#Which btw they themselves say quite a lot during arguments “its my house get out”

[coffeeandinsanityy]

fucked up parents and their fucked up parenting

[lololollywrites]

thoughts about being 29 on the internet that i just had in the shower...

...and had to write down. they were all basically just about how f**king - NEW. and surreal. the internet, its capabilities, and its fandoms can still be to me sometimes. i feel like i forget this a lot. but when i think about it, i can easily recall my wonder at discovering that it all existed in waves of smaller finds. and because i know there are others like me, i thought i’d share some of my own experiences. because honestly, i’ve had fewer years on tumblr and sites like it than some people much younger than me. i’m catching up and enjoying it.

firstly, i know i’m old to some of you, but i’m not really old. not really. i’m still a millennial, screwed over by student loans and old white men and viewed as part of the technological generation. i’m a phd student, and because i’m always on a college campus, i’ve been mistaken as a freshman. a few times. but it’s been fascinating to witness actual freshman and other college students and consider just how different things are for them and honestly? i’m sort of jealous. 

because...

i can remember when i first discovered that fanfiction existed. i was in third period tech skills as a junior in high school - 16 years old - and got a little off-topic and searched for spoilers for a new supernatural episode. this was in 2005 and the show had just come out (yes i still watch, i can’t escape).

and what did i find? somehow? fanfiction.net. i was, no exaggeration, shocked. i sat and read a full-length chaptered fic in episodic format. my mouth was hanging open. i saw thousands more fics in hundreds of fandoms and suddenly felt less strange for envisioning full-scale episode re-imaginings in my head as i laid in bed, dissatisfied with what i had just watched. (btw, i watched new supernatural episodes the sunday after they used to originally air on the wb on thursdays, at my mom’s house where i had my own room and own tiny tv, because no one at my dad’s house wanted to watch and streaming episodes wasn’t something i could even imagine. plus i didn’t have internet at my dad’s house. i know.)

not only that, but i was impressed as hell. here was me, not even aware that you could somehow upload your own text to the internet, and people were not simply writing polished stories in private but posting them somewhere that allowed for chapters. that allowed for people all over the world to read their words. that categorized everything into a huge virtual library. and, most incredibly to me, that allowed for reviews from people around the world.

i couldn’t believe that this new world was open to me. that people would be so generous as to offer amazing stories to me to read FOR FREE. that i had a limitless supply of content to read and review. i barely had functioning internet at home, so i had been sheltered. i told the people sitting next to me in class about it and encouraged them to check it out, mostly to blank stares. i may have even told the teacher, but no one cared. i didn’t understand. who wouldn’t be interested? i told my dad and my sister about it when i got home from school. i was mind-blown.

months in and many reads and written reviews later, i wrote my first fic. it was for smallville. 6 chapters, with updates every few days, that received 14 reviews in total. i read them all multiple times. i showed my sister. i checked the story stats every half hour. i cried. i wrote on the family computer secretly in the evening when most of my family had gone upstairs, because i was about half a year away from owning my first laptop. i wrote more stories sporadically for about 6 years, gradually getting better, but also gradually becoming more stressed and aware of negativity, online arguments, and the embarrassment and shame i suddenly felt about having an online presence. i found a supernatural forum at tv.com (the forums sadly no longer exist), learned about fandom, and immersed myself in posting and being part of a community that i thought understood me more than my friends. like a secret life.

during my first year of college, in 2007, i was in a friend’s dorm when he asked everyone if we wanted to watch an episode of scrubs. i laughed. surely he was joking. “how can we just watch an episode? it’s not on now and you don’t have the dvds.” i literally didn’t consider that there may have been a way. he excitedly told us that he had found some website that had episodes just... pre-uploaded. and that you could just click. i didn’t believe him. the stress of having to be at the tv at a certain time each week for fear of missing an episode entirely and forever was just part of being a fan, right? buying the tv guide and checking listings was necessary. but he found the episode. and clicked. it only took a few full minutes to load and there it was. again, i was astounded. this memory is so shockingly clear to me. it changed how i spent much of my free time, for one. just that moment.

