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coraniaid · 6 months ago

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trick or treat!

This is a Kendra headcanon that I like a lot but that I'm not sure will ever make it into anything I'm writing.

So: Kendra occupies a pretty strange place in the wider setting of Buffy. She's the first Slayer other than Buffy we meet, but the show itself is pretty aggressively uninterested in her. After the two parter she's introduced in, she's not mentioned again until Becoming, when she comes back to be killed off. She'll only be mentioned a couple of times after her death. Years and years after the show ended, Joss Whedon retroactively gave her full name as "Kendra Young", even though Kendra herself tells Giles that "[she] has no last name".

And the little scraps of backstory we do get about Kendra don't really feel consistent with anything we learn about how Slayers and Potentials operate, either. Kendra was identified as a potential Slayer when she was very small, and her parents (apparently willingly) gave her up to be raised by her Watcher, a Mr Sam Zabuto. She's very, very rules-focused, and familiar not just with the Slayer handbook but with more general details of the supernatural (for example: she's read about Angel before, which Giles himself hadn't, and she can cite sources about the Order of Taraka that Giles seems not to have read).

Meanwhile, the Council didn't know anything about Buffy or Faith until they were both Called, as far as we can tell, and even Potentials like Season 7's Kennedy who were identified at a young age don't seem to have been treated much like Kendra. Kennedy was trained to use weapons, but she doesn't seem to have separated from her parents (at least not based on how she talks about her childhood to Willow) or expected to memorize the contents of multi-volume arcane texts that even a Watcher like Giles describes as being "a bit stodgy" (in fact she tells Willow that magic "seems like fairy tale crap", so her theoretical knowledge must be pretty limited). Something is strange about Kendra. She's not like the other Slayers.

Kendra herself tells Buffy that "[her] people" take Slaying very seriously and that she sent to live with her Watcher at such a young age that she "doesn't really remember" her parents. And ... okay, well, let's be honest: this is mostly just bad writing. It can be explained by a combination of the show trying to position Kendra as, at all levels, an opposite to Buffy [Buffy lives with her mom so Kendra doesn't; Buffy's parents don't know she's a Slayer so Kendra's do; Buffy dislikes studying so Kendra must excel at it; Buffy has friends and dates so Kendra can't, etc.] and not caring particularly if the results add up to anything consistent. And it can, more damningly, be explained by the Buffy writers' regular automatic assumption that non-white people living outside the USA are necessarily more "primitive" and more in touch with old, pre-modern traditions, that they are less interested in the happiness of the individual and more respectful of authority and in doing what is best for the collective. That Kendra's people are like the Incans who sacrified the girl who we only know as "Ampata" (not her real name, of course), or the Shadow Men who activated the First Slayer, or Jenny Calendar's Uncle Enyos (who explicitly contrasts the beliefs of his "tribe" to those of "the modern man").

But what if things were different? What if this wasn't just another example of the show's constant background racism?

As it happens, as early as Season 1 we were already introduced to a group of people who take Slaying very seriously and who pass knowledge of the supernatural and the occult down to their children. People who think of themselves as having "destinies" and who make "tiresome speeches about responsibility and sacrifice". What if this group is, unbeknowst to her, the people Kendra is refering to when she tells Buffy about "[her] people"? What if Kendra's parents were Watchers?

We know that the Council don't always identify Potential Slayers at a young age, but they did manage to identify Kendra, at a young enough age that being a Potential is practically all the life she knows. What could explain that better than if Kendra herself grew up surrounded by Watchers? As soon as they decided to start looking for nearby Potentials, they'd have found one practically under their feet.

What if Kendra's parents had been expecting to train her as a Watcher, but now found themselves having to face the fact she might be Called as a Slayer? What if that's why her training focused so much on reading books and studying theory; why it made her into somebody Buffy describes as a "she-Giles"? What if her parents were hoping that she would grow up never being Called, until she was old enough that she never would, and she could become the Watcher they were always hoping she would be?

Well, we might ask: why then does Kendra claim not to remember her parents? And why does she tell Giles she doesn't have a last name?

This is, in fact, something of a mystery in any case: if Kendra's parents knew she was a Potential and were happy for her to be raised by Watchers -- even if they weren't Watchers themselves -- why was it necessary for them to cut off all ties with her? Why did she have to be raised in isolation? It can't have been for secrecy, because these people would have known that Kendra was a Potential Slayer. Again, this isn't something we see the Council insist on for any other Potential Slayer. Was there some ulterior reason that Kendra couldn't be allowed to know who her parents were, or to talk to people who might have known them?

Well, remember what Quentin Travers accuses Giles of having in Helpless: "a father's love for the child ... and that is useless to the cause". How might somebody like Travers reacted to finding out that a Watcher had potentially given birth to a Slayer? Would he trust them to raise her? Would he allow it?

What if, instead of cheerfully giving her up, Kendra's Watcher parents -- or perhaps parent, singular -- had to agree to raise her as if she wasn't theirs, just to prevent the Council from swooping in and taking her away? What if the reason Kendra thinks she hasn't got a last name is that, if she'd remembered what it was, she'd have noticed it was the same as somebody else she knew? What if, while Buffy had a Watcher she often thought of as a father even though they weren't biologically related, and who was punished for being too much of a father figure, Kendra had a Watcher who was related to her, but who was under Council orders not to tell her that he was?

What if "Kendra Young" was born "Kendra Zabuto"?

#btvs #asks #thanks!

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lizardsfromspace · 7 months ago

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I went to this URL and it just won't load and I've never been happier to not see a "buy this URL!" screen bc there's a very strong chance I would. Not as an ironic redirect, I would make this my personal homepage. It would never once mention Joss Whedon or anyone associated with him. I would make business cards just to hand them out and say "you can learn more about me at Restore Joss Whedon and His Smoking Hot Ass Kicking Chicks dot org". I want to put it on a resume but then no one would hire me again and I wouldn't have enough money to keep owning the website. Am I not a strong enough female character to deserve this

#incredible

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weaselandfriends · 1 month ago

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Chainsaw Man (Anime)

When I posted about my Neon Genesis Evangelion reviews earlier, I mentioned my goal to think more deeply about the things I watch. Evangelion invites viewers to think about it. Its plot is tangled and complex; it draws on religious iconography that gestures toward deeper symbolism; and its tone is weighty, self-serious, and ponderous. None of this is to say that Evangelion actually has deeper meaning (it becomes increasingly clear, for instance, how much of its kabbalah references are purely aesthetic table dressing), but it certainly wants you to ask yourself what it means.

Chainsaw Man, by contrast, is aggressively irreverent. Its main character Denji is a superhuman doofus; he and arch-doofette Power bingus brother about in a Beavis & Butthead routine that undercuts any pretensions toward seriousness the supporting cast might scrounge. Rather than oblique references to Judaic mysticism, Chainsaw Man draws its iconography from popular films; the OP directly remakes shots from such classics as Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and The Grudge vs. The Ring. Even the title "Chainsaw Man" is bluntly brainless, and the anime ends with a climactic battle between Chainsaw Man and Katana Man, except Katana Man's katanas look more like machetes, fulfilling the Sadako vs. Kayako horror crossover promise of the OP via Leatherface vs. Jason Voorhees.

It's a show that is very easy to watch, go "Yeah that was fun," and have nothing more substantial to say. In many ways, the show invites that reading.

It does have a few things going on under the hood, though. The first is how despite its irreverent tone it often cleaves tightly to plot beats I've seen in other shounen shows. Kobeni is a useless crybaby, but in a fight turns into an unstoppable badass; I saw this in Demon Slayer. A bunch of fodder characters are introduced, developed, and then summarily executed to give the impression "anyone can die" (the core cast has all survived); I saw this in Attack on Titan. The main character is too weak, so he gets trained by an eccentric mentor who kicks his ass until he gets stronger; I saw this too many times to list. Denji's Beavisness is itself only an intensification of the Monkey D. Luffy template for shounen protagonist, a well-meaning dipshit who takes ridiculous joy in simple creature comforts like stuffing his face with food. In a way, by overtly asking the viewer not to think about things too deeply, Chainsaw Man is defending itself from the realization that little of what it is doing is particularly unique. That it is, at its core, a series of recreated shots stitched together from pop cultural sources.

It works, though. I thoroughly enjoyed all of those regurgitated elements I mentioned before, even the fake-anyone-can-die shtick that annoyed me to no end when Attack on Titan did it. The brain-off style encourages the viewer to engage with the story at the level of an earnest and excitable child, the kind of person who would think someone called "Chainsaw Man" is super cool and not lame at all. It's fascinating, because there's an element to the story's willingness to undercut itself that is reminiscent of the Joss Whedon-style snarkery that has rendered the MCU unwatchable. Someone giving their serious backstory only for Denji to go "HNNNGGH? That's dumb!" is pretty similar to Loki's big villain monologue being interrupted by the Hulk. How much of Chainsaw Man's effectiveness is simply because it's hitting the exact right note at this moment in time, the way Avengers did in 2012 (when I finish my rewatch of Sword Art Online I'll have a lot to say about the year 2012), attuned to the exact right frequency of irony, before years go by and that frequency becomes passe, out-of-tune? It feels inexplicable now, but people really thought "Puny god" was an amazing joke back in the day. Now it's hollow and lifeless. Is Chainsaw Man doomed to the same fate, after a decade of imitators bite it to pieces? (And there are imitators; I'm currently watching last season's big anime, Dandadan, which takes a lot of tonal cues from CSM.)

