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volkswagonblues · 4 years ago

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a lil guide to the Fire Nation for the ATLA fic writers out there

(aka. a no means exhaustive primer on east asia by an asian person)

This is a guide for fic writers want to write a canon-era story set in the Fire Nation, or featuring Fire Nation characters. A quick little primer on the tiny details of everyday life that you might not think about, but certainly stuff that would make me, an asian person, wince if I were to encounter it. BRUSHES, not quills. CHOPSTICKS, not forks.

(note #1: this was partly inspired by a chat with @elilim)

(note: #2: I originally intended it for zukka fic writers before realizing that other writers might find it useful. so apologies for a slight Zuko-bias for that reason)

(note #3: this is all stuff i was thinking about when writing firebender’s guide, in case anyone was wondering)

1. CLOTHING

Okay, I think the most straightforward way to describe what everyone’s wearing most of the time is “tunic”. They’re all just...tunics of different colours and varieties. Later when Zuko’s the Fire Lord he wears robes. The show provides a better visual guide than I could, here are a few notes to keep in mind:

a) Japanese people wear their collars LEFT crossed over RIGHT

I don’t think this would come up in writing as much as it would in art, but it’s considered bad luck to do it the wrong way because that’s only for dead people. Let my boy Zuko demonstrate:

b) There are no buttons

This is picky, but Wikipedia says “Functional buttons with buttonholes for fastening or closing clothes appeared first in Germany in the 13th century.[6] They soon became widespread with the rise of snug-fitting garments in 13th- and 14th-century Europe.” I kinda believe it. If you look closely, characters’ clothes are always tied together or wrapped in some way with a belt. If there are fasteners, they’re braided frog closures that go into a little loop, like the qipao-style dresses women wear in Ba Sing Se, or Zuko’s casual prince’s clothes in the topmost image. Anyways, I don’t think Zuko or Azula or the Gaang would technically button or unbutton anything when they’re changing clothes. Clothing is designed to be tied, not buttoned.

[so much more under cut]

c) This isn’t a real rule, but there’s something called koromogae, or the seasonal changing of clothing in Japan.

This is something I learned when I was writing firebender’s guide, and I just liked the fun detail about there being a strict calendar for when to wear something. I liked the idea of someone like Zuko, who actually spent most of his formative years outside of the Fire Nation, coming home and just suffering mutely through the summer heat because upper class etiquette says no changing into cooler clothes until August 15.

From My Asakusa:

And this website:

Generally, people change from thick, heavy, dark-coloured clothes for winter to thin, lighter, bright-coloured clothes for spring and summer. In traditional Japanese culture, particularly in formal settings such as tea ceremony, it is important to acknowledge the changes of seasons—in such circumstances, not only the patterns and colours of the kimono that are worn but also the utensils and furniture that are used are required to change. By changing their clothing, people notice and appreciate the change of seasons. [Japan Foundation]

Here are some visual guides from the official creators for clothes: (notice how it’s pretty much always left over right)

2.FOOD AND EATING

a) Traditional cuisine

It seems like the most common foods in canon are Fire Flakes and meat, to the point where poor Aang had to eat lettuce out of the garbage at some point.

HOWEVER, the Fire Nation seems to basically a big subtropical archipelago, so I would guess that seafood and rice are common. If you want to write about characters eating, a. quick google for “traditional japanese cuisine” would help you come up with a menu really quickly.

Wikipedia says:

The traditional cuisine of Japan, washoku (和食), lit. "Japanese eating" (or kappō (ja:割烹)), is based on rice with miso soup and other dishes; there is an emphasis on seasonal ingredients. Side dishes often consist of fish, pickled vegetables, and vegetables cooked in broth. Seafood is common, often grilled, but also served raw as sashimi or in sushi.

But before we get too serious, at one point the Gaang eats a “smoked sea slug” (Sokka’s Master)

Oh ATLA, never stop being you.

b) Utensils

One thing to keep in mind is chopstick etiquette. Someone like Zuko or Toph, for instance, would have completely internalized all of these.

Another thing is that there are no glasses. Cups and bowls are made of ceramic or clay. Let the Gaang show you:

And another note: characters won’t eat “bread” in the European sense, ie. a baked lump of dough. Steamed buns, yes. Fried pancakes made from batter, yes. Flatbreads, okay I’ll give it a pass. Rice or noodles should be the most common carbs of choice.

3.ETIQUETTE

“In the homeland, we bow to our elders” - angry schoolmistress in The Headband.

Japan Guide has a list of etiquette rules for visiting Japan, which is interesting but not too necessary to read. In general, based on what The Headband tells us, Fire Nation characters would have been raised with a strong nationalist curriculum that values communal contribution over individualist expression. Even someone like Zuko, who openly rebels against that, probably couldn’t help but be affected by it. In general the Fire Nation seems to have an East Asian-ish set of values. It’s patriarchal, all the positions of authority are filled by men; there seems to be a strong emphasis on patriotism; there’s a sense of diffidence and respect towards one’s elders; and finally, there’s an emphasis on “knowing” one’s place in society and fitting into what’s expected of oneself.

I don’t really know how to describe it, but in China and Japan I sometimes feel like there’s rules for everything, and even people born and raised there acknowledge it could be stifling at times. You could go down a rabbit hole researching points of etiquette (for instance, rules on who has to sit where in group dinners...), but to me the most important thing is acknowledging that Fire Nation has a rigid system of etiquette, and also, they’re an imperialist power who’s pretty prejudiced against foreigners. Poor Aang/Kuzon gets called “mannerless colony slob” just for being slow on the bowing action (!!!)

(in firebender’s guide I had a lot of fun imagining the stupid microaggressions Ambassador Sokka has to face in the Fire Nation, so obviously I’m just biased)

4.WRITING AND DESKS

Characters would probably write on paper, with a calligraphy brush. Not quills or pens -- a brush. Technically, old Japanese and Chinese texts should be written top to bottom, right to left, but the show itself doesn’t do this, so I think you’re fine.

One fun thing about traditional calligraphy is that you don’t use bottled ink. You have something called an ink stone, and then you grind your ink yourself by rubbing the ink stone in a special little dish with a bit of water. In my (very few) encounters with this stuff in the calligraphy lessons of my youth, the ink stones can be plain or have beautiful designs on the side. It looks something like this:

ATLA is an East Asian-ish universe, so characters are likely to be kneeling at a table, not sitting. To demonstrate, here’s my boy Sokka doing his famous rainbow at Piandao’s:

and here’s the war chamber meeting when Zuko speaks out against a general’s plans to sacrifice some soldiers:

THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS: This is Zuko’s cute little setup when he’s writing his goodbye letter to Mai. In this case he’s writing in a chair and table. It’s possible that some furniture items, like a sitting desk and a bed in a bedframe (not a bedroll or futon) are special royal palace features. Normally in a private setting we see characters sitting on the ground or on a slightly elevated platform with a low table. Maybe Caldera is just different? Or rich people are just different: the Bei Fongs also have a sit-down dining table + chair setup.

(That little rectangular box is his ink dish!!)

5.A NOTE ON GENERAL CULTURE

It’s worth talking about a few general points of East Asian culture. I can’t claim to speak for ALL of Asia, and I don’t think I should. But I do think ATLA fic writers who want to set something in the Fire Nation should take a few moments to at least skim the wiki pages for filial piety and Nihonjinron (literally, "theories/discussions about the Japanese"). There’s a certain...vibe to...asianness... that I’m not sure I can explain without like, a doctorate degree in sociology.

It’s a bit like gender, I guess. There’s no definitive checklist to what is a woman and what is a man, and we can argue that gender is performative, that it’s a construct, but at the end of the day gender is still (tragically) real in the sense that it still shapes people and affects how we walk and talk and dress and think. Nationality is the same. Obviously, the Fire Nation is a made up place in a made up show, but out of respect to the cultures that inspired it, I do think it’s worth familiarizing yourself with some of these cultures’ codes and values.

Also, ahem, if I can direct you to war crimes in the Japan’s colonial empire. Again, worth remembering that the Fire Nation was an imperalist colonizer too.

I might do a continuation of this post and talk through my more abstract takes about Fire Nation culture - Is Zuko an example of filial piety gone right or filial piety gone wrong? Why I think Zuko’s flashbacks are like, at least part teenage melodrama bullshit (the reason is son preference), how someone like Sokka might be treated once he’s openly Water Tribe in the Fire Nation (probably with racism...), specific aspects of asian homophobia and racism, etc. We’ll see.

This is not a definitive guide. Comments and critique welcome.

If you think there’s a factual mistake, PLEASE hop in my asks and let me know. I also think there’s a huge blind spot in ATLA for South and Southeast Asian representation, so I acknowledge that I can’t speak for all Asians, and there is no such thing as a “pan-asian” identity.

If there’s something else you’re curious about, I’m not a historian or anything, but I like research. Ask me and I’ll try to answer the best I can.

And oh, one last thing, this is how I do research when I wrote firebender’s guide, in case anyone’s interested in learning more (LINK)

#Avatar The Last Airbender #zukka #atla fic #my fic #fire nation

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sketching-shark · 3 years ago

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LMK fandom: Oh, what do we do about this guy who has nothing but hurt Xiaotian, tried to replace Sun Wukong and his crew, hurt Tripitaka and ordered servants to cannibalize a monkey? Oh I know! We’ll turn him into our little meow meow~ he’s so innocent and Sun Wukong is obviously the villain!

What doesn’t help is this idea is perpetuated by multiple fan fic writers and artists for some reason. Especially some aus they make that turn SWK into a bastard for the sake of the story rather than considering cultural context and thinking they should be respectful.

And almost everyone lets them get away with it just because the art or fanfic is good and they get so popular that no one can point what is actually wrong without feeling like they’re going to get attacked.

I'm starting to feel like my blog is the one anons go to specifically to vent their frustrations about the Six Eared Macaque in his lego monkey show form & the associated fandom lmao. But I guess this makes sense, as I’ve had fun quasi-dragging him before & will in fact use this anon submission as an opportunity to have my own, to put it academically, bitch fest about not just this fandom's favorite protagonist-traumatizing meow meow, but about the way villains are often treated in not just fanon, but increasingly in canon works as well. But same policy as with the last anon; I'll post my opinions below the cut, and as fandoms love to say, don’t like don't read if you don't want to see me dunking on the six eared simian & common fandom tendencies towards villains.

Oh man I would say where would you even begin with this but anon you’ve pretty much started yourself with my main gripe with a lot of ways that the Six-Eared Macaque is portrayed in fandom; there seems to be this unspoken agreement that his acts of violence towards Sun Wukong, Qi Xioatian, and Qi Xioatian’s loved ones are either to be framed as somewhat or totally justified, to be immediately forgiven/excused, or to simply & completely be ignored. Like friends maybe this is just me not seeing the proper posts but while the fandom is inundated with art and fanfics of Macaque as a generally decent individual & a true member of team good guy, I have yet to see one person address the fact that this monkey literally kidnapped & mind-controlled Xiaotian’s best friend and father figures & forced them to brutalize Xiaotian while ol’ Six Ear looked on and laughed (X_X). Like this kind of fandom villain treatment is definitely not something that’s solely at work for Monkie Kid, but it is kind of nutty how fandoms will swing between yelling that people should be allowed to like villains without even mild critique, and then will just flat-out not address the villainous behavior, and will even bend over backwards to frame even characters who committed genocide as just poor innocent widdle victims who need a hug. At its worst, I’ve even seen tons of people in a fandom get really angry at other people who don’t like a villain, and will even start accusing those people of hating real-life mentally disabled or abused individuals all because they don’t like the fandom’s favorite literal war criminal. The Monkie Kid fandom is FAR more chill & better than a lot of other fandoms I’ve come across in that regard, but that is an exceedingly low bar, & the tendency to woobify certain kinds of villains-- as with Macaque and the extreme emphasis on his bad boy/sad boy thing--is very much at work.

