’t killing they could be a dad,a neighbor,a coworker just anybody anything besides a killer you wouldn’t know what they do in their free time. And that’s what makes it scary

Teach me your secret for writing so much in such a short time, please😂I need it for my headcanons🙈especially because I fear these days it could take me some days or weeks to reply to asks😥since I have to study, having my degree thesis on September 10th, where I will have to give a speech, I'm terrified😭

Anyway, don't worry, I don't mind spoilers or word vomit, but thanks for mentioning those things for others too, just to be safe☺

Regardless, I think you're right🤔I believe "Hush" would mostly upset Nathaniel (due to the stalking theme) and Domnra (due to the cruelty reminding Domnra of who cursed him with Mobim in the past)

Uriel would like "Your Next" because the protagonist would actually fight back and kick ass and Zuri would like it for the plot and betrayal that lies beneath

"Purge" would mainly disturb Uriel (due to the absent justice) and Remiel (who would feel bad for all those poor souls)

"Strangers" would especially upset Demya (due to the thought of a possible invasion of her nest)

While "Hellfest" would slightly disturb Azul, not so much for the plot, but for the end, because he would try to empathize. If Azul were a parent, he would actually attempt to tone down his demon lifestyle, turning to murder only if necessary, he would also pity the little girl in the movie and what she could become in the future

The only one who wouldn't bat an eye at those movies would be Odon (to be fair, Odon still remains an ancient eldritch horror and it took them a few centuries to learn what empathy or other emotions felt like, they would hardly be shaken up by such themes basically)

[juniorfor2]

It’s kind of insane to me that the ONLY reason that people watch HotD is because of Nettles. According to them, if Nettles is cut out, then “what’s the point of watching the show, I only watched because I wanted to see Nettles dunk on VaLyRiAn SuPrEmAcY.”

I mean, they seriously only watch a series that they KNEW would be about the Targaryens, was focused on Targaryen history and themes, with a Targaryen protagonist that spans 30 years, just for a girl that’s barely part of the book.

It’s not even confirmed that she’s non-Valyrian!!! It’s a theory made up by FANS, I’m fairly sure it isn’t even suggested by GRRM. Glydayn, Munken, and Mushroom are definitely racist, but their only theories are to disparage the idea that Nettles could be viewed as pretty or accomplished because of her skin color. Their ideas were used to suggest that Nettles was a whore, or to then backtrack to say that she was “a skinny brown girl” that oBvIoUsLy couldn’t be attractive.

Nettles is definitely important, but (at least in my opinion), her ambiguity is the most important thing about her story. How others perceive her, not just in-universe by maesters, but by the fandom is more important than her origins. How the audience allows their theories around her to be guided by the racist thoughts of maesters, all while claiming that they themselves aren’t racist, is more important her actions.

Even the HOW of people deciding whether or not Nettles was Daemon’s lover or his daughter, is more important than the actual truth of the matter.

In the actual story, Nettles really doesn’t do that much. Her main thing is being loyal and flying around with Daemon to hunt Aemond. The only conflict she (supposedly) causes is between Daemon and Rhaenyra. And while it actually is fair criticism to say that Nettles’s story only being important as black girl causing conflict between two white people is a bad plotline, people then using a person of color to alienate and insult other people of a foreign culture is not ok. People conflating GRRM’s unfortunate internalized racism (that yes, he tries to go against, but occasionally fails at) with the personalities of the characters themselves is not ok.

People need to let their ideas of Nettles go. She’s important, and she certainly should not merge with Rhaena as if black women are interchangeable, but she is not an avenue of debunking Targaryen “supremacy”. HOTD is racist, but I honestly think that the way some people are reacting is almost more racist/xenophobic itself.

[danmei-confessions]

Not to jump on the JGY discourse badwagon, and please don't tag this with JGY for reasons I'm about to outline, but what JGY fans consider 'bashing' is really absurd to me. I've never been in a fandom like this. I admit, I'm new to the fandom and there seems to be a lot of history that has caused people to become over-sensitive but BOY OH BOY are they over-sensitive.

I've seen people accused of bashing JGY for calling him a villain. Which is just... true? I suppose if you prefer the term antagonist but people often (erroneously) use the terms interchangeably and antagonist is a more accurate definition of his placement in the story (antagonist being a character who is opposed to the protagonist, regardless of morals or who might be 'right' or 'wrong'). I think there's a fair case to be made for defining him as a 'villain' as well but I think there's a fair case to define most of the characters in MDZS as 'villains' so that isn't really meant as some sort of condemnation of his character, just an acknowledgement that he has done villainous things and some of those villainous things for villainous reasons. All that to say, I do think it's totally fair to have interpretations of his character that are far more blameless. It is a story from an unreliable narrator so if you choose to read the narrative as being completely inaccurate with regards to him, I think that's actually a really fair interpretation of the text. I prescribe to a watsonian death-of-the-author view of literature so whatever you get out of the text is an entirely valid interpretation. My point is merely that it's an equally valid interpretation to view him as a 'villain' and calling him such, especially in a series such as MDZS, is a neutral statement. And yes, someone could use the label of villain as a jumping off point to start bashing him but what I'm trying to point out is the fans who call it 'bashing' if you call him a villain alone, regardless of whether the person calling him a 'villain' is a fan of his character or not.

