#an unpopular opinion is not just another socially acceptable interpretation

[deadpoetsandlivinglegends]

Y’all respectfully don’t mind what this person is saying, please keep posting all your interpretations even if this one person isn’t having fun cause I for one quite enjoy them. I like reading them even if people might see them as ‘mundane’ or ‘basic’ takes because they encourage us to use critical thinking and look deeper at the characters within the media we consume. Seeing tons of interpretations can help me personally think deeper about the media and forces me to determine what my own opinions are, whether from agreeing or disagreeing. Also people trying to say their interpretations is them trying to demonstrate in their own lives the whole point of this movie, like even if people do happen to wrongly label it ‘unpopular opinion’, like literally who cares, people may be running in different sides of the fandom which may have differing opinions on things so to this person they may be under the impression that this is unpopular, which is exactly why we should encourage them to speak up when they have a different opinion because speaking your mind when people hate on you for doing so or for having thoughts on things that may differ from the people around you is an important thing, so like everyone, especially the young adults, please keep giving your interpretations and don’t feel discouraged bout it 🫶

And just so homie can maybe have a little more fun in this fandom and stop *checks notes* ‘gatekeeping interpreting media one consumes from teenagers’ because they *checks notes again* ‘haven’t had enough experience interpreting media so they therefore “don’t understand” how to properly interpret media they consume and therefore should stop trying instead of practicing to get better at it’, I’ll give them one of the ‘character x is misunderstood’ posts based on what they in the tags outlined and determined to be ‘unpopular’ enough for an interpretation.

Despite what the fandom things, Neil’s father was a relatively good father, the best parent out of all the poet’s parents, but he had flaws that caused his downfall. Neil’s father actually cared about his son, but he had faulty ideas because he was failed by the same systems that oppress Neil so he didn’t realize in trying to protect Neil from those systems, he was suppressing and in a way killing his son. Mr. Perry’s own traumas affect his relationship with his son and his decisions he makes in the movie, even if Neil never could see it in that light because he was being taught different than his father.

His father grew up in an environment where he was made to believe that the only way to protect his son and make sure he lived life to the fullest was by trying to help him succeed in the world they were in rather than try to change the world to fit Neil’s needs. His way of showing he loved his son, although we know it was misguided, was by trying to help his son succeed so he doesn’t have to face difficult hardships in life. Mr. Perry likely would have had to live during the Great Depression, watching people struggle to get by, knowing firsthand what it was like and not wanting that life for Neil. He tells Neil that he had opportunities his father didn’t, as we know his father likely lived through this difficult economic time in America followed by likely being affected by World War 2, whether through enlisting or through the draft. Mr. Perry, through pushing Neil into medicine, was trying to open up opportunities for Neil so he wouldn’t feel stuck like those people Mr. Perry had to watch live through these difficult times in history, and the dramatic irony is that through trying to make Neil not feel stuck in the future, he only made Neil feel more stuck now because Neil constantly felt micromanaged and that his desires were plowed over in favor of what his father thinks is best for a future Neil that we know will never exist. Everyone thinks Mr. Perry is too strict for the sake of being strict or is trying to live through Neil, but it’s clear he is a man driven by fear and beliefs stemming from his own trauma of growing up in these flawed systems, trying to make sure his son has a good life. The tragedy comes in when in trying to make sure his son has a good life, he is unknowingly killing his own son.

That is also why he tells keating in that deleted scene that he blames him, because he truly believed he was giving his son the best life his son could get in the world they were in, but then his son had this teacher who encouraged him to pursue a risky career that would cause him to live a tricky life barely getting by if getting by at all, which his son threw away the whole ‘safe’ future Mr. Perry had laid out for him in order to follow this risky barely thought out plan, and when Mr. Perry tries to push his son away from this unsafe and unsuccessful life, his son is so overdriven by emotions that he kills himself.

He didn’t believe the world could be changed and he believed his son trying would only result in him being crushed so he was trying to protect him, but unknowingly was only shutting his son out and causing his son to feel unloved and unheard. This doesn’t make him a bad person or a bad father, but merely a caring father who was a victim of the world he lived in misguidedly trying to force his son to adhere to the system against what his son needed, forcing his son to feel the only way out to be death as his father couldn’t listen due to his own fears. He was a loving father with a fatal flaw that caused not only his downfall but the downfall of those around him too. This does not make Mr. Perry inherently bad as we know he is just as much a victim as those who were hurt by his actions, but that does not mean he was right in his actions.

This story shows us despite our initial beliefs, perhaps adults don’t always know better than children, and it is through listening and open dialogue between the two that these systems work best. Maybe we should sit and think deeply about this before we tell children online to shut up because them having opinions on a topic only results in ‘mundane takes’, just some food for thought, ya know

sometimes i have fun, sometimes i see a post of someone claiming to have an unpopular opinion and then saying the most mundane shit about people "not understanding x character" and i remember this fandom is full of Literal Children

[iniziare]

🔥 GO WILD

Prompt: Send me a “ 🔥 “ for an unpopular opinion. // Accepting. // @ccaptain

I don't think that there's a single thing that I feel as strongly about, as my opinions of the following two lines: 'Every portrayal is equal' and 'There are multiple interpretations of a character'. I think that they both play into harvesting and perpetuating the worst mentalities on Tumblr: insecurity and egos. I disliked the PSAs about the former back in 2013, I hated the transition of the former to the latter in 2015/2016, and I hate how the latter still seems to resonate around the RPC as if it's some sort of bible that does anyone any good. And before any potential 'but Sae, those are two different things', no, not really, they play into the same concept, it's simply the phrasing that changes to make it all the more mentally inclusive and sound more socially welcoming. But a bad message remains a bad message no matter how pretty its packaging is. It all plays into not wanting to hurt people's feelings, which I fully understand and it's even a noble cause at its basis, but coddling doesn't help people, it never has, and it has and will only continue to make people more sensitive (which is a topic for a different salt send-in), all the while demotivating and utterly frustrating others. I'm sorry folks, but not every portrayal is equal, there are people who will create a blog merely because a character is hot, or for social political reasons of 'look at me', or because they simply ache to write a fandom's popular ship, and they disappear as quickly as they come when the 'urge' has been fulfilled. Those, for instance, are not equal to people who put a lot of time into their portrayals, and I'm not saying that everyone needs to live up to the latter, but don't be telling me that everyone is equal on the mere premise that they all 'exist' and we should 'all support one another'. Not every portrayal is equal, not everyone's writing is equal, and people's understanding of a character will not always be equal. And these things aren't subjective, they are factual. There can be such clear differences between portrayals and ignoring them is actually doing an injustice to every single depiction out there. If you tell a blog that does minimal writing and seems to not have a great understanding of the character (yet?), or the worst one: seems to really not care— that they’re equal to everyone else, then you’re telling them, for starters, that they could have nothing to improve on. And trust me, I’ve seen it happen time and time again, people will not put in effort to improve if you tell them that there’s nothing to actually better. And of course simultaneously, you demotivate the ones that have stuck around for years and put much time into what they do on Tumblr. And that sucks pretty hardcore.

Now luckily, that first line has somewhat died out, but now in its stead, we're left with 'There are multiple interpretations of a character'. I don't know whether it's worse, better, or just equally as bad of a take. I vote for... worse, actually. — No, no one will ever convince me that if they wrote an OC, and then released them to the world, that they'd be okay if RPers anywhere would claim that one can read their OC multiple different ways. I've seen RPers on Tumblr blow up over much less. What I need people to realize and remember, is that all creators and writers alike, have an intent with their characters, and that isn't subjective. Just like personality traits aren't subjective. For instance, one can't look at Veritas Ratio and go 'he's confident' and have someone else state 'he's insecure', and say that both are factually true and that both takes are equal in 'value' if we look at accuracy, because they're not. They cannot both be true, and I'm not talking about minor details that can be considered to be 'exceptions', I'm talking about the rule. What I need people to admit to, more often than not, is that it seems to have become a common take to conflate what they want a character to be like with what they actually are. I sometimes can look at a character and objectively go 'I wish they had done this instead, focusing on this and this, or this part of their personality'. but if I then choose to portray the character like that instead, it doesn't mean that it's what the character that we ultimately see on screen is actually like. And admitting that it's not the case isn't a bad thing, being canon divergent isn't a bad thing, but it is entirely different from intending to write the character based on what we actually see.

[freddieofhearts]

Bye bye, dears (for now!)

I know there have been a lot of rumours and some posts about me leaving, so here I am to set the record straight and say a quick ‘au revoir’. This post is long, and I don’t expect everyone to read the whole thing—if you just want information on how to keep in touch, or about access to my removed fics, scroll to the bottom. ⬇️

*

Why are you leaving?

Firstly, of course I’m not leaving Freddie. This is just an ongoing hiatus from the social side of fandom, because while I have some incredible friends here, who have done all they can to support me and have made this experience wonderful in lots of ways—it’s also true that the social space has become more and more toxic for me.

I get a wild amount of hate. Despite never having my ask box enabled on here, people create new accounts just to message me and tell me all the problems in this fandom are my fault, that I’m faking being sick, that I should kill myself, that I’m fat, etc. I also very regularly get hateful comments on AO3.

Obviously I realise that I’m not the only one who receives these cruel attacks, but it’s become increasingly hard to handle them—especially as some people (‘real’ accounts, not faceless anons) do continue to blame me for wider problems in the fandom. It makes me feel consistently sad, anxious, and paranoid, so that I can’t focus on anything Queen-related that I enjoy.

More pressingly, it’s affected my mental health, which is—imperfect at the best of times. As I’ve occasionally alluded to in older posts on this blog, I have a history of anorexia, OCD, PTSD, and some other overlapping issues. Most people who know me in the fandom are also aware that I’m ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ to Covid-19, significantly immunocompromised, and have been isolating at home for eleven months.

The combination of all of these things + the constant toxic messages has really been triggering me, and leading to an uptick in disordered behaviours, which my body cannot sustain. Every new instance of hate from an anon—every time there’s another indication of groups in the fandom wanting to ostracise me further—my reaction is deeply self-punitive and unhealthy. Ultimately I need to be out of this environment for, at least, a protracted period. My therapist, my partner and my close friends in the fandom support this decision.

*

So, what went wrong?

In 2019, I expected to be an absolutely tiny blog in the Queen Tumblr landscape. The fandom was already well-established, and I have never worked to ‘build a following’ on here—I think I’ve linked my own fic a maximum of three or four times!—in fact, more or less the opposite. As I mentioned above: ya girl is nutty as a fruitcake. As a result, I often avoid extremely niche things in daily life which cause severe anxiety for me, Relevant examples here: I never look at my timeline. I never intentionally look at my follower number. Yup, it’s strange, I fully admit it, but it’s best for me to go with these things—usually. In Queen fandom, however, this avoidance both of analytic stats and of most direct engagement led to some problems... My followers grew without me realising, and way more people were reading my blog than I was aware of. I was still in a—“Wow, this fandom is very frustrating, and rife with ableism, racism, etc., so how do we fix this???”—mindset, and I wanted to share my opinions, sure! but I also thought I was sharing them with 15-20 like-minded people.

Now, intent is not impact, and I recognise that I was brusque, didn’t phrase things particularly sensitively, and absolutely did hurt some people by criticising the fandom so freely. I still regret this—and I regret just as much the fact that some assholes have used my criticising the fandom on my own blog as implicit justification for attacking authors. I have said on here many times that I don’t condone that behaviour—but I also think there’s some truth in the presumption that these anonymous malcontents felt my critiques somehow ‘permitted’ them to engage in abuse. For the first few months, though, I genuinely had no idea there was a link at all—and so I was initially slow to condemn this abusive behaviour in public, because I was taking it for granted all authors agreed it was shitty. It took someone directly telling me (shoutout to @a-froger-epic) that people had identified a connection between my posts and the anons, before everything fell into place.

I would like to offer my apologies to the fandom at large for not being more quick on the uptake about this, because I feel that had I realised sooner that these people were taking ‘inspiration’ in some way from me, it might have been easier to put a stop to it. It does seem that there is still a lot of confusion about whether I support them and which of their views I agree with. Let’s be 100% clear on this: I do not support the anonymous commenters on AO3. At times there is some, limited overlap between parts of their views and parts of mine, but even that is less than you may think—I often see anonymous comments from so-called ‘Freddie fans’ that I substantially disagree with.

Perhaps even more importantly: I do not support anyone who sends anonymous hate on Tumblr.

*

What’s all this about ‘overlap’ with the anons?

Let’s do a mini-summary of the myths vs. the truth. There are views I hold which are genuinely unpopular in the fandom—but which I own up to completely, and have never tried to hide in any way. I’ve never needed to use anonymous to share my opinions because I’m completely open about them! What people who don’t know me tend to have ‘heard’ about me, though, is usually a drastic distortion of my real opinions.