I’ve also talked before about a kind of monoculturalization of certain character interpretations and story beats in fandoms, and one of the more popular ones that seems to be applied to Macaque a lot is the “hero actually bad, villain actually good” cliche, as observable from the general fandom assumption that Mr. Six-Ears he wasn’t even slightly lying or remembering things through a rose-tinted or skewed lens when he gave his version of his and Sun Wukong’s past. Like at this point it seems the possibility that people WILL NOT even consider is that Sun Wukong never did & still doesn't care that much about the Six Eared Macaque (in JTTW they weren’t sworn brothers & in Monkie Kid the only thing the monkey king really said to Macaque before attacking him was a pretty contemptuous "Aren't you ever going to get sick of living under my shadow?," & responds to his "beloved friend" getting blown up with "You did good, bud" to Qi Xiaotian, who did the exploding), or that their original fight may in fact have mostly been instigated by Macaque. After all, to repeat what this anon summarized & what I've said before about their original JTTW context (& in an example of the things that do feel like it's often lost in translation) is that the Six Ear Macaque was a villain not just because he beat up the Tang Monk, but because he wanted to take over Sun Wukong's entire life and identity so he could have all that glory, prestige, and power for himself. To quote the macaque himself from the Anthony C. Yu translation, "I struck the T'ang monk and I took the luggage...precisely because I want to go to the West all by myself to ask Buddha for the scriptures. When I deliver them to the Land of the East, it will be my success and no one else's. Those people of the South Jambudvipa Continent will honor me then as their patriarch and my fame will last for all posterity." And in order to do this, the Six Eared Macaque had apparently made Sun Wukong's "little ones," his monkey family, his captives through either trickery or force, and gotten a number of them to take on the appearance of Tang Sanzang and the other pilgrims. It's also made clear that in very direct contrast to Sun Wukong, he doesn't care about these monkeys beyond how they might serve him. In fact, after Sha Wujing kills the monkey posing as him the Six Eared Macaque not only all but immediately replaces him with another, but also "told his little ones to have the dead monkey skinned. Then his meat was taken to be fried and served as food along with coconut and grape wines." So this monkey is not only willing to risk the lives of a lot of other monkeys for his own personal benefit, but is also a literal cannibal. And yes yes, I know a lot of people have argued that Monkie Kid shouldn't be considered a direct sequel to JTTW & that's fair enough (for example, Sun Wukong probably shouldn't be smashing anyone into a meat patty in a children's cartoon lol). And of course, it needs to be noted that there are a buttload of really out there & really cursed pieces of media based on JTTW & that were created in China. Yet the above description is the oft-ignored in the west original facet of the Six Eared Macaque's character. And it is this selfishness, entitlement, and treatment of other individuals as tools for his own self-serving ends that is, from where I’m standing, still very much present in Monkie Kid. Like besides repeatedly going out of his way to physically and psychologically traumatize Xioatian, with the last episode Macaque seemed to be going right back to his manipulative ways. I’ve seen people frame their last conversation as Macaque softening to Xioatian a little bit, but personally that read a lot more like that common tactic among abusers where even after they’ve hurt you they’ll dangle something you want or need over your head (in Macaque’s case, the promise of desperately needed training and information about a serious looming threat), with the implication that you’ll only get it if you do what they want you to, such as, in this case, Xioatian going back to Macaque as his student even after having been so terribly hurt by this monkey, which would give Macaque power over Xiaotian and probably Sun Wukong as a result. And it is this violence and manipulation that it seems the fandom at large has tacitly decided shouldn’t even be addressed, instead leaning more towards a (and this is an exaggeration) “Six-Eared Macaque my poor meow meow Sun Wukong has always been bad & has always been wrong about literally everything” reading.

And while it is the case that I am not Chinese and feel that as such it would be best left to someone who actually comes from that background to provide more context into how common interpretations of the Six Eared Macaque from China may clash really badly with the stuff the western fandom creates, it also must be noted that, as much as we all want to have fun in fandom & in spite of all the out-there versions of JTTW from China, we westerners should recognize that there is a very long and very ugly history of western countries stripping other cultures’ important religious and literary works for parts & mashing them into their own thing while implying or even insisting that what they present provides a true understanding of the original piece. And while I trust most individuals in regards to Monkie Kid are able to step back and think “this is a lego cartoon and not a set guide for how I should understand JTTW” (especially given the insistence that JTTW and Monkie Kid should be considered there own separate works) there does nevertheless seem to be something of a tendency to take the conclusions people come to, for example, about Sun Wukong’s characteristic in his lego form & then assume that’s just reflective to Sun Wukong as a totality. I imagine a good portion of this is due to people not reading JTTW & especially to not having easy access to solid information or answers about JTTW’s many different facets (like geez awhile ago I was trying to get a clear answer on what is considered the most accurate translation of the names of Sun Wukong’s six sworn brothers & got like 5 different responses lmao), but that tendency to take a western fandom interpretation & run with it instead of doing any background research or questioning said interpretation is still very much at play. As such, & as made prominent in the way people have been interpreting the dynamic between Sun Wukong and the Six Eared Macaque in the lego monkey show, tbh it does seem kind of shitty for western creators & audience to sometimes go really out of their way to ignore all of this original cultural & narrative context for the sake of Angst (TM) in Macaque's favor, demonizing Sun Wukong, and shipping the monkey king with his evil twin (X_X).

And speaking of which, even beyond the potential inherent creepiness & revulsion that can be inspired by this specific ship given common interpretations of the og classic's original meaning (again, it's my understanding, given both summaries of translated Chinese academic texts I've been kindly provided with, my own reading of the Anthony C. Yu translation of JTTW, & vents from a number of Chinese people I've seen on this site, that the Six-Eared Macaque is commonly interpreted in China as having originated from Sun Wukong himself as a living embodiment of his worst traits, hence why only Buddha can tell the difference between them & why the monkey king is much more slow to violence after he kills the macaque), I'd argue that in the face of all the uwu poor widdle meow meow portrayals lego show Macaque is, especially if you include JTTW's events, still in the role of “Sun Wukong but worse” as he is very much a violent & selfish creep. Like he was basically running around in JTTW wearing a Sun Wukong fursuit, but there he had the sole reason of wanting to replace Sun Wukong wholesale so he could have all the good things in the monkey king's life without actually having to work as hard for them. But if you combine that with Macaque now claiming that he used to be best friend with Sun Wukong in his pre-journey days (something that's made funny from a JTTW context given that that status actually belongs to the Demon Bull King lol), his original violence has now blown into this centuries long and really unhealthy obsession with the monkey king. Like he's apparently gone from wanting to literally be Sun Wukong to being so obsessed with getting revenge on Sun Wukong that he's got basically nothing else going on in his life. Like he's only appeared in two episodes but...does he have any friends? Any family? A career or even a hobby that DOESN'T center the monkey king? Anything at all outside of his "get revenge on and/or kill Sun Wukong/use his successor as my personal punching bag” thing? Like dude! That is extremely creepy and extremely bad for everyone all around! As I’ve said before, this seeming refusal to see beyond the past or to do something that doesn’t involve Sun Wukong in some capacity is a trait that makes Macaque an interesting and somewhat tragic villain--he even seems to be working as Sun Wukong’s reflection in a mirror darkly, with lego show Sun Wukong pretty clearly not being able to heal from his own past which is hinted to be defined by one loss after another, and with Monkie Kid even kind of having these two characters somewhat follow their JTTW characterizations in that in the latter half of the journey Sun Wukong often gets sad & starts crying in the face of what seems insurmountable odds (& Monkie Kid Sun Wukong does seem to be hiding some serious depression behind a cheerful facade), whereas the Six-Eared Macaque retains a worse version of Sun Wukong’s pre-journey characteristic of getting pissed and lashing out if things don’t go his way--but it’s also what would make any current friendship or romantic relationship between these monkeys horrific. Although to be fair even the fandom seems to recognize this in an unconscious way, in that a lot of the art & fanfic seems to swing erratically between them kissing & screaming at each other in yet another example of bog-standard fandom adulation of romanticized toxic relationships lol.

At the end of the day, of course, this is nothing new. You'll find versions of this dynamic across a ton of fandoms and now even canonical work. And as such, I can only look at this kind of popularized relationship dynamic with a kind of resigned weariness whenever it pops up, & my frustrated question with the popularity of this kind of pairing is the exact same one that I have for a multitude of blatantly toxic villain/hero ships, given common fandom discourse & the tendency to either ignore or justify the villain's actions & demonize the hero: if you're THAT convinced that everything is the hero's fault, if you believe THAT much that the hero is the one in the wrong for the villain's pain and their subsequent actions, then why are you so set on them not only becoming a romantic pair, but framing this get-together as a good thing? Like I know we contain multitudes but that's waaay too many contradictions for me to wrap my head around. And it definitely doesn’t help that one branch of underlying reasoning behind this kind of pairing seems to be the ever-present “you break it, you fix it” mentality, where the assumption is that if you’re in a failing, abusive, and/or generally toxic relationship (platonically or romantically), if you put in enough time and effort & attempts to compromise, you’ll be able to restore/have the relationship you dreamed of, even with someone who hurt you really badly. And this assumption isn’t limited to fandom: I’d even argue that it’s everywhere in the culture, hence why a lot of people feel like they “failed” if they have to get a divorce or make the choice to leave an unhealthy friendship. Personally, I feel like people could really benefit from more stories about how it is not only the case that the people you hurt don’t owe you their forgiveness & you can still become a better and happier person without the one you hurt in your life, & that while it can be really hard it can also be a good thing to leave a relationship, even if it’s one that once meant a lot to you.

But in all honestly, from my own perspective this kind of pairing is starting to read far less like enemies to lovers and far more like a horrible fantasy where you can pull whatever shit you want, even on the people you "love," & never be held accountable for your terrible behavior or even have to consider that maybe you were in the wrong. It's another facet that makes me larf every time I see people insist that fandom is an inherently "transformative" or "progressive" form of storytelling like friends you are literally just taking status quo toxic monogamy & rebranding it as somehow beneficial & romantic (X_X).

But as to anon’s last frustration, it is hard to know what is the appropriate response with this kind of thing...like for my own part I’m keeping my frustrations to my blog & now increasingly to posts that you would have to click on the “read more” button to see what I have to say, but I totally get the hesitation to give even a mild critique to big names in a fandom. Like I've now seen it happen repeatedly where someone who has a big name in a fandom will make something that's kind of shitty for one reason or another, someone will message them with some version of "hey, that's kind of shitty, you shouldn't do that," and the typical response is either to blatantly ignore the issue completely, or more popularly to make a giant crying circus that seems deliberately geared towards stoking emotions on both sides of the, for example, fiction does/doesn't affect reality issue so that something that didn't even have to be that big a deal gets blown out of all proportion, with the big name often framing what often started out as a very mild critique into a long crying jag about how the initial response to their kind of shitty thing was so mean/cruel and they're just a poor innocent & that YOU'RE the true racist/sexist/bigot etc. if you don't agree with their opinion. It must of course be noted that there have also been numerous instances of people taking it too far the other way & sending not just big names but smaller creators literal deaths threats over stuff like innocuous ships which like holy hell bells people that’s a horrible thing to do. But for the big names at least, the end result of all this fighting is usually that once the dust has settled they have more attention/fame/money/power in the fandom than before, and with anyone who might have a problem with their stuff feeling afraid to voice their opinion lest they be swarmed by that person's fans. In that way fandom does often seem to increasingly be geared towards presenting an “official” fandom perspective about various facets of a piece of media instead of allowing for a multitude of interpretations, and with criticism, no matter its shape or form or how genuinely warranted it may be, being hounded out of existence. I feel like a lot of this could be made less bad if there wasn’t this constant assumption & even drive to think that a different interpretation of or criticism of your favorite work of fiction or your fanwork isn’t a direct claim that you are a thoroughly loathsome individual (& maybe also if people cultivated an enjoyment of learning things about important works from a culture outside their own, even if what you learn clashes with your own initial understandings), but I guess we’ll see if that ever happens.