And that's only one example. People have been accused of bashing him for simply stating things that he did within the novel. Which again, it's totally fair to interpret things like NMJ's death as justified or unjustified depending on your interpretation of the text but the fact is that he did it. It's also fair to think his involvement in JRS and QS death is dubious at best, but it's also a fair to interpret the text that he did do it. So again, if someone says "he killed JRS and QS" that is not bashing, that's just saying a thing that is entirely possible within the text. It would be bashing if they say "he killed JRS and QS and that's why he's the worst character ever and he should die etc etc etc" and I'm sure that this hyper-sensitive fans have dealt with that sort of nonsense in the past and that is why they're so hypersensitive and quick to call everything bashing, but it is really odd to watch.

Basically any statement that's even mildly uncharitable or even just goofing on his character a bit (in a light hearted or affectionate way) I've seen be called bashing. At this point, it feels to me as an outsider looking in that the only way you're 'allowed' to engage with his character is if you have the absolute most charitable interpretation of him. You can't be a villain-fucker who likes a morally dubious and manipulative guy, you have to interpret him as the most innocent little guy who never did anything wrong or you're bashing him.

And it's just very absurd to me. I'm a fandom veteran in my 40's and I've been through so many fandoms over the years and I've never seen any fandom be quite like this about a character. Yes, the JC defenders are also quite obsessive but from my perspective, I've seen more of them willing to acknowledge JC's faults than the JGY fans (of course, this is completely anecdotal and it's entirely possible that I've just only seen small portions of both fanbases that made one of them seem more defensive and aggressive than the other, in which case I do apologize. I'm really not trying to be uncharitable). But even with JC and XY and other widely contentious characters, I still see a lot more defensive/aggressive behavior than I'm used to seeing in other fandoms.

Again, this is anecdotal and just my path through fandoms and as a long-time villain-fucker, but in all the other fandoms I've been a part of it's been "omg he's the worst and that's why I love him" or even "he's the worst, why do I love him" or just any iteration of "I love this character, he's the best to me, but yeah he does shitty stuff sometimes".

This is just I guess an actual confession rather than real discourse because I'm not really interested in having discourse over this. I'm a bit exhausted seeing all the discourse and I might even start distancing myself from the fandom because the more I talk about it, the more I realize it's just a lot more exhausting for me than I realized. This is just an observation and a confession about how I've felt while observing the hyper-defensive nature of some fans within this fandom. Mostly just triggered by seeing someone comment "stop putting bashing in the tag" and I read the post and I was really struggling to see what the bashing was. Again, maybe there's dog-whistles I'm blind to or maybe people are just too hurt over past drama to see clearly or maybe I'm just too old for this stuff. I guess I'm just used to bashing to be... bashing? Not "look I love the guy but he's kinda mean lol" or "he's a good villain".

Back in my day (LOL) bashing was just defined differently I guess.

Anyway, continue to love your blorbo and in any way that brings you joy, I'm not the blorbo police.

For the record, JGY is my favorite character and I find him deeply sympathetic even in less charitable interpretations of the text. I just like who he is, regardless of whether he's 'justified' or 'good'. My personal interpretation of his character is somewhere in between the most charitable and most uncharitable. I think he's a good person in an impossible position who had to struggle for everything in life and those struggles twisted him up inside until he made lots of mistakes and committed a lot of unforgivable acts. His story is tragic to me and deeply engaging. And the fact that I wrote this up as a huge JGY fan and I don't want it tagged because I legitimately think there are parts of the JGY fanbase who would interpret this as bashing is why I think I need to give up this fandom.

.

[lucy-moderatz]

any thoughts on the recent influx of heavy criticism and hate carrie's received on social media from newer and younger viewers even since satc moved to netflix? like, how horrible she was for making her breakup with berger more important than charlotte's engagement? how a sex columnist was actually prudish and quite conservative about sex? her being 30-something and terrorizing a 20-something (natasha)?

I'm not particularly surprised, because for as long as I've been a fan of this show, there has always been heavy criticism of Carrie as a character. She has always been taken to task for being self-involved to the point of obsession and for the less than stellar choices she makes throughout the series.

Michael Patrick King once said in a DVD commentary of, I think, "Change of a Dress", that when shooting outside they specifically tried to avoid movie posters because they didn't want to tie the show down to a particular time. They wanted it to feel like it could be taking place at any time. I think that was a wasted effort. Society evolves pretty quickly and it didn't take long before the politics, sexual and otherwise, that the show exhibited became very dated (see the insulting depiction of bisexuality in "Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl" or the transphobic language in "Cock-A-Doodle-Do", for two huge examples).

As a Carrie Bradshaw stan (for better or worse), I will address these specifically, though:

how horrible she was for making her breakup with berger more important than charlotte's engagement?