What people think I think:

- Freddie should never top.

- It’s okay to send anon hate if someone writes Freddie ‘wrong’.

- It’s more important to correct ‘wrong’ portrayals than to respect other writers.

- It’s inherently wrong to be more interested in band pairings than canon pairings.

- Freddie should be overtly written as a r*pe survivor/victim (and not doing this is wrong).

- Freddie should be overtly written as having an eating disorder (and not doing this is wrong).

- Kink fics are wrong.

What I actually think:

- I believe Freddie did have a strongly defined sexual identity with marked preferences, but I don’t think Jim Hutton lied when he said that Freddie topped. I believe Freddie did top, but this isn’t the time or place to get into my thoughts on why/when/how much. I do believe that my analysis of the sources relevant to this subject is as historically accurate as one can reasonably be in matters of sex (where historical accuracy will always be particularly limited and imperfect)—but I don’t think it’s morally wrong to write Freddie as topping more than he probably did.

- I don’t believe there’s only one ‘right’ version of Freddie (all others being ‘wrong’). I do believe it is possible to be more right or less right—but I’m also conscious of the fact that this scale of value is not one by which everyone measures fanfiction. As a result, then, I don’t think that any perceptions surrounding ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ justify sending anonymous, non-constructive criticism, or outright hate.

- I do believe constructive criticism is a good thing. I welcome and appreciate it myself; I have received it on my fics in Queen fandom, and it has made them better. I have been in writing workshops which included very forceful criticisms, and the value of such feedback has been intimately and immediately part of my life as a writer for years. However: in this case, I have accepted that my opinion differs from the general community preference, and so I no longer offer any constructive criticism (outside private beta-reading). I haven’t changed my view, but I’ve changed my practice to align with community norms.

- I do not think any single, individual writer has a personal responsibility to write about Freddie Mercury in any given way. That ranges from including the more distressing topics to which I’ve devoted attention (such as trauma)—to concentrating on ‘canon’ pairings like Jimercury—to, even, focusing on Freddie at all.

“Now, that doesn’t sound like you, @freddieofhearts,” you might be thinking. And I know it doesn’t; I think something I’ve done a poor job of articulating is the difference between how I view each individual fan—namely, as free to shape their creative experience at will, even in ways that I might find distressing or offensive; even in ways that you might find distressing or offensive—and the way I view the Collective. I think people have interpreted some of my critiques of ‘Queen Fandom’ as meaning something like: “You-in-particular, a specific Queen fan, are doing it wrong and should change everything about how you do it; also you don’t really care about Freddie.”

And—that’s not it. What any given fan, as an individual, does, isn’t a problem. And that can be true alongside—concurrently with—a multivalent critique of how the fandom is lacking in representation of Freddie’s life, with all that that (wonderful, deservedly celebrated, but also profoundly traumatic) life entailed. I still hold that view; I still have myriad problems with ‘the fandom’ (structurally, collectively, historically and presently—from the 1990s to the 2020s). Some of what I want to work on (away from the social life of fandom) is expressing those critiques with greater nuance, in ways that can’t be misinterpreted as shading any particular fanfiction author or subgenre of story.

In brief: I haven’t changed my mind, but I think Tumblr is an untenable environment in which to discuss the things I want to analyse, especially as there is an ever-present danger of hurting someone.

*

Can we keep in touch? Where is the fic?

I will drop by this account periodically to check out posts that friends have sent me, so you can always sent me a private message to ask for my contact details on the other app that I’m using now for fandom friends. Multiple Freddie conversations and projects are going on over there, off-Tumblr, with a much ‘gentler’ environment and no bad actors—I personally love it!

All my fic has been downloaded and saved. I don’t want to deal with constant harassment on AO3, but I’m happy to share a copy with anyone who missed it and wants to read/re-read something. I also saved everyone’s lovely comments and thoughtful con-crit, so none of that has been lost or erased.

Thank you to everyone who welcomed me to the fandom, made me think, taught me, shared with me, sent me into fits of the giggles, collaborated with me creatively, and otherwise made this one hell of a ride! Love you all. ❤️

[sleepymarmot]

Re-liveblog: eps. 4 & 10

Here's something I've been planning to do for a while -- rereading the liveblog of The Untamed I wrote a couple of months ago and looking at my own initial reactions to Jin Guangyao's storyline with new eyes. Returning to old liveblogs is always fun, but particularly when the perspective on something changes so much by the end of the story!

Of course, this turned into a monstrosity with word count in thousands that sat in my drafts for about a month, and involved rewatching most of the scenes the liveblog mentioned, and some that it didn't. Please be warned: this series of posts is not meant to be a comprehensive analysis, and will jump from one point to another or highlight only the things I have changed my mind about, or haven’t talked on this blog before. It is going to include some very personal interpretations and opinions, sometimes possibly (or definitely, in the case of this very post) unpopular or negative. I am here to reflect on my own experience of watching the show almost as much as to write meta about the show itself.

[All re-liveblog posts]

[ep 4]

is this shy illegitimate son the same person who summoned WWX in the first episode, or are they two entirely unrelated bastards? I don’t think the ages match up…

Oh, so that's what I was thinking during Meng Yao's introduction scene: trying to figure out whether he was the same person as Mo Xuanyu or not. That's funny.

[negativity ahead!]

Of course, I was also admiring Xichen's elegant way of Using His Privilege For Good, but I thought that was self-explanatory enough not to put in the liveblog. It didn’t occur to me this scene could be interpreted as a sect leader openly hitting on a disadvantaged youth, or that such an interpretation would be popular, especially in a literal and positive way as opposed to a dark or subversive headcanon. So even if this is ever confirmed to be an intended message of the scene, I’d just say “I recognize the council has made a decision...” and continue to disregard it. Kind of incredible how it manages to squick me in at least five ways -- and xiayo is one of my main ships in this fandom! And not only squick -- in my eyes, sexualizing LXC’s intentions in this scene not only adds something that I don’t like, but actively detracts from the textual, surface meaning and narrative function of LXC’s actions (establishing LXC as a Model Authority Figure who masterfully manipulates the social power dynamics not for self-interest, but for justice, kindness, and peaceful conflict resolution; see also the following scene with the Wens). And from the other side, I think Meng Yao is shocked and impressed specifically because someone like LXC would do this for someone like him without an ulterior motive; I suspect that if he saw this as LXC making an excuse to touch someone attractive, he would only be turned off: a sect leader who can’t keep his hands to himself is nothing new and nothing good from the point of view of JGS’s illegitimate child.

But if this brief brushing of hands holds any in-universe significance in addition to a possible foreshadowing of this relationship’s future importance -- I think I just finally realized what it must be! This interaction is an adaptation of the following scene from the book (which, to be fair, happens when MY and LXC already know each other, not during a first meeting):

Meng Yao had been a famous joke for a certain period of time, which was why a few recognized him. Likely thinking that the son of a prostitute perhaps also carried some unclean things with him, the cultivators didn’t drink from the cups that he had presented with both hands. Instead, they put the cups to the side and even took out white handkerchiefs. As though it felt too uncomfortable, they repeatedly wiped the fingers that they’d touched the teacup with, either intentionally or not. Nie MingJue wasn’t someone mindful to such things. Wei WuXian, though, caught sight of this through the corners of his eyes. Meng Yao acted as if he didn’t see anything, his smile unfaltering as he continued to pass around tea.

As Lan XiChen accepted his cup, he looked up at him and smiled, “Thank you.”

He drank a sip of the tea immediately afterward. Only then did he continue to converse with Nie MingJue. A few cultivators began to feel uneasy as they saw the scene.

(Chapter 48)

So CQL!Meng Yao’s eyebrows twitch in pleased surprise because the sect leader not only personally approached to verbally support him, but took something directly from his hands, not even trying to avoid him or flinching at skin contact. As if it didn’t even occur to the majestic Zewu-jun to think of Meng Yao as dirty or disgusting.

I don’t know if this is an intended interpretation either, because I don’t remember anyone specifically avoiding physical contact with MY in the show, and on the contrary, there were examples of both friendly (from Huaisang) and unfriendly (from the commander) touch. But I certainly prefer it to the other interpretation, and ignoring the interaction altogether seems a bit intellectually dishonest.

[/negativity]

On another note, much is said about JGY’s performativity, but check out LXC’s! Someone’s being bullied in his classroom? Not on his watch! Time to descend from his pedestal like truth coming out of her well, Very Pointedly and at length explain how this person Has His Official And Personal Approval And Is Very Welcome Here, then take the gift from him personally instead of letting a disciple do that. Note how in the following scene, he also personally accepts the gift from Wen Qing as a peacemaking gesture. I love how LXC’s character establishing event is about defusing not one but two uncomfortable situations in a row. Of the two brothers, all social skills went to him...

I have no comment on the goodbye scene. Just sadness.

Oh wait, after rewatching the entire show and coming back to the post, I do have something to say. This episode is the only time I can say with all certainty that all of Meng Yao’s words and reactions are fully sincere. After this point in the timeline, it will never happen again. :(

It’s a shame that the gifs I’ve seen of this scene end with the iconic stopped bow, because the final shots are also great! As soon as MY turns away, his face becomes clouded again, and seconds after the Sect Leader himself held his arms and assured they were peers, he felt the need to bow and lower his eyes as some unnamed disciples walked by. And the bitter look he sends after them tells the viewer how much he is aware of falling from the dreamland where a nobleman would compliment him like three times within three minutes, back to the regular life where it is better not to be noticed at all. Meanwhile, Xichen looks him in the back like “I want it to grow strong and healthy, I want to tell my friends and neighbors about it”.

[ep 10]

Alright, when 10 minutes ago I thought “Meng Yao, sweetie, kill that clown”, this is not what I had in mind

SOMEBODY GIVE MENG YAO A HUG (after some emergency medical care) HE HAS DONE NOTHING WRONG IN HIS LIFE. Can Xichen adopt him now?

Ah, the joys of the first viewing. 

At this point, I was thinking of both Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue exclusively as of father figures for Meng Yao. For LXC I think I slowly started to notice the romantic tension later but made a complete flip to the romantic interpretation only during the "late light talks... no sign of curse on his body" conversation. For NMJ it was during the head flashback. And as much as I like these pairings, it does feel like a loss that their existence displaces the very different pseudo-family dynamic. I think a story in which NMJ, LXC, WRH and JGS are all openly presented as competing father figures would be interesting; has anyone written that?

On rewatch, I was outraged by all of the blatant manipulation that I bought completely on the first viewing. MY is very good at playing a wounded bird -- especially when he's literally wounded. I had wondered why he just limped away without treating it, but now it's obvious he is using Stoic Suffering to invoke pity and admiration. Just like, a few minutes earlier, he showed NMJ that he was ready to be struck down, and it saved his life. He tells NHS with a sad but brave face “I won't be able to take care of you anymore” and on first viewing it worked on me just as he intended -- I thought “Poor boy, so trained to serve, he puts his duty to others above his own feelings even in this situation”. Ha...

And NMJ is only helping his case. He had the chance to explain everything and share the truth of MY's actions. And in the novel, he does take this chance, retelling the incident to Xichen (who chooses to turn a blind eye). Instead, NMJ basically confirms MY’s narrative: by hiding the reason for the exile, he makes it seem like there was no respectable reason at all. NMJ, all by himself, makes himself look like an irrational tyrant, and MY like a victim of an arbitrariness. And he does it in front of Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, no less -- an heir to a major clan and his brother! By trying not to discuss internal problems with outsiders, he achieves an opposite effect. Luckily for him, JC and WWX don't give a shit... But imagine how different the plot would be if they had this information from the start?

What I still don't understand is -- what was��Meng Yao’s plan in this episode? Who was he working for? Who was his accomplice, whose feet we saw in the later flasback -- surely not Xue Yang himself, he’s supposed to be under arrest! Was he working with the Jin secretly already? (I don’t think so: in a later scene, JGS asks him about this incident, seemingly ignorant.) Or with the Wen (I don't remember -- did Xue Yang go back to the Wen afterwards)? Or just with Xue Yang directly, setting him completely free just on the promise of future cooperation? This seems most plausible -- but to risk and lose everything over such an uncertain gamble doesn’t make MY look very smart.

I have some other things to say about the events of this episode, but they’ll be in the post about the flashbacks in episode 41.

