#Thayle rants

[thaylepo]

Okay.

So first off, this is a misunderstanding of the differencw between a HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION and an ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION.

I've held my piece on this topic for a long looong time because I haven't had the steam for a rant on the scale of the Cave Woman Dildos, but I'm back on my adhd meds and therefor back on my bullshit, so buckle up buttercups, let's do this.

A "historical reconstruction" is the recreation of an object, a method, or action using only data collected via evidence-based research. This includes archaeology, scientific study, ethnologic study of living cultures and their ancestors, comparative studies of a collection of multiple subjects, and more recently, microscopic analysis and cool shit like mass spectrometry.

The statues above are RECONSTRUCTIONS. What y'all are complaining about is that they are not ARTISTIC INTERPATATIONS.

Lemme explain further.

Analysis was made on microscopic pigment remains on the statuary to identify the colours that the statue may have been painted with (afaik). Since ancient pigments can often exhibit a range of colours, additional research on that can be done to determine the most likely visual hue, multiple items analysed to fill in areas where no pigment was preserved or couldn't be identified. Then a reconstruction of the statue is made to show it painted in the most accurate colours determined by all the evidence of this research. It's the best that could be done, sticking only to that evidence. Guarantee, the minute more evidence is available, the researchers are gonna be fervently reassessing their work, but the physical reconstruction in the museum? In that 10, 20, 30yo article? It'll still be there. Shit's slow to update in rhe public side.

So why isn't it an ARTISTIC INTERPETATION? Why isn't that part of this process? Isn't the study of ancient art evidence too??

It is! But it's a different kind of study!

While some logical connections can be made and justified in evidence based research in the interest of creating a physical recobatruction like this, you will notice that what all this research CAN'T determine is stuff the artistic shading and variance of colour to give depth, dimension, and glow to the subject. The physical analysis of pigment is just going to identify the pigment molecule. The research into ancient pigment making is just going to give you its physical properties like colour. The location of the sample is just going to tell you where on the statue the pigment was applied. It ISN'T going to tell you how the artist applied it. It can't. The nature of this subject limits it like that.

Because the RECONSTRUCTION is only the evidence-based part of this process. The next part is the ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION. This is where you look at the frescoes, the mosaics, and every example we have of how colour and depth are artistically applied, break it down into historical periods (the Roman Empire was really, really long, guys), make a detailed in depth artistic study of all of these techniques and examples, combine them with the research on pigments and your statuary, and THEN.... THEN you create an INTERPRETATION of how you THINK the statue MIGHT have been painted.

Tl;dr..... my beef here is that we are seeing the results of one part of a two part process.... and then complaining that the second part isn't there. That.... that's like seeing someone mix a cake batter, and then complaining that it doesn't look like a cake yet. There's a whole second process that needs to be done before that happens!

Simply put, in terms of say, colouring in photoshop for example, this evidence-based data gives us our base layers. To get our shading and effects, we need to begin a new, different process.

Not every archaeologist is an artist, or even does artistic study and interpretation in addition to physical microscopic pigment analysis, tho many do! In any case, you can do the physical analysis and reconstruction, and it will stand on its own as a publication-worthy study without the artistic interpretation. The reverse cannot be said.

So you get a lot of these studies presented as absolute and factual and scientific, and that makes it look like the second part, the artistic interpretation part, is being done separately by an entirely different field of study. It also doesn't help that these sides of the study of archaeology, hard physical evidence based science and artistic/humanities/social sciences often appear to be constantly bickering in the extremes, when most often both need to be applied whenever possible, as rigorously as possible.

I get that the ins and outs of academics can be pretty obscured to anyone looking in with casual interest, and often these bite size public science articles put things in clipped absolute terms to make them short and easily digested ("This is EXACTLY how these statues looked, the smart people said so! Wild! Now click this link about Roman dick lamps before we've lost your interest!"), and this in particular is often misrepresented. Sometimes this kind of thing is misrepresented intentionally, not to fuck with the public, but to make it easier to get further funding from people who have lots of money but do not understand archaeology as much as they do investment. (And sometimes the archaeologist is just a dick. I guarantee we all just thought of one name, and we're probably all right.)

But. But. The field as a whole? Collectively?

My guys. My dudes. My people. My wonderful, intelligent, creative, and lovely people who share my burning passionate interest in all things of the past and present?