I can't see the future, but Chainsaw Man has a bit of narrative bite of its own to sustain itself. There's a thematic throughline about the sacrifices people make to attain their goals. Denji is introduced as literally selling off parts of his body for money in pursuit of pathetically unambitious goals like "eating bread with jam"; later, most members of Public Safety are shown to have made contracts with devils in which they also literally give up body parts in exchange for the goal-fulfilling power. Like Denji from that first episode, though, the members of Public Safety are in a form of slavery they have no hope of escaping. Their sacrifices are noble gestures, but ultimately useless. In one scene, Aki uses a cursed sword that steals his lifespan to kill Katana Man, only for Katana Man, being functionally immortal, to stand up seconds later. Likewise, Himeno gives the Ghost Devil all of her body to save Aki, killing herself; the Ghost Devil is immediately devoured by the Snake Devil moments later, failing to do what Himeno wanted. (It's then revealed that all Himeno had to do to save Aki was pull the string on Denji's body.)

It is that sense of futile nobility that Chainsaw Man skewers most stringently, both in its text and its tone. Aki and even the devils taunt Denji for his lack of ambition, framing themselves as superior because they pursue something loftier than him. Yet Denji, of course, always prevails; even against Aki, he responds to the taunt by kicking him in the balls. Aki claims that only people with strong ambitions can survive in Public Safety, but the story proves him wrong at every turn. It's Denji and Power, in their brainless contentedness with basic pleasures in life, who survive battle after battle unscathed. They are both immortal (or "near immortal," as Power is described), as though they are simply too stupid to die. Even among the human characters, the only one who crawls out of the show unscathed is Kobeni, who seems to have no ambitions of her own beyond survival; she was forced into Public Safety by her family to pay her brother's college tuition.

At first glance, this makes the message of Chainsaw Man seem clear: "Ask for too much, and you'll simply be destroyed." This message perfectly matches the story's irreverence. If you wanted a deep and thoughtful story, too bad, you're getting a guy with a chainsaw for a head cutting up zombies. It's bread with jam, and the story wants to make sure you enjoy it.

But there's more at play here. Denji is unstoppable, sure. He lives while his colleagues die or get maimed. At the same time, he's trapped in the same web as the rest of them, Makima's web, and his simple ambitions only make him trivial for her to manipulate. At the end of the day, Makima is the only one who is getting what she wants, who controls everything. I once had a dream about Makima that accurately spoiled her role in the story, so even though I've only seen the anime I have an inkling of what's to come. I only wonder, narratively, how it'll play into the ideas about ambition introduced in this opening arc.

Then, there's the scene where Kishibe first starts training Denji and Power. In an endless graveyard of all the Public Safety employees who have died, he asks them what their ambitions are, why they fight. They give characteristically low-minded answers, and Kishibe chokes with emotion. "You're perfect," he says. "I love you." He hugs them, then snaps their necks as the first part of his training regimen.

Weeks later, speaking to Makima, Kishibe explains. He thought he could look at Denji and Power as toys. Meaningless, silly, able to be sacrificed. Not like the hundreds, thousands of dead Public Safety employees he's buried, who had real dreams with emotional weight. Only, after weeks of training, he's finding that even they can't truly be seen as toys, that something about them is growing on him.

I read this scene as a metaphor for Chainsaw Man's irreverence as a whole, for the purpose of ironic detachment in art. In the MCU, characters give undermining quips to avoid emotionally interfacing with the art. It's the ethos of "comic relief" in general. Relief; as though seriousness is too much to handle without some silly joke to take the weight off. Denji and Power are toys (there's something toyetic in the idea of Chainsaw Man himself), comic relief, an excuse to not become emotionally invested, Beavis & Butthead who go "HNNNGGH? That's dumb!" whenever things get serious.

But, in Chainsaw Man at least, the seriousness is still there, under the surface. There is a field of graves, there are people sacrificing themselves for no reason, there is a whole ecosystem of serious men and women in salaryman suits and ties being thrown into the meat grinder. (It's interesting that the characters who survive unharmed -- Denji, Power, even Kobeni when she goes badass mode -- forgo the black blazer of the Public Safety uniform and wear only the white shirt that gives them a younger, more student-like look, as though it is a metaphorical childhood that protects them, whereas the more formal black-suited members are consigned to an adult oblivion. I wonder if Makima's dogshit fit means anything in this dichotomy.) The irreverence is not a full reprieve. It doesn't make the emotional elements go away, and as the show goes on, more and more time is spent in the perspectives of characters like Aki, until Denji starts to feel like an alien element in his own story, the piece that doesn't fit correctly into the established emotional framework.

Additionally, Denji starts to notice sociopathic traits in himself, like when he ponders Himeno's death and finds it made no impact on him at all. This element only appeared near the very end of the show, so I don't know how it develops across the rest of the story, but on its own it suggests the downside of ironic detachment, an inability to feel emotion even when emotion is warranted. That was David Foster Wallace's bugbear with postmodernism; that it was too insincere, too distant, capable only of metatextual flippancy, and that there was a need for a "New Sincerity," a post-irony, a post-postmodernism. Chainsaw Man is, like so many works that are popular today, post-postmodern. What fascinates me about it is how it manages that not by abandoning irony and irreverence, but by embracing it even more totally. Or is that a necessary component of post-postmodernism, distinguishing it from simple pre-modernism? You can't simply forget the genre savviness that makes you see a story as a series of tropes rather than an emotional whole. The challenge in the post-postmodern landscape thus becomes to make a story work emotionally in spite of, or perhaps because of, that detachment.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't at least mention the animation. The show looks amazing. Anime has finally gotten adept at using 3D by blending it with 2D, the way the best live action films blend practical effects with CGI. Even beyond that, there's an excessiveness and indulgence to the show; every single episode has a fully unique ED, some of which are among the best EDs I've ever seen. What studio did this?

...Oh. I guess it was natural to make a show about adults sacrificing their bodies in pursuit of impossible goals when 300+ animators made that exact same sacrifice for the benefit of MAPPAkima.

#chainsaw man #csm #anime

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hainethehero · 2 years ago

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A JOSS WHEDON HATER FOREVER- a think piece on how Avengers 1 set up Steve Rogers to be the MCU's punching bag for the rest of the franchise

(We all know Joss Whedon is an absolute garbage person. He's done many horrible things including being a racist, sexist moron who should be behind literal bars.) This is a commentary on his absolute shit writing for Avengers 1.

This one particular scene and the one following it is purely poor writing & direction for the character of Steve Rogers.👇

After Coulson dies, Fury addresses Steve and Tony and tosses Coulson's bloodied Captain America cards at Steve. He says something like "guess you never found the time to sign them" which is just horribly cruel and though not OOC for Fury, is not something he'd say lightly. We later realize here👇

...that he's secretly trying to put together the team. This is where he makes his big "there was an idea" speech and mentions that "Stark knows this." Because yeah, Tony was made aware of this in Iron Man 1 when Coulson visited and told Pepper. In contrast, Steve had no idea about the Avengers Initiative.

In fact, the dude was just pulled from the Valkyrie in the ice!! In the beginning scene of Avengers 1, we see him at the gym with the punching bag having LITERAL WAR FLASHBACKS about Bucky and Peggy and the Howlies! He's not stable and yet Fury confronts him and ropes him into the mission to get the Tesseract. Steve says, "you should've left it where you found it." And I can't help but think that maybe Steve means himself as well because dude just lost EVERYONE & EVERYTHING he literally knew and cared about.

Anyway, back to the point, Steve knows nothing about the Initiative but is suddenly made to feel guilty about Coulson's death in some kind of roundabout way of "convincing him to join the team" in honor of Coulson.

And then, to make matters WORSE, in the next scene they make HIM comfort Tony 👇

They make him say, "im sorry" (like it was his fault???!) and "he was just doing his job" and "is this the first time you've lost a soldier?" LIKE WTAF???

*INSERTS JACOB ELORDI MEME FROM EUPHORIA SAYING WHAT THE FUCKKKKK?!*

First of all, Steve barely knows these people! Second, he was fond of Coulson and I'm sure they would've been close friends. But did they have to GUILT-TRIP Steve into joining the team? Like, that's just dumb and proves that they don't actually give a fuck about his character!

AND TALK ABOUT MEAN! Fury at least knew about Steve losing Bucky on that train. He KNOWS Steve's first words when he woke up from sleep was "I had a date" reflecting the tragedy of the man out of time. To just rip him out of sleep and thrust him into a mission and later making him feel guilty about Coulson was just pure cruelty, making SHIELD no better than HYDRA. They all saw Steve as a pawn, another mindless soldier to carry out their missions and I hate JW for that.

Steve's character was not accurately portrayed nor was his trauma properly dealt with and so this is why today, we see alot of MCU "fans" calling Steve the worst avenger, lame, boring and basically a crutch to Tony's genius. (I'm a huge Tony Stark fan, don't @ me). It just felt that the mcu wanted to make Tony the ultimate hero- which is fine, Nothing's wrong with that- but they did it at the expense of Steve's character and trauma.

Sadly, this narrative continues all the way down to Endgame and for that I will always hate JW & the mcu's portrayal of Steve Rogers.

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tainbocuailnge · 8 months ago

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i think ive mentioned this before but something that I keep running into with replaying the game in german is that i was often remembering the english version as like, more thematically coherent than it was. so people will remember drk as being very good because they're like remembering the shadow on the wall of a single person getting angry on your behalf and of running yourself so ragged that your own self preservation instinct has to step in and remind you saving everyone includes yourself, and then you actually read it again and it's like damn do you really have to talk like that? but it's not just with drk even though that's got some of the biggest differences i keep running into scenes all over the game where it feels like the english translators weren't aware that something was a theme so they end up de-emphasising various elements that were supporting that theme. and it's very often that this de-emphasis comes paired with presenting wol as uniquely tortured and special, as opposed to ultimately just one of many people trying to do the right thing, which is part of a larger pattern of being scared to let characters be motivated by genuine complex emotion instead of being gruff and cool. and that's setting aside how much they hate women. calling (the english version of) dark knight very american in ideology is almost too on the nose but it really is a very succinct way to put it. and again having seen john crow speak on panels and knowing he did the english translation for drk it's really not surprising that the guy who talks like a joss whedon character would be overemphasising how cool and edgy and tortured dark knights are at the cost of most of the emotional sincerity.