So these are my general thinks about the Six Eared Macaque’s current fandom meow meow status & some of my bigger gripes with fandom tendencies as a whole. I stand by my idea that the most interesting & beneficial route for Macaque moving forward would be a kind of “redemption without forgiveness from the ones you hurt” arc--as I think was done pretty excellently with the character Grace in Infinity Train--and if for no other reason than gosh dern this monkey really needs to cultivate some sort of identity beyond his “Sun Wukong but worse” persona.

#lmk macaque #monkie kid macaque #6 eared macaque #monkie kid #lmk sun wukong #qi xiaotian #lmk monkey king #sun wukong #monkey king #journey to the west #jttw #fandom criticism #lmk

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anolyso · 3 years ago

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Utena thoughts...about 2 weeks later

I've been putting it off for way too long and so most of my thoughts stopped being fresh. On top of watching way too many analysis vids post-watch, but still I do at least want to put my 2cents of Revolutionary Girl Utena out there for the world.

Utena is perhaps one of the most famous "magical girl"/shoujo action shows out there for not only it's transgressive themes of relationship abuse and low-key pretty much being the poster girl for like actual feminist perspective on/in anime...but also just doing it all in both a heavily allegorical and understated, yet super over-the-top stylish fashion

But that's it's reputation preceding itself, is Utena worth while all these years? The answer is Yes, but it also really shows it's age and budget in pacing and repetition, tho as an appreciator for "behind the scenes" compromises in art, it's more showcasing Ikuhara's talent in working around both taboo and long-form budget constraints with just well-thought out and iconic imagery that - while episodic and formulaic - is just very good at filling the 39 eps with feasts for the eyes.

Utena broadly is about tomboy Utena with memories long ago after her parents died being "saved" by a princely figure like a princess...except she's so enthralled by the nostalgia that instead she becomes a full on Prince herself and receives a dueling ring to fight in the Ohtori Acadamy secret duels for "engagement" to Rose Bride Himemiya Anthy.

Utena is divided between 4 arcs, only the first and last being Manga adapted from hearsay:

1: Student Council Saga

2: Black Rose Saga

3: Akio Ohtori Saga

4: Apocalypse

From back to forth I'd say that Akio + Apoc is more just escalation into the finale while Black Rose being anime original comes off as a glorified side-character study which while complementing the secondary cast, feels like one of those Anime movies that has to say "but if you don't watch this part, it's pretty much optional for the main plot" despite it also actually introducing the most important antagonist within it's margins.

More importantly, it's the Student Council (arc and the actual people) that lay the foundation but also a large part of the show's focus which ironically puts Utena in the background until like almost the finale and some in-between developments, so it's less "Utena (and Anthy Himemiya)'s story" until the very end, but more like a showcase of how fucked up the system at large is (pin in that).

By the Council themselves is:

Kyouichi Saionji: The biggest jobber, like actually introduced as the most despicable loser ep 1 and proceeds to be a complete arrogant joke for the rest of the show. Honestly in another shojo "love" story, they'd find some way to redeem him but semi-compellingly they turn him into like an Aqua-lad type pathetic brat with an inferiority complex to the actual Student head

Miki Kaoru: the naive "nice, non-threatening soft boy" that also just never actually listens to the girls around him. Probably adds more complexity to the whole patriarchal idea on analytic reflection since yeah, the whole "nice guy finishes last" plays up better when the kid comes off as that "ally" energy of wanting to save Himemiya from being the Rose Bride but also low-key won't actually not just do the duels and win her cuz he's that sorta wishy-washy hypocrite. Arguably the least hateable guy in the cast (minus mascot Chu-Chu)

Juri Arisugawa: TRAGIC LESBIAN TRIANGLE LOVE. Probably the biggest point to of both "not-explicitly homosexual" but also really freaking obvious since her entire story is her girlfriend stealing her "boy crush" when actually she was crushing on her and being pretty much frustrated throughout her story as pining most of it. It's quaint by today's standards but also like damn girl, get over her she was like the worst back stabbing bitch (literally if Black Rose counts)

Nanami Kiryuu: SPEAKING OF QUEEN BITCH, it's been a long time since I've watched a High School girl bully and honestly it's kinda refreshing. If Miki is "soft-boy uwu" Nanami is a brat that gets her come-uppance often, featured prominently as an anime only with the MOST filler/comedic episodes but also not low-key, being the most out-spoken actual brother complex ironically spins perhaps the biggest twist and ironic relationships of "I love my brother but not-like-that but also like-that" by the end. Mostly comedic relief but I find her inclusion to actually add a lot more to juxtapose...

Touga Kiryuu: Big Student Council Prez himself, the first arc antagonist and also a strong foil to Saionji and later a stepping stone for Akio. Touga is THE image of a Princely Playboy Heart-Throb that in any other Shoujo romance would have the main girl win him over from all those "other girls" despite him being apathetic if not outright manipulative of them. Good thing Utena is better than that and really puts a spotlight on just not-actually-ok his power hunger for "the power to bring the world revolution" that leads him to heavily objectify Anthy, arguably even more than Misogynist Trophy Girlfriend beater Saionji, since he doesn't even see her as more than a means to an end despite professing and looking the Prince part but lacking all the actual virtues.

The Student council matters more since they're characters and subsequent tragic flaws are the ACTUAL meat of the show and on second rumination actual shows more how fucked up the system/gender dynamic/power hierarchy is since - while it blatantly fucks over Juri who can't just outright say who she likes - also show almost it's own sub-text of Masculine failings: Saionji desperately clinging to being TOXIC MASCULINE™ and completely falling short underneath Touga; Miki's "nice boy" act belying him trying to replace his low-key nostalgia for his sister (also a bitch, but apparently was more like Nanami in the manga); and best yet Touga being the quintessential "Prince in all but actual behavior" by emulating a cutthroat and Machiavellian world view but coming up empty because well, he's just an illusion of a prince...but that leads in way more to the big finale piece where I'll reintroduce the actual story's main trio

Utena Tenjou: Tomboy Prince with brain empty except for lesbian thoughts. Honestly probably what every western "STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN" archetype wishes they were since while having very tomboyish personality in athletics, blunt speaking and also VERY oblivious to the actual plot for REAL DRAMATIC IRONY, but also never actually demeaning her being feminine partially due to her love of an childhood prince and how she maintains her relationship with both her friend Wakaba and later Anthy. Honestly mostly a plot device after S1 until she gets ACTUAL development by the very end and instead kinda bumbles her way into undoing the entire REVOLUTION OF THE WORLD. I kinda wish she felt either more cognizant or at least felt like she was developing/properly rebuking the rest of the cast's power obsessions but I guess that's for the movie.

Anthy Himemiya: Actual Trophy Wife with a dark secret (darker than ski- wait no that's terrible scratch that). Set-up very much as an immediate princess in distress while also being the most femme Yamato Nadeshiko, Anthy being the Rose Bride as a literal prize who acts and behaves as whom she's "engaged" with desires while otherwise being quiet, wry, mysterious and noticably submissive, by the end it actually plays up into THE BIG REVEALS of just how abused she's been into a hopeless acceptance...like y'know actual abuse victims.

Akio Ohtori: Grade A Antagonist, probably the most insidious I've seen a villain in a while, Akio is notable for, back in 1997, being perhaps the big go-to of actual deconstructing the facade of a whole shoujo genre's "hots for a teacher/sexy man putting the moves" and highlighting how actually exploitative and abusive a person like that really is. Being Himemiya's brother (somewhat justified in the manga by both being a weird Sailor Moon-esque reincarnation of gods/godesses of Dios), despite how much of his motives are runing the background and how the entire back story is uh...brought up in like barely in the last arc with little lead up (some scenes feel like they'd be a full melodrama season and they just have like 1 scene in the final arc episodes) he manages to one-up Touga (in the plot as well) by instead of "just" objectifying girls, not-just-flat out saying Utena looks best as a princess, but y'know the fact that he is implicitly yet constantly exploiting and victim-blaming Anthy for her own suffering for "the power of Dios/Revolution of the world" turns it on its head

I've spent all this time on characters but in truth a lot of the meat of the show relies again on the Council Members fleshing out the issues of system leading to outright divorcing "being a Prince" (heroic altruistic virtues) and "being a man" (considering like all but maybe the comedic relief have some deliberately misogynistic behavior) and beyond just the plot (or rather character) synopsis, the talent goes far more in how it's framed, the symbolic/allegorical shots, the repetition adding a good episode formula flow to character showcases, probably the most "tasteful" allusion to uh...*ahem* sexual abuse that so many other edgier/prentious shows fumble. Both in how intimidating yet understated it's foreshadowing is until they hard-reveal it despite never explicitly naming it even tho it sends Nanami into hysterics

Really it's both a massive blessing and reason for it's cult beloved status for it's aesthetics but also it's burden, for being a full 39 episodic season by season character development study of everyone BUT the main trio except for snippets and the very end that makes it greatly appreciable as a legitimate work of art.

What I wanted more to say however (long overdue) is that a large part of following is, visibly at least, western feminist critiques and yes while it almost seems like Utena fits the "deconstructing patriarchy" story like a glove...it's weird how almost none of them actually can give a good historical account of actual Japanese female/gender/sexuality norms nor Anime contemporaries actually were. Like Tenchi Muyo and Berserk came out the same year (Cardcaptor Sakura the next) and despite how you can "feel" the influence in lots of modern shows like SHAFT's signature visual imagery cuts or many WESETERN shows having straight scene references to Utena....almost no one has a similar feel to Utena until like Princess Tutu comes out.

Really tho probably should've watched Utena and then Tutu because while it's undeniable that Utena is a major pillar of shoujo re-codification - what with everyone before Utena was saying they thought it'd be like a Rose of Versaille or Lady Knight rip-off...whose laughing now? - it's almost like there's a missing link between it and it's major western fanbase (probably with what few anime did get overseas, this one probably rose to the top), or how very noticeable there IS an influence on it's genre in Japan

Almost none of the big analyst fans actually know A) it's not "a deconstruction of Magical Girls" since despite Ikuhara working on Sailor Moon just before this, almost none of the tropes line up and instead more with Shoujo genre as a whole. or one of the major inspirations was Takarazuka theater.

And this is not to dismiss how inspirational it is to it's western fandom, but while I am notably cynical towards placing things on pedestals, there's probably something about cultivating the whole pop-culture feminist reading commune with people making weird time-loop theories while kinda most of it is just filling in a mad-lib mostly thanks to Ikuhara just keeping things on the vague and letting the audience take away their own perspective.

Again, most of the show is completely sub-textual or visually/symbolically depicted and never stated nor properly defines it's weird key words (End of the World, Revolutionize the World, Power of Dios, Rose Bride, all things said constantly but never really said what they "mean". But that's also perhaps its charm, in it's allegory and very Death of the Author approach, it has definitely allowed it's fan theorizing and appreciation to flourish so there's something there for that.

Ultimately I'd say Utena the TV series is great more so for what it isn't...or rather I should say it's great for not just subverting Shoujo tropes and archetypes for the Japanese audience but also that despite dealing with some very serious and heavy subjects in obtuse and perhaps understated ways for the time, people have allowed it to be put on it's pedestal because they can easily fit it in themselves.