sometime during this first year of college, i was home for break and came across a video on youtube, this new website i had started to use. it reminded me of ebaum’s world, which my friend would show me at her house sometimes because her computer was faster than mine. it was called “cat soup”, and by two guys that called themselves smosh. it had more views than i could comprehend - probably not much more than 5 digits, but still. they were just two kids i could have gone to school with who could create a funny video and get famous. again, i was shocked. mind-blown.

i showed my sister, my mom, and all my friends. they appreciated it a bit more than the fanfiction, but no one seemed to grasp how incredible and revolutionary it was. they all liked “shoes”, with the kelly persona by liam kyle sullivan (we still quote it today), probably because its budget and effects made it a bit more familiarly professional and it appeared less homemade (though it definitely was). but i couldn’t forget smosh. i was so impressed by them. i watched more videos and eventually found communitychannel and jenna marbles and eviliguana and shane dawson. i even found fan edits for my faves, buffy (maybe i saw one of phil’s, lol) and supernatural and smallville, and tried making my own. i freaked in 2009 or so when fred reached a million subscribers. a million. i couldn’t wrap my head around that. again, i told my sister and friends, expecting them to see the enormity of something so crazy happening, and they just... didn’t.

back in 2008, after watching “stick it” again, i recalled the name of a gymnast my cousin used to always talk about when we were kids - from the 1996 olympics - and looked her up on youtube. i realized that all gymnastics competitions imaginable had been uploaded. again - not to be repetitive - but i was shocked. there’s no better word. i gave myself a thorough education on the sport, traveling through time. i am still so grateful that i was able to do that.

sometime in 2009, my friends started pestering me to create a facebook account. i was a junior in college. 20 years old already. it sounded weird - pictures of me online? why? but i gave into pressure and made one. my mom had never allowed us to make a myspace; we were a bit young, and she hated the idea (now, she’s on facebook more than i am). around the same time i got my fanciest phone yet - an LG Env3. i figured out that it could access the internet and that i could use songs to create ringtones. again, sufficiently mind-blown. considering my first cell phone had been a flip phone with no camera that i shared with my sister during emergencies when i was 13, i felt that technology was coming along fast. 

smart phones were foreign to me for a long long time, until recently actually. i thought they were unnecessary for quite a while. i don’t even remember what phones i had at the end of college and through grad school, but i’m pretty sure they consisted of a series of cheap pay-as-you-go phones from walmart. in 2013, i went to china for a year to teach. i got a cheap phone there and used it for about 7 months. one day, a friend of mine gave me his old htc smartphone because he was getting a new one. i didn’t know how to use it, but i played one app on repeat before class and snapped some low-quality photos. after that, i almost immediately went to indonesia for another 9 months to teach high school (2014-2015). the htc phone died very quickly, so i used the nokia brick phone given to me by the organization. it was fine. i had never even used my old smartphone to access the internet, aside from wechat, thanks to china’s internet blocks. it wasn’t until i got home, in the summer of 2015, that i finally got an iphone. it was a huge deal and a big learning curve. it was also around this time that i found dan and phil and tumblr. i only got my macbook two years ago and finally think i have some things figured out.

so i may be old in some ways and remember floppy disks and the card catalog and using encyclopedias to write my middle school papers and huge computers with black screens and green text that displayed math problems in elementary school. i may be able to remember the sound of ancient, huge printers that used reams of paper with perforated, tearable strips down each side. i may remember aol red, dial-up, and not being able to connect if someone was on the phone. but i can also remember watching technology evolve in front of me, discovering fandom and the huge world of content and friendship that lay ahead. and when people try to say i’m too old to like dan and phil, i remind them that dan and phil can also remember. we’re the same age. i relate to them and their stories. to phil’s buffy obsession. to dan’s love of smosh. i’ve only had about 10 fully-cognizant years here on the internet, and only a couple in the world of tumblr and iphones and mobile apps. i’m young in those ways. and i look young enough that strangers sometimes think i’m a teenager. 

that’s laughable to me in some ways, because i’ve lived so much since my teen years. so much has happened. but in others, i don’t feel much different. there’s no age where you just feel grown up. that your interests vanish. that things suddenly seem childish and dumb. yes, i cringe about some things i wrote or did back then and i think i’ve matured, but my interests are all still relatively similar and i can finally explore them in ways that i just couldn’t before.

i hope that this has made sense. and i hope that some can relate.