#efksiv

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canonmisogynyvictimstournament · 2 years ago

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PRELIMINARY ROUND - BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER/ANGEL THE SERIES

PROPAGANDA

Fred Burkle

1.) She is chronically a damsel in distress in the canon even though she has demonstrated her intelligence and ability to use weapons. The canon consistently takes away her agency over her body and ability to make decisions just to further plot. Why does she die because she gets possessed by a god for no reason </3

2.) ok I promise I'll be more normal about the other ats female characters than about cordy. fred was introduced as a genius physicist who had spent five years stuck in a demon dimension where humans were persecuted, surviving on her own and trying to somehow find a way back home. after being rescued from the demon dimension by the show's main characters, she joins the main cast and starts trying to readjust to the normal world. the setup for her character is really interesting, with her having a lot of trauma from her time in the demon dimension, feeling helpless, and struggling to become comfortable living in the human world again. but I guess because she's a Woman the show instead reduces her to just being at the centre of a love triangle with two of the other main characters, which she has almost no agnecy in and gets stretched out over like two seasons. and then after she breaks up for good with one of the guys and it looks like MAYBE she'll at least be freed from love triangle hell, the show introduces a NEW love interest for her just to keep the love triangle drama going. she basically never gets any focus or to be an active player in the show's plot aside from in a couple of episodes, pretty much being reduced to just a damsel in distress. and as if all that wasn't bad enough, fred's story ends with her being killed by a demon that takes over her body and destroys her from the inside out in a way that isn't Technically a mystical pregnancy but is like. close enough to one and presented close enough to one for it to count. (if you read the cordelia submission and are perhaps thinking to yourself jesus christ did they actually fridge both their main female characters in exactly the same way? Yes. Yes they did.) the demon in fred's body then allegedly becomes a new member of the main cast but the show does pretty much nothing with this character and she doesn't play any important role so it really does just feel like fred died for no reason other than to make her boyfriend sad. This is because fred died for no reason other than to make her boyfriend sad. It fucking sucks but I guess it's not like she got any agency or development when she was alive either

3.) Poor Fred. Amy Acker is a fantastic actress and Fred had the potential to become a truly wonderful character - a brilliant scientist who goes through intense trauma and finds her purpose in helping other people. I have a lot of love for her. Unfortunately she was the victim of a lot of really misogynistic writing. For starters, a lot of her characterisation falls into the ‘quirky weird girl who’s hot but doesn’t realise’ camp which Joss Whedon is fond of. Like other examples of this, her trauma is turned into something quirky which fades away once they get bored of it. Also, she becomes completely sidelined and silenced in a love triangle where the feelings of the man pining over her are given all air time, and her own opinion is never mentioned. Additionally, she’s constantly sidelined in the final season after being made the token girl, and is finally killed off unceremoniously to generate drama and pain for the aforementioned man who was pining over her. And you know what the worst part is? She still gets off more lightly than Cordelia.

Cordelia Chase (CW: Pregnancy)

1.) (downs an entire bottle of vodka and slams it back on the table) SO. CORDY. Cordy started off as a supporting character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the start she was your typical high school mean girl character, but as the show went on we got to see more depth to her character: her insecurities, her courage, her capacity for incredible acts of kindness. Then after the third season she moved into the show's spin off, Angel, where from the beginning she was basically the show's secondary protagonist. Her and Angel were the two mainstays of the show's main cast, she gets the most episodes centered on her out of all the characters aside from Angel (and yes, I've checked), and we really got to see her grow from a very shallow and self-centered and kind of mean person to a true hero who was prepared to give up any chance at a normal life to fight the good fight while still never losing the basic core of her character. There were some… questionable moments like the episode where she gets mystically pregnant with demon babies and things got a bit iffy like halfway through season 3 where the writers seemed to run out of ideas for what to do with her outside of sticking her in this romance drama/love triangle situation with the main character but overall, pretty good stuff right? THEN SEASON 4 HAPPENED. In season 4 she gets stripped of literally all agency and spends pretty much the entire season possessed by an evil higher power, and while possessed she sleeps with Angel's teenage son (who BY THE WAY she had helped raise as a baby before he got speed-grown-up into a teenager it was a whole thing don't worry about it) and gets pregnant with like. the physical manifestation of the higher power that's possessing her. it's about as bad and stupid as it sounds and also is like the third time cordy's got mystically pregnant in this show and like the fourth mystical pregnancy storyline overall (you will be hearing more on that note in other submissions I'm so sorry). after giving birth she goes into a coma, in which she remains for the rest of season 4 and the first half of season 5. SPEAKING OF WHICH DON'T THINK SEASON 5 IS GETTING OFF SCOT FREE HERE. yeah so in season 5 the show just FULLY starts trying to erase cordy's existence. she gets mentioned ONCE in the first episode and then never again until halfway through the season where she wakes up, helps out Angel for a bit and encourages him in his fight against evil, and then goes quietly into that good night and dies so it can be all sad and tragic. I'd call it the worst fridging of all time but even THAT feels generous because the whole point of fridging is killing off a female character so a man can be sad, and after Cordy dies basically no one's even sad about it because the show immediately goes back to pretending she never existed. she is not mentioned ONCE in the two episodes after she dies. in the whole stretch of time between her death and the end of the season she gets mentioned exactly four times. again, I counted. anyway the fun twist to all of this is that all of this happened because the actress who played cordy got pregnant before season 4 and joss whedon was so pissed off about this affecting his plans for the show that he decided to completely fuck over her character and then fire her and write her out of the show. so cordy's a victim of both writing AND real life misogyny!! good times!!

2.) OH SO MANY THINGS they menaced by giving her terrible hair cuts, making her seem like she'd get together with the guy she loves (and who loves her back) but instead she was killed and when she was brought back, she got possessed by an evil entity who used her body to give birth to itself. afterwards she was in a long coma and died. her character was so throughoutly assassinated

3.) She got demonically pregnant TWICE - there was this real sense of a womb/ability to get pregnant as like, a place for evil to get in. She got positioned as femme fatale and evil mother. The actress basically got fired for being pregnant, and when she agreed to come back for a single final episode she specifically said they could do anything but kill off the character. Guess what happened

#polls #preliminary round #cw pregnancy

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raisedbythetv89 · 11 months ago

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*tw* mentions of sa throughout the btvs series:

Expanding on the thoughts in this post about fandom culture and etiquette for how to make this a safer and more enjoyable space for everyone no matter who you ship

If you are a fan of btvs or ats no matter who your favorite characters are or who you ship - you have suffered at the hands of joss whedon's narcissistic personality and the subsequent emotional abuse he not only put the actors and his characters through but the audience as well

He gave us characters and relationships we fell in love with and then always, without fail, something horrible happens to one of them or they do something horrific and we're forced to cope with the emotional whiplash that happens every time he does it and decide if we love the character or relationship enough to cope with what joss did to them or if that's it for us enjoying that character or relationship

Like Bangel? Surprise! He's gonna lose his soul and completely psychologically destroy Buffy! AND THEN he's gonna come back and turns out he's been lying to this whole time to Buffy and he actually loved Darla so much he tried to be evil even with the soul first and actually stalked Buffy for a year before he introduced himself and fell in love with the sight of her crying at 15 and we made her look SUPER childlike and innocent to really up the ick factor!

Like Spuffy? Here take the most traumatic depiction of attempted sexual assault we've ever seen in the series that comes out of absolutely nowhere and is specifically designed to punish women after Spike was the only person who could be there for Buffy besides Tara as she battles her severe depression!

Like Tillow? Well Willow goes from empowering Tara and standing up for her to yelling at her to shut the hell up and then magically drugging and sexually assaulting her! and then when Tara calls her out on in she uses the "I didn't mean to" line and then is gonna use magic on her in the exact same way! and then we're gonna rush tara forgiving her just to kill her off!

Like Fuffy? Well Faith is gonna steal Buffy's body and then sexually assault both buffy and riley simultaneously while trying to goad riley into violating buffy's body as much as possible!

The list is truly ENDLESS you either survive on btvs long enough to do something horrific or you're killed off in a brutal, shocking and senseless way (I'm not going to list every single relationship and horrific event as it seems unnecessary and I know I can expand on the above example even further but again it feels unnecessary so please don't freak out if you feel I missed something this is by no means an exhaustive list)

Joss hates people, he hates women, he hates people of color, he hates his audience. Doing horrible things to people you claim to love is incredibly normal for him and any abusive narcissist because they don't love people or even see them as fellow humans - they're just things they play with for entertainment or to make them feel good about themselves which is why this is so prevalent in the buffyverse in the first place

Liking a ship where something horrible happens, you're not condoning it - it happened TO YOU. You were going along loving a character or relationship and then the creator got bored or angry and decides to throw a narrative punch just because he can and he likes the control it gives him to make a bunch of people react in certain ways emotionally and he loves to ruin things people love that's a huge thing for narcissists - if they see someone else feeling good about themselves or experience joy they want it destroyed

We have all suffered at the hands of this man, everyone has their favorite characters for very specific and deeply personal reasons. Just because you can't move past or accept certain behaviors from a character doesn't mean you get to dictate that for everyone else. Truly loving or connecting to a character means you have more capacity for forgiveness than someone who just liked them - and loving a character also usually comes with a deeper understanding of that character in the first place that can give you perspective and understanding that helps you contextualize the bad things.