Honestly though, not that a more "straight forward" approach wouldn't detract from Utena but I will say that the movie, Adolescence of Utena, is very much the best encapsulation of what Utena strives to be (for another big blog post) and while the TV series has plenty of time and flexes it's directorial muscles with budget constraints and season pacing UNrestrained, the movie will trim a lot of the fat

#long post #Revolutionary Girl Utena #I haven't actually done my Anime thoughts in a while #Maybe I'll keep this on my main blog this time #I wrote this mostly on facebook tho if I wrote it here first I'd better integrate images probably #anolyso's media time #uh...except now that's on my main blog

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errgative · 6 years ago

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Japanese Literature Essentials

This is a list of five classic Japanese books and short stories that I feel are essential reads for anyone interested in Japan. I’ve chosen these books not only because they are excellent literature in their own right, but because they offer unique insight into Japanese culture and showcase the differences between Japanese and Western literature. Whether or not you are studying Japanese, I think you can gain something valuable by reading them. I know there are many great books I’ve left off this list, but Japanese literature is just too expansive to be summarized in one post - feel free to reblog with your own favorites if I didn’t include them!

Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji (源氏物語)

Recommended Translation: Royall Tyler

The Tale of Genji is one of the most iconic and foundational works in the history of Japanese literature. Written at the peak of the Heian period, it combined aspects of Chinese literature with traditional forms of Japanese storytelling, resulting in an 1100 page (written almost entirely in kana!!) epic that follows Genji through his adventures and romantic pursuits while giving insight into Heian court life. I feel that Tyler’s translation brings the beautiful Classical Japanese prose to life while preserving the original aesthetics of the tale.

The author, Murasaki Shikibu, was a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial Court. Although women were traditionally not taught Chinese, she was able to study it due to her immense talent. Her mastery of literature is shown in that Genji was greatly praised even at the time of its release, despite her being a woman.

Soseki Natsume: Kokoro (こころ)

Recommended Translation: Edwin McClellan

Soseki is often regarded as the founder of modern Japanese literature. His works are informed by his life experiences, as well as issues salient to Meiji-era Japan, such as the westernization of Japan and conflicts between modern and traditional culture.

Kokoro takes place during the transition out of the Meiji era. The central characters are a young student and the man he idolizes, called Sensei. Through the young man’s relationship with his parents and Sensei, Soseki explores the boundaries between urban and rural values, as well as what it means to receive an education. The third and final part is in the form of a letter from Sensei, and deals with themes of guilt, isolation, and the egoism of youth, as the reality behind the student’s idealization of him is revealed.

In the interest of full disclosure, this is my favorite book on this list and definitely in my top five books of all time - it has only a spare, basic plot, but manages to convey the feeling of an entire nation in a time of transition, while not sacrificing beautiful language or complex, nuanced characters.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke: Hell Screen (地獄変)

Recommended Translation: I actually don’t know who translated the version I’ve read, since it’s a pdf that doesn’t include the title page. Contact me if you want it, or pick a translation that sounds good to you.

Akutagawa was one of the most influential Japanese writers of the twentieth century. Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, is named after him. He is probably best known outside of Japan for his story Rashomon, which inspired Kurosawa Akira’s film of the same name. Much of his work deals with what he perceives as the corruption and spiritual anxiety of modern life, as well as themes of obsession, isolation, and illusion.

Hell Screen is a short story set in an ambiguously medieval Japan, potentially the late Heian period. It centers around the painter Yoshihide, who is the finest painter in the land, but hates everything except for his art and his daughter. He is commisioned by a lord to create a screen painted with the Buddhist hell. Through Yoshihide, Akutagawa explores the nature of artistic obsession and the conflict between art and moral behaviour, all while creating a sense of uncertainty around the truth by choosing an unnamed courtier who is devoted to the lord as a narrator. The end result is a wonderfully disturbing story that subtly critiques modern ways of thinking in the guise of a Buddhist parable.

Warning for implied rape.

Mishima Yukio: Forbidden Colors (禁色)

Recommended Translation: Alfred H. Marks

One of the most well-known postwar Japanese authors, Mishima wrote about themes such as beauty, gender, sexual desire, and patriotism, and his work has been equally praised and criticized for its long, flowing descriptions and decadent prose. Today, Mishima is known almost as much for his gruesome death by ritual suicide as for his literary accomplishments.

Some of you might wonder why I chose to include Forbidden Colors on this list rather than the better known and less disturbing Confessions of a Mask. While it’s true that both of them feature gay protagonists and involve similar themes, I feel that the viscerally disgusting nature of Forbidden Colors makes it a much more powerful read. It is by no means enjoyable, essentially being 400 pages of nothing but hatred and vitriol. Both the protagonist, Yuichi, and his ‘mentor,’ Shunsuke, are amoral, manipulative, and hopelessly misogynistic. The plot is based around Shunsuke’s quest to get revenge on the entire female population by using Yuichi’s good looks as his weapon. Yuichi starts out as somewhat naïve and afraid, thinking he’s the only man to ever be gay, but begins to become more and more like Shunsuke, adopting his misogynistic habits and using his experiences in Tokyo’s gay scene to learn how to weaponize his beauty. The horrifying story of what Yuichi does and experiences provides a harsh, angry critique of Japanese society without any moments of hope or levity.

While I do highly recommend this book, please know that it is highly disturbing and if you cannot read books that contain rape/dubious consent, graphic violence, extreme misogyny, or homophobia, it might be a good idea to skip it.

Enchi Fumiko: Masks (女面)

Recommended Translation: Juliet Carpenter

Enchi is probably the most well-known female Japanese writer from the Showa period. She drew attention to the plight of women in an increasingly militaristic and patriarchal Japan, and achieved success after World War II despite the male-dominated Japanese literary establishment. Her works explore gender and the nature of power.

I had a hard time deciding whether to include Masks or The Waiting Years; both are powerful explorations of female forms of power, and both are quintessentially Japanese in nature. Ultimately Masks won out because of its direct ties to The Tale of Genji, which opened this list. Masks draws on countless layers of Japanese culture, from Genji to traditional shamanistic practices to Noh theatre and art. The story is told from the perspective of men, but as the novel goes on, it becomes clear that the men are being manipulated by the crafty Mieko, whose schemes quickly ensnare the narrators. Central to the story is an essay Mieko wrote on the role of the Rokujo Lady in Genji. Ultimately, Masks is about power, how it can be subverted, and the results of those subversions, while simultaneously exploring the nature of gender, revenge, and legacy. It’s hard to summarize the genius of this book - the way Enchi weaves together differing sources and plot threads into a cohesive, indictive whole - in one paragraph, but I hope you all will read it.

Once again, I’m including warnings, this time for graphic sex, dubious consent (in that one party does not know who the other is), graphic descriptions of blood, and death.

More Recommendations:

Soseki Natsume: I am a Cat; Botchan

Akutagawa Ryunosuke: Spinning Gears; Kappa

Oe Kenzaburo: The Silent Cry; Hiroshima Notes

Enchi Fumiko: The Waiting Years

Tanizaki Junichiro: Naomi

Kawabata Yasunari: The Old Capital; Thousand Cranes

Mishima Yukio: Death in Midsummer - Onnagata, Patriotism

Murakami Ryu: Almost Transparent Blue

Abe Kobo: The Woman in the Dunes

Yoshimoto Banana: Kitchen

#japanese #literature #bookblr #languages #litblr #japanese literature #japanese langblr #book review #langblr #mine

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cavernfullofexistentialdread · 9 months ago

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Hi welcome to me horribly mutalating this post a professional SIX fan, a severely critical person, and a history geek. (Long post ahead!!)

Remember kids, you don’t truly love a piece of media until you can positively critique and understand the flaws in it

Six the musical is fundamentally an analysis of our misogynistic approach on women’s history …Despite that idea being channeled through an Ultra Pop girl group.

THIS PERSON IS VERY RIGHT THIS SONG AND TO EXTENT THE MUSICAL AS A WHOLE TREATS ANNE LIKE HOW HISTORY TREATED HER!!

Whether that be through dialogue of her and Catalina de Aragon fighting or her disagreeing and “competing” with Cathy Parr, she is arguably the closest we’ve got to a semblance of an “active antagonist” in this musical.

However we do see glimpses of her “actual” personality. Or whatever little we actual know of it. One of her famous motto’s was of her family. “The most happy”.

…

(this section is skippable)

I’d also like to give a shout-out to her iconic mini monologue, “Since the only thing we have in common is our husband, grouping us together is an inherently comparative act and as such unnecessarily elevates a historical approach ingrained in patriarchal structure. I read :)”

Anne was SMART and it made her stand out. In history it’s BAD that she’s smart. But in this musical that quote blows everyone away. In the audience, in the characterization (this seems pretty OoC), and to an extent the other queens.

… She was described as being charming and charismatic, not necessarily the “temptress” status that it came to grow into. Her choruses are a lot more care free and happy, compared to her ambitious seductress power chord induced verses. THE VERSES THAT TELL THE STORY!

OF COURSE THIS IS THE SIDE OF ANNE THAT TELLS THE STORY.

Anne Boleyn is THE most popular queen in both the fandom (or queendom) AND our modern culture as a whole.

Because this is a of course, originally British filled audience; the show plays with the viewers’ pop culture view of Anne. As the temptress. (When really she was just a woman in the face a powerful man who wanted her). With the built in misogyny of the retelling of the story of Boleyn, it pits Anne as the action and Henry as the reactor. Anne seduces Henry, Henry falls for it, it’s a “Look what YOU MADE me do”. But in reality, let’s be real with ourselves, it’s the other way around. “Look what YOU DID because of me.”

…

At this point in the musical no characters are questioning the status quo (the women are the reason and therefore cause of Henry’s fuckary), the verses that are telling her story are filled with her “bad” persona.

The play plays with our idea of Anne, and that is a little bit lost with international audience unfortunately.

This musical is MAINSTREAM and at a certain level IT SHOWS. But this is the same musical that shows us an incredibly soul crushing but VERY plausible interpretation of Kat Howard that erases and fights back against the hate for these women.

…

Which is why this is valid and we should not view Don’t Lose Ur Head as who Anne Boleyn is. It is “Boleyn”, but it could never be Anne.

This musical sympathizes and maybe even glorified these women. Their history has already become a spectacle, like celebrities in the latest juicy drama. (ayyy no wonder it’s a pop girl group!!”

They have already be flattened and stereotyped and social murder and resurrected and killed again OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN FOR FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.

Six Anne Boleyn never truly was or will be Anne. And that’s okay. Because we are viewing it as an audience that doesn’t know Anne. We are an audience who knows the woman who was beheaded for adultry, treason, and incest. We as the audience seeing this commodified spectacle see the most villainized of all these women be villainized again. Only to be given metaphorically and literally a temporary relief with the I Don’t Need Your Love.

We could never truly reclaim these stories. They’ve been ours ever since Cromwell kicked Anne of the throne.

Just take this musical with a grain of salt and all it’s historical inaccuracies.

when are people actually going to understand that SIX is treating Anne Boleyn like people thought she was at that time, and not how she actually was. it's seen from the point of view of the people who actually believed she was guilty

#Haha sorry if none of this makes sense #It’s like 11 pm here and I’ve been drinking only sprite and cola for the past hour #Shout out to CJ the X for making me like thus #RANTY RANT RANT #six the musical #Six musical #anne boleyn #This is not double checked for typos #In fact it was typed in a frenzy

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octaviainthewasteland · 5 years ago

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Wonder Woman: on female characters in comics PART 3

p. 1, 2, 3

Finally my lazy ass finished it. Warning: Image heavy. Please bear in mind that English is not my first language and we do not beta, we die liek mne!