[optomstudies]

everyone always says to follow your dreams ... but at the same time I have to make sure to go after money to be able to survive ... do you have any advice on how to do both? (btw, you seem like a really nice person and you are always so helpful, thank you for that

Thank you, I try to be cause it’s fun!! It’s super sweet of you too! ^__^

Well, this one’s a bit tricky because it’s more about who you are as a person, and what most of the time, what degree/career we choose has a bit of a compromise somewhere or another. If everyone loved their job 100% and found it super easy to do, well, no one would really pay people all that much to do things. For example, jobs which require a lot of hard labour are physically straining on the body, so they get paid more or else no one would do it when they could get a comfier job in something like retail instead. There’s a trade off a lot of the time. 

There’s no denying that there’s a particular set of jobs which people would fancy doing if the average pay was better. Not talking about the people who hit it big and make it famous, or the better paid people in the industry e.g. artists, actors/actresses, photographers, designers, teachers, fashion designers, etc. 

University is about improving your chances of comfortable living. It in itself is a compromise; you’re giving away 5 years of your life and investing a lot of finances too depending on what country you’re living in, for a better income than you would get without a university most of the time, with the exception of the few entrepreneurs which are able to innovate so uniquely they build multi-million dollar corporations. They’re the exception though and not the rule, as many start ups would like to believe. 

You only live once, quite literally, so it depends on what’s important to you. Why are we living if we’re not meant to find contentedness and/or happiness? Following your dreams is a good thing. So is choosing something slightly less “ideal” (and is it really your “dream”? I discuss below) so that you can live a comfortable life. Some people are married to their career, and others simply find their career a means to an end. Other people find enjoyment in their career and/but have something more important to them, things like family, prestige, honour, comfort, material goods, etc. 

You can’t live without money, you also don’t need too much of it. If you don’t have money, you feel stressed constantly, relationships are strained as well. You can’t really provide for people and children who may depend on you, and not literally in a dependent-type relationship, but emotionally as well, your person is taken up by worries. If you’re too stressed, people important to you lose out as well. On the other hand, people who make around $75K are as happy as people who make millions a year. The more money you make, the more responsibility you have, so millionaires also have stress. There’s also the argument that if you have too much of a good thing you can’t really appreciate it as much. 

In any case, if you’re the type of person who becomes unhappy and unfulfilled if you can’t work your dream job, then go for it. Even if you don’t make it big, you’ll be the type of person who didn’t regret spending all that time and money investing in your career. 

If you’re the type who is happy enough doing something that you’re pretty good at and are comfortable with the added bonus of good pay, go for it. You’d be the type to not miss chasing a dream with its associated risks and opportunity costs. 

If you’re someone who doesn’t particularly mind what job you do as long as you have money for the important things in your life, then go for it. You’d be the type to care more about providing for a family then being 100% satisfied at work for a simple example. 

Those aren’t even close to all the situations possible. A lot of times people might not really know themselves that well and for one reason or another decide to go for something that isn’t really going to make them happy. Most often in popular media it’s the person who chooses becoming some businessperson and then bam, one day they slam their resignation form on the bosses’ table and walk out and chase their dreams belatedly. Sometimes people choose to chase after their dream job from the outset, or you get the person who decides to choose a more traditionally stable job from the beginning. 