Loving even the worst fictional characters literally harms no one, but attacking, shaming, judging, feeling superior to real people for their fictional tastes does so don't come on here and "well actually" me with "well MY fav didn't do [x]" or "MY fav never did anything.." because that's not the point. The whole point of this post is other btvs or ats fans who like different characters or ship difference ships are not you enemy - JOSS WHEDON is the only enemy here - be mad at him and only him, hate on other characters all you want but being cruel to other fans who don't agree with you is exactly what joss wants and we all hate that fucker so stop playing his game and don't be a dick.

#btvs #btvs meta #fuck joss whedon #meta #don't be a dick #fandom etiquette #buffy the vampire slayer #narcissistic abuse #everything xander does feels less like whiplash and more like OF COURSE of course he did that and riley wasn't shocking for me either but #I'm sure it was for some #jenny was lying to everyone the whole time and then dies #giles abandons buffy when she needs him the most as well as the cruciatum #the cursed cordy conner storyline #oz cheating willow cheating dawn joining in kicking buffy out anya calling buffy lucky #and don't even get me STARTED on joyce ugh absolute shit mother #narcissists genuinely don't let people have nice things ever so you take what you can from buffy and leave what you can't

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ordinaryschmuck · 6 months ago

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While you mentioned not liking the amount of swearing in Hazbin, I do kind of like that CHARLIE is still willing to swear. Because, with the type of character she is, you'd think she'd be less willing to, but no. Heck, her dad actually swears less than her. And that makes sense. She grew up in an environment where the people around her probably swore all the time and didn't care. It's kind of why I think she's less innocent than she'd seem regarding sex stuff. Like, she saw two people having sex and didn't seem put off, she knows what the term bukkake means, even when she went to Valentino's studio, before the stuff with Angel Dust, her reaction was less "scandalized" and more "Oh wow, this is all hot." Like, she's kind and sweeter than most people around her, but not the innocent Disney Princess she gives the vibe of.

I get what you're saying...but I don't know. I feel like if EVERY character swears, from the angels to the demons, it not only takes the PUNCH of the curse, it gives the sense that there's not everyone is so unique. Like, the dialogue and the energy each voice actor puts into the performance at least helps differentiate everyone, but to me, it feels like VivziePop makes her characters swear like Joss Whedon makes superheroes quip. It ignores the fact that dialogue is dependent on who's saying what, because if everyone talks the same then nobody's all that different. You could give the line to anybody and the effect would still the same.

Now, that's not to say I'm opposed to Charlie swearing at all. It's the same reason why I'm not against Batman making a quip in the original Justice League. When asked what his powers are and his response to go "I'm rich" is perfect. It's quick, it's dry, it's Batman. But him saying, "Yup, something is definitely bleeding" after Superman throws is awkward and could have, again, been said by anybody if they were thrown like a ragdoll by Supes. If you gotta make him quick, make him do it in a way that suits HIM.

Same goes for Charlie. If she's gotta swear, swear in a way that suits the optimistic princess...who happens to be the Princess of HELL. Have her say regular stuff like "hell" or even "shit" on the regular, but save the bigger stuff under her breath or when pushed to the brink. For example, there's this now dead show from the late and great Rooster Teeth called Camp Camp, which has a similar problem. Everybody's cursing left and right, with "Fuck" being the most popular word--I mean, it's a Rooster Teeth production. What are you going to do? The only characters who don't swear as often are Nicki, Space Kid, and, of course, David. So when THEY swear, it's either to give that extra PUNCH for the joke or for the dramatics, with David's first AND ONLY f-bomb in the series resonating with me all these years later since I first watched the show. It works because of the character who said it, not what was actually said. Because in a show where "Fuck" is said by almost everyone, HIM saying it hits the hardest because you would never expect it. And that's Hazbin's whole problem with almost every character cursing, especially Charlie.

You can have them swear as much as you want, but if everyone talks the same, are they really all that different?

#hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel critical #asks #ask me anything #send asks if you want #sorry that things got long there buddy #this is just something that rotates in my brain a little when I think about Hazbin and Helluva's swearing

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baltears · 3 months ago

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more severance thoughts

- idk what this theory is about miss huang being related to gemma or ms casey because she seems like way more of an obvious foil/parallel to harmony. most likely she's a kid who is being raised by lumon and if we can judge by the rest of management she is not severed so maybe she's another product of a lumon orphanage. suuuper interested to see where they go with harmonys character this season as she starts to seriously question her faith in kier/lumon and i think miss huang will play a role in that or parallel that bc we are watching that dogmatism and combination of intense reverence to authority & equally intense force of personality be established in her. theres a sense of suppressed fear & resentment toward milchick that reminds me of harmonys relationship with the board/natalie in s1

- milchick remains king of the smize. NEED to know more abt him. also desperately want him and harmony to interact again

- the fact that lumon actually cares about the work caught me off guard bc i had been ignoring it due to the innies not knowing what it is and having basically no way of finding out. but like somebody mentioned that mark could be reformatting caseys chip and yeah that would make sense.... esp as the reason why they would need mark specifically to finish the project and can't just replace him. curious too about the other, 'spare' mdr workers and why the turnover happened as they apparently weren't working for lumon at the time they received their pineapple bribes. if mark is indeed reformatting her chip i just really wonder what everyone else is doing like do they all have a corresponding person like gemma? the worker besides mark we know the most about is petey but his loved ones all appear to have survived him. likewise were there additional circumstances around helena joining the severed workforce which apparently no eagan has ever done despite the obviously good optics of that? she could have just stayed unsevered and been ceo. can anyone be severed and if so why can at least some not be easily replaced? who is crucial and why, is it just mark because the situation with ms casey is some kind of high stakes leap-forward experiment?

- speaking of petey i do think it's possible we could see him again in some way, it does appear that the chip could contain extensive information about the brain, meaning he or part of him could potentially have been preserved in that form.

- also speaking of petey i anticipate the return of june and potentially her getting involved in serious anti lumon efforts which could add some complications for mark. but like sooner or later she's going to try to figure out what actually happened to her dad similarly to mark trying to investigate what actually happened to gemma

- is mark the only 'man on the inside' contacted by reghabi whose outie knows about reintegration and who is working against lumon? i kind of suspect burt could also be reintegrated or moving in that direction but like at least 1 other person must be or must have been. i also hope we get more info on why and how petey contacted her or if vice versa why she felt it was safe to reach out to him

- this show is a lot like dollhouse and as flawed as dollhouse is that does make me happy bc i do think it deserves a critical reexamination thats not about just pointing out every time joss whedon wrote something weird or revealing about himself. like yeah he did that. there's other stuff going on here though. i kind of think the chilly reception & cancelation of dollhouse might have contributed to his seemingly totally giving up on his artistic integrity around 2012 and personally i think as much as he sucks he had a point that the show deserved a different kind of attention than it was getting and really got shafted because it was genuinely ahead of its time in some ways

#severance

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coraniaid · 7 months ago

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In 2001 Buffy writer Drew Z. Greenberg wrote a scene in which (canonically lesbian character) Willow uses a magic spell to make two random men hassling her at a bar (neither of whom we have ever seen before and both of whose sexuality is unknown) start kissing each other. However, Buffy showrunner Joss Whedon vetoed this scene, which was then cut from the episode before filming, because he didn't want to suggest magic could change people's sexual orientation or that same sex attraction was some sort of punchline. Definitely not for any other reason, of course.

In 2002 Buffy writer Drew Z. Greenberg wrote an episode in which (canonically lesbian character) Willow is affected by a magic spell that made her -- and every other surviving woman on the show -- suddenly attracted to a random teenage boy. Of course, since Joss Whedon's decision to cut the previous scene I mentioned was motivated by principle and not just a blanket refusal to ever openly depict romantic or sexual attraction between men on screen, this episode was also heavily rewritten to make it clear that magic cannot change people's sexual orientation, and ...

... oh, what's that? It wasn't rewritten? At all? The fact that Willow is a lesbian is brought up as a punchline? Oh, okay.

Well, that probably doesn't mean anything.

#btvs

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tristantzara · 7 months ago

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Halfrek: "Do I have to mention Mrs. Czolgosz?" This could be a reference to Leon Czolgosz (pronounced Choal-gosh), the anarchist who assasinated President William McKinley at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition in September 1901. In 1900, Czolgosz, then 23, married Emma Wisemki, a 17-year-old German immigrant whom he had apparently gotten pregnant. She had gone to Charleston, West Virginia looking for the father of her unborn child (who was using the alias Fred Nieman); he reportedly readily agreed to the marriage after police located him. Stephen Sondheim, of whom Joss Whedon is a big fan, wrote about this event in "The Ballad of Czolgosz" in his musical Assassins.

??????????????????????????? <-my issue is less the false biographical information and more the last sentence because ok maybe you're not being at all rigorous with your sources sure whatever but you can clearly observe that "the ballad of czolgosz" is NOT about that

#leon czolgosz #assassins musical #i'm so curious about the context of this quote. it's from buffy the vampire slayer season 7 episode 1 lessons

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 2 years ago

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Is It Really That Bad?

I don’t think I’ve ever felt like the universe actively conspired against something until I witnessed the production of The Flash.