I don't think she did that. She just found that post it note. It was a very raw, very insulting thing that had literally happened to her right before she put her clothes on to go to brunch with her friends. I think she was entitled to be angry about it. Also, she didn't even bring it up until Charlotte reminded her that she also came in with news. And later, when Charlotte was being hesitant about celebrating her engagement properly, Carrie was very supportive and most importantly, genuinely happy for her in spite of having been left by her boyfriend the previous day.

how a sex columnist was actually prudish and quite conservative about sex?

Well, she is. Samantha says as much in season two. She says, "For a sex columnist, you have a very limited view of sexuality." She is rigid in her definitions in part because she is so deeply insecure. If her boyfriend is bisexual, there are now twice as many people he can leave her for. This same plot creeps up in an episode of Ally McBeal. The late 90s and early 00s view of bisexuality was hugely biphobic. There's no way it can't be dated now.

I think it's a fair criticism of her, honestly, but I don't have a problem with it the way others might.

her being 30-something and terrorizing a 20-something (natasha)?

Natasha is 27 years old. Her brain is fully developed. She's an adult. Lets not infantilize her. When we talk about age difference between characters and the power dynamic that is involved, I don't think it's always relevant. In the case of a 40-something man like Big marrying a 20-something girl like Natasha? That's more relevant. Marriage is a different dynamic with different power imbalances that can occur. In the case of Carrie and Natasha, I don't think their ages are relevant. They're both adults and there isn't that much of an age gap between them (between seven and eight years).

Carrie did not terrorize Natasha. She talked shit about her behind her back and had an affair with her husband. These are cruel things to do to anyone, of course, but they do not rise to the level of terrorizing someone. Her attempt to apologize was idiotic and misguided and not really about Natasha at all, but that's the only time she went out of her way to seek her out, very much against her will. Did she treat Natasha like crap? Yes. Are we, the audience, supposed to think that's a good thing? Absolutely not.

Carrie is our protagonist, but we're not supposed to endorse everything she does. I get why people have problems with Carrie. And having problems with Carrie is, really, nothing new, so I'm never surprised, or offended, when it happens.

[in-kyblogs]

need to know more about italian lestat and why is this so overshadowed by his french side 😤

Have you heard about the fact that Lestat is nonbinary on his mother side? We could say the Italian thing is the same kind of situation really lmao

His mother, Gabrielle De Lioncourt, was born in Naples and grew up there. It was common for Italian nobles to marry in France for political alliances reasons, the most famous is the Medici family from ‘400 Firenze: Caterina De’ Medici was a french queen in 1547 (fun fact: the Medici family seal has similarities to the royal French seals with the arald of a lily I think for some alliance thing in the ‘500 but I can’t exactly remember). But I digress. This is to say that, as direct neighbours, Italy and France have a lot of history and a lot of beef, mostly due to wine and cheese if you can believe it. And football. Oh, especially football.

Gabrielle isn’t really an affectionate mother, she has a complex and fascinating relationship to her role as a woman and a wife and a traumatic experience, I’d say, with giving birth to seven sons (can’t wait for her character in the show, especially since Hannah, who wrote a play on these themes called What a young wife ought to know, which I wholeheartedly recommend, said she is really excited to be writing for her!). This results in her and Lestat having a really weird relationship, cold and distant but at the same time extremely visceral due to the both of them being kind of prisoners in their own life. Gabrielle never teaches Lestat Italian, nor is particularly forthcoming about her old life or her cultural roots. When Lestat runs to Paris, Gabrielle tells him to find someone who can write Italian for him, so he can send her letters that his father can’t read. She also never bothered to teach him the alphabet, even less a second language, and she used to read Italian books that Lestat couldn’t understand. So, very mixed feelings about this on Lestat’s part I’d say. He is, I think, really resentful of this side of his mother that he isn’t allowed to know, but at the same time really fascinated by it: his first attempt at escaping is with an Italian troupe of commedia dell’arte actors, a type of play that involves a lot of improv. Basically you have a series of “maschere” (characters) that have a definite set of characteristics but no written lines (we call it canovaccio I have no idea how to translate this concept though). Each character is tied to a specific part of Italy, for example Pulcinella is the neapolitan one, Arlecchino (Harlequin) is from Bergamo (near Milan). Lestat plays Lelio in the book, a character from the italian play that is the maschera of the lover. (He is also the protagonist of a play by Goldoni where he is also a liar (title of the play Il Bugiardo), totally unrelated to iwtv but it always makes me laugh).

I basically wrote all this stuff to say that Lestat knows basically nothing about his italian heritage and that explains why it is so overshadowed by his french side, but I will say that both italian and french people are extremely extra, in wildly different ways and also they will fight each others over nothing (they stole the Gioconda btw), so this accounts for why Lestat is like that ™️. Particular about food? Italian heritage. Snobbish about music? French heritage. Extremely petty? Eh, to be fair, both. Will hold a grudge forever? I will tell you, during fifa and uefa football games we still yell at the French team about that time during the 2006 World Cup final when one of their players went and hit one of the Italian team players with a headbutt (Italy won btw💁🏻‍♀️). So yeah. Lestat never stood a chance really