You know, people often think the latter is a compromise, but don’t you feel like that’s a particularly Westernised concept? Compromise in the context of a career I mean. Not that I know anything about social studies, but compromise is important in life, and the skill should be valued. If you don’t compromise, you can never be happy. You want a house and nice car but you also want to blow millions on designer handbags, have a stress free life, 20 hour work week, go out to Tetsuya’s or some other high end restaurant every week, and a perfect family with a few dogs too? Most people can’t have everything. And in between these two media stereotypes is everyone else. There are all these shades in between, because humans, people, have a multitude of reasons why they want to pursue one recourse and not another, and I don’t think making a choice between the two (i.e. money or dreams), or literally choosing a course that is something in between the two (because there are a lot of well paying jobs you can get that are pretty enjoyable :D) should warrant negative judgement from others. 

So after the philosophical discourse, for some advice to balance between both, I think it’s important to understand that people’s dreams, or what people perceive to be their dreams rather, is usually formed by a pretty shallow understanding of what the job entails. When you work hard at something you become good at it. When you become good at something you enjoy doing it more. When you enjoy doing something, there is a good chance you will become passionate about it and it will become your dream. A lot of times, having an open mind and not rejecting from the start what you’re going to study means you’re going to find it interesting. 

Personally, that’s how I’ve somehow come to approach all my studies during high school which then led to an interest in science and eventually resulting in me choosing my current degree. To be honest, I kind of think it’s a difficult situation senior year students face. There are so many occupations out there, and how many do we actually know of, like literally understand what the day to day job entails? When you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, there’s like a list of twenty jobs they list “I wanna be a doctor, lawyer, police officer, fire fighter, nurse, etc.” Gosh I even met a hairstylist-in-training my age who didn’t know what an optometrist was when I was in my first year. 

So you can totally balance both if you choose something remotely interesting and work hard at it. It’s very hard to hate something that you’re good at, particularly if it matches your personal values as well. For example, I really like helping people, so a health science was great for that. Optometry was kinda cool, but I was impartial to most health sciences, I felt like the optometrist career at the end suited me more because it was community-based. The more I studied optometry the more passionate I became about it. So I’m effectively making it my dream in that aspect, though I kind of like everything and anything so it doesn’t particularly feel like I’ve ever really had a “dream” just because 1. that word is raised on a pedestal and has the “best thing of my life” emotional baggage/connotations and 2. I would study almost anything if education was free (both literal fees and opportunity cost). 

Anyway, that was super fun to talk about! I don’t claim to know everything mind y’all, I just like discussing things so don’t witch hunt me :) I hope that helped you come to terms with whatever decisions that you decide to make, and helps you to understand the decisions that others make as well! 

✧・ﾟ:*✧・ﾟ:* Sleepover time! *:・ﾟ✧*・ﾟ✧

[zenosanalytic]

A Murder of Gods Redux

Ok, so I’ve watched Ep 6 a few times now and I want to write more in-depth about my reactions to it.

Somewhere in America

The Somewhere in America intro was good, I thought. The US and Jesus/Christianity/God/the Divine mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and this intro does a good job of both exploring that fact in the specific context of southern USian immigration, and establishing this difference, sometimes conflict sometimes synthesis, as a central theme of the episode.

To the Immigrants, the US is an aspiration, an opportunity, a place of salvation; to the Murderers, it is something they already have and need to protect from other people getting. To the Immigrants, Jesus is a guardian sharing in their suffering and giving aid at their worst extremity; to the Murderers Jesus is also a guardian of sorts, but as a patron and justifier of righteous violence. The Murderer with a rifle has a crucifix in his trigger-hand and another crucifix as the crosshair of his sight: symbolically, Jesus guides his killing-hand, and his murderous world-view is seen through Christ and the Crucifixion.