Since 1991 there have been quite a few proposals for Flash movies, but they never really got off the ground for whatever reason. Following Barry’s debut in Justice League, a movie finally was announced before multiple delays due to rewrites, in particular to cut Ray Fisher’s Cyborg from the story after he went public about the awful shit he had to deal with under Joss Whedon. Things seemed hopeless until It director Andy Muschietti came onboard, at which point production on the film finally started to go smoothly. Sure, there were rumblings about Ezra Miller having episodes on set, but that’s just typical actor nonsense, right? Surely it couldn’t get any worse!

Look, I’m here to review a movie so I’ll keep this brief: Miller committed crimes. Lots of crimes. So many, in fact, you’d think they were method acting for the role of Reverse-Flash. The thing is, despite all of this, Miller was basically given a slap on the wrist by the studio, being forbidden from doing promos and press tours (oh no! The horror!). And as if the situation wasn’t already a fucking mess, while Miller’s crime spree was ongoing WB canned the nearly-complete Batgirl movie that featured Michael Keaton and Academy Award-winning actor Brendan Fraser while simultaneously inflating The Flash’s budget to nearly $300 million with reshoots. It seems baffling to cancel a movie that was nearly done and that people were marginally interested in for the sake of a movie that people were losing interest in quickly due to its star’s erratic behavior, but remember: Leslie Grace isn’t white, while Ezra Miller is. WB is never beating those racism allegations at this rate.

With a normal movie, this is where the nonsense ends. BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

This film was meant to smooth out the clusterfuck continuity of the “Snyderverse” with a soft reboot, with Henry Cavill filming a end-of-movie cameo alongside Miller, Gal Gadot, Keaton, and Supergirl’s actress Sasha Calle to establish the new direction of DC going forward. Unfortunately, the hierarchy of power at DC changed, and Gunn shot that down. While this meant the ending would probably not get people confused with regards to upcoming projects, it also meant the movie wasn’t going to really have any closure for the old universe. Affleck, Cavill, and who knows who else are just gone, and the future is just a big old question mark. At least Aquaman is safe, maybe?

Literally none of this news was very reassuring to fans. Nothing above is any good for a film’s perception to audiences under normal circumstances, but here we have all this news coming to a fanbase that genuinely did not want this fucking movie. The DCEU was already divisive when the film was announced, and Miller’s portrayal of Barry doubly so; the fact it was adapting Flashpoint was seen as lazy and uninspired, not to mention its not really a story that lets Flash stand on his own merits, making it seem more like this movie was just an excuse to reboot; it was a multiverse story in a day and age with an abundance of such stories, and it was releasing around the same time as Across the Spider-Verse to boot; and Gunn’s reboot plans meant this story was likely a narrative dead end. This movie had an uphill battle the likes of which haven’t been seen since Sisyphus.

But much like that mythological figure, the boulder came crashing right back down when the numbers came in. The movie would likely need to gross $500 million at minimum to break even after factoring in the reshoots and advertising, and it only managed half of that with a pitiful opening weekend followed by a massive 73% drop. It now sits alongside films like The Lone Ranger and Mortal Engines as one of the most expensive bombs in history, to the point where WB would have saved more money by cancelling it like they did with Batgirl. And despite glowing praise from the likes of Tom Cruise and Stephen King, it received middling reviews from mainstream critics.

Audiences haven’t been any less mixed, but considering most people weren’t particularly excited or invested in this film’s existence this is basically a miracle. Sure, there’s plenty of people out there saying this is the “worst comic book movie ever” like they do every time a new superhero movie drops, but even more people are saying they enjoyed the film… although even they tend to have some severe criticisms.

Even though I knew most of what was going to happen in the movie going in, I wasn’t really sure what to expect given everything surrounding the movie. But you know me, I’m willing to give almost any movie a chance, and bombs this big don’t happen every day, so even before it was voted on I was trying to make time to check it out. So sit down, microwave yourself a snack—

—and watch as I try and determine if The Flash is really that bad.

THE GOOD

The biggest shock of this film is that Ezra Miller is actually really good here.

Their Barry is still a bit of a goofball, but he’s clearly matured as a character since his precious appearances. They managed to make him much more charming and likable than he ever was, and this gets compounded when he interacts with the younger Barry and gets confronted with how annoying he was before. I think young Barry could have come off as really insufferable, but the fact he annoys everyone around him and also ends up maturing makes him a lot more endearing.

Miller really kills it with the emotional moments, particularly the ending encounter with Barry’s mom and the scene where old Barry snaps at young Barry. The film is really carried by the dramatic, emotional moments far more than any of the superheroics, and Miller manages to sell a lot of it very well. It was to the point where I started thinking, “I really wouldn’t mind if they stick around.” Then a scene where Barry says the Justice League has no real psychiatric help or where his younger self ends up repeatedly exposing himself in public by accident happens, and then I remembered, “Oh yeah, aren’t they a mentally unwell criminal?”

Unsurprisingly, Michael Keaton absolutely kills it in his role as Batman, but much more shockingly is that Ben Affleck's brief return as Bruce is pretty great as well. I always thought Affleck, much like Henry Cavill, was desperately trying to give a great performance while weighed down by bad writing; here, he gets an actual poignant scene where he talks to Barry about how dwelling on tragedies isn't the way to do things, and you should try and move forward instead. It shows he really could have been great if given better material to work with.

Okay, enough being nice to Affleck, I wanna talk about Keaton again. As much as the marketing hyped him up and as much as he is obviously the most blatant fanservice possible, it's still so cool to see him in the suit again. I am not immune to nostalgia pandering, and as corny as it could have been from anyone else, the zoom into his face when he says The Line really is a highlight of the movie. Keaton has a great deal of charisma, and while there are issues with Batman they aren't his fault at all. Most impressively, he doesn't steal the show away from Miller like I thought he would; he enhances the scenes he's in without stealing the spotlight completely from their performance. I feel like this is a problem in a lot of movies like this, where the lead gets overshadowed by a hyped up character, but somehow The Flash of all things managed to avoid this.

And as bad as the cameos could get, this movie gave two of the greatest cameos ever put to film with the return of the GOAT George Clooney Batman and, best of all, Nicolas Cage Superman from the unmade Superman Lives, fighting a giant spider to the death just as God intended. I am not immune to the charms of Nicolas Cage.

Overall, this movie presents us with a solid story, plenty of fun moments, great character dynamics, and more... for the first two acts, anyway.

THE BAD

Once this movie hits the third act, it basically just loses any and all focus and becomes a big dumb video game-esque battle against Zod and his forces in a bland desert landscape. While both Barrys admittedly get some pretty cool moments sprinkled in and Keaton’s Batman’s second death is actually a well done emotional moment, Supergirl ends up being completely wasted, with her sole role being to angrily scream and then die repeatedly.

This actually highlights the problem with Kara in this movie: She’s basically nothing but a plot device and has zero personality, and a good 80% of her dialogue is just angry screaming. As hot as Sasha Calle is and how much she obviously wants to make Kara compelling, she is given so little to work with that her efforts end up being fruitless. She does nothing of consequence after helping Barry get his powers back, and could be replaced or written out of the story and it would still make perfect sense.

Zod’s inclusion is pretty baffling as well, especially since they chose to water down one of the only good things from Man of Steel into a boring, generic doomsday villain. You can really feel that poor Michael Shannon would rather be doing anything else, and his bored performance just highlights how poorly implemented Zod is in the plot. Like, the Fladh has some of the best and most colorful DC villains in his rogues gallery, one’s that are often overlooked because Batman’s villains sell more toys. Why not highlight some of them instead of taking a Superman villain and stripping him of all personality to the point the actor clearly has no passion for the role? Cutting Zod would make cutting Supergirl even easier, and then two of the biggest problems with the movie are gone!

The third act does manage to mostly rerail itself once it goes back to Barry trying to unfuck the timeline, with only a disgustingly egregious bit of fanservice that I’ll discuss in the next section hampering it. But at the end, despite the incredibly based George Clooney cameo, there’s just so many unresolved and unanswered questions, with the biggest one being who killed Barry’s mom? Considering her death is what kickstarted the whole plot, you’d think this might come up, but it never does. A lot of other things come up and get dropped too, like whatever was going on with Batman in the opening, but maybe I’m just crazy for wanting elements introduced in a plot to have significance beyond just being there to be cool.

Even beyond that, there’s the fact that Supergirl and Keaton!Batman’s final fates are never really resolved, something that apparently wasn’t a problem in early versions of the film since they showed up alive in the final scene. As much as I loved seeing Clooney, I think trading him for getting some closure for Keaton and Calle would have been more satisfying.

Everyone harps on how bad the CGI is—and it absolutely is, don’t get me wrong—but for the most part I found it endearingly bad. Like the opening with the CGI babies? That’s too goofy for me to hate. But once the movie revolves into bland grey and black CGI bad guys and creepy deepfake celebrity cameos, I stop being quite so forgiving.

Oh, and on the subject of cameos, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one as pointless and unfunny as Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman showing up out of nowhere (complete with theme music) to make Bruce and Barry look like dumb assholes. Imagine thinking this was a good idea.

THE UGLY

The biggest point of contention surrounding this movie is the CGI necromancy used in the aforementioned cameo clusterfuck from the climax, which gives us George Reeve, Christopher Reeves, and Adam West posthumously reprising their DC roles in non-speaking appearances (there’s archived audio from West, but his cameo isn't really focused on to the point you can barely tell it's him) where they just stand there before the camera swoops around like in that Saul Goodman gif.

I think this is one of the very few times where I actually think the outrage is mostly justified. To be clear, I’m not getting mad on behalf of dead celebrities I never knew, and as long as the filmmakers went through the proper channels and the estates of these stars were properly compensated, I don’t have any legal objections. All of my distaste is coming from a subjective, moral standpoint.