Part 3: Woman: Warrior, Wife, Wonder

Summary: Critical analysis of the character of Wonder Woman

Under the cut

Previously, I have talked about gender inequality in the comics industry and poor portrayal of female characters in the comics. In this part, I am going to talk about comics as an active political tool, and Wonder Woman as a medium of gender politics.

Lepore and Fawaz both define Wonder Woman as the banner-bearer of the feminist separatist utopia (Lepore, 2016: 199) (Fawaz, Hall, Kinsella, 2017: 9), though they refer to different feminist movements. While Lepore stresses the importance of the movement of 1910s for the invention of Wonder Woman, Fawaz matches Themyscrira, the home island of Wonder Woman, to the idea of separatism of 1970s. As noted by De Beauvoir and Fawaz, it was impossible to imagine the life without men. Women have no separate history, no separate culture. They were attracted to the idea of an island, isolated from the rest of the world. This fantasy on the pages of the comic book has become a safe space for exploring the social, cultural and political possibilities and conflicting notions of a better, desirable world (Fawaz, Hall, Kinsella, 2017: 4).

The very birth of Wonder Woman is a political statement. In the early 1930s Margaret Sanger has led the birth control movement. (Lepore, 2016: 147) The question of to whom belonged the power over the woman’s body has been on everyone’s lips. On the pages of The Origin of Wonder Woman Marston tells a story of a matriarchal birth, a celebration of woman’s agency. (Wonder Woman #1, 1942) Parallels can be found between the legend of Wonder Woman and Christian narratives, even more so than, for example, Superman, who is typically analysed as a Jesus figure. She is born, fathered by no mortal man, and sets on saving the humanity from the forces of hate and oppression, fighting injustice, suffering, intolerance and destruction. She is omnibenevolent and wise, even being chosen by the ring of the Star Sapphires, because her heart is abundant with love (Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #2, 2010) However, Diana has neither father, nor any similar patriarchal figure in her life. She is born in a feminist utopia with no contribution from a man. The significance of this phenomenon cannot be overstated. Wonder Woman is devoid of the weight of patriarchy; hence she is the manifestation of the feminist fantasy (Curtis, 2017: 307). For 70 years she has been an exceptional figure within the pop-culture, centered around the question of Fathers and Children and ignoring the trope of the Absent Mother. The feminist utopian fantasy, though, has been killed in 2012. Of all people, by her own new authors, Azzarello and Chiang. Not only does Wonder Woman have a father now, trivializing her story, taking away her legendary status, but also this new version destroys the sisterhood. In the new version, Hippolyta lies, because she is scared of Hera’s jealousy and revenge. The same Hera, who has protected Diana and Hippolyta from Zeus’ forced advances. The same Hera, who has blessed Diana at birth. Goddesses and Amazons are no longer a monolithic front, now they are pitted against each other, fighting over the affections of a man. Wonder Woman used to be a character born from defiance. Now she is a character born from fraud, and the supremacy of the male principle has been reinstated. (314)

What early villains of the Wonder Woman comics share is their opposition to gender equality. Some villains were fictional, some of flesh and blood. Jill Lepore uncovers a schism, verging on an open war, between the writers of Wonder Woman in 1942 (Lepore, 2016: 210-213). Gardner Fox rejects the idea of the female superhero and downgrades Wonder Woman to typing out minutes and getting trapped to be saved by the male members of the Justice’s Society.

(All-Star Comics #14)

He refuses to include her in the action and show her fighting side by side with the rest of her colleagues. (All-Star Comics #12-17, 1942-43) On contrary, the political influence of Marston’s Wonder Woman grows by leaps and bounds, both in fiction and in real life.

It is worth to also compare the politics of visual presented by the case of Fox and Marston. Under Fox’s pen Wonder Woman becomes a meek female heroine, an incompetent lady, and the textbook token female character, which makes a team diverse without delivering any real contribution. After the death of Marston, she is stripped even of such nominal power. Just as Athena warns Amazons, if they submit to a man, they will lose their powers. The metaphor of the gauntlets is very curious, in fact. Amazons are bound, so that they do not forget what happens if they let man conquer them (Madrid 2009: 36). Surprisingly, Wonder Woman uses the gauntlets to protect herself, deflecting bullets and other weapons. We can see a careful threading of Marston’s motif on the struggle of women. A paradoxical situation of a shackle turned into a shield can be connoted as the remainder for women that they have broken free and they are powerful, but if they submit to a man, they will lose all their power. (Lepore, 2016: 220) Wonder Woman’s lasso is also a reference to a real-life phenomenon, specifically the lie detector. Its invention has fascinated Marston and on more than one occasion he has offered his services as the operator to the US Army (Lepore, 2016: 61). For him it has been a turning point in history of science and politics, and of course, Wonder Woman needs such a device in her adventures.

Opposed to Fox’s portrayal, Marston’s Wonder Woman stands against the International Milk Company that has been overcharging for milk, “an essential element of American children’s lives”. It has been a direct criticism of politicians such as Al Smith. On the pages of the comic books, Al Smith turns into a Nazi secret agent Alphonso De Gyppo, the evil president of the International Milk Company. Twice he tries to kill Wonder Woman, but she manages to escape him and lead a political rally. She captures his evil boss, Baroness Paula von Gunther, and the prices for milk drop, to the gratitude of American children and everyone concerned. Another example involves a fictionalized social critique of the working conditions in America. A textile workers’ strike in Massachusetts, in 1912, is retold as a strike against Bullfinch’s Department Stores, as the workers are underpaid and exploited. The real villain is the fiancé of the lady, who is owning the Department Stores, and when she realizes his true evil nature, she punches him and takes over, doubling everyone’s salaries as the first order. (Sensation Comics #8, 1942)

Everything feminine and girlish had been considered (still is) weak and boring (Lepore, 2016: 187). Marston, on the other hand, believed that men confuse desire with pleasure. They desire domination, while women can receive pleasure from both domination and submission. He felt that if there had been a strong beautiful woman (Marston wanted Wonder Woman to look like a Varga Girl), men would submit to her willingly and she would teach them love and peace. Never before such a character has existed (191). Submissiveness became power.

(georgia peach, alberto vargas, esquire, 1940s)

The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps are formed in 1942 by Roosevelt. Each issue of the solo Wonder Woman comic book has praised women, who have also been scientists, writers, politicians, social workers, doctors, nurses, athletes, and adventurers – or, in other words, Wonder Women of History. (Lepore, 2016: 220-222) Chained, tied up and gagged women are an allusion on the suffragist movement. Women seemingly reclaim the imagery of bondage and bound, giving it the implication of the struggle, the defiance, and resistance. Moreover, the idea of submission has been the new display of feminine supremacy. (236)

Fretheim suggests noting that Wonder Woman’s weapons form circles and defines them as ‘vaginal weapons’ (Fretheim, 2017: 24) as opposed to phallic weapons such as guns and swords. That it, I must correct myself, until recently. As can be seen in Chiang reimagination of Wonder Woman, she is often depicted on the comic book covers with swords, axes and other weapons.

As if drawn phallic weapons also raise the levels of testosterone, to match her updated apparel, new Wonder Woman is also more short-tempered, aggressive and has actually become the new Goddess of War after defeating Ares. (Cocca, 2014) However, some, like Walter J. Ong, have argued that even the earliest version of Wonder Woman has been ‘too much like a man’. (Lepore, 2016: 255) He criticizes her resistance towards marriage and family life, accuses her of sustaining only on the anti-social pure sexual allure, by standards of the men. He goes on to develop an argument that comics have been fascist propaganda, with the concept of ‘supermen’ directly borrowed from Nietzsche, ‘the herald of Nazism’. (256) If you are not sure who Walter J. Ong is, it is that same man who concluded that Batman and Robin promote homosexuality and we can say thanks to him for the Comics Code nonsense. So, we can see that Wonder Woman has constantly faced accusations of being ‘too masculine’. It is a hard job of being a girl in the boys club: you’re either the lady-friend who inevitably becomes the love interest or you’re a tomboy. Wonder Woman tries to be both, to be neither, to be something else entirely.

Nonetheless, in 1944, out of all comic book superheroes, it is Wonder Woman, who becomes a newspaper strip. There is a considerable difference in exposure between comic books and daily newspapers, opening a whole new audience to Wonder Woman. She joins Superman and Batman as the first trans-media superheroes and thus the Trinity is formed. Marston has always been quite open about Wonder Woman being feminist psychological propaganda for the new type of strong and courageous womanhood. (220) The message of Wonder Woman transcends the comic books and becomes a social commentary on the gender politics and economic environment of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, this is the temporary liberation. The most sinister villain of them all turns out to be the peacetime. Once again, the comic book works as a mirror, reflecting the changes on the political and socio-cultural stage. With the end of the Second World War, there blooms a daunting realization that the service of women is no longer required. The period of high threat is relieved by the period of low threat and the decisive, tough heroes can loosen up. Not to undermine them and the returning soldiers, women all over the country are fired and urged, those unmarried, to tie the knot, and those married, to hurry up and procreate. Wonder Woman is stripped of her kinky red boots, of her position at the Justice’s Society and ultimately, her powers. She becomes a friendly guide for young ladies, who dream of fairy tale romance, a handsome husband and a multitude of little pink-cheeked copies of him, running around their little cozy house. (271)

Feminist movement gave birth to Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman has become the symbol of the feminist movement. When Wonder Woman has appeared to be chained and depowered and forced to fit into categories she has been fighting against since her creation, “fellow sisters” has come to her aid. She is put on the cover of the Ms. magazine and once again blazes the fantasy of the female superhero, equal to Superman and Batman, and of the all-women culture, glorious in its isolation from the discrimination and oppression of the male imposition. (Lepore, 2016: 283; Fawaz, Hall, Kinsella, 2017: 8)

Wonder Woman returns to peaceful protests on the pages of It Aint Me Baby and feminist newsletters. There starts the try and miss of the comic industry with the female characters. Wanting to cash in on feminists, Marvel attempts to introduce new female characters, but they all fail spectacularly after just a handful of issues. (Lepore, 2016: 289) Forty-five years later, the situation is not much better. Marvel executives even try to put the blame on the readers, because apparently the stories about diverse characters are not selling. (Cain, 2017)

To be fair, in 70s it has been a real issue. Nothing has been selling. Even Wonder Woman. The feminist movement is divided. Radical, liberal and intersectional movements emerge, at odds with each other. The Second Wave supports a predominantly white, heterosexual view.

In 1987, Wonder Woman is rebooted. Pérez and Wein make her more ethnic, acknowledging her origins. They finally bring up the fact that on an island with 100 percent female population, homosexual relationships take place. (Wonder Woman Vol. 2 #38, 1990) In the #180 issue Diana is in a relationship with an African American man, Trevor Barnes. She gains her powers back. She addresses the issues of race, sexuality and gender. Wonder Woman rises again on the crest of the Third Wave of Feminism: a struggle for equality, diversity, complexity, inclusivity, individualism and cultural critique. (Cocca, 2014) However, due to historical processes, as history does not evolve in a linear, progressive fashion, the maturity and growth call for a major backlash (Cocca, 2016: 10). The comic books are then overflowing with hyper-masculine men and hyper-sexualized women. The new Wonder Woman, Artemis, has been criticized and remained unaccepted both by readers and by the characters of the comics themselves. For instance, Batman is openly dismissive of her and objects to her presence, going as far as forbidding Artemis to even sit in Diana’s chair in the Justice League Headquarters. (Wonder Woman Vol. 2 #90, 1994) The problem with Artemis is that she is too aggressive, too rash, and therefore, does not fit the norms of femininity, imposed by the predominantly male audience.