I PROMISE YOU. I promise, from my very bones, the people who have spent years, decades, dedicated their very careers to the study of Roman art and archaeology? Who spend months hunched over in the dirt, months more hunched over in the lab, who voraciously consume every book, lecture, who visit every tiny local museum within a fifty mile radius of wherever they spend more than a week's time, who cross the world to see sites and artifacts with their own eyes because pictures are not good enough, who can look at a fragment of a fresco painting and tell you exactly what wall on what Pompeiian bathhouse it was painted on?

They know. Okay? They know. They are fully, completely aware and in agreement that this is not how these statues were actually painted. They know! They're okay with it, because:

What they also know that has been unfortunately obscured from you, is that that's not what is being presented here. These paint-by-numbers examples are just a very basic visual, physical reconstruction based on data from physical evidence. They know that artistic interpretations are much, much harder, take longer, require different skills, methods, and area of study, have to be generously extrapolated because we only have other forsms of painted art and no existing fully painted statuary to go by (again, afaik), and are much, much more subject to controversy, interpretation, and error.

So like, cut 'em some slack okay? Very few of us are stodgy tweed jacketed bearded old men from the 30s and 50s anymore. We're largely gen x/millenials being taught and working for an "old guard" while knowing we will likely never inherit their stable tenured positions. The majority of the field is younger women now, and many of us are queer, of diverse cultural backgrounds, and struggle to afford to do the work we studied to do, that we crave to do, while trying to create needed change in a field whose existing structure remains as resistent to change as it ever was.

If something seems off to you in a bite size public science article? Look it into it! Do your own further research! I guarantee you'll find out more than you expected. That iceberg is fucking massive under here, and there is plenty of it to dunk on that actually deserves it lol

... mosaic ...

Roman mosaic, Detail of floor, 1 century BC, National Archaeological Museum of Aquileia, Italy

[thaylepo]

They do have it after book 20 tho. It's never said whether they try it, but it IS said, explicitly, box or not, that there's no way to reverse nothlitization. Elfangor knows this. Arbron knows this, and has them leave him behind on the taxxon world because of it. Elfangor tells the kids right off, don't do it, there's no going back if you get stuck. They hope anyway, in absence of any other information, that the Andalites can help Tobias. Ax confirms they cannot. At the time of the events of Animorphs, there is no known way to reverse a nothlit. They don't need to attempt using the box in-text in the books, just like Ax and Tobias never have their conversation about Elfangor being Tobias' father in-text. We're told that they did. We're told there's no cure for being trapped in morph. It's shown the box will not even give Tobias the morphing ability back, by the fact that it takes a literal interference from god to do so. If it were as simple as giving them the box back, the Ellimist would not have needed to do so directly. We know the box survived and was in the construction site all along. The series has plot holes, yes, but this is not one of them. The box will not work on a nothlit, just as acquiring someone in morph doesn't work. Deviations to some of anthe rules only happen in ghost written books, but even then, it's a confirmed status quo that nothlit = permanent. No cure.

If a cure is found in-universe by 2022, that's a different story. But it's made explicitly clear in canon that the Andalites do not, and never did, have any way to fix being trapped in morph during the series. It's a core tenet of the books.

Writing otherwise isn't bad or wrong!!! Veriation and different takes literally make fandom what it is!! It's just not canon, that's all. The difference is just is/is not. No weight of judgement either way, it's just important to know the differtence, cuz everyone can look to canon as a consistent point in any fandom.

I always wondered if someone is trapped in a morph, why not use the blue box on them again? I always thought it would be so ironic if after all this do I stay as a bird or a boy stuff with Tobias that only to realize they could do this at the end of things and it was never suggested because it’s maybe just not attempted or something.

My guess is that the andalites have tried it at some point and Ax knows it won't work. Because — even though Tobias himself is ambivalent on the subject — Rachel and Jake are both DETERMINED to de-nothlit him no matter what. So between the Berensons' desperation to Fix The Thing and Ax's closeness with Tobias, I can't imagine that no one ever brought up the idea of trying to use the blue box on Tobias a second time. My guess would therefore be that it's widely known there is no cure for nothlitization, with or without the box.

Ax mentions early on in #8 that he's "afraid Tobias will ask" about how to get un-trapped, because he knows there's "no way to fix" a nothlit, but that Tobias hasn't asked him at any point in their first several weeks as roommates. So that suggests to me both that Ax knows there's no cure, blue box or no blue box, and that Tobias is happy enough as a bird not to bring it up.