I have never liked this CGI necromancy ever since Rogue One popularized it. I find it really gross and distasteful, and in most cases I think finding a lookalike actor would be preferable than playing Weekend at Bernie’s with a computer generated facsimile of a dead person. In The Flash, I understand having lookalikes would diminish the wow factor of the crossover, but there was an extremely easy workaround to this: Have cameos from all the living DC stars.

Was Brandon Routh not available to put on the Superman tights? Would it have been so bad to let Grant Gustin pop in for a cameo? They acknowledge Helen Slater, so why not Melissa Benoist? Hell, if you want to reference bad, campy movies, have Shaq show up as Steel or Josh Brolin pop in as Jonah Hex! Or even Ryan Reynolds, I’d bet he’d be down to return if you gave him a real suit this time!

Like there’s just no excuse for ghoulishly parading around dead guys when there’s so many alive guys you could use instead. People can complain all they want about the fanservice and cameos in the past few Spider-Man films, but at least they only had returning characters played by living actors. And when this movie already has the niche, out-there Nic Cage Superman cameo, proving they were down to do things as out there and inoffensively creative as reference unmade movies, it’s really just inexcusable. It doesn’t ruin the movie for me, but it makes me lose a bit of respect for the people who okayed this over less offensive cameo ideas.

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

To my surprise, this film actually turned out to be pretty good. Not “great,” not “the best superhero movie ever,” but genuinely mostly good and enjoyable.

My opinion is that the movie is good in spite of itself. The third act is truly a hot mess, the stupid desert battle against Zod is awful and boring, Supergirl is depressingly pointless, so many plot points are just dropped or otherwise forgotten, and the CGI necromancy is nothing short of ghoulish. But the rest of the movie is truly a lot of fun. Barry and his younger self have a fun dynamic, Keaton really manages to take what little he’s given and show that he’s still got it as Batman, the Clooney and Cage cameos were delightful, and most importantly the emotional moments are actually effective.

I think with a bit more polish this film could have actually lived up to the hype around it. There is a great movie in here being suffocated by fanservice and CGI but still managing to get a few gasps of air regardless. I think if they’d kept the conflict more grounded or made Reverse-Flash the primary antagonist, things might have turned out better.

I think its score is pretty fair. My friend @huyh172 described this as “the worst good DC movie,” and it’s an assessment I fully agree with. It’s not as good as Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Suicide Squad, the Snyder Cut, or Shazam!, and it’s definitely not as bad as stuff like Wonder Woman 1984 or Josstice League. It’s also a bit too enjoyable to be mid. It’s just a really solid movie held back from true greatness by some damning flaws… and really, that makes it the perfect capstone to the "Snyderverse," a cinematic universe that had some solid movies but was held back from greatness by incredibly bad ones.

#Is It Really that bad?#IIRTB #review #movie review #The Flash #The Flash 2023 #Ezra Miller #andy muschietti #DC #DCEU #Snyderverse #Michael Keaton #Batman #Sasha Calle #Supergirl #Barry Allen #superhero movie

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linisiane · 2 years ago

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What do Rick Sanchez, Don Quixote, and Harry Du Bois Have in Common?

In all three of these stories, these characters are ‘self-aware’ in that they intentionally play into the tropes of the stories they’re satirizing (Rick Sanchez satirizing sitcoms, Don Quixote satirizing chivalric romances, and Harry Dubois satirizing roleplaying games). However, the trick to their ‘self-awareness’ is that they’re lying to themselves.

This post is LONG, so feel free to skip to the end if you're just interested in "The Self-Aware Player of Harry Du Bois" (in bolded green) if you don't feel like reading the rest of the analysis. I go into the meaning of the political vision quests, the meaning of the 4th wall breaking RPG elements like copotypes and Jamrock Shuffling, and the effect this has on the player's relationship to Harry Du Bois!

(Common) Rick Sanchez (L)

Although Rick acts like he can see the audience and uses marketable catchphrases like “Wubbalubbadubdub” to appeal to sitcom sensibilities (“Bazinga;” “Did I do that?” “Legen- Wait For It -Dary;” etc.), the truth of the matter is that WITHIN HIS REALITY, he is not a sitcom character.

He truly does not know he’s in a sitcom.

He’s just an asshole.

ID A screenshot from the show Rick and Morty, with subtitled dialogue that says: Wubbalubbadubdub! That's my new thing! I'm kind of like, what's his name, Arsenio! Wubbalubbadubdub! See you next week. Beside the screenshot is a picture of the mentioned Arsenio, who is the titular character to a sitcom called The Arsenio Hall Show End ID

Rick has ATROCIOUS main character syndrome. Truly obnoxious. We happen to be enjoying (debate-able) it from our TV screens, but he doesn’t know that! Hoe’s just calling his family ‘side characters’ and taking them on traumatizing ‘B plot’ adventures to humor-cope with his multiverse induced nihilism. (it is NOT WORKING)

Dan Harmon, as a big fan of the storytelling theory behind sitcoms, has a thing for these type of self-aware-but-not-really characters in his shows. Abed (from his other well-known sitcom named ‘Community') is basically a film student obsessed with film tropes—

Which means he’s eternally making meta self-aware quips on the show without actually being self-aware. He’s not Deadpool, he's just a movie nerd.

It's a wink and a nod to show the audience, Hey, we’re aware that nowadays people are savvy enough to comment on when they’re in a wacky sitcom plot.

This is ‘some looney tunes type shit,’ amirite guys?

(This trick is called lampshading, it got popular recently with Marvel movies and the influence of Joss Whedon's writing (@dingdongyouarewrong), but it's also going through a bit of cliche fatigue right now. "That happened" jokes are an example that I know so many people are sick of, partly because it feels like writers include self-awareness/lampshading as a shield from criticism by pretending you can't critique a problem they're self-aware about!

Let me highlight it to you in the rest of this essay as a tool in satire/pastiche.)

'Donkey Hotel' (according to my speech to text)

To explain Donkey Hotel's deal, I must remark: This guy is on some ancient mental illness type beat.

Now, in the ancient era of Hippocrates, there used to be the hot idea that there are four major human temperaments, and these temperaments are influenced by the balances of liquids in our body called humors. And that an imbalance of the four would lead to an over representing of a temperament.

Don Quixote had a 'Choleric' temperament, which is an overrepresentation of yellow bile and characterized with qualities such as 'hot and dry' and emotional irregularities such as increased anger or behaving irrationally. That's our knight!

Now obviously we know that the idea of 4 Humors in our body controlling our temperament is a BS simplification of mental health, BUT, there’s usually a kernel of truth in ancient theories. The universe really was made up of elements like Aristotle theorized, just not the fire, earth, water, air that he thought they were.

Similarly, our author our man, Cervantes, was using the 4 Humors more to develop a physical/biological explanation to Don's mental illness.

All this to say, Don Quixote is currently deluding himself into believing he is a gallant knight, off to defend the honor of his lady love, the total paragon of a chivalric romance novel because, and I quote, “he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.”

Let's pause.

An escapist stupor that completely wiped the mind of its host?

(FANART BY @so-engery! Check them out!)

ID Two images. One is is Gustave Dore's "Don Quixote Dreaming" drawing. The other is Disco Elysium fanart by Marie Enger @so-engery. Both showcase the main character of their respective works, slumped and surrounded by mad figments of their imagination, highlighting the parallels between the two. Harry with his Skill voices and Don with knights and fairytale creatures. End ID.

That’s our boy, Harrier Du Bois right there!

And while obviously Harry's condition at the start of Disco Elysium is more based on modern understanding of psychology (aka alcohol did it to him, not intense insomnia and a chivalric romance bookathon), it’s real neat we get this this little parallel before we even dig into Harry!

Now, with that neat explanation of why he’s self-aware out of the way, Don Quixote’s deal: Again, he’s not actually self-aware, he’s quite possibly the opposite of self-aware, and EVERYBODY (even the audience!) knows it. He’s only self aware in the sense that he’s acting like a character in a fictional story, which he is, but he’s got the wrong genre.

He thinks he’s in an action/romance, but he’s actually in real life—A satire of the action/romance genre!

Well, caveat.

Is Don Donning the 'Don' Inspirationally or is he Donning the 'Don' to Act as a Don About the Downs of Chivalry?

I read it as Don Quixote donning the 'don' title to act as a don at the college of 'please touch grass and stop romanticizing romantic chivalry.'

A super popular adaptational take, however, is to read him like he's an inspirational dreamer held back by a harsh reality.

Big Nate's Book Reviews on YouTube did a sweet review that highlights this perspective, along with his lil doobie,

that Don Quixote's perspective brings fresh child-like imagination and fantasy to the mundanity of the lives of the people around him. Nate says that Don Quixote and Sancho are "Truly the homies;" they're the first times he's ever felt that he could "find friends in characters in a book."

So there's definitely a joy and a message to the dreamer reading! BUT I tend to be a bit cynical about this, like it can feel a bit too similar to USAmerican Exceptionalism to me.

To clarify what I mean, let's do a Rick parallel.

Don Quixote, as a character, is more similar to the FANS of Rick and Morty than he is to Rick. (Which is its own commentary about how little we have progressed as a society since this book was published like 400 years ago, but also the way media is influenced by prior media.)

To explain THAT, lemme first say that there’s a sort of meta irony (which is how I describe this phenomena according to J-Reg’s theory of satire, but I don’t know the actual name of this) in the ‘he’s just like me fr’ guys. ‘Literally me’ guys. Guys who pseudo imitate Patrick Bateman, literally any Ryan gosling character, etc.