[blackasteriia]

🔥 oh yeah gimme those unpopular Xion Opinions™

Feed the Fires of my Salt

As I haven’t dragged 358/2 Days through the mud, here’s a nice list of Xion Hot Takes™ 

1). Axel is not Xion’s friend. From now on I want everyone to translate, “I’ll always be there to bring you back” to  “I will always assault you, kidnap you, and return you to your abusers, no matter what.” That is not a promise, it’s a threat. Axel captured Xion and dragged her back to the Organization against her will, twice. Both times he had to attack her and knock her out in order to return her unconscious body to the castle. I’m sick of hearing he had ‘good intentions.’ Not when he lied to her and gaslit her. Axel was willing to kill himself to save Sora and Roxas, but he wasn’t willing to lift a finger to help Xion. Axel was Xion’s friend so long as she was controllable. Xion knows that Axel cannot be trusted and is bitter that she ever did at all. 

2). Overprotective Roxas™ is gross and weird. So much art, fanfiction, and interpretations read Roxas as this jealous, controlling, and clingy guy that treats Xion like she’s his responsibility. First of all, sexist and weird, no thank you. Second of all, as if Xion needs Roxas to be her babysitter. They are both like, a year old, a baby cannot sit a baby. She’s capable, she’s smart, and Roxas respects her as a human being because she’s his friend. Fandom interpretation has put Xion as this really sweet girl and Roxas as a die mad rebel. When Xion was the one who picked-fights, and questioned the Organization; And Roxas, said ‘yes, sir’ like a good boy for 350 days until someone explained the plot to him. 

3). Leave the ‘Character X sees Xion as someone else’ trope at home. For the love of God, please. This is... acceptable, in the very early days of the Organization when Xion’s appearance is mutable. When she’s a full person though, with her own face, and gender? Oof. If you’re focusing on Character’s X reaction to seeing their lost Lenore however and just using Xion as a vehicle for your wangst, please don’t. In the writing business we call that ‘objectification’ and it’s on the level of fridging a character. Please use another device to explore your character’s emotional trauma. That, or have Xion interact so she can have agency. Because being seen as a different person after a lifetime of being misgendered, misnamed, and misidentified, is well, upsetting. It means Character X is not viewing her as her own person and they may need to be called-out on it. 

4). I’m disillusioned with the Sea Salt Fam and you should be too. This is rooted in canon. Remember, the last time Xion saw Axel he was kidnapping her and KH3 has me believe she’s okey-dokey with seeing him again. Not to even start on Isa. I’ve heard the argument that Roxas and Xion are ‘good kids,’ who wouldn’t hold Saïx against Isa. And that is not how abuse works nor how should it work. Saïx attempted to murder Roxas and Xion, multiple times. Say nothing of the emotional abuse he subjected both kids to. See, the first bullet point for the problems with Lea. I’m not saying that Sea Salt Fam is impossible. I’m saying that Sea Salt Fam is possible under the stipulation that the problems are addressed. Isa and Lea must take full responsibility for their previous behavior, no shucking it off on the kids. They must make amends for what they did and never behave that way again. The apologies have to be accepted by the kids--

And guess what?

Xion and Roxas do not have to accept their apologies. 

They are not obligated to forgive Isa or Lea! That is not how forgiveness works! In fact, forcing too soon apologies is probably as alienating as not apologizing at all. And you also have to understand that Xion and Roxas are child soldiers who are not socialized, have never been to school, don’t know but the basics of self-care, and have severe trauma. They are not easy kids. If Isa and Lea aren’t prepared to handle that-- they need to step aside so someone else can. 

...

And like, of the top of my head, those are my five Xion Hottakes™

thank you for coming to my ted talk

[ckret2]

King Ghidorah?

I got two of these asks lmao. I choose to believe it's two people who wanna know how I feel about Ghidorah rather than tumblr screwing up.

How I feel about this character

Listen, there's nothing cooler than a three-headed lightning*-breathing dragon from outer space. You've got the objectively best mythological creature ever—the dragon, which is the best because it's a lizard and/or snake, and also flies—and, on top of that, it's an ALIEN, and then you triple that. Best character concept. 10/10.

*Gravity beam shmavity beam. I know lightning when I see it.

And then, on top of that, they've got this wildly underexplored capacity for pure, undiluted angst, the likes of which most people would never think of applying to a character concept that seems tailor-made to be airbrushed on the side of a van—but there it is anyway. They might be pets that were deliberately abandoned in order to mutate them into monsters. Or they might be one-time would-be alien conquerors who were then conquered and mind-controlled by every wave of would-be alien conquerors to come since. Or they might just be the only aliens alone on a world where even the monsters have other monsters to hang out with. And there's nothing I love more than taking characters whose entire character concept is an answer to the question "what would be really really cool?" and then slathering them in emotional depth.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

I came out of KOTM, looked at what fandom was doing with Ghidorah, went "mmm I'm not sure about this sticking-them-with-Rodan thing," and it took y'all all of five minutes to suck me into Rodorah anyway.

I'm determined to drag more folks into Ghidorah/Gigan with me, they have such wonderful potential to be horrid world-flattening alien sadists together, and also empathize over being extremely physically modified and mind-controlled.

While I'm intrigued, theoretically, by the potential of Godzilla/Ghidorah, I've yet to see anyone do it in a way that hits precisely what I'm looking for. ... Or, for that matter, even vaguely what I'm looking for. So I'll hold onto that one and maybe someday someone will make it Just Right.

I also ship the heads with each other due to the fact that Wouldn't That Be Messed Up. What if one head likes another but the other doesn't return the feelings. They've just gotta live with that knowledge and they can't get away from each other. What if you had a crush on someone and a mad scientist saw it and went "ah, these ones are compatible!" and stitched you together and you were stuck like that for the next million years. That's messed up right. That's super messed up.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

It's on my ship list, but Ghidorah & Gigan is also my top platonic pair for Ghidorah, for the same reasons.

But going with someone who isn't on the list! Okay quick partial movie summary for those of y'all that haven't seen 1991 Godzilla vs King Ghidorah: in Heisei, King Ghidorah is made by time-traveling humans from the future, including one named Emmy Kano who explains that dorats are genetically engineered pets with empathic abilities, and interacts with them the most before abandoning them in the past to be nuked into King Ghidorah. They fight Godzilla, Godzilla rips off Ichi and kills them, Emmy goes into the future to get their corpse a cyborg resurrection with a new middle head, and goes back to the past with Mecha King Ghidorah while serving as Mecha Ichi's pilot and commanding them as a whole. They die again defeating Godzilla but Emmy survives and goes home.

ALL THAT TO SAY: it's never stated, but I like to headcanon that the dorats were Emmy's pets—or at least that she was in charge of taking care of them until they could be mutated and they FELT like they were her pets; that they were broken-hearted when she abandoned them in the past; that they could sense Emmy nearby due to their Unexplained Empath Powers the first time they fought Godzilla; and that when they were brought back from the dead to find Their Owner Was Back and fighting alongside them they were overjoyed to see her again and do anything she wanted.

So, Emmy & Ghidorah, because the idea of these sweet tiny pets being turned into a big terrifying monster but at heart remaining sweet tiny pets around their owner enchants me. I do plan on writing a substitute-Emmy into my KOTM Ghidorah's backstory.

My unpopular opinion about this character

"hey didn't you sorta talk about this yesterday" yeah because while trying to answer this question i got distracted by an overlapping topic and had to go make a post about it in order to stop thinking about it

This is sort of an overall one about KOTM, but vaguely sticking to the parts of it applicable to Ghidorah:

So we've got all these titans that have been alive for like, five minutes. Ghidorah's been awake probably a sum total of four hours. Until now nobody even knew that he was from a different planet, so I mean, Monarch's got less than zero information on him. The only three things he's been observed doing so far are 1) trying to kick Godzilla's ass, 2) successfully kicking Rodan's ass, and 3) yelling so loud a dozen plus other titans wake up.

And then this dude whose defining character traits are "hating Godzilla and other titans in spite of the mounds of scientific evidence that they're great for the environment" and "deciding that he knows everything better than the actual experts in the room who have dedicated their lives to these subjects and pigheadedly shouting over them with his own just-walked-in-the-room ideas," he looks at this situation and "oh, this Ghidorah, he's definitely a rival alpha to Godzilla," he says, as if the "alpha dog" theory hasn't been thoroughly and painfully debunked in the very wolves he studies, and as if it makes sense for seventeen-odd different species who might never have been awake and alive during the same era until now to not only have identical alpha-based social hierarchies but also share a social hierarchy across species and predator/prey lines, and as if it makes sense for an alien animal who didn't evolve on Earth to have anything in common with the local animals, including an understanding of and agreement with their local hierarchical structures...

And we're just... as a fandom, we're really just collectively accepting everything Man Who Became A Drunk And Abandoned His Family Because He Doesn't Know How To Express Any Emotion But Anger says about this hyper-masculine social structure that he's projected onto these wildly inhuman species? As if what he says is the gospel truth? Everything that gets said about alphas and kings, we're just assuming that the titans—who again, are not human, and may have never communicated with humans—have the exact same mental constructs about "alpha dog" theory and monarchy that humans do? We're assuming animals have concepts of kingship identical to ours? We're assuming that the theories that these humans tossed out within the first few hours of seeing most of these species move for the first time are 100% correct, even though in real life we'd been observing wolves for literal millennia before we came up with "alpha dog" theory and then within a century figured out it was totally wrong? Really? That's what we're going with? Not questioning whether anything about the humans' assumptions might have been wrong?

Okay.

So anyway my interpretation of Ghidorah is a hypnotic siren who doesn't know or care about Earth leadership, solely wants to destroy Earth for funsies, and only has a rivalry with Godzilla because Godzilla doesn't want the planet that he is living on to be destroyed and happens to be the sole dude tough enough to beat Ghidorah up.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

Mecha King Ghidorah Mecha King Ghidorah Mecha King Ghidorah.

But unlike other folks, I don't really want him to show up in Godzilla vs. Kong. I want that conflict to be the focus of the movie. Throw in MKG, and Godzilla and Kong's rivalry—whatever it's based on—has to get truncated to deal with this other threat, and MKG won't get a whole movie to shine as the primary villain. I'd like to save him for a future movie, where he can be billed as the primary threat rather than something that swoops in to interrupt someone else's movie.

[wild-oats-and-cornflowers]

les mis for 001

001 | Send me a fandom and I will tell you my:

Favorite character: Jean Prouvaire. I love my soft Romantic poet who thinks about nature and social issues and Dramatic Literature all day

Least Favorite character: Tholomyes and M. Thenardier are both anti-favorites, but the latter at least ends up being the reason Valjean is able to get out of the sewers with Marius, whereas the former serves no purpose except to be Terrible (I mean he did knock Fantine up with Cosette, but that was probably an accident, so he gets no points for it.) So Tholomyes gets the official position as Character I Would Most Like To Invite To A Hearty Punch In The Head.

5 Favorite ships (canon or non-canon): Combeferre/Prouvaire is the otp of course, also love Courfeyrac/Marius (Cosette can be in there too!), J/B/M (just J/B is also cool), Enjolras/Combeferre, and ExR (but mostly only if the kinda-dysfunctional-not-that-healthy dynamic is acknowledged and explored)

Character I find most attractive: gonna answer in terms of the 2012 movie because most of em aren’t given much of a physical description in the book (other than Enjolras, lol), and say Courfeyrac purely because Fra Fee is an extremely pretty man

Character I would marry: Prouvaire and Combeferre are both variations of My Type, so I’ll take either one thanks

Character I would be best friends with: Combeferre, because I also am an excitable nerd with a bunch of varied interests 

a random thought: someone needs to extract Eponine from the book and give her to me that I may adopt her and give her love

An unpopular opinion: In brick canon specifically, I do interpret Grantaire’s feelings towards Enjolras as having romantic overtones but I don’t honestly think that Enjolras ever returned it. I like the ship, but I interpret the smile/handclasp as Enjolras accepting Grantaire as a real comrade who had finally risen out of his depths of alcoholic dysfunction (and what we would today probably classify as mental illness) to become the person that Enjolras likely always hoped he had the potential to be, capable of doing noble things and making sacrifices for the things that really matter. Not as a romantic epiphany or anything. (Now, in the canon of various adaptations, that’s a whole other ballgame.)

My Canon OTP: LET MARIUS AND COSETTE BE HAPPY they have suffered enough in life

My Non-canon OTP: Combeferre/Prouvaire forevermore

Most Badass Character: Valjean commits so many acts of badassery over the course of the story that he practically ascends to superhero status lbr

Most Epic Villain: Society

Pairing I am not a fan of: Prouvaire/Montparnasse, quite aside from its making no sense whatsoever in canon, seems rather extremely cruel to Prouvaire imo given how unrepentantly violent and terrible Montparnasse-the-actual-serial-killer is in canon

Character I feel the writers screwed up (in one way or another): Bahorel, by leaving him out of adaptations most of the time. WHY would you leave Bahorel out, he’s actually pretty prominent among the Amis and is extremely entertaining besides.