Wonder Woman is rebooted anew in 2011, as mentioned before. Contrary to the critiques that Artemis has received, this Diana is also aggressive and ‘male-like’. Here we can notice a similar pattern. Because female empowerment associates in men’s mind opposite proportionately with male disempowerment, a strong female superhero that challenges the social structures terrifies the reader. Hence, Amazons are both objectified and dehumanized. They are no longer peaceful immortal protectors – after the reboot, in order to maintain their population and quench their sexual thirst, they engage in sexual intercourses with sailors, who have expressed dubious consent and are often killed off afterwards. Newborn girls are to stay on the island, while boys are sold into slavery to Hephaestus in exchange for weapons. Amazons’ queerness is erased from the narrative. Wonder Woman discovers that she has a brother, who is somehow more powerful than she is. (Justice League Vol. 2 #50, 2016)

She also pursues romance with Steve Trevor. Their relationship is truly a double-edge sword. He has appeared in the first issue of Wonder Woman and has remained her supporting character since. The polarity of his character lies in the interpretation. From one side, he is a ‘token boyfriend’ (Robbins, 2006), from the other, he is a lonely boy in the refrigerator. Robbins argues that introduction of Steve Trevor should ensure the reader in Wonder Woman’s heterosexuality. Therefore, he is the political instrument that positions Wonder Woman in the framework of heteronormativity. On the other hand, it is an interesting subversion of the ‘damsel in distress’ trope. Steve Trevor gets in trouble and Wonder Woman rushes to his rescue. His suffering propels her plotline and he is secondary to her character, not having much of a distinct personality, changing with the trends over time, reflecting what kind of man is popular at that instance. The only constant is the mesmerized ‘Angel’ to Diana, which, in fact, either baffles or irritates her. (Sensation Comics #2, 1942) Either way, the existence of the character of Steve Trevor restricts Wonder Woman from exploring her diverse sexuality, but on the other hand constructs a new meaning for visual representation of Wonder Woman in the comics.

During the Second World War, people have been constantly bombarded – by standardized imagery. With the rise of Communism and the National Socialism, the rhetoric of good and bad has returned to the military conflict. One side is morally right; their opponents then must be immoral and wrong. One side is the hero and the other side is the villain, aiming to oppress, torture and destroy. As we know from the fairytales, from everything we have been taught, the good side always wins the evil. The hero always arrives just in time and saves everyone. This stream of non-stop visuals from the media has produced something Alvin Toffler calls a ‘mass-mind’. (Toffler, 1980: 176) The comic books promote All-American ideology and the image of the superhero that defends the world with the help of the good sports from the American Army. It is a ready-to-wear moral certainty. The movements are represented by a particular group: the feminist movement is predominantly white and heterosexual; the LGBT movement receives one-dimensional representation of the G.

In the late 70s the stream gradually becomes less uniform. Toffler introduces the concept of ‘a blip culture’ (177), a culture of confusion, feeling of abandonment and anger, because now the visuals are fragmented, contradictory, people are left to give these ‘blips’ their own meaning. The system pulsates with bigger and bigger amounts of data. Today we want out information fast. Faster. Memes, photos, tweets, and headlines of the articles we are never going to open to read in full at the top of the IPhone screen. We prefer to digest information through visuals. It does not matter where we live, in a developed or a developing country, in a metropolitan city or in the countryside, we stay up to date with the pop-culture. It necessarily consists of the modern and old media, which become another ode of propaganda and promotion of the ideas, people and trends that just ought to become popular. The power of textual is substituted by the power of the visual.

Comics are the low genre of entertainment. It is primarily identified as being strictly for children and youth (Ndalianis, 2011: 113). And yet it has victoriously invaded the mainstream media. No matter how much so-called nerds desire to maintain the illusion of an exclusive boy-club, who are socially awkward and misunderstood by everyone, it is no longer a niche. The comic book characters’ faces decorate lunch boxes and backpacks; they become a new type of celebrity, symbols of the generations. It is no longer the comics in itself that is important – but the superheroes. The phenomenon of the superhero has transcended the medium of the comic book. Pop-culture turns politics into another component of the field of entertainment, and brings it on the transnational level. It becomes a performance, where the spectators are the citizens, divided into the politically charged individuals and apolitical witnesses. The superheroes are a fiction, but the borders of the fiction and the reality blur. With appearance of the superheroes on the screen, the audience starts associating the character with the face of the actor. Because the superheroes are already surrounded by myths, different interpretations and fandom, the figure of the superhero can become more real than the person, playing him or her. The imagery and simulacra, which are the foundation of the society, create a model of the prevailing life style of the said society. It is not the aggregate of the characters, but the social relationships between people, intermediated by these characters. (Baudrillard, 1994)

To support my argument about how the superheroes received the status of celebrities and how Wonder Woman has become a simulacrum of the political figure, we need to break down the process into five stages. I shall bring some examples to build a case to explain how the superheroes have evolved in our consciousness and from mirrors have transformed into active agents that represent and influence masses.

In 1996, a special edition comic book has been released, featuring Superman, to promote the landmine awareness among children. The comic has been distributed to Bosnia and the territories of the former Yugoslavia. DC has published the comic book in cooperation with the Department of Defense and UNICEF. So, exhibit one: the superheroes, as the role models, are suitable to educate children.

In 2016, a certain video has gone viral under the name Avengers Against Trump. In reality, it has little to do with Marvel and its team of superheroes, but it has starred some of the actors from the cast of the Avengers, such as Scarlett Johansson, who have been emphasizing the importance of each and every vote. Their disdain for Trump becomes the disdain of the superhero they play. Exhibit two: the process is started, the reality and the fiction begin to merge, the figure of the actor is perceived not as a celebrity of interest, but as the avatar of the superhero.

On February 7, 2016, Turkish Airlines has released a commercial, where they have been ‘pleased to announce the new destination: Gotham City’. Ben Affleck appears during the commercial, credited as Bruce Wayne. Exhibit three: real life companies utilize the superheroes as the ambassadors of the brand. The line between performers and the superheroes they play becomes even thinner. The superhero becomes more real.

In this fashion, Wonder Woman is no different. Maybe even more exemplary, as she has been created specifically as feminist propaganda. The artwork in Mural, Philadelphia, depicting Wonder Woman landing a punch on Donald Trump, illustrates quite well the extent to which the reality of our social and political consciousness and superhero narratives influence each other.

Wonder Woman is a superhero, which defends all defenseless and openly stands against discrimination and oppression – and there she stands against Donald Trump, a person in a position of power, who is infamous for his racism and sexism. Exhibit number four: gathering information and background from the comics, TV-shows and movies, we analyse it and draw our own conclusions and assume that the superheroes have certain opinions about the realm of noumena, to which they do not belong, and what these opinions would be. Most people would agree that Batman is – notice how the conditional would be is dropped – for gun control. Harley Quinn is crazy about Comic-Cons. Wonder Woman is anti-Trump.

Wonder Woman has become a symbol and a spokesperson of modern feminism through this fusion of fiction, politics and personalities of the actresses. Wonder Woman has become a simulacrum of a celebrity and by extension a political figure. She makes choices, supports some politicians and publicly disapproves others. The critical point of this development takes place on October 21, 2016, when the UN has decided to use Wonder Woman in an honorary role in the empowerment campaign to fight for gender equality, and thus, Wonder Woman is appointed as the UN ambassador. The final exhibit: it shows that the superhero is treated like a real person and has been given exercisable political power. One might point out that she has been demoted from the position two months after, but the case rests. We live in a world, where Wonder Woman has become an ambassador of the United Nations, even if only for two months.

(Wonder Woman design art, Harry G Peter, 1942)

Bibliography

Fawaz, R., Hall, J., & Kinsella, H. (2017). Discovering paradise islands: The politics and pleasures of feminist utopias, a conversation. Feminist Review, 116(1), 1-21.

Lepore, J. (2015). The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York: Knopf.

Curtis, N. (2017). Wonder Woman’s symbolic death: On kinship and the politics of origins. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 8(4), 307-320.

Madrid, M. (2009). ‘Sirens and Suffragettes.’ The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines. Ashland, OR: Exterminating Angel, 2009. 145–81. Print.

Fretheim, I. M. (2017) Fantastic Feminism: Female Characters in Superhero Comic Books. Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo

Cocca, C. (2014). Negotiating the Third Wave of Feminism in "Wonder Woman". PS: Political Science and Politics, 47(1), 98-103.

Cocca, C. (2016). Superwomen: gender, power, and representation.

Cain, S. (2017). Marvel executive says emphasis on diversity may have alienated readers. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/03/marvel-executive-says-emphasis-on-diversity-may-have-alienated-readers [last accessed on 1 May, 2018]

Robbins, T. (2006). Wonder Woman, Lesbian Or Dyke?: Paradise Island as a Woman's Community. Available at: http://girl-wonder.org/papers/robbins.html [last accessed on 15 April, 2018]

Toffler, A. (1981). The third wave. London: Pan in association with Collins.

Ndalianis, A. (2011). Why Comics Studies? Cinema Journal, 50(3), 113-117.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

Fly to Gotham City with Turkish Airlines! Super Bowl TV SPOT (2016) Available at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS7JBHxdxko [last accessed on 8 May, 2018]

Avengers Against Trump. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnK9tEdNjX8 [last accessed on 8 May, 2018]

#Wonder Woman #Diana Prince #DC comics #dc girls

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makerof150papermasks · 6 years ago

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The Three Governments of Spyro the Dragon

Today, I have something really interesting that I feel would be worth talking about. Now I remember recently reading a post titled “’Kirby Super Star’ is a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union,” which delves into the titular 1996 SNES video game so deeply and somehow matches it up with certain pieces of USSR history (Reddit). After viewing this, I began to think, “I know a few other games that I could analyze like this guy did with Kirby.” Yes, I was motivated so much by this blog that I had a hunch to work on my own research chat.

Now the games I am about to talk about are the first three games in the Spyro the Dragon series first released for the PlayStation from 1998 to 2000, titled Spyro the Dragon, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage, and Spyro: Year of The Dragon (Additionally, all three titles recently received a remake collectively titled “Spyro Reignited Trilogy,” which makes this document relevant as of 2019). With a little research, I was able to pair those games with a government that best defined them in a nutshell. Of course, not all real-life elements of these governments may actually match up with how any of the fictional societies depicted operate, but I’ve tried my hardest to make sure the details match up strongly enough that they can be talked about.

*If you haven’t played the games yet and don’t want to be spoiled, then don’t bother reading!

Spyro the Dragon: Confederation (Left)

I want to start this discussion by saying something unique about this first third of the review: unlike the latter two titles, Spyro the Dragon seems to promote the idea of its featured form of government rather than point out the significant flaws and ensure the audience doesn’t sympathize with the concept at hand. First off, I want to give you folks a good look at how the populace of the Dragon Worlds goes about their lives and organizes themselves socially speaking. For those of you don’t already know enough about the game’s context, there are five socially-unique sectors that each owe something important to the well-being of the larger society. The Artisans represent the working class, the Peace Keepers are equivalent to a military system, the Magic Crafters are most likely representative of the business owners and upper class (As noted by the sheer presence of overly-elegant architecture in their specific area), the Beast Makers represent those who work in health, medical, biological, and other science-related fields, while the Dream Weavers can be considered a spiritually-grounded group of dragons who are experts in the field of meditation. Then there’s the extra sixth sector known as Gnasty’s World (Residence of main antagonist Gnasty Gnorc, who holds no true political power under any circumstance; therefore, I will leave him out of the equation), which I’ll just shoehorn into the sanitation sector, even though it would still easily be associated with the working class (Artisans).

With the exception of Gnasty’s World, these groups all serve an equally vital role in establishing the economic stability and societal foundation of the Dragon Worlds, in the form of a confederation. Now if you folks are wondering what that’s supposed to mean, here’s the definition; “an organization which consists of a number of parties or groups united in an alliance or league.” For a historical example, the United States operated in this manner under the Articles of Confederation of 1777, which was ratified in 1781 and formed a society whose power lay mostly in the hands of the member states. Up until 1789, these states could establish laws without having to worry about a federal government trampling over those laws since the existing equivalent had far less political power than the one present (Reference.com).