The view of the Murderers finds continuity in the citizens of Vulcan, Virginia; and I wonder if putting it in Virginia was, itself, symbolic. As a symbol of USian racism and white supremacy via its role in slavery, the confederacy, and Jim Crow, obviously, but also the name, Virginia, “Virgin”, and the way in which white concepts of virginity play into white USian racial, and sexualized national, anxieties. The people of Vulcan, as Wednesday says, want to keep for themselves “their America” and “their Town”, viewing the outside world(including the rest of America) as hostile and dangerous. That connection shows how easily the Murderers’  xenophobic desire to make the Nation inviolate(and therefore “virginal” in a misogynistic, property-relations conception of the term) morphs into egotistical sectionalism within the Nation(hint hint, the Southern revolt in defense of slavery). It shows how the mindset which vilifies and verminizes the outsider and immigrant quickly and easily turns to do the same to one’s neighbor, a connection strengthened by the visual callback to the Rifleman in Vulcan; right before Vulcan gives his benediction to the congregation, we see a close up of one of its members holstering his gun, a crucifix beside it on his belt.

While I can’t really articulate why at the moment, there seems something very Apt in this being the “home” and power-base for an Old God who has sold out to the New Ones. Maybe it is that the multiculturalism and racial “sensitivity” displayed by the New Gods in Ep 5 was so obviously the shallow insincerity of corporate image-control, that an Old God unabashedly promoting white supremacy and white Christian gun-culture seems philosophically aligned with them already. Or maybe it is that there are few ideas which have, historically, garnered more devotion in, and been more central to the Eurocolonial States of the American continents, than white supremacy making it, while unmentioned by the series, the oldest of America’s New Gods.

I don’t like how the Somewhere in America sequence fits, structurally, with the rest of the episode, though. I feel like it’d have been better, that it would make the argument more firmly and clearly, to cut directly from this SiA to introducing Vulcan, and either returning to the characters afterwards, or putting the two character sequences before, and having the SiA be an inter-ep interlude which blends back into the ep via the Vulcan intro. For instance: you do the intro scene, but take the bit where the camera lingers on a Vulcan bullet and put it at the end of it, after the crucifixion bit. The camera tracks the shell as it tumbles into darkness and then it lands on the factory floor in Vulcan, to be found by the “Boss”, who takes it from there. Maybe throw in a “wouldn’t want anybody to slip on this” line when he picks it up, so that his later death-by-factory-mishap is more ironic.

A Plot

I think the musical cues in S1E6 could have been seriously tuned back, which is weird because this series(and these show-staffers) typically do such a great job on sound and music. The cues used in L&Sw’s parking lot scene, and when Wednesday pulls the tree-homunculus out of Shadow, were distracting and dissonant with the action on the screen; I’d have preferred either leaving them out, or using something not so loud and jangly. Same thing for the music during Vulcan’s speech about faith in the study; it just didn’t FIT. Silence, punctuated at the moment of recognition of his betrayal by Vulcan’s pistol-shot, would have been a better accompaniment to the scene. The sort of sarcastically dirgey jazz march in Vulcan for the funeral didn’t work for me either. The shift to it from the more understated music before was too stark, the guitar distortions didn’t fit, and it sounded kinda... circusy is the only way I can describe it. I don’t think going that Metal with it worked well, though I understand the impulse given the industrial/volcanic subject matter and god it is meant to be themeing. I didn’t like how Wednesday’s monologue was woven into the march, either, and I felt it was kind of heavy-handed and obvious for the character. Maybe if it’d been done as a dialogue, with Shadow opening the discussion by commenting on the weirdness of  the uniforms and guns, or on how everyone, from the moment he entered the town, was watching him with such obvious hostility?

Which gets to another thing I didn’t like about this ep, which was the writing for Shadow. He’s been written as more talkative and emotive than he was in the book throughout the series, and necessarily as rather passive and reactive here at the beginning as he’s been introduced to the world it takes place in, but this ep just really seemed to sideline him into sidekick territory; into setting up and reacting to the speeches and actions of others rather than being a full character, equally as involved in the story as everyone else.