Favourite Friendship: The Courfeyrac and Marius friendship is adorable.

Character I most identify with: see “best friends with”

Character I wish I could be: eeehhhh most of em do NOT get any kind of a happy ending and even the ones who do have hella suffering to get through and end up in a complicated place, so, uh, none of them really

[aegisregalis]

♚; ✘; ✎

@cookignis || mun’s interpretation - Accepting!

Disclaimer:

I have a strong bias for Gladiolus.

The basis of my portrayal is heavily influenced by the Japanese characterization.

I am salty

♚ Do you agree with fandom interpretation of your character?

With my disclaimer in mind. I absolutely loathe (is there a stronger word than this?Because if so I need it) the fact that a large portion of the fandomreduces Gladiolus into an unintelligent muscle-head. That he can barely formcoherent sentences and is near illiterate, despite the fact that he’s shownreading on so many occasions in the game. Oh wait, it must be because one ofthe boys taught him how to read while on the road trip. I wish I was jokingwhen I tell you I have seen that used explanation to why he reads. Let this interpretationof him die, yeah?

Let👏It 👏Die👏 

Is it the way he speaks that makes thisinterpretation prevalent? Because the last time I checked, when I am among myclose friends I speak less formally, with slang and the occasional expletive.The way I speak with close friends and family is not how I would speak duringan interview or when making a formal presentation. It’s a bit off putting howGladio gets penalized for how he speaks when it’s alright for Prompto to speakcasually. But wait! It’s alright because we know that Prompto went toschool with Noctis. Hang on a second– 

Have we forgotten that he has nobleupbringing? Let’s dive into this shall we? House Amicitia, one of thewealthiest houses in Lucis, can easily be assumed to be an old household. Weknow they have been service of the royal family; leading the Crownsguard aswell as becoming the Shield of the King. Gladiolus is eldest son of theAmicitia family. As in Clarus Amicitia’s son. Not the son of a pauper smith orsoldier, but the son of someone in a very high position with a seat in theroyal counsel. Taking those factors into account: 

Old house in Lucis 

Sonof a high standing figure.

There is no doubt that the Amicitias were alwaysunder strict scrutiny. I cannot imagine the ridicule and shame that would havebeen brought upon the Amicitias, if Gladiolus was uneducated, uncouth, and fellinto the dumb muscle trope. It wouldn’t make any sense. Rather, going alongwith line of nobility, he more likely attended the most prestigious academiesin Insomnia, with pressure to maintain excellent academic scores, haveknowledge in military strategy and tactics, as well as undergo rigorous Crownsguardcombat training. Gladiolus is not anywhere close to being uneducated, nor doeshe lack social graces.

✘ Any unpopular opinions about your muse?

Gladiolus isn’t callous and uncaring towards Noctis. Again, I’m not sure if this was another thing lost in translation, due to the harsh words and biting tone, but he isn’t “toxic” nor is he an “unsympathetic jock.” I think he cares too much, but more often than not he chooses not to voice this emotional side. He internalizes a lot. 

When Insomnia fell he also lost his father and members of his house. Though he doesn’t act upon his emotions. He doesn’t get frantic and mopey. And while you may argue that everyone has different coping mechanisms, I feel that the main reason for Gladiolus not acting out is because it is his job to keep his head in the game. His bond with Noctis is deeper than that of a bodyguard to his lord. Not only is he the protector of the crown, but it is his duty to shoulder the fate of the realm alongside Noctis. He has unwavering faith in his king, but he also understands that Noctis is human and humans are flawed. He even says to Noctis, “When you can’t focus, I focus for you.” 

What is often overlooked is the closeness and bond that Noctis and Gladiolus share. Make no mistake of it they are friends. It’s clear by the playful banter and teasing. It’s clear in how Gladio hooks his arm around Noctis’ neck playfully or rustles his hair. How Gladio pats him on the shoulder or back. How excited Gladiolus is to tell Noctis about the Liege of the Lake fishing tour. How in their photos they display silly and playful poses. This is more than just King and bodyguard. They share an undeniable closeness. Gladiolus is bound to Noctis by both duty and love. Be it familial, platonic or romantic, he does care about and love Noctis. Though perhaps his brand of love, is tough love. Gladiolus takes it upon himself to take on the difficult tasks. To shoulder the burdens where he can. Really, no one wants to tell someone who has just lost their father, home and friend to stop being sad, to stop moping. But time is of the essence. Gladiolus knows in order to continue on their journey, Noctis has to have his head on straight and be able to focus for himself as well. Call it a rude awakening, but he’s showing Noctis that he isn’t the only one that has lost something or someone precious. They all have/are making sacrifices. They are all in this together. He is still standing by his side. He has unwavering faith in Noctis and he wants him to also believe in himself.

✎ What do you wish the author would reveal/had revealed about your muse?

Everything? Tell me more about the Amicitia family and their origins. Tell me more about Gladiolus’ relationship with his father Clarus. Tell me more about his Crownsguard training. Just… give me all things Gladiolus. 

TL;DR: 

Gladiolus is an amazing character with so much depth. Stop reducing him to a callous neanderthal. 

@rex-clypeus @dysah : Bless you both for your wonderful works of Gladiolus. I support and agree on your Tweets on Gladiolus as well. You both are Diamonds in the rough!

[cwwdcim2019]

#NotAllMen: A Divided Community

The Internet has given a voice and a platform to many ideas and beliefs, and in doing so has given people a sense of community amongst those who share those beliefs. For marginalized people like women and people of color, having a safe space to discuss issues with people who understand their point of view helps them feel more accepted and heard. But, because the Internet is a public entity that anyone can access, there are also people that co-opt these safe spaces to challenge usually liberal ideals. 

One example is the topic of feminism, where women have the space to discuss problems faced by women in the largely patriarchal society and bring up possible changes that could resolve these issues; however, wherever there are women talking about the bad things men do to them on a daily basis solely because of their sex, there are men defending these actions and pushing back against feminist ideals as 'misandry'. This can be seen in action with #NotAllMen, a hashtag where one can observe men using it seriously and women use it satirically to highlight men's antagonistic attitude. The hashtag #NotAllMen is an example of how societal norms are informed by virtual activism, how virtual activism is informed by real-life societal norms, and how one online space can separate into two distinct communities.

The phrase 'not all men' has created two types of communities on the Internet, both of which can in some way be considered minorities: feminists and 'meninists'. While the popularity and practice of feminism continues to rise, on the Internet in particular, feminists are targeted with ridicule, trolling, and vitriol. Likewise, while men are in no way a minority in real life, men who hold misogynistic views generally don't spread them in real life, but on the Internet, they have found a common community where they can share their otherwise unpopular and unsavory views. As Larry Gross writes in "Somewhere There's a Place for Us", digital media representation can present "the opportunity to reach out and communicate with like-minded individuals", creating "virtual public spaces that can be life - or at least, sanity-saving refuges for many who have reason to feel they are living in enemy territory" (258). 

For both sides of the hashtag, people utilizing it feel as though the opposing side is the enemy, attacking their beliefs and their very right to live unmolested by others. Tumblr user Kristoffman, representing the men's rights side of #notallmen, shares his thoughts on feminists' venting below:

His post shows that, despite holding most of the social and economic powers, men feel persecuted and singled out by women sharing their complaints about dangerous or just plain annoying men. This feeling is what has led to a rise in the rebuttal "Not all men" in response to women saying things like, "Men get paid more than women," or "Men catcall us on the street." The community surrounding #notallmen is a defensive one, banding together to assert their innocence in male-perpetrated crimes and faux-pas, despite the fact that “83 percent of girls 12 to 16 have experienced some form of sexual harassment in public schools” (Blow, 2014) -- a statistic that shows a lot of men must be perpetrating sexual harassment. 

As Jess Zimmerman of Time Magazine points out, the fact that men try to distance themselves from other sexist men is an indicator that the phrase "Not all men" indicates "a developmental path that echoes an individual man growing a social conscience", moving from the mentality "'but what about men's problems' to 'not all men like that'". In other words, Zimmerman says, it shows the shift from the idea that "Sexism is a fake idea invented by feminists" to "Sexism happens, but the important part is that I personally am not sexist". While this is progress to a degree, the defensive community mentality of 'us versus them', male versus female, that #notallmen provides gets in the way of an actual conversation between the two groups.

The other side of the hashtag is the women's perspective, where feminists have co-opted the phrase so often used to derail their conversations. Women began using the phrase 'not all men' to show how ridiculous men sound when they use it as a serious argument. They will make claims about the sexism they have experienced in the past, then show a man rudely interrupting in an obvious and defensive way to show that men aren't even listening to what they are saying. As Kirsty Strickland points out, men who use the phrase “not all men” ��are letting women know that discussing misogyny makes them uncomfortable, and they’d like to be absolved of any blame before they will let women continue”. 

Women and feminist men across the Internet have created a community dedicated to making sure women's voices are heard when they discuss the discomforts and dangers they face from men every day while showing defensive men that of course, rationally, not all men kill or rape or even catcall, but enough men do it that there is the need for a conversation about how to change things. By turning "not all men" into a satirical meme, feminists across the Internet have brought the conversation back to their community and, by beating men to the punchline, opened up space for a different kind of dialogue and reaction (McKinney, 2014).

The fact that men using #notallmen un-ironically tend not to share their posts on more professional or family-minded platforms like Facebook speaks to Bryce J. Renninger's observation of youths feeling uncomfortable using Facebook: because it is a social media platform where most people have family members, real-life friends, and even professional connections following them, they don't feel comfortable divulging certain pieces of information where they are "at risk of being disrupted, ridiculed, dismissed, or ignored” (2). This leads me to conclude that the un-ironic use of #notallmen constitutes a counterpublic. 

Likewise, feminist appropriation of #notallmen can be considered another counterpublic because the feminist group is "seeking to change the status quo" and utilizes counterpublic communication "because it engages in the 'non-compliant practices of intervening, and the formation of new social and cultural structures, both in support of and resistance to changing social norms and values' (Lindtner et al., 2011: 5-6)" (Renninger, 2). These two communities share so many similarities in their classification and structure, but their interpretations of the other's message mean they are unwilling to listen to the other side and have a meaningful conversation.

The fact that one single hashtag has two distinct meanings depending on the kind of person using it shows the fluid nature of virtual spaces and how easily real life can come to be impacted by the influence of a virtual movement. #NotAllMen started off as a way for disgruntled men to push back against inflammatory feminist remarks, then morphed into a way for feminists to highlight the self-centered nature of this rebuttal and open the conversation up to different discourse. In doing so, #NotAllMen has informed the way that men and anti-feminists must go about their arguing both online and in real life, showcasing the transformative nature of online communities and activism.

Works Cited:

Blow, Charles M. “Yes, All Men.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 June 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/opinion/blow-yes-all-men.html?ref=opinion&_r=0. Gross, Larry. “Somewhere There's a Place for Us.” Technological Visions: the Hopes and Fears That Shape New Technologies, edited by Marita Sturken et al., Temple University Press, 2004, pp. 255–269. McKinney, Kelsey. “Here's Why Women Have Turned the ‘Not All Men’ Objection into a Meme.” Vox, Vox, 15 May 2014, www.vox.com/2014/5/15/5720332/heres-why-women-have-turned-the-not-all-men-objection-into-a-meme. Renninger, Bryce J. “‘Where I Can Be Myself … Where I Can Speak My Mind’ : Networked Counterpublics in a Polymedia Environment.” New Media & Society, vol. 17, no. 9, 2014, pp. 1–17., doi:10.1177/1461444814530095. Strickland, Kirsty. “Why Men Should Stop Saying #NotAllMen. Immediately.” Medium, Medium, 25 Oct. 2017, medium.com/@KirstyStricklan/why-men-should-stop-saying-notallmen-immediately-f657e244f7a1. Zimmerman, Jess. “Not All Men: A Brief History of Every Dude's Favorite Argument.” Time, Time, 28 Apr. 2014, time.com/79357/not-all-men-a-brief-history-of-every-dudes-favorite-argument/.

[theadmiringbog]

RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back

RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

RULE 3 / Make friends with people who want the best for you

RULE 4 / Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

RULE 5 / Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

RULE 6 / Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

RULE 7 / Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

RULE 8 / Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie

RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech

RULE 11 / Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

RULE 12 / Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

--

RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back

If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate’s brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position. Its original brain just isn’t sophisticated to manage the transformation from king to bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and regrowth. Anyone who has experienced a painful transformation after a serious defeat in romance or career may feel some sense of kinship with the once successful crustacean.

--

Among the chimp troupes he studied, males who were successful in the longer term had to buttress their physical prowess with more sophisticated attributes. Even the most brutal chimp despot can be taken down, after all, by two opponents, each three-quarters as mean. In consequence, males who stay on top longer are those who form reciprocal coalitions with their lower-status compatriots, and who pay careful attention to the troupe’s females and their infants. The political ploy of baby-kissing is literally millions of years old.                