Revisiting my view from the previous paragraph, it can be noted that each of the first five sectors can be viewed as separate, autonomous states that, in spite of their different approaches to solving daily situations, hold a common view of some sort that unites them into a larger entity. While it’s not known in canon if the sectors that dragons live in have ever come into conflict with each other at any point, I will bring up some backstory later on that may be worth identifying.

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage: Empire (Middle)

Now looking at the titular villain and his path to wretchedness, picture him as this small, colonial society. From what we’re aware of based on the context provided in-game, Ripto and his cronies have no idea that Avalar (The main setting of this sophomore title) even exists at first. Now keep in mind that since Ripto despises dragons, he’s picky about where he wants to expand his influence. But anyway, once he finds himself in this dragon-free dimension, it becomes the perfect opportunity for Ripto to slowly nibble away at the land until there is no more for him to take over, aka, colonize. Of course, once Spyro shows up, the horned, red midget becomes rather peeved, prompting him and his goons to actually begin setting up the framework for his proposed kingdom.

Throughout the events of the game, Ripto not only uses his magic to spread his negative influence across the dimension (AKA: Cause various beasts and baddies to run amok and result in calamity), but we are also shown the blue banners of Avalar being rolled back in favor of emblems donning the antagonist’s mug, THRICE. According to my searches, an empire is defined as, “an extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority, formerly especially an emperor or empress.” In this case, Ripto can easily be seen as emperor because at his highest position, he holds control over not just his two reptilian brutes (Who serve as a metaphor for his “kingdom” at its most basic), but also numerous realms scattered throughout Avalar, each serving as their own formerly independent municipalities until he enters the picture.

Now here’s another point: even with Spyro around, Ripto still feels the need to settle in Avalar because there are no dragons around other than Spyro himself currently present to scare him away, which thereby gives him access to a shipload of land and resources. When it came to real-life empires, they were strategic regarding which areas to conquer. For example, the Roman Empire wouldn’t go east into modern-day Germany because the cost of conquest in that area was far above the monetary worth earned from the extractable resources available in that region (The Daily Reckoning).

Moving on, the western half eventually collapsed primarily due to internal conflicts over power that left them exposed to outsiders (The eastern half, dubbed “The Byzantine Empire,” managed to survive until 1453, when it fell to Turkish invaders as a result of their victory in the Byzantine-Ottoman wars). In-game, the biggest reason Ripto is defeated is because he overlooks the possibility of Spyro collecting Avalar’s sacred talismans and orbs, which collectively allow the young dragon to pass through the barriers that separate both parties.

Spyro: Year of The Dragon: Totalitarian State (Right)

Jumping ship to the final third of the original Spyro trilogy, we now examine the Forgotten Realms and its central government in the form of the despotic, blue crocodilian-esque Sorceress. Now the previous two games sugarcoated their subject matter immensely (Though the second game still views the concept of an empire as a detrimental idea), but this time the game doesn’t make things look as rosy. First and foremost, The Sorceress displays a position of superiority around anyone in her vicinity, and in an overly aggressive manner most of the time. Already, we’re seeing her being established as a straw tyrant; alas, there is still so much more to discuss regarding the Forgotten Realms operating as a political body that blatantly abides by the guidelines of totalitarianism. Now where do we begin on this topic?

My first point of conversation in this segment is that unlike Gnasty Gnorc or Ripto in the previous two games (Now although the latter does become “ruler” near the end of his respective game, he doesn’t spend nearly enough time to be officially considered a grand-high patriarch by any of the residents of Avalar), The Sorceress is a formally-recognized monarch, is referred to as such by the inhabitants of the Forgotten Realms, and to make matters much worse, has been ruling this same exact dimension, in the same throne for AT LEAST 1000 YEARS. Not only that, but at one point, the dragons currently living dwelling in the Dragon Realms once lived in the Forgotten Realms. But when they left, they took their magic with them and as the centuries passed, magic began to drain and caused their fancy-schmancy portals to stop working. We’re convinced to think that the reason The Sorceress has become so wary of Spyro’s presence is because he will disrupt her plans to gather the eggs they had stolen from the dragons; she is supposedly gathering them in order allow this upcoming generation of winged reptiles to bring magic back to the dimension she rules over.

I will bring up that part about the dragons and the eggs again, but there is an important detail that points further to establishing The Sorceress as an antagonist known for taking full advantage of her position over everyone around her and therefore preventing anyone from reasoning with her other than Spyro and a slew of animal friends she had recently imprisoned. A little more than a quarter way into the game, Spyro finds himself in a realm known as Enchanted Towers; it is here that he discovers that a slew of lavender-skinned counterculture humanoids had been tasked with erecting a statue built in their highness’ likeness.

There’s just so much to talk about regarding what the statue situation represents, but first let me define what this government is. Totalitarianism is described as being, “a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.” The aforementioned statue in Enchanted Towers is probably one of the biggest pieces of evidence pointing to the Forgotten Realms operating under that kind of system. To start, the Sorceress displays unrivaled power in the world she inhabits and no one dare beg to differ with her on that matter. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that the citizens of Enchanted Towers mention that they certainly did not enjoy creating this tremendous work of art (Though they agree that it looks prettier than the actual character herself, further driving the sense of rebellion in), but they completely understand that going against what The Sorceress is telling them to do is like flirting with death.

You, the reader, have to realize that this is a form of government where there isn’t a legislative or judicial system to limit executive power. Heck, that’s not even getting into the fact that the denizens of the Forgotten Realms have neither a right to free speech nor the freedom to vote in elections, as far I’m aware. It’s certainly no fun living in a society where one person holds all the social and political power and you’re not that one person, nothing delightful about that (And there’s nothing anyone can do to change the fact unless someone successfully uses force to overthrow the one in power so they wouldn’t be able to enforce their laws any longer).

Before getting to the climax of this essay, it’s that time I bring up a real example. Although I’d be talking about a dictatorship along the lines of Nazi Germany, I’ve decided to take a more interesting example from further back in history. The Qin Dynasty, an empire to which China borrows its name from, relied on an authoritarian set of regulations that would become hugely influential to every Chinese-based dynasty that followed. Although it only lasted from 221 to 207 BC, there’s still some valuable information to extract from this chapter of human history. It also makes sense for me to select this example because the game’s title, Year of The Dragon, references a specific birth year on the Chinese Zodiac (Speaking of which, the year the game itself originally released just happened to land on a dragon year, which only happens once every twelve years).

Now allow me to continue with the example. Under the commissioning of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the very first leader of a unified China, came a standardized system of writing and a strictly-guided formula for measuring the width, weight, and length of highways. Huang also oversaw construction of what would become the first section of The Great Wall of China and eventually went on to abolish the feudal system that flourished during the Zhou Dynasty decades earlier (In which landowners owed allegiance to the emperor as a result of kinship rather than fulfilling legal obligations). In addition, he commissioned the burning of almost all of the books currently available in that region at the time, only sparing those that provided information on topics like medicine and issued gigantic tax levies in an effort to pay for his military and construction expenses. This matrix of catastrophes led to a rebellion following Qin Shi Huang’s death in 210 BC, which went on to ultimately knock the Qin Dynasty out of power and make room for the Han Dynasty roughly 3-4 years later (Britannica).

Now what I’ll be explaining next is going to be extremely horrifying in hindsight, so grab your popcorn and hold your breath. While exploring Evening Lake, the third home world of the game, Spyro’s close friend Hunter winds up in a subterranean trap set up by The Sorceress that was meant for Spyro himself to prevent him from collecting any more of the dragon eggs that she desperately wanted to remain untouched. He is then approached by her servant, a magician-in-training named Bianca (To whom he has a developed a liking for over the course of the synopsis), who comes to tell the caged cheetah that the reason the dragons left so many years ago was because it had to do with their wonderful wings. As they began to realize that the obese blue saurian autocrat wanted to clip them off to give her immortality, they had no choice but to find solace in another reality. Linking this information to Spyro 1, we can now go back to viewing the example of confederation as the United States during the era of the Articles of Confederation, trying to recuperate from their religious tension with the monarchy of England and emigrating from there before ultimately deciding to settle in North America and establish a self-governed nation over the course of several decades. In the Spyro continuity, the dragons succeeded in building an autonomous series of societies in the then-vacant Dragon Realms following their disastrous affair with The Sorceress, where they then proceeded to push aside Gnasty Gnorc to the wastelands at some point later in time so they would have enough room to properly establish their footing in this uncharted land.

But sadly, that is not the end of the suspense; when Bianca returns to her master’s throne room, she discovers a dreadful truth she hadn’t been aware of until now. Ever since her henchmen brought the yet-to-hatch eggs back from the Dragon Worlds, The Sorceress hoarded them not because she wanted them to return their magic to the Forgotten Realms once they did hatch, but because she wanted to KILL THEM FOR THEIR WINGS LIKE SHE ATTEMPTED TO DO WITH THE ADULT DRAGONS BEFORE THEY LEFT. What she’s basically telling us is that she plans on committing an act of GENOCIDE ON AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF NEWBORNS in a similar manner to how Hitler promoted the large-scale massacre on an enormous number of Jews during the Holocaust.

With not a pinch of sympathy for anyone but herself by this point, the malevolent indigo monarch has become nothing short of a filthy caricature for the horrors of tyranny and dictatorship. By the way, she didn’t have to kill the newborns at all for that to happen, she just felt the need to do so JUST BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T WANT TO SEE THEM SQUIRMING AROUND IN HER QUARTERS. Prompting a drastic change of heart, Bianca decides to cease working for her master, opting to rescue Hunter from the trap her former supervisor had set up in Evening Lake. Fed up with the treason her lackey recently committed, The Sorceress decides to create an absurdly powerful, bat-winged monster intended to annihilate practically everyone in her opposition (Simply put, that means almost the entire population of the world she governs, plus Spyro and some of the friends he bought along).

Even though Spyro manages to eradicate The Sorceress for good, (Much to the satisfaction of the Forgotten Realms inhabitants) the atrocious myriad of actions she takes during that one game position her as an antagonist who is regarded as a dark villain for a normally light-hearted sugar bowl series like Spyro, thereby leaving an indelible mark on the narrative of that franchise’s continuity. Serving as a harsh critique for the concept of autocracy and its consequences on the people, Spyro: Year of The Dragon uses a surprisingly pathos-inducing series of events that favors a call to action for executive reform, appealing to the wants and needs of the governed rather than the desires and aspirations of the government itself.

Sources:

Kirby Super Star: https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/39dbqi/kirby_super_star_is_a_marxist_critique_of_the/

Confederacy: https://www.reference.com/government-politics/examples-confederate-government-230a5f967d7f24fa

Empire: https://dailyreckoning.com/how-empires-really-work/

Totalitarian State: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Qin-dynasty

https://www.reference.com/history/feudalism-ancient-china-8ddd0bf737a29fc5

#spyro reignited trilogy #spyro the dragon #playstation games #i need to post more often #my very first critique #enjoy ur day

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meabhmcdonnell · 7 years ago

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In anticipation of the release of Louise O’Neill’s feminist retelling of The Little Mermaid, The Surface Breaks, we spoke to Louise about re-inventing fairytales, feminism, and the importance of owning your voice.

Why did you choose The Little Mermaid as inspiration for The Surface Breaks?