ID A youtube screenshot of 3 different videos titled "literally me" "Literally Me" or "Literally me (I'm mentally insane)" with different Ryan Reynolds characters as the thumbnail. In the "I'm mentally insane" video description, one of the tags is the word "sigma." End ID

Often these characters are meant to be made fun of as parodies of another trope, like Don Quixote is to a chivalric romance protagonist, but there’s a certain subset of the audience that is either too dumb to get it or just doesn’t have the context or background to get it.

Like the dudes who watch fight club, and just end up making fight clubs of their own. Or the way people misinterpreted Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ as celebrating the US, instead of its true message of lambasting the US for its hypocritical treatment of its veterans. Or the glorification of Rorschach from Watchmen despite him basically being a MAGA. Or the way USAmericans didn’t get Starship Troopers because it was a parody of US military fascism.

There are tons of examples of these because of satire usually says more about the reader/viewer than it does about the author, like a Rorschach test (he really is aptly named). (And it’s why it’s more often fascists/conservatives wildly misinterpreting leftist media. People are more likely to come with a conservative perspective than vice versa bc conservatism is, by its definition, the norm. Though this does still happen on more progressive sides e.g. TJLC.) They didn't see or chose not to see the irony.

Cue the Reddit dudebros misinterpreting Disco Elysium as pro centrist or “all ideologies are equally bad" and the INSANE 'you have to have a high IQ...' 'rick is good and objectively correct' Rick and Morty fans.

ID Two screenshots. One of the infamous "To Be Fair, You Have To Have a Very High IQ to Understand Rick and Morty" copypasta. One of a Disco Elysium Reddit post titled "Disco Elysium is Not Politically In Favor Of Any Ideology." End ID

Speaking of Rick and Morty fans, this is what I mean by the idea that Don Quixote is more like Rick's fans than he is like Rick. Much like the way Don un-self-aware-ly misinterprets his satirical reality for the chivalric romance of his favorite novels, so too do Rick and Morty fans un-self-aware-ly misinterpret Rick's nihilist satire on the sitcom for what is cool and good to do in real life. Plus, I can totally see these type of dudes unironically saying "Milady" to keep chivalry alive. But, there's one level further to this, beyond even seeing the irony, which I call the 'he's just like me fr' guys.

Now, in the case of the 'he's just like me fr' guys, it's not that they're mistaking the satire for sincerity—they totally understand that Patrick Bateman is a satirical take on Yuppie 'grind till you make it alpha' culture.

They're doing a secret third thing—meta irony—where they understand that Patrick Bateman is meant to be bad but act like they're un-self-aware and missed the irony anyway.

It's supposed to be a joke, buuuuut it's a joke the same way people will say "SLAY!" as a joke until it's unironically a part of their vocabulary. The ambiguity is key.

I'd argue that the dreamer Quixote approach is an application of 'he's just like me fr' view to Don Quixote, where he's 'a Chad rejecting reality in favor of the perseverance of man's whimsy' to some people, even as they joke that he's delusional ("Literally me (I'm mentally insane)").

Don Quixote certainly isn't doing it on purpose—again, he's un-self-aware, and he even got bullied out of it in part 2 (which admittedly I haven't read). Yet, there's a genuine sadness there of a man with such a penchant for adventure getting bullied that makes you wanna start humoring him.

It's ironic but not: Meta irony.

ID A screenshot of Jreg's "Post-Irony, Meta-Irony, and Post-Truth Satire (Video)" thumbnail. End ID

But yeah, meta irony is all fine and dandy when it's about slaying, but when it's about emulating the patriarchal psychopath, Patrick Bateman, or using edge-y humor to spread alt-right talking points, you start to wonder if there can be something insidious to the 'he's just like me fr' approach.

To put it best, the wild popularity of the Dreamer Don Quixote interpretation feels like the result of USAmerican 'grind till you make it' 'individual exceptionalism' 'it would suck for you, but i'm built different' values distorting the absurdity of being a reality denying dreamer, the same way we struggle to understand the Starship Troopers because it just feels normal/celebratory to us.

Don Quixote

So I think Don Quixote resonates strongest, for me, in the way it boldly states that reality is beautiful and worth living in without needing the opium of escapist fantasy.

For one, Cervantes is a rare ye olden feminist king who takes the time to point out that one man's escapist chivalric masculine fantasy is another woman's misogynistic reality.

To demonstrate, he has many examples of female characters telling off men for projecting romantic fantasies on them, but a more relevant way is how he writes Don Quixote as literally renaming some random woman he's never met 'Dulcinea' because he's decided she is his Lady he's given his eternal servitude to.

He renames her Dulcinea because it's "a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon, and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself and the things belonging to him."

Which is PEAK satire of the misogynistic objectification of chivalry. If only the Rick and Morty "Milady" stans had the self-awareness this book had 400 years ago.

(Sidebar, but does anybody else think Don Quixote would make an absolutely killer Drag King persona? Don Queerote... Plus the ballet about him would help with the pre-existing choreo/music. Just a thought!)

But on another level, Don Quixote is full of interesting characters or stories outside of the chivalric knight conceit!

ID Pen illustrations (aka engravings by Gustave Dore) of two events happening simultaneously at the same inn in Don Quixote. The one above is of Don's assault on the wineskins in his sleep. The one below is of the reunion of Dorotea, Luscinda, Cardenio, and Fernando in the inn. End ID

People often clown on the novel for having so much time dedicated to the soap opera antics of side characters totally unrelated to the knight plot, but their antics being outside of Quixote's chivalric view emphasizes how life is interesting even when you're not following a delusional knight lifestyle!

Romance and reunions and betrayals that Don never really understands because he's too busy fighting windmills and wineskins! Yes, the delusion allowed him to go out and explore the world, but there's something so silly and sad about missing whimsy of real life in favor of living in escapist Knight Fanfiction. Reading about Cervantes's soap-opera-worthy life only reinforces this whimsy for reality and touching grass.

The Self-Aware Player of Harry Du Bois

Preface: My main experience is JRPGs, not so much other Western RPGs and tabletop games. So although I’m saying it’s a satire of these tropes, and I noticed a lot of these things as ‘satire’ and 'parody,' I’m not totally enmeshed in the subculture the creators were going for, so I might need some corrections.

Finally, this transitions into the deal with Harry! It's fascinating to me to think about how satire is used as the 'touch grass' or 'be fucking for real' genre. Oftentimes it's making fun of tropes/conventions by humorously contrasting them with reality—so how does this play out with the RPG!?

Weeellll, it goes hand in hand with the idea of RPGs as escapist power fantasy. RPGs are often thought of as the ultimate self-insert fantasy by its detractors or worst players, ahem looking at all those DND horror stories about entitled mangsty murderhobos.

One of the most infamous criticisms of Disco Elysium is its lackluster combat.

ID A screenshot of a random forum discussion post by dungeon master Zed Duke of Banville. It reads: "Disco Elysium has neither combat nor exploration, and therefore is missing two of the three fundamental components (or sets of components) that define the RPG genre." End ID

The game has essentially bordered off your ability to make Harry into a power fantasy murderhobo because you just are physically unable to equip an longsword or cuisse to murder your average citizen on the street of Martinaise.

But even on a less mangsty level, it subverts a lot of the basic expectations of RPGs.

Like the encounter with the racist lorry driver! You never get the ability or quest to change his mind, you only choose how you react to him.

Where other RPGs might let you act as the white savior or the white knight of chivalric romance, no questions asked, you're changing the minds of everybody who's wrong so we can all get along, Disco Elysium really makes you confront your ability to whiteknight, makes you confront if whiteknighting is even helpful, and why you wanted to whiteknight in the first place.

It’s part of the fun/humor experience of Disco Elysium that you at first expect to solve the world’s problems with a couple quests and lines of ‘good’ dialogue and then get socked in the faced with the fact that yeah, you can’t do much, you’re one person, what did you expect, asshole? Cuno doesn't fucking care!

ID a screenshot of Disco Elysium dialogue YOU - "Don't call it a dump, you've made it nice and cosy here." NOVELTY DICEMAKER - "Yeah." She stares out of the window, not really hearing your words. "Or maybe it's the entire world that's cursed? It's such a precarious place. Nothing ever works out the way you wanted." "That's why people like role-playing games. You can be whoever you want to be. You can try again. Still, there's something inherently violent even about dice rolls." "It's like every time you cast a die, something disappears. Some alternative ending, or an entirely different world...." She picks up a pair of dice from the table and examines them under the light. End ID

Like, Neha is highlighting this little meta element of how you can stack your Harry in any RPG to pursue a certain ending or situation, but the actual outcome is still influenced by a dice roll out of your control.

A lot of the satirical humor in Disco Elysium comes from the absurdity that you can do everything right or everything wrong, and the dice can still fuck it up or save it for you—not just for things like high-fantasy attacks, but mundane things like remembering your name.

The dice are, at their core, about how RPGs aren't just for the control fantasy, of winning high-fantasy battles, but also can represent life as it is, mundane and uncontrollable.

Similarly, Harry is clearly written—complete with all the 'lore' that this would entail—to couch his RPG protagonist nature in the real.

If RPG characters are blank slates? Let's give ours amnesia! Need fast travel?! Kim teases the 41st Precinct for constantly running everywhere by calling it the Jamrock Shuffle. He needs to have deep and intimate conversations with everyone, even when they're strangers? Yeah, that's so weird we gave him the name 'Human Can-Opener,' and everybody remarks on his uncanny manipulation skills.

It's commenting on difference between controlling an RPG avatar and navigating in a human body.