--

“In my kingdom,” as the Red Queen tells Alice in Wonderland, “you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.”                

--

If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive and safe, and that you are well buttressed with social support. It thinks the chance that something will damage you is low and can be safely discounted. Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster.                

--

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge. This means that the damage caused by the bullying (the lowering of status and confidence) can continue, even after the bullying has ended.                

--

When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially)— their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most destructive of wishes. To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.                

--

Maybe you are a loser. And maybe you’re not—but if you are, you don’t have to continue in that mode. Maybe you just have a bad habit. Maybe you’re even just a collection of bad habits. Nonetheless, even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school—it’s not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number. Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin. This will make you less happy, and more anxious and sad, and more likely to back down when you should stand up for yourself. It will also decrease the probability that you will get to live in a good neighbourhood, have access to the highest quality resources, and obtain a healthy, desirable mate. It will render you more likely to abuse cocaine and alcohol, as you live for the present in a world full of uncertain futures. It will increase your susceptibility to heart disease, cancer and dementia. All in all, it’s just not good.                

--

Thus strengthened and emboldened, you may choose to embrace Being, and work for its furtherance and improvement. Thus strengthened, you may be able to stand, even during the illness of a loved one, even during the death of a parent, and allow others to find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed with despair. Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy.                

--

RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.                

--

You need to consider the future and think, “What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?”                

--

RULE 3 / MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU                 

When people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.”                

--

Are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility? Are you enabling a delusion?                

--

Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today’s cheap pleasures. As the infamous father of the Simpson clan puts it, immediately prior to downing a jar of mayonnaise and vodka, “That’s a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy!”               

--

RULE 4 / COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY                 

You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing. The words imply no alternative and no middle ground. However, in a world as complex as ours, such generalizations (really, such failure to differentiate) are a sign of naive, unsophisticated or even malevolent analysis. There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by this binary system, and the consequences are not good.                

--

The world allows for many ways of Being. If you don’t succeed at one, you can try another. You can pick something better matched to your unique mix of strengths, weaknesses and situation. Furthermore, if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one.                

--

But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.                

--

When the internal critic puts you down using such comparisons, here’s how it operates: First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, maybe, or power). Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant. Then it contrasts you unfavourably with someone truly stellar, within that domain. It can take that final step even further, using the unbridgeable gap between you and its target of comparison as evidence for the fundamental injustice of life.                

--

You set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning. Then you ask yourself, “What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?” Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly. Then you give yourself that damn coffee, in triumph. Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different. Now you’re aiming for something higher. Now you’re wishing on a star. Now the beam is disappearing from your eye, and you’re learning to see. And what you aim at determines what you see. That’s worth repeating. What you aim at determines what you see.                

--

What would your life look like, if it were better? What would Life Itself look like? What does “better” even mean?                

--

Everything you value is a product of unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural and biological. You don’t understand how what you want—and, therefore, what you see—is conditioned by the immense, abysmal, profound past.                

--

Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.                

--

Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you would fix. You can find such somethings by asking yourself (as if you genuinely want to know) three questions: “What is it that is bothering me?” “Is that something I could fix?” and “Would I actually be willing to fix it?”                

--

If you find that the answer is “no,” to any or all of the questions, then look elsewhere. Aim lower. Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day.                

--

What if you allowed yourself a glass of wine with dinner, or curled up on the sofa and read, or watched a stupid movie, as a reward? What if you instructed your wife, or your husband, to say “good job” after you fixed whatever you fixed? Would that motivate you? The people from whom you want thanks might not be very proficient in offering it, to begin with, but that shouldn’t stop you. People can learn,                

--

Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What                

--

You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.                

--

Do this every day, for a while. Then do it for the rest of your life.                

--

You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself. Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good. Now, your trajectory is heavenward. That makes you hopeful. Even a man on a sinking ship can be happy when he clambers aboard a lifeboat! And who knows where he might go, in the future. To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully….                

--

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.                

--

RULE 5  /  DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DISLIKE THEM                 

Children are damaged when those charged with their care, afraid of any conflict or upset, no longer dare to correct them, and leave them without guidance. I can recognize such children on the street. They are doughy and unfocused and vague. They are leaden and dull instead of golden and bright. They are uncarved blocks, trapped in a perpetual state of waiting-to-be.                

--

RULE 6  /  SET YOUR HOUSE IN PERFECT ORDER BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE THE WORLD                 

if one parent abused three children, and each of those children had three children, and so on, then there would be three abusers the first generation, nine the second, twenty-seven the third, eighty-one the fourth—and so on exponentially. After twenty generations, more than ten billion would have suffered childhood abuse: more people than currently inhabit the planet. But instead, abuse disappears across generations. People constrain its spread. That’s a testament to the genuine dominance of good over evil in the human heart.                

--

When the hurricane hit New Orleans, and the town sank under the waves, was that a natural disaster? The Dutch prepare their dikes for the worst storm in ten thousand years. Had New Orleans followed that example, no tragedy would have occurred. It’s not that no one knew. The Flood Control Act of 1965 mandated improvements in the levee system that held back Lake Pontchartrain. The system was to be completed by 1978. Forty years later, only 60 percent of the work had been done. Willful blindness and corruption took the city down.                

--

A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known—that’s sin. That’s failure to hit the mark. And the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).                

--

The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They acted as if God’s goodness—the goodness of reality—was axiomatic, and took responsibility for their own failure. That’s insanely responsible. But the alternative is to judge reality as insufficient, to criticize Being itself, and to sink into resentment and the desire for revenge.                

--

RULE 7  /  PURSUE WHAT IS MEANINGFUL (NOT WHAT IS EXPEDIENT)                

for dust you are and to dust you will return. (Genesis 3:16-19. KJV) What in the world should be done about that? The simplest, most obvious, and most direct answer? Pursue pleasure. Follow your impulses. Live for the moment. Do what’s expedient. Lie, cheat, steal, deceive, manipulate—but don’t get caught. In an ultimately meaningless universe, what possible difference could it make?                

--

Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer to a neighbourhood ask a new neighbour to do him or her a favour, citing an old maxim: He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged. In Franklin’s opinion, asking someone for something (not too extreme, obviously) was the most useful and immediate invitation to social interaction. Such asking on the part of the newcomer provided the neighbour with an opportunity to show him- or herself as a good person, at first encounter.                

--

RULE 8  /   TELL THE TRUTH—OR, AT LEAST, DON'T LIE                 

Taking the easy way out or telling the truth—those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.                

--

Typical calculated ends might include “to impose my ideological beliefs,” “to prove that I am (or was) right,” “to appear competent,” “to ratchet myself up the dominance hierarchy,” “to avoid responsibility” (or its twin, “to garner credit for others’ actions”), “to be promoted,” “to attract the lion’s share of attention,” “to ensure that everyone likes me,” “to garner the benefits of martyrdom,” “to justify my cynicism,” “to rationalize my antisocial outlook,” “to minimize immediate conflict,” “to maintain my naïveté,” “to capitalize on my vulnerability,” “to always appear as the sainted one,” or (this one is particularly evil) “to ensure that it is always my unloved child’s fault.” These are all examples of what Sigmund Freud’s compatriot, the lesser-known Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, called “life-lies.”                

--

What did she know about her fifty-two-year-old self, when still a teenager? Even now, many years later, she has only the vaguest, lowest-resolution idea of her post-work Eden. She refuses to notice. What did her life mean, if that initial goal was wrong? She’s afraid of opening Pandora’s box, where all the troubles of the world reside. But hope is in there, too. Instead, she warps her life to fit the fantasies of a sheltered adolescent.                

--

A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie.                

--

If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward. This is a biological truth, as well as a conceptual truth. When you explore boldly, when you voluntarily confront the unknown, you gather information and build your renewed self out of that information. That is the conceptual element. However, researchers have recently discovered that new genes in the central nervous system turn themselves on when an organism is placed (or places itself) in a new situation. These genes code for new proteins. These proteins are the building blocks for new structures in the brain. This means that a lot of you is still nascent, in the most physical of senses, and will not be called forth by stasis. You have to say something, go somewhere and do things to get turned on. And, if not…you remain incomplete, and life is too hard for anyone incomplete.

--

If you’re lucky, and you fail, and you try something new, you move ahead. If that doesn’t work, you try something different again. A minor modification will suffice in fortunate circumstances. It is therefore prudent to begin with small changes, and see if they help. Sometimes, however, the entire hierarchy of values is faulty, and the whole edifice has to be abandoned. The whole game must be changed.

--

Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it, and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice. To accept the truth means to sacrifice—and if you have rejected the truth for a long time, then you’ve run up a dangerously large sacrificial debt.                

--

“Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn.” 

That is the voice of authenticity. 

“Did what I want happen? No. Then the world is unfair. People are jealous, and too stupid to understand. It is the fault of something or someone else.” 

That is the voice of inauthenticity.                

--

It is not too far from there to “they should be stopped” or “they must be hurt” or “they must be destroyed.” Whenever you hear about something incomprehensibly brutal, such ideas have manifested themselves.                

--

it is necessary to aim at your target, however traditional, with your eyes wide open. You have a direction, but it might be wrong. You have a plan, but it might be ill-formed. You may have been led astray by your own ignorance—and, worse, by your own unrevealed corruption. You must make friends, therefore, with what you don’t know, instead of what you know. You must remain awake to catch yourself in the act. You must remove the beam in your own eye, before you concern yourself with the mote in your brother’s. And in this way, you strengthen your own spirit, so it can tolerate the burden of existence, and you rejuvenate the state.                

--

Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.                

--

You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond.                

--

In His human form, Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily to the truth, to the good, to God. In consequence, He died and was reborn. The Word that produces order from chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity.                

--

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.                

--

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.                

--

If you bend everything totally, blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal, and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you, and the world, better. It is this that you sacrifice if you do not tell the truth. If, instead, you tell the truth, your values transform as you progress. If you allow yourself to be informed by the reality manifesting itself, as you struggle forward, your notions of what is important will change. You will reorient yourself, sometimes gradually, and sometimes suddenly and radically. Imagine: you                

--

Perhaps it is better to conceptualize it this way: Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. But all such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to what might be considered a meta-goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves. The meta-goal could be “live in truth.”                

--

If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise.       

--

RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over. I thought,                

--

If I had been the adherent of a left-wing, social-justice ideology, I would have told her the first story. If I had been the adherent of a conservative ideology, I would have told her the second. And her responses after having been told either the first or the second story would have proved to my satisfaction and hers that the story I had told her was true—completely, irrefutably true. And that would have been advice.                

--

You can be pretty smart if you can just shut up.     

--

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech

We see rocks, because we can throw them, and clouds, because they can rain on us, and apples, to eat, and the automobiles of other people, to get in our way and annoy us. We see tools and obstacles, not objects or things.                

--

Here’s the terrible truth about such matters: every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and will then plague that betrayed and self-betrayed woman for the rest of her life. The same goes for her husband. All she—he—they—or we—must do to ensure such an outcome is nothing: don’t notice, don’t react, don’t attend, don’t discuss, don’t consider, don’t work for peace, don’t take responsibility. Don’t confront the chaos and turn it into order—just wait, anything but naïve and innocent, for the chaos to rise up and engulf you instead.                

--

Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem would enable its solution? Because to specify the problem is to admit that it exists. Because to specify the problem is to allow yourself to know what you want, say, from friend or lover—and then you will know, precisely and cleanly, when you don’t get it, and that will hurt, sharply and specifically.                

--

But you will learn something from that, and use what you learn in the future—and the alternative to that single sharp pain is the dull ache of continued hopelessness and vague failure and the sense that time, precious time, is slipping by.

--                

RULE 11 / Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

Women have a strong proclivity to marry across or up the economic dominance hierarchy. They prefer a partner of equal or greater status. This holds true cross-culturally.184 The same does not hold, by the way, for men, who are perfectly willing to marry across or down (as the Pew data indicate), although they show a preference for somewhat younger mates.                

--

Any hierarchy creates winners and losers. The winners are, of course, more likely to justify the hierarchy and the losers to criticize it. But (1) the collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy (as some will be better and some worse at that pursuit no matter what it is) and (2) it is the pursuit of goals that in large part lends life its sustaining meaning.                

--

We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued. The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself—and then there would be nothing worth living for.                

--

We might instead note with gratitude that a complex, sophisticated culture allows for many games and many successful players, and that a well-structured culture allows the individuals that compose it to play and to win, in many different fashions.                

--

There are only two major reasons for resentment: being taken advantage of (or allowing yourself to be taken advantage of), or whiny refusal to adopt responsibility and grow up. If you’re resentful, look for the reasons.                