And at the same time he was being sidelined, the action the ep chose to focus on wasn’t really given the time or treatment it needed to sell it. There are, of course, signs that Vulcan has chosen the other side(his industrialization for one thing, the unreality of the manufacturing sequence for another, his comfort and wealth for still another), and that Wednesday wants that friendship to have held firm but is wary(the thundering at the end of their first meeting, his notice of and slightly offended tone at Vulcan not drinking the Soma[which btw, they really need to have introduced and explained before it played a plot-point in an ep, adding to the feeling the Vulcan sequence was pushed forward from where it was originally meant to be in the series]), but that interpersonal stuff wasn’t built up enough to justify the pay off. On further viewing, the Study scene works better than it did initially for me, and I picked up on smaller touches in Whittle’s acting which I missed the first time around which made the whole sequence at his House better to me, but it as a whole(and the performances of McShane and Bernsen) still felt too heavy-handed and rushed to me for the feeling of paranoia it’s meant to evince. I mean: Shadow’s discomfort and its sources are more than clear from the moment they arrive, as is Vulcan’s role in escalating them through his unstated aggression towards Shadow(though I wonder if this is not only racism, but also a reaction to Shadow’s demigod nature? Vulcan’s “so it’s true” statement to Wednesday on seeing Shadow, and his look to Shadow at the end before saying “oh Yes” suggests to me that Odin’s fathering a child and bringing him into play might be seen as an act of aggression by the New Gods, raising tensions), but Wednesday’s concern, and the things Vulcan did to set it off, were too in-your-face and fast-developed to be satisfying.

Also, while the noose-vision at the tree itself was not a bad idea, having it be a bone-noose was cheesy, and belabored Odin’s connection to bonfires and skeletal remains through the symbol of the noose, for no reason I could see. I mean, thinking about it now, maybe the point was to suggest and foreshadow Odin’s own destructive manipulation of Shadow and his emotions, or Wednesday(and the concepts/states of mind he represents)’s own involvement in the USian history of lynching, more directly than a rope-noose would have? To tie Wednesday, who in the scene is Shadow’s ally and sympathetic confidante(sharing a knowing look with him in response to Vulcan’s behavior), to the very history of racist “sacrifice” to white purity and supremacy which puts Shadow on edge about the town in the first place? But, if so, it’s such a small, esoteric, difficult to parse part of the scene, and so overwhelmed by the more immediate and visceral reaction to the noose and lynching itself, that I don’t think it really conveys that effectively, even if that was the idea behind it(which it might not have been. Maybe they just thought it would look “Cool”). And, honestly, lynching symbolism is kind of a tasteless place to hide what could only be an easter-egg for book-fans already in-the-know |:T

Also, and this is obvsl less important than that last bit, I felt like the God-Talk in the house scenes was really obvious, but that the show wanted us to react to it like it wasn’t? Which is just... Incomprehensible, quite frankly. Honestly, the show’s kinda done a bad job of managing Shadow’s entree to this world in a way that keeps pace with that of the audience. Though I come at it from having read the book, so maybe someone who hasn’t would feel like the syncing of the pacing isn’t so bad.

Also Also: the Laura segue from the House didn’t fit. Like: why? What was it in those scenes connecting them? Shadow and his relationship to Laura and Wednesday and his relationship with Vulcan? Trust and Betrayal? Faith and Doubt in one’s relationships? The nature of Gods and Shadow’s growing divinity? Houses and Homes? It didn’t feel well-established and it did feel like just a lazy reason and way to transfer back to the ep’s B story.

I have to say I liked the conclusion of the A plot a lot better on a second viewing, though, and the look on McShane’s face after beheading Vulcan, while watching him burn in his own fire, was Delicious >:] The pissing into said fire to “lay a curse”, and Shadow’s overreaction to it, was Excessively “edgy” >:T There’s certainly something primally human in pissing as a sign of disrespect and desecration, more so when it is done onto the thing, but it just didn’t work for me in that context here(I’m curious to know if it worked and felt justified in the scene for others, though. Maybe the move away from such casual vulgarity, and the increased social sanctioning of sanitary functions, in the US over the last 100 years or so makes it too difficult to connect to? Maybe I’m just too prudish on this subject to appreciate its intent here?? idk)

B Plot

On further viewing, my opinion on the first leg of Laura, Sweeney, and Salim’s journey hasn’t changed much. I liked it, I thought their performances were good, the dialogue writing was mostly good though too on-the-nose philosophically and too wrought(sounding like something someone would write and not like something they’d say is what I mean) here and there. Laura’s long-suffering reaction to Sweeney’s constant “Cunt” was satisfying, as was her distaste for his mockery and meanness to Salim, even if it is probably partially instrumental to her and meant more to build a rapport with her driver than sincere. It was fine, but nothing in it really grabbed me or blew me away.