As Kurvits said: “In reality we do not have control, or complete control, of our minds. Just like our body, it is something that we give-not even commands wishes to, and we hope it's gonna do it. We hope it's not gonna break down, we hope it's not gonna rebel against us.”

In one type of RPG fantasy, we don't even question our total control and even assume the joy is from the control. But in Disco Elysium, we lack control and find joy in it anyway. That is the fun of the game making us, the players, 'self-aware' about its RPG elements, and it especially resonates with anybody not able-bodied, anybody neurodivergent.

Harry Du Bois and Self-Awareness: Copotypes? More like Cope-otypes.

So that's on Disco Elysium and being aware of RPG elements in general, but let's deep dive into Harry and his Copotypes and political alignments like the OP!

I kind of want to round this last one out with what this all means. WHY am I, and others, linking self-awareness and satire? What's the link here?

Irony is one of the major tools of satirical writing, and there's always a little irony in being self-aware and doing it anyway, I think. It's specifically that Meta-Ironic element/Lampshading that is so rich for Touch-Grass satire because it parallels the futility/irony of self-awareness in real life.

The copotypes work this way.

ID A screenshot of a youtube comment. @jbeast3385 "Harry fundamentally takes on extreme interpretations of every ideology in the game as a coping mechanism for the tragedy that is his life, and it's amazing to see the amount of care given to extending an understanding of why each ideology appeals to his fractured mind. Each quest makes him something of a Don Quixote, searching for a purer purpose through political thought, failing spectacularly with it, but still fundamentally developing him and inspiring others beside him." End ID

The copotypes and the political alignments are a parody of classes and moral alignments. Rather than being a knight or a wizard, you're a superstarcop or a sorrycop! They don't do much, like there are no fireballs for an art cop, but they do poke fun at the ways the player is choosing to play Harry! Instead of chaotic good or neutral evil, you can be a communard or an ultralib! Which both involve spouting hilariously inappropriate talking points to the other citizens of Revachol.

What's fascinating, as @fagcrisis of this post says, is that these alignments are statements of how your Harry copes with the real world and the past/how he justifies what he does.

From the Solution to the Boring Cop Thought:

When someone says something political, the first three thoughts in your head are a ludicrous hodgepodge of communism, fascism and stock tips. When they ask you why you did something, it's superstardom, apocalypse, or the *mea culpas* of a flagellant cop monk

You start off making some choices based on the limited dialogue options of Harry's bizarre personality. If you play it like any other RPG power fantasy, BAM, the game hits you with the "Regular Law Official" thought, and you're labeled "Boring Cop." Or if you're apologizing to get the 'good' route, BAM, the game hits you with the "Rigorous Self-Critique" thought, and you're labelled "Sorry Cop!"

The game makes you 'aware' of your playing style, a little poke to say 'Stop being so scared of failures! You're boring! Sorry is not enough! Stop trying to be 'lawful good' (ACAB) and be a human!'

From the same Solution:

It's not easy, reaching for the fourth option -- the normal one. But you have. And now you're not *just* crazy, you're also *boring*.

Some people get this taste of self-awareness and fully embrace diving into the deep end of the game—Disco baby! Others lean into the sorry/boring/moralist cop in an ironic 'self-aware' sort of way—like the technique of Lampshading, since we're our own writers as RPG players.

But on a Harry level, it's also about HIM becoming self-aware of his habits, of internalizing these thoughts about his actions, his past, his coping mechanisms.

Seeking either “sweet oblivion” or to become “a different kind of animal,” many of the possible roleplaying choices are rooted in his desire to forget, evade or reframe the past. Whether self-destruction through drug abuse, fantasies of superstardom or visions of impending doom; it’s all in the service of not wanting to face the past, and the disastrous effects Harry’s continuous failure to do so has had on his life. - Vice

As the @fagcrisis of this post noted, Dora pretty much ALWAYS mentions the way Harry escapes reality by thinking of himself as an archetype, like other people are NPCs in an RPG. "like hes a self aware character but in the shitty way where him knowing he is a character and him acting like it only makes it worse because there isnt a story to escape from, he just cant cope with the real world" He's pulling a meta-ironic ''he's just like me fr" with Guillaume Le Million (who hangs himself) and superstardom the way "he's just like me fr" guys do it for Ryan Gosling.

And each copotype and political alignment are an opportunity to satirically critique the flaws and failures of each coping mechanism.

Cope-otype: Fascism

"Fascism, being marked, according to Paxton, by a need to compensate for humiliation, promises easy solutions to someone like Harry. It’s a crutch to prop up threatened masculinity, a rhetoric to shift blame for personal failings to ominous outside forces." - Vice

This game's satirical take on fascism is sort of perfect, literally making it about the lower intestines, 'gut instinct,' and bullshit (@spilledkaleidoscope). To be frank, fascists are 'full of shit,' and the vision quest highlights the way fascism isn't about a coherent ideology like 'returning to the past,' but rather it's a hodgepodge of SHIT thrown together to prop up hurt ego, threatened masculinity, of giving an easy scape-goated answer to the question of how Harry's supposed to face his past and his future.

The answer? He shoots it.

It's accurate in a way that doesn't reinforce the 'cool' aesthetics and pageantry fascism is obsessed with, what with literally calling fascists full of shit and all. Kim notices your change in expression, your stoic 'noble suffering' fascist face, and immediately calls it constipated. Bless.

Yet, even as Kim calls you out, even as you're aware of fascism's failures, how it destroys you ala Harry Du Bois -> Detective Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau, Fascist!Harry still believes because he can't face a wounded ego.

Cope-otype: Ultralib

Ultralibs on the other hand? I think it's telling that Idiot Doom Spiral is basically ultralib Harry's foil and a major questline NPC—the one who gives you Tequila Sunset.

Even the names are foils. Idiot Doom Spiral names himself that way to romanticize it, to make it into a marketable story, "but it keeps him in this state too, like a vicious cycle. The name ‘George’ is a name that still connects him to humanity," while Idiot Doom Spiral is a way to 'accept his place' even though it's miserable and keeps him from doing something about it, nor connect with other people, as @kindaeccentric put it in this post.

Similarly, the megarich light bending guy in the UltraLib quest LITERALLY is much more unlikely to connect with poorer people because the Rougon-Macquart coefficient literally dictates that we cannot see the richest people because their networth bends the light around them. It's an inversion of the way rich people are ignorant to poverty in real life, and here's a really good fic that covers this coefficient!

Finally, this mirrors Tequila Sunset as a name as well, the way it's a cope for hating himself. Instead of being miserable, he glorifies his misery by calling himself a funky, disco drink name, even as it symbolizes being washed up or even symbolizes the pale swallowing all, depending on how you play him (@palin-tropos).

So much of the ultralib plotline is about adding value — whether by sprucing yourself up with a new name like Tequila or Idiot or by 're-conceptualization' — through stuff like grind/hustle culture. An obsession with increasing networth but also 'giving back' to the community, as philanthropists put it.

But the satire of the ultralib vision quest is highlighting how hollow 'adding value' is, how much of it's just competition for wealth for the sake of wealth with no real meaningful answer or value.

ID Two screenshots of the game Disco Elysium. The first is of the horseback monument as it is. A matrix of cables and ropes isolate the fragmented bits in thin air. The second is described as this through in-game dialogue: HORSEBACK MONUMENT - The scaffolding around the old monument has been taken down, In its place are the spoils of your investment. Numerous rods and ropes still hold the original reassemblage in place. YOU- Reflect on the re-conceptualization. HORSEBACK MONUMENT - An apricot sceptre shines party-bright across the monument. Glitter balls dangle like severed heads below the eternal king of disco. It is unmistakably a vision of you in your prime -- a killer on the performance floor, icon for all. End ID

It's 'reconceptualizing' the Horseback Monument — the symbol of both the bombing of the revolution and the enduring of spirit the communards anyways, the way they've built a monument to freeze in time the moment of the profligate king being blown up — by building it in your own image. The fact that to do so you need to exploit the labor of an artist so you can make a profit, and it doesn't truly 'give back' to the community in any way. In fact, it's almost the opposite, like you've ruined the community monument by painting yourself AS THE KING.

It's why even Harry admits that "You're just insane, insane and gone. Even six billion won't fix you if she’s not there." Each copotype and political ideology contends with their own version of this as Harry learns to grow and face his past head on.

The Marriage of Fictional Conventions and Real Human Psychology

In the end, you can't just lean into an ideology or an archetype and hope that it'll answer all you problems.

But more than that — being self-aware about your issues doesn't solve anything either, no more than lampshading "fixes" any problems with your TV show.

It is this parallel between what Harry learns as he progresses and what the player learns as they progress that makes us empathize/resonate with Harry.

From acting erratically, then realizing it's part of an ideology, self-awarely adopting an ideology, to seeing how it fails and learning not to hide behind it. From "He's a blank slate so I can project my power fantasy onto him," then "I don't actually have a lot of power or control here," to "He's not just my RPG character, he's a person."

He's becoming a person, twice over.

It's ludonarrative resonance or consistency. A marriage of literary convention and real human psychology, on two scales.

And this resonance demonstrates why this genre of self-aware pastiche character is so popular: At it's best, you're forced to contend with the characters as fully realized people, paradoxically because they highlight the difference between fictional conventions and reality.

By acknowledging and poking fun of the fictional conventions, Harry Du Bois, Don Quixote, and Rick Sanchez feel more real to us.

And their stories come packaged with rich themes about dangers of disconnecting yourself from reality and the short distance 'self-awareness' alone can take you, which will resonate with almost every one of us here on the Internet. At least, I know it resonated with me.

BONUS:

Shen Yuan from Scum Villain Self-Saving System (@whetstonefires) also fits this list!!!!!!

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