--

Agreeable, compassionate, empathic, conflict-averse people (all those traits group together) let people walk on them, and they get bitter. They sacrifice themselves for others, sometimes excessively, and cannot comprehend why that is not reciprocated.      

--      

RULE 12 / Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

I started with my thoughts about my son. She had asked, like everyone in her situation, “Why my husband? Why me? Why this?” My realization of the tight interlinking between vulnerability and Being was the best answer I had for her. I told her an old Jewish story, which I believe is part of the commentary on the Torah. It begins with a question, structured like a Zen koan. Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack?211 The answer? Limitation. If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being. That idea has helped me deal with the terrible fragility of Being.                

--

Perhaps that is true prayer: the question, “What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?”

[comrade-meow]

"When someone tells you to 'educate yourself,' they are not telling you to actually learn the facts, figures, history, or logic of debate. They are telling you to agree with them. The idea that someone may be educated on an issue and yet still disagree with you on it is inconceivable to people who have been 'dis-educated.'"

Educate yourself. If you have ever stated an unpopular opinion online, especially about social issues, you’ve probably had this mantra thrown at you. If you’re new to being on the “wrong side” of a particular debate, being told you need to “educate yourself” can be really disorienting. The phrase implies that the speaker knows more than you, you’re undeniably in the wrong, and a little bit of reading will set you straight. But like many mantras on the left today, “educate yourself” has become a meaningless tagline devoid of any real connection to the actual text of the phrase.

A popular progressive Instagram account, @soyouwanttotalkabout (no affiliation with the book “So You Want To Talk About Race”), claims to help educate readers on issues such as race, gender, and politics. The account includes over 400 image slide posts of sound-bite style messages on all of the most popular issues in social justice today. “Choosing to educate ourselves is the first step in becoming allies,” says one post on being a trans ally. “With this education, you’ll be able to better support the trans and nonbinary folks in your lives, and help to create a safer, kinder and more accepting world.” The account also includes, without the slightest hint of self-awareness, a post describing “performative activism” (vs. “authentic activism”) as activism that is “Visible, Audience-driven, and Sustained by public consumption.”

There are pages of comments on these posts thanking the account for the content and helping them learn. The most popular comment, though, appears to be followers tagging in another user to the thread—presumably, to educate them.

“This was a good one for me to share with family & friends that just refuse to open their eyes & minds,” one user commented on a post titled “White Denial.”

“@[username] you should read this,” says another.

The @soyouwanttotalkabout account appears to exist almost entirely to give people a place to go when they need to “educate themselves,” or, when they want their friend to get educated.

But the posts themselves are superficial in depth, often repeat misinformation, and rarely cite sources except in the case of direct quotes. To be fair, Instagram does not lend itself to a more detailed, nuanced, or in-depth format for education—but this is exactly the problem. Well-meaning people who want to “be better” are turning to social media for an education on issues that are often complicated and have real consequences on the lives of others.

This account perfectly encapsulates the problems associated with demands to “educate yourself.” Education in this context doesn’t mean actually learning the breadth of information on the issue, but instead training yourself to parrot surface-level mantras. When questioned on the details of your stance, you don’t need to deepen your education—you just need to shut down debate and tell the other person to educate themselves. What’s happening is not education but rather, as Jones School of Law Professor Adam J. MacLeod put it, “dis-education.” In a 2017 speech to his first-year Law Students, MacLeod confronted his students over the growing trend of illiberalism among his students:

“Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason. For many of you have not yet been educated. You have been dis-educated. To put it bluntly, you have been indoctrinated. Before you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.”

Today, the professor would probably face disciplinary action for this speech.

When we are told to “educate yourself,” what we are actually being told to do is to allow ourselves to be indoctrinated into a particular ideology. In reality, developing a deep understanding of all sides of the debate is unwelcome, and those providing the “education” are often very misinformed themselves. For example, in their post on being a Trans Ally, @soyouwanttotalkabout made several claims that are logically incomplete (such as creating a circular definition of “gender”), but actually didn’t even represent the critical gender theory ideological perspective accurately (the side they are claiming to educate us about).

Despite many people helpfully instructing me in the past few years to educate myself on trans issues, I was able to immediately spot problems with the thread from the gender theory perspective (such as their list of “common genders,” conflation of “gender” and “gender expression,” and the claim that gender identity “can change over time”). This is because, despite disagreeing with the ideology of gender theory, I am actually very well educated on the issue. I have spent the past three years now writing nearly exclusively about gender identity, I have personal experience with friends and family members transitioning, and I work for a nonprofit which largely focuses on the issue. I am, by nearly every measure imaginable, more educated on the issue than every person who has ever demanded I “educate yourself.”

When someone tells you to “educate yourself,” they are not telling you to actually learn the facts, figures, history, or logic of debate. They are telling you to agree with them. The idea that someone may be educated on an issue and yet still disagree with you on it is inconceivable to people who have been “dis-educated.”

Two people who are equally educated on an issue (imagine they have read all the same books and studies, spoken to the same experts, and listened to the same people with “lived experience”) may still come to a different conclusion.

How is this possible if all you need to be on the “right” side is to simply educate yourself?

The deciding factor in most of our political opinions is not the facts of the case, but rather the values we hold through which we interpret the meaning of these facts.

Most people, to at least some degree, hold many of the same values: individual liberty, societal equality, the sanctity of life, and the desire to reduce harm and suffering in the world. How we will position ourselves on certain issues often has less to do with the facts of the case, or even which values we hold, but in which order we prioritize these values.

To grossly oversimplify the culture war between the “woke” and the “unwoke,” critical theory tends to prioritize social equality over individual liberty (for example, by limiting which groups of people can use certain words or hairstyles to prevent the few instances of racism that could stem from individuals of these groups using them).

When someone disagrees with a value prioritization on issues where values compete (such as individual liberty vs. social equality), education based on your own values is not what is needed to change that person’s mind. The role of facts in changing someone’s stance is to inform them of whether or not a position they support is ultimately upholding their values. Sometimes people apply their values inconsistently, and pointing this out can be either met with defensiveness or provide an opportunity to change their opinion. However, what someone is unlikely to change through the knowledge of new facts is their underlying values and the priorities they assign them.

If we are to trust a definition provided by @soyouwanttotalkabout, intolerance is:

“Not being able to or willing to accept that someone’s ideas or lives are different from our own.”

The inherent intolerance in the “educate yourself” rhetoric is the assumption that someone can not hold or prioritize different values from you. Our values are borne in us from a combination of our genetics/personality and life experiences, and they are core to what makes us individuals. “Educate yourself” is a form of gaslighting—denying the facts we already know and rejecting our own perception of the moral implications of that reality. Unless the person repeating the command is a verified expert in the domain, they probably have no business demanding you to learn anything (see also: the Dunning-Kruger effect). If anything, the very use of this phrase is likely to signpost a person who is actually quite uneducated on the issue—or else they would have been able to engage with you in a more meaningful way.

The truth is, we probably could all stand to have more facts when evaluating our stances on important social issues. Facts help us decide when our values are being upheld or when they are being violated. But when someone tells you to “educate yourself,” they don’t mean engaging in the process of collecting facts and analysing their moral outcome as compared to your value priorities. They mean fall in line. Capitulate. Give up your own values, your own education, your own life experience and do what I tell you—or else.

[inputgarlic92]

Amazing Contemporary Society Restrictions Centered Surrounding Mobile Phones

Determine a new direction in friendships happening inside our society thanks partly to the huge usage of smart phones. So how are we transforming in our public connections with other people? If you want to take the best in our conduct we must start researching the modest alterations taking place each and every day. Although phones have already been innovative in assisting online social connections, they experienced detrimental effects offline. Face-to-face interactions have been split up and we are writing less real-life experiences, now more than ever. The location is the personal sensitive location we each inhabit, fashioned by our interactions with the environment around us. The significant overlap is a term used to describe the shared open area between a few individuals formed by their shared emotions. It really is these overlaps that type the basis of our interactions. The result smartphones have upon this overlap is clear. Our mobile phones essentially draw us out of our environment, resulting in less shared experiences during social connections and for that reason a smaller sized overlap. The structure of our social relationships are also changing. During on-line socializing, we are completely blind to the response and real-life feelings of your partner. In face-to-face relationships we use cosmetic expressions and various other non-verbal cues as reviews to help us understand more about the additional individuals internal monologue With out these physical cues, we should infer hints from just about any digital response we obtain. This may lead to misjudgment of others feelings and less shared experience as we have a smaller knowledge of the others very own experience. Phone use can also lead to long-lasting problems with offline human relationships. A brand-new research discovered that cell phone usage during an connection was frequently interpreted as a kind of rejection. Rejection can cause feelings of hurt, anger and resentment - decreasing self-esteem and mood. These feelings were related to lower relationship satisfaction and increased turmoil. Although cellphones can boost interaction, it really is evident they are interfering with this offline cultural interactions and decreasing the grade of our human relationships. Rejection within interpersonal interactions leads to lower self-esteem and signals of depression. Extreme cellphone usage during social interactions, therefore, could be destructive to your mental wellbeing by lowering the grade of associations. Not merely are cellphones affecting our relationships, the constant using these devices is causing identification problems. Modern smart phones possess loads of applications available to users with app use creating 81% of cellular time. Study conducted on social media marketing usage found that 65% of your time spent on social media is via phone applications. This implies that mobile phones are facilitating the usage of social media applications, which can be damaging to our social identities. Excessive social media usage is normally causing people to derive their self-worth using their social media following and likes. In todays world, people correlate a minimal social media pursuing and less loves with that person being relatively boring and unpopular. This way of thinking puts pressure on people to maintain an internet social media presence by remaining active on the phone and spending excessive time on social media marketing, a vicious cycle. The unlucky thing about the existing climate is usually that those who do not make use of their phone as much are being appeared down upon. Thoughts of belonging is a strong and expected facet of human being nature. Relating to social identity theory, we normally seek belonging within groups. People are progressively equating a minimal social media following with a lack of belonging, causing them to feel disconnected.

A problem arises when folks are consumed by their social media marketing activity but usually do not receive the identification or appreciation that they expect. Another issue presents itself when those individuals cannot gain access to their social media marketing platforms. For instance, a video of a social media marketing influencer not long ago went viral just after her Instagram account was terminated. This member, who boasted over 100,000 fans, claimed that she is nothing without her pursuing and that it experienced like murder when her account was shut off. A Moderate post explored how mobile phones are taking advantage of an evolutionary dependence on acceptance. The author shows that smart phones contain various variable prize schedules, such as for example messages and social media likes that constantly draw us in. We are steadily seeking rewards from our smartphones, in the form of social media attention. A brand-new research supported the idea that excessive social media use can lead to emotional and mental medical issues. Self-conflict theory may describe this effect. Our online presence is supposed to be always a representation of our real self. Nevertheless, given the fact that we mostly display only our positive characteristics online, our profiles are actually an improved representation of our ideal self. Therefore, those that tend to promote themselves more positively through their social networking channels may merely be displaying their high levels of self-discrepancy. So presently there you have it. Regular cellphone use may damage our relationships and cause us to feel as though we dont belong - triggering feelings of low self-esteem and despair. They also facilitate excessive social media use, which can often result in discrepancies between our ideal and real self. These feelings also result in a lower self-esteem, feeling and opinion of ourselves and in addition increasing our likelihood of feeling depressed. This blog post isn't an attack on smartphones, as I am among the many who are guilty of the excessive usage of my mobile phone. Consider this a warning of the problems of excessive smartphone use. In future, when you are conversing with somebody in person, place the smart phone down! In spite of what is usually on your display can wait. We must treasure our face-to-face interactions and be pleased with who we are actually rather than seeking acceptance through the over-use of our mobile phones. As I mentioned before, I do not want this post to be considered an attack on smartphones. Digital society has simply educated me about the prevalence of technology within our everyday lives. Not merely regarding smartphones, but especially learning about the web of Issues and Smart Metropolitan areas, I now have a better knowledge of the direction where the globe is headed. It really is quite obvious to see, we are destined towards another whereby technology is used in nearly every aspect of lifestyle, from self-service checkouts to driverless vehicles. Whilst these technological innovations are resolving everyday problems for all of us and producing existence more convenient, I wish to know how the use of technology is affecting the way we work as individuals in culture. As a Mindset student, becoming even more educated about how the globe is using technology has led myself to ask queries about the result that is having on our mental health. With the whole planet being controlled by technical devices, that is bound to have an effect on the dynamics of society. Given the fact that wise technology is a comparatively new phenomenon, we do not yet know much about how exactly it is impacting our lives. For instance, the Digital Engagement subject taught me about how exactly businesses are more and more using our online activity to advertise and advertise new products to us. This is unquestionably a implication of technical use, even as we are becoming brain-washed into spending money. Whilst that is a threat of smartphones, I needed to breach additional into the mental ramifications of technology on people. Smart phones, for me, encapsulate the digital culture we reside in. We are linked with one another in society through a small handheld device that can be taken with us wherever we move in our pockets. Though the problem is, that most of that time period these cell phones are not kept inside our wallets and we are spending additional time looking into our cell phones. Consequently, if cell phones represent the digital society, then the risks of phones might tell us more about the implications of living in a digital culture. Reading through several articles, I have been subjected to different opinions and viewpoints. Content articles and personal blogs have got helped increase my knowledge about technology, that i have been in a position to apply to different psychological ideas and concepts. Digital Society has allowed me to modernize my knowledge of environmental elements on emotional wellbeing. After all, if the environment around us can be changing - the way in which we are influenced by our environment will change too. The primary challenge for me was fine-tuning my academic writing method right into a blog post format. As a person who is used to writing in an average university assignment style, this has opened my eyes to a new way of writing. Although tough to adjust to in the beginning, I now enjoy composing blogs and have discovered that I feel much more in a position to express my personal opinions when composing them. referencia In fact, I look forward to composing more blog posts in the foreseeable future.