I’m a bit more conflicted on the her wanting to visit home again, though. On the one hand it didn’t feel natural, on the other part of Depression can be not feeling you feelings most of the time, and then being overly sentimental when you finally, for once, do get to feel your feelings for awhile. That ambivalence of both wanting a connection and resenting it, appreciating people while also harboring very negative opinions about them sometimes(or most of the time) is part of being depressed so including that bit, and including it in a way that seemed out of the blue, certainly furthers that characterization of her.

I also like the bar scene a bit more, as I think there’s definitely a connection being drawn there between Laura’s “love” of Shadow, and Wednesday’s needs/plans for and befriending of Shadow. Sweeney’s obviously speaking more for Odin there of course, furthering Wednesday’s desire to keep Laura away from Shadow out of a concern that a variable like her could really throw a spanner in his plans for him, by sowing doubt in her mind about his continued devotion/love for her. But he’s right, in certain ways, about Laura’s feelings for Shadow, and more right than he could possibly know he is; that she doesn’t particularly care about how her love impacts Shadow, or their relationship and how he feels/felt about it, and only really considers their relationship, and Shadow, from the perspective of what it can do for her and make her feel. Basically that her relationship with him is Instrumental and fundamentally manipulative. This scene cuts directly to Shadow looking up at Vulcan’s hanging tree and seeing that bone-noose flop down. Which, now that I think about it, probably undermines my complaints about it a bit >:| That connection, and Laura’s parting rejection of examining her relationship to Shadow, casts Wednesday’s sympathy with Shadow in that scene, over Vulcan’s behavior and comments and the Neighborhood Watchman eyeballing him, in a more insidious and manipulative light. This suggests that that sympathy, and Wednesday’s later use of the common social justice refrain that neutrality in the face of oppression is siding with oppression, are performances for Shadow; attempts to manipulate and use him just like Laura did and still wants to.

Seeing that now, though, I’m still ambivalent about the scenes; they just don’t feel like, when watching them, they are handled as well as they could be, or that they make this as obvious as it needs to be given the subject matter and the importance of getting these racial politics immediately across to everyone in the audience.

The Ending of the B Plot returns to the central theme of this episode; Faith and Perspective, and how Big Ideas mean different things to different people. Salim prays and says God is Great. Laura, in typical Jerk-Atheist fashion, condescendingly corrects him with “Life is Great, Salim not Salim”. But he doesn’t take offense because he hears that as an addition, rather than the correction she meant. “Life is Great” he adds, to him nothing more than a recognition that God’s Greatness comes to people through the Life it gives them. With the Sunrise in the background, the examination of his prayer as a physical act, and the appropriate music, it’s an ending that manages to be thematically appropriate and beautiful without ignoring or editing away Laura’s egocentric misanthropy(her focus on Life, when that’s the objective she’s currently pursuing, is Telling), or Sweeney’s twitchy, dissatisfied sense of abandonment as he side-eyes and spits and kicks the dirt at a sun whose meaning for him has yet to be entirely revealed. And again, I just have to say Schreiber’s performance is amazing, because with those simple gestures he manages to convey that his constant aggression is somehow tied to his relationship to the Sun, beyond his need for the Coin and the ill-luck giving it away has brought him.

So I still feel pretty dissatisfied with A Murder of Gods, but with more looks I think there’s definitely Meat to dig into in it. The ideas and themes in it are interesting, but I didn’t find the execution of all of them satisfying.