[aircoil50]

Contemporary Value of Relationships Because of Mobile Phones

Shall we talk about smartphones. The light and portable gadgets which have changed the way we socialize and connect during the last few years. However, the amount of will cellphone utilization effect our interactions, cultural relationships and self-identities, and what impact is normally this developing on all of our mental wellbeing? Although mobile phones have already been innovative in facilitating on-line cultural communications, they have had detrimental effects offline. Face-to-face relationships have been broken up and we are writing less real-life encounters, now more than ever. The open area is the personal sensitive location we each enjoy, placed together by our relationships with the environment around us. click the next document The significant overlap is a term used to spell it out the shared space between several individuals shaped by their common activities. It is these overlaps that type the foundation of our romantic relationships. The influence smart phones have upon this overlap is clear. Our cell phones essentially pull us out of our environment, resulting in less shared encounters during social relationships and therefore a smaller sized overlap. The characteristics of our social connections will also be changing. During on the web socializing, we are totally blind to the reaction and real-life emotions of your partner. In face-to-face relationships we use cosmetic expressions and other nonverbal cues as responses to help us understand even more about the various other individuals internal monologue Devoid of these physical signs, we must infer signs from just about any digital response we receive. This might lead to misjudgment of others feelings and less shared experience as we've a smaller knowledge of the others personal experience. Phone use can also result in long-lasting issues with offline interactions. A new study found that smartphone use during an interaction was frequently interpreted as a kind of rejection. Rejection can cause emotions of hurt, anger and resentment - reducing self-esteem and feeling. These emotions were related to lower relationship satisfaction and increased discord. Whilst smart phones can enhance conversation, it is evident that they are interfering with our offline social interactions and decreasing the grade of our human relationships. https://thenextweb.com/plugged/2019/06/12/how-close-all-open-safari-tabs-iphone-ipad/ Rejection within interpersonal interactions leads to lessen self-esteem and indications of depression. Excessive smartphone use during social connections, therefore, could be destructive to our mental wellbeing by lowering the grade of interactions.

Not only are cell phones affecting our relationships, the constant using the unit is causing identification problems. Modern mobile phones possess loads of applications available to users with app utilization making up 81% of cellular time. Analysis conducted on social media marketing usage discovered that 68% of time spent on social media marketing is via smartphone applications. This implies that smart phones are facilitating the usage of social media applications, which can be damaging to our social identities. Excessive social media usage is definitely causing people to derive their self-worth off their social media subsequent and likes. In todays world, people correlate a low social media following and less enjoys with see your face being relatively boring and unpopular. This way of thinking puts pressure on visitors to maintain an internet social networking presence by remaining active on the phone and spending excessive time on social media marketing, a vicious cycle. The regrettable thing about the current climate can be that those who do not use their phone as much are being appeared down upon. Feelings of relating is a solid and unavoidable facet of individual nature. According to social identity theory, we naturally seek belonging within groups. People are significantly equating a low social media following with a lack of belonging, causing these to feel disconnected. A problem arises when people are consumed by their social media activity but usually do not receive the identification or appreciation that they expect. Another problem occurs when those individuals cannot access their social media platforms. For example, a video of the social media marketing influencer just lately went viral following her Instagram profile was terminated. The member, who boasted over 100,000 fans, claimed that she is nothing at all without her following and that it sensed like homicide when her accounts was shut off. A Moderate post explored how smart phones are exploiting an evolutionary dependence on consent. The writer suggests that smart phones include various variable incentive schedules, such as messages and social media marketing likes that constantly draw us in. We are progressively seeking rewards from our smartphones, in the form of social media attention. A modern research supported the idea that excessive social networking use can lead to emotional and mental health issues. Disparity theory can express this impact. Our online existence is supposed to be always a representation of our real self. https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/04/cumulative-app-store-titles-declined-for-first-time-in-2017-report-says However, given the actual fact that we mainly display just our positive features online, our profiles are actually an improved representation of our ideal self. Therefore, those who have a tendency to promote themselves more positively through their social networking channels may basically be exhibiting their high levels of self-discrepancy. So generally there you own it. Regular mobile phone use can damage our romantic relationships and cause us to feel as if we dont belong - triggering feelings of low self-esteem and depression. They also facilitate excessive social media marketing use, that may often lead to discrepancies among our ideal and actual self. These emotions also create a lower self-esteem, feeling and opinion of ourselves and also increasing our odds of feeling frustrated. This website post is not an attack on cell phones, as I am among the many who are guilty of the excessive use of my smart phone. Think about this a warning of the dangers of extreme smartphone usage. In future, when you are conversing with somebody in person, place the cell phone down! Whatever can be on your display can wait. We must treasure our face-to-face connections and be proud of who we actually are rather than looking for acceptance through the over-use of our phones. As I discussed earlier, I do not need this post to be considered an attack on smartphones. Digital culture has simply informed me about the prevalence of technology in your everyday lives. Not merely concerning smartphones, but especially learning about the Internet of Issues and Smart Cities, I now have a better knowledge of the direction where the globe is headed. It really is quite clear to see, we are destined towards another whereby technology can be used in almost every aspect of lifestyle, from self-service checkouts to driverless vehicles. Whilst these technological innovations are resolving everyday problems for us and producing existence more convenient, I want to know how the usage of technology has effects on the way we function as individuals in culture. As a Mindset student, becoming more educated about how exactly the globe is using technology has led myself to ask queries about the effect this is having on our mental health. With the whole planet getting controlled by technological devices, that is bound with an effect on the dynamics of culture. Given the fact that sensible technology is a comparatively new phenomenon, we usually do not yet know much about how exactly it really is impacting our lives. For instance, the Digital Engagement subject taught me about how businesses are significantly using our on-line activity to advertise and advertise new products to us. That is undoubtedly a implication of technical use, even as we are becoming brain-washed into extra cash. While this is a threat of smart phones, I wanted to breach further into the psychological effects of technology on individuals. Mobile phones, for me, encapsulate the online culture we reside in. We are associated with each other in society through a small handheld device that can be taken around wherever we proceed in our wallets. Though the issue is, that a lot of of the time these cell phones are not kept inside our wallets and we are spending additional time looking into our mobile phones. As a result, if smart phones represent the digital culture, then the hazards of smart phones might reveal even more about the implications of living in a digital society. Studying various content, I have already been exposed to different opinions and viewpoints. Articles and blogs and forums have got helped increase my knowledge about technology, that i have been able to apply to different psychological ideas and ideas. Digital Society provides allowed me to modernize my understanding of environmental factors on mental wellbeing. After all, if the environment around us is certainly changing - the way in which we are affected by the environment will change as well. The main challenge for me was aligning my informative writing style into a blog post format. As somebody who can be used to composing in a typical university assignment style, this has opened up my eye to a fresh way of composing. Although tough to adjust to at the start, I now appreciate composing blogs and have discovered that I feel much more able to express my own opinions when writing them. In fact, I look forward to composing more blogs in the foreseeable future.

[bagelpyjama19]

Potential Risks and Gains of Cellphone Use in People

Let us talk about cell phones. The small devices which have improved the way we make friends and connect over the last 10 years. Yet the amount of does mobile phone usage effect our interactions, sociable connections and self-identities, and what effect is normally this generating on each of our subconscious health? Although mobile phones have been revolutionary in assisting online sociable connections, they have had harmful effects off-line. Face-to-face relationships have been split up and we are posting less real-life experiences, now more than ever. The location may be the individual cognizant location we each inhabit, shaped by our relationships with the surroundings around us. The significant overlap is a term used to describe the shared open area between a few individuals created by their shared emotions. It really is these overlaps that form the foundation of our relationships. The result cellphones have upon this overlap is clear. Our cell phones essentially draw us out of the environment, resulting in less shared experiences during social relationships and therefore a smaller overlap. The makeup of our social interactions will also be changing. During on the web socializing, we are completely blind to the response and real-life emotions of your partner. In face-to-face relationships we use facial expressions and additional nonverbal cues as feedback to help us understand even more about the other individuals inner monologue Not having these physical signs, we must infer hints from just about any digital response we receive. This may lead to misjudgment of others emotions and less shared experience as we've a smaller knowledge of the others personal experience. Smartphone utilization can also result in long-lasting problems with offline romantic relationships. A fresh study discovered that cellphone utilization during an interaction was frequently interpreted as a kind of rejection. Rejection can cause emotions of hurt, anger and resentment - decreasing self-esteem and mood. These feelings were linked to lower relationship satisfaction and increased turmoil.

While smart phones can enhance connection, it really is evident that they are interfering with our offline sociable interactions and decreasing the grade of our relationships. Rejection within sociable interactions leads to lessen self-esteem and indicators of depression. Excessive cell phone usage during social connections, therefore, can be destructive to our mental wellbeing by reducing the quality of interactions. Not only are smartphones affecting our relationships, the constant usage of these devices is causing identification complications. Todays smart phones have plenty of applications available to users with app use making up 88% of mobile time. Research conducted on social media marketing usage discovered that 64% of time spent on social media is via cell phone applications. This shows that smart phones are facilitating the usage of social media marketing applications, which can be damaging to your social identities. Excessive social media usage is definitely causing visitors to derive their self-worth from their social media following and likes. In todays world, people correlate a minimal social media following and less enjoys with see your face being relatively boring and unpopular. In this manner of thinking puts pressure on people to maintain an internet social media presence by remaining active on the phone and spending excessive time on social networking, a vicious cycle. The unfortunate thing about the existing climate is usually that those that do not make use of their mobile phone as very much are being looked down upon. Sentiments of belonging is a strong and expected aspect of individual nature. Relating to social identification theory, we normally seek belonging within groups. Folks are significantly equating a minimal social media following with too little belonging, causing these to feel disconnected. A problem arises when people are consumed by their social media activity but usually do not receive the reputation or appreciation that they expect. Another problem presents itself when those people cannot access their social media platforms. For instance, a video of a social media marketing influencer not too long ago went viral following her Instagram profile was suspended. The member, who boasted over 100,000 fans, claimed that she actually is nothing without her following and that it experienced like murder when her accounts was disabled. A Moderate post explored how smart phones are exploiting an evolutionary need for acceptance. The writer shows that cell phones consist of various variable incentive schedules, such as for example messages and social media likes that constantly pull us in. We are steadily seeking benefits from our smartphones, in the form of social media marketing attention. A recent research supported the theory that excessive social media marketing use can result in emotional and mental health issues. Conflict theory may explain this effect. Our online existence is supposed to be a representation of our real self. However, given the actual fact that we mostly display just our positive characteristics online, our profiles are actually an improved representation of our ideal self. Therefore, those that have a tendency to promote themselves more positively through their social media channels may basically be showing their high levels of self-discrepancy. So generally there you own it. Frequent phone use can damage our romantic relationships and trigger us to experience as if we dont belong - triggering feelings of low self-esteem and despair. In addition they facilitate excessive social media marketing use, which can often lead to inconsistencies between our ideal and real self. These feelings also result in a lower self-esteem, disposition and opinion of ourselves and also increasing our likelihood of feeling frustrated. This blog post is not an attack on smartphones, as I am among the many who are guilty of the excessive use of my smart phone. Think about this a caution of the dangers of extreme smartphone usage. In future, when you are conversing with somebody in person, put the cellphone down! Irrespective of what is usually on your display can wait. We must treasure our face-to-face interactions and be pleased with who we are actually rather than looking for authorization through the over-use of our cell phones. As I mentioned before, I do not want this post to be considered an attack on smartphones. Digital society has simply educated me about the prevalence of technology in your everyday lives. Not only concerning smartphones, but especially learning about the Internet of Stuff and Smart Metropolitan areas, I now have a better understanding of the path in which the globe is headed. It really is quite obvious to see, we are destined towards a future whereby technology can be used in nearly every aspect of existence, from self-service checkouts to driverless vehicles. Whilst these technological innovations are solving everyday problems for all of us and producing existence more convenient, I want to know how the use of technology has effects on the way we function as individuals in society. As a Psychology student, becoming even more educated about how exactly the world is using technology has led me personally to ask questions about the effect this is having on our mental health. With the entire world becoming controlled by technological devices, this is bound to have an influence on the dynamics of culture. Given the fact that smart technology is a comparatively new trend, we usually do not however know much about how exactly it is impacting our lives. For example, the Digital Engagement topic taught me about how businesses are significantly using our on-line activity to market and advertise new products to us. That is unquestionably a implication of technological use, as we are getting brain-washed into spending money. While this is a threat of smart phones, I wanted to breach further into the psychological ramifications of technology on people. Cell phones, for me, encapsulate the digital society we live in. We are linked with each other in society through a little handheld device that may be taken with us wherever we move in our pouches. Though the issue is, that a lot of of that time period these smartphones aren't kept inside our storage compartments and we are spending more time looking into our phones. Therefore, if smart phones symbolize the online society, then the risks of cell phones might tell us more about the implications of living in a digital society. Reading through various articles, I have been subjected to different beliefs and viewpoints. Content and blogs have helped increase my understanding of technology, which I have been able to apply to numerous psychological theories and suggestions. Digital Society offers allowed me to modernize my knowledge of environmental factors on psychological wellbeing. After all, if the surroundings around us is certainly changing - how we are influenced by the environment will change as well. The primary challenge for me personally was fine-tuning my academic writing method right into a blog post format. As a person who can be used to composing in an average university assignment style, this has opened up my eyes to a fresh way of composing. Although challenging to adjust to at the start, I now enjoy composing blogs and also have found that I feel much more in a position to express my personal opinions when writing them. Actually, I anticipate composing more blogs in the future.

[andryuska]

🔥 + the fandom's interpretation of andrei

send  🔥 + a topic for an unpopular opinion ( accepting )

where do i even fucking begin? okay, there are a lot of not so good interpretations of andrei through the great comet fandom ( which is what i’m gonna focus on, the war and peace book fandom is pretty good ) and so i think my unpopular opinion on them is that they just… exist at all, tbh. like, the source material ( literally just one song ) is not exactly great at portraying the depths of andrei, i get that, but there are some ways that it’s taken that are totally off the mark and it really bothers me. i’m gonna put the general things here and you can read more if you want to, because i have a lot to say about a few particular things: first, andrei is not a villain, second, andrei had every right to refuse to forgive natasha and this should not be seen as a malicious action on his part ( because it fucking isn’t ), and third, ( in a bit of a different direction ) andrei and natasha would not have had a good marriage. explanations under the cut.

andrei is not a villain. he’s not. it’s just not a thing, he’s not a villainous character and when he’s malicious it’s because he’s trying to contain a very deep grief through repression, and because he grew up in a household where expressing emotions was not okay ( especially for andrei, who was being molded by his father into a very traditional and unhealthy image of masculinity ), he ‘s trying to suppress those emotions. the way he knows how to do that? by being cold and very standoffish, and then by just completely refusing to talk about it.

when pierre comes to see andrei, andrei refused to see him at first, and is engaged in a debate about politics. while he and pierre talk, andrei is reserved and pretty much just pushes away every emotional question. he says he can’t forgive her, and that’s it, that’s the end of the story, he doesn’t want to talk about it, and the way he expresses it is almost forceful because that’s the person he’s been told to be by traditional russian society ( via his father ). when he tells pierre to go and to never speak to him of the matter again, it’s about avoiding questions. and after that, you’ll note, he and pierre relationship as friends is essentially over, because andrei has just buried himself so deep in repression and this desire for revenge against anatole ( to defend honor and because he’s understandably upset ) that friendship won’t do anything. andrei self isolates, but it is NOT out of a desire to be malicious or evil. it’s just a thing that he does, that is unhealthy and comes off kind of badly when you don’t have the whole context of the rest of his reaction.

further, and there’s a post out there somewhere about this but i’m not going to dig it up, when he “ smiles coldly [and] maliciously ” it’s not because he’s happy about hearing natasha’s in bad shape - he most certainly is not. rather, he’s trying to push thing away, and again it comes off as kind of horrible, even if that is in no way his intention. you gotta remember, andrei is not very adequate socially, he’s not good at these emotional cues, and so sometimes the right expression just won’t translate. expressing grief with a sort of pained smile is one such miscalculation, in my opinion, and it shouldn’t be taken as an expression of actual and intentional malice toward natasha.

andrei had every right to refuse to forgive natasha and this should not be seen as a malicious action on his part. my mom kind of put this in perspective for me when i told her about great comet, and it basically goes like this: andrei doesn’t have to forgive natasha, because even though it’s sad, and even though we sympathize with natasha and know she made a mistake and was definitely manipulated in some degree by anatole, she still fucking cheated on him. as far as andrei knows, she had every intention of going through with her elopement and she refused him very much on her own volition. the complexities of those actions are known to us, but they are not known to andrei, and again. she cheated on him, no matter the motivation behind it, and so he has every right not to forgive her because of that.

also important is that in refusing her, andrei is not acting maliciously ( imagine me, having to clarify this again and again ) against natasha, but acting in accordance with his own grief, and with the sense of betrayal that’s come with her refusing him. no matter the circumstances of their relation from his perspective, which i will get in to in the next section, what she did hurt him a lot, and he has every right to respond to that pain with not wanting to forgive her immediately and reconcile their relationship. take what happened and put it in another story, and we’d all be agreeing with andrei, not having this discussion about the ethics of refusing to reconcile your betrothal with someone who very much intended to refuse you for another man despite having already promised marriage. 

( all of you who made it this far: thanks for putting up with me, and be warned that this next one is the unpopular opinion that is probably the most controversial. )

andrei and natasha would not have had a good marriage. listen, i know it’s nice to think about them living in a happy marriage with each other and all of their problems being solved, but it wouldn’t work out. whether you count in the anatole drama or not, they just wouldn’t have been able to sustain happiness together. there are reasons on both sides for this, but this unpopular opinion is about andrei, so i’m going to focus on why he wouldn’t have been happy marrying natasha. that’s not to say they did not love each other: andrei loves natasha lot, even after she refuses him, and he is indeed very invested in her happiness and would do a lot of things for her. he loves her unquestionably, but that does not necessarily make up the basis of a happy marriage when there are other factors at play. so here we go;

exhibit a: before he leaves, when he asks for her hand and when she says yes, he already suddenly loses a lot of the hope that he has. like, she says yes, and he suddenly clues into her faults and starts to forget that very temporary bout of happiness he has after otradnoe. it’s not natasha’s fault, it’s just who andrei is: he has a disillusionment deeply ingrained in him, and the moment he gets too close, the moment he can lift the veil of ignorance, he’s going to find faults and its going to make him unhappy, and it’s a pervasive problem: much earlier on, he says to pierre that he can’t sleep because he has all these intellectual burdens, and that applies just as much to marriage.

this is because andrei is not so cool with the idea of marriage itself. there are some sexist reasons ( which i do not condone and completely downplay here, because tolstoy was a dick and i’m not making that a part of my portrayal ) and more importantly here, there are some objections to the “ consequences ” of marriage that andrei has. namely, a life that is heavily focused on inaction and society, one wherein people talk about political affairs and military operations as though they’re games, when it fact they’re something he sees as an enormous tragedy and failing of mankind, that should not be taken likely. he feels useless when he’s married ( see: his very bad marriage to lise ) and marrying natasha, regardless of love, wouldn’t change that.

exhibit b: andrei and natasha are fundamentally different people that, though in the early stages of their relationship, might be okay, would not have led to a long term happiness between them. andrei has a very cynical view of the world and of other people, he does not enjoy things in society, and he is intensely intellectual and judgmental and harsh to those who cannot necessarily keep up with that intellect. natasha is wonderful, and i love her, but she and andrei couldn’t have kept their happiness up for long because andrei would inevitable become disillusioned with her, and then likely get bored and end up miserable again. not because he would fall out of love, but just because they’re not exactly that compatible. andrei needs someone in the long term who can not only offset his cynicism, but can also fight against it, and who also has at least enough similar interests that they’ll never lack for intellectual conversation. because, after all, andrei does not do talk about emotions and other people very well, he needs that political and intellectual side as well, and for all the things she does have, natasha doesn’t really have that.

there’s also the thing about natasha being very young and still quite inexperienced whereas andrei has had a lot of very terrible experiences and some difficult trauma from them, and the fact that they cannot seem to keep up their relationship with separation, which is something that would have happened a lot in their marriage - whether he wanted it or not, andrei would have been going away frequently. so, while there’s a lot of points for their relationship, like that love and affection, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to something long term and sustainable.

tl:dr: their marriage would have been a bit of a mess, and probably would have caused them both unhappiness even if they continued to love each other.

anyway, i guess i should conclude that long, completely unedited rant with a saying that if you have a different opinion, that’s fine, this is just the interpretation that i take from having read the book. if you want to hear more anger ranting about andrei, i actually do have more opinions, so send me that ask with the same topic and i will continue, i promise. otherwise, um, thanks for putting up with me and my bitterness.

[chiclovesyou]

so I made a super long philosophical status on Facebook tonight and I thought I'd post it here too: " disclaimer: this is going to sound preachy, maybe even a little SJW/snowflake-ish (whatever the heck that means). but I just want to throw some of the thoughts I've been having out there. so warning, this is about the be a long opinionated Facebook status. read at your own risk. so one of the biggest struggles I've had theologically the past few years has been wrestling with maintaining a healthy interpretation of Scripture (that is wary of westernized hyper-individualism) while trying to reconcile God's plan to heal me/us from low self esteem. I have an unpopular stance of being against the "self love" movement (which you can comment on if you want but that isn't the point to this status) but it's hard because I know God cares about my emotional well being. so even while I'm talking about this and making claims, I'm still miles away from a lot of conclusions. and also talking about this here, on Facebook in front of a multitude of people I know in real life instead of going to my blog where a majority of the people who will read it I have never met, is terrifying. it's no secret to me. I know how I look. I know I'm not tall dark and hipster (lol instead of handsome). honestly, it's hard coming to terms with my height because I know I'll always be pudgy. so yah, naturally I have several deeply rooted insecurity issues that, no matter what I do or how hard I work, never seem to go away. which this moment of transparency also isn't the point of this status. so walking the line between body positivity and trying to obtain a clear balanced view of what's healthy and scriptural has been difficult. recently I've been thinking about my body image issues and what scripture says and what's healthy and all the stuff I just mentioned, but along side this I've been thinking about the social implications of what all this means. so in society we have barriers that separate us. money, status, religion, political affiliation, even things like the music you listen to or your favorite sports team or the kind of clothes you wear, etc. these are all the things we subconsciously use to separate ourselves. and here's the conclusion I've come to: one of those barriers is outward appearance. the world devalues fat/ugly people (told you this was gonna get SJWish HAHA I am so sorry). you can deny it all you want but I'm convinced otherwise. so my particular problem tonight has been, how am I supposed to gain clarity when society tells me that it accepts me but then turns around and says I'll only be successful/find meaning or happiness or whatever, if I'm attractive or by some miracle I win the heart of the pretty girl/boy. there's a line in Scrubs where Dr Kelso tells JD something to the affect of, "the uggo only gets the girl in the movies". Beauty & the Beast is only a novelty. stories like Hitch (I love that move btw) are only novelties. it's embedded in our culture. they're not feel good stories, they're slaps in the face. (ok I'm gonna apologize because this is another point that I'm not trying to make at the moment. sorry lol). the bottom line is, that barrier is there and it's really hard always knowing it's there and not being able to do much about it. most of what Jesus did was break social barriers. whom He called to be his disciples, the Samaritan woman at the well, the adulterous woman, healing and touching lepers, having dinner with Zacchaeus, etc. Paul said in Romans 12 that we should associate ourselves with people of low position. James said in James 2 that we shouldn't be partial. (both of those refer to poor people but I still think this applies). how do we break this social barrier? if we are to imitate Christ in love (Ephesians 5), then we are to break social barriers. why have we failed so miserably at this particular one? how do we embody the counter-culture nature of the Gospel and reach across a barrier Jesus has shattered to a hurting demographic of people AND at the same time resist individualism? The cross is the only thing that can break through this line that divides us, but do you have the balls to walk across it?"