Louise: Well, it was the summer of 2016 when the editor and director of Scholastic in the UK contacted my agent and asked, would I be interested in writing a feminist retellling of The Little Mermaid? It’s funny, because I should have said no! I was knee deep in writing Almost Love [which came out in March of this year] at that stage, and I was thinking about saying no. I had wanted to take 2017 and concentrate on Almost Love, which was my first novel for adults. So it was a bit of a transition. But I really couldn’t refuse the offer, because I’ve always loved The Little Mermaid. We lived right on Inchydoney beach until I was four: And I was obsessed with the water from when I was a child.

I would stare at the sea for hours and hours and my Mam always used to say, when I was very young, and she was giving me a bath, I was always much more settled in water.

And then in 1989, the Disney version of The Little Mermaid came out. I was four at the time, so I was at a prime age for it. So the idea of The Little Mermaid really embedded itself in my psyche at a very impressionable age. So when Scholastic came to me and asked if I wanted to do this, I just couldn’t say no. As I said partly because I loved the story so much, but also because as a teenager, with a burgeoning sense of feminism, I began reexamining the fairytales like The Little Mermaid, which was always my favorite one. It became increasingly obvious to me that it was very problematic. It’s literally about a young woman who gives up her voice and silences herself to be in a relationship. And she mutilates her body, so that a man she barely knows will fall in love with her. So I think there were really interesting parallels there with what some young women go through today in contemporary society. I felt that it was ripe for a feminist retelling – and I really wanted to be the one to do it.

Your little mermaid, Gaia’s, character is driven, not just by love, but also by desperation, a need to get out of a dangerous situation when she chooses to become human and leave the sea.Was that something you were consciously thinking about?

Louise: Absolutely. It’s funny, someone was asking me recently, why all of my books are about someone who is trapped? I think it’s just a feeling with that I can really identify with, as a young woman, feeling really trapped by society, feeling you’re trapped by your family circumstances, by geography, by things that often feel very much outside of your control. And, particularly for women, you might feel like there are gendered expectations on you on how you should behave, and how you should look, and how you should feel.

It can feel very restrictive. It is for Gaia, growing up in that society, which is incredibly patriarchal, and having such a controlling and overbearing father who basically sells her to the highest bidder. He sells her body to a much older man who finds her attractive. So she is absolutely desperate. I think there’s an element of that in her decision, I mean of course she finds Oliver incredibly attractive and she does feel physical attraction to him, but I think she’s very quick to label it love. But she’s just so desperate to get out of her situation.

Her father is very much portrayed as the villain in this retelling. Was that an interpretation of the original story or inspired by the domineering father portrayed in the Disney version?

Louise: I suppose it was a bit of both really. It was also that I wanted to portray cultural ideas of domination and overbearing fathers.

I suppose, in a lot of ways, he is the embodiment of the patriarchy, he is the embodiment of white male privilege and the embodiment of the idea of hereditary wealth and privilege and entitlement. He really does feel that he is entitled to control his daughters in that way. There are definitely shades of it in the Disney version, but he is still quite a sympathetic character. Whereas in my version of it I wanted to have that sense that Gaia is a really trapped character. So much of that comes from her father, who believes he has the right to control her body, control her destiny, and make decisions about who she should be with. It was an interesting way of critiquing the patriarchy.

It’s literally about a young woman who gives up her voice and silences herself to be in a relationship.

On the other hand, for the sea witch, Ceto, gets a much nuanced portrayal, she is given much more of a redemptive arc.

Louise: It’s funny because you see the Disney version and it’s really interesting to contrast what you know as a child and what you know as an adult. Because Ursula is a villain when you’re a child but when you’re an adult Ursula is the best character in the entire movie, she’s such a badass! I did a lot of research before I wrote the book, not just research about mermaid mythology, but also read a lot of academic essays about fairytales and the didactic messages that are contained in them for women. There were some really interesting points made about the role of the witch in fairytales, it is a very sexist and agist portrayal. It portrays women as always being in competition with one another. If a woman is older and unmarried then the only thing she can do is move to the fringes of society and live there, plotting her revenge. So I wanted to reclaim the witch. I wanted to reclaim the mermaid as well but I actually think while writing it the witch is the most interesting and compelling character in the book. I wanted to explore other reasons why she has been ostracised.

For me, the reason she has been ostracised, is that she is a woman who inhabits and owns her sexuality. She’s also a proud and beautiful fat woman which I think is something that can be slightly looked down on in our society. She is also a woman who demands to live on her own terms. She doesn’t try to acquiesce to societal demands and that can often lead to being ostracised and having to live on the fringes of society. As she says in the book, the most important thing a woman can do is live true to herself.

Gaia comes to that knowledge throughout the story, which she ends in a position of strength even though she has lost and sacrificed a lot to get to that point.

Louise: I agree. This is probably the most hopeful, or the most empowering ending I have had out of all of my novels, particularly my YA novels. I think it’s interesting when you look at the story again. When I was preparing to write the book, I read and re-read the fairytale again and again. I listened to it over and over again, while I was at the gym, while I was in the car. So within a few weeks I could practically recite the whole thing verbatim. When you look at the original fairytale, she’s quite a passive character, the act of going to the sea witch is the only time she really demonstrates any real sort of agency. So the reason I ended it where I did was that I didn’t want to see her as passive and I didn’t want to see her as a victim. I wanted to see her as just a girl, a girl who wanted to take up more space in the world and not less. A girl who wanted adventure and love.

I didn’t want to see her as passive and I didn’t want to see her as a victim. I wanted to see her as just a girl, a girl who wanted to take up more space in the world and not less. A girl who wanted adventure and love.

She wants the truth of things, she wants to find out what happened to her mother. And it sounds like such a cliché but women are so incredibly strong. I have friends who have had children and even that alone I think is just the ultimate act of strength, even that that women’s bodies can do that, it is just strength. And I have friends who have been victims of sexual violence, who have had horrible things happen to them, but just have resilience and strength. I think women are warriors and I really wanted to portray that in this book.

I think the patriarchy really wants to keep us weak and afraid because it makes us easier to manage and easier to control. But I think that absolutely all of us have a core of strength inside of us.

What was your writing process for The Surface Breaks?

Louise: I’d never started a book with the narrative framework already done. I knew that it was going to be a fairly straightforward re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairytale. I knew there were certain beats I had to hit: her fifteenth birthday, the shipwreck where she sees the prince for the first time, going to the sea witch and taking the potion, etc. So that made it a lot easier for me, when I sat down to start writing. I finished the first draft of Almost Love on a Thursday, I gave myself the Friday off because it was my birthday, and then I started on The Surface Breaks on the Monday. Because I had the basic narrative set out for me, I could just let my imagination go wild in between. It was really fun. I had a lot of fun with the names, I had fun with the character development, like with the sisters, trying to make them all different and give them their own personalities, independent of each other. I would have the characters very well fleshed out before I start any book, I feel like I know them really well.

I think the patriarchy really wants to keep us weak and afraid because it makes us easier to manage and easier to control. But I think that absolutely all have a core of strength inside of us.

Fairytales were originally told by women, by housewives by hearthside, and were then collected by men. The most famous fairytales had female protagonists. Do you feel like it’s time that we are reclaiming these fairytales with a feminist perspective?

Louise: I really agree with you, I do feel like it’s time. As you said, it’s interesting that fairytales would have been traditionally written and told by women about women and concerned themselves with issues that directly affected women at that time. May that be marriage or children or poverty. Then you see them appropriated by men and see them skewed to stick guidelines about how young women should behave. And it’s interesting that these stories are so much a part of our cultural consciousness. Most children will have been given a book of fairytales at some point, so these stories are very, very familiar. As an author and as a feminist, as you get older, you start to really look at the stories you were told as a child and see how damaging some of the messages in those could be and wonder about the affect that they had on you.

For me there is a sense of responsibility of wanting to reclaim the story and give it a more satisfying but also an ideologically sound twist to it

So for me there is a sense of responsibility of wanting to reclaim the story and give it a more satisfying but also a ideologically sound twist to it, so that any young woman who would read my version of The Little Mermaid would not be left feeling that their prettiness, or their beauty is their only ticket to success. That there are so much more important aspects of being a woman and being yourself.

Sometimes when I say to people I’m writing a feminist version of The Little Mermaid, they say back to me, ‘Oh for god’s sake, political correctness gone wrong, what was wrong with the original?’ But it just feels a little short sighted, I mean children are like sponges, and saying that they don’t understand or that they can’t absorb the messages in these stories is really reductive. The problem is is that they can. Particularly for little girls, when the only role models they see in popular culture or in books is the perfect princess figure. It’s a very heteronormative story. Even if you look at Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty, there is the idea that you have to wait for a man to rescue you, or wait until you fall in love in order to be happy or in order for your life to begin.

It’s important to look at these stories a different way, these stories that have been with us for so long. Given #MeToo and #TimesUp it really feels like the right time for these stories to be told and given a new lease of life.

Louise: I totally agree. In the last year with the #MeToo movement when women are speaking out, now more than ever a story of a woman who gives up her voice and allows herself to be silenced, that has to be reclaimed. I think it’s so relevant and so important. Because so many women, we have been silenced, our voices have been quietened and it has just come to a time where we’re just so unwilling to accept that anymore. We’re speaking up, we’re speaking out. And we’re raising our voices, demanding that we be heard, and believing that we deserve to be heard and our stories deserve to be shared.

With Gaia, she has so much regret over the fact that she has given up her voice. And I think she comes to realise as the story unfolds that her voice was one of the most important attributes that she had, and one of the most important tools that she had. I think that that’s something that is really important for her and other young women.

Best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?

Louise: Other people’s opinions of you are none of your business.

Other people’s opinions of you are none of your business.

The Surface Breaks by Louise O’Neill is available now in all good bookshops

Illustration designed by Freepik. Photograph by Anna Groniecka.

Finding her voice – an interview with Louise O’Neill In anticipation of the release of Louise O'Neill's feminist retelling of The Little Mermaid, The Surface Breaks, we spoke to Louise about re-inventing fairytales, feminism, and the importance of owning your voice.

#almost love #asking for it #author #fairytale #feminist little mermaid #feminist retelling #feminist writing #Interview #louise o&039;neill #mermaid #the little mermaid #the patriarchy #the surface breaks

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roughribo · 6 months ago

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Wow, did not anticipate the level of engagement this got when I went to bed last night. @amysubmits hits the nail on the head as for how these ideas can be played with.

Most misogyny/patriarchy kink like what I mentioned in the original post that I've been involved in has 3 things: people who like playing around with the concept of "traditional" gender roles, play is done over a temporary timeframe, and the sub is actually free to provide critique, dissent, question things, use safewords, etc even if the language used during play purports otherwise.

It usually involves collaboration to get to that sweet spot where a dom and sub are enjoying that flavor of degradation and nothing needs to be questioned, but that's also a reflection of learning one's partner and having built up trust.

So one night a couple decide to have a scene where the woman is supposed to play the role of the meek submissive housewife who doesn't question their husband and the man plays the role of authoritarian husband. He has her make dinner and complains that one bite of the food is dry so he spanks her at the table, corrects her tone, fondles her during casual conversation, etc, until eventually sexual shenanigans ensue because it's intended to be a misogynistic roleplay premise to have sex or other play, not an actual abusive environment. (Disclaimer: I'd never insult my partner's cooking even if it's a scene, sorry honey for using that as an example, it's just an example!)

This plays around with the idea of absolutes like Amy said and also the trope of the authoritarian husband unhappy with his meal and things may be said that are purely for the aesthetics of the scene like "don't you ever question me" or other sexist language while still having safewords present. It's also just a flavor of degradation some enjoy engaging in. Maybe it's a way to process and disarm the society we live in and some of the bad things in it, who knows.

Abuse is never kink, hard agree. Sometimes people play with the aesthetics of misogynistic behavior and patriarchal beliefs and it's also fine to want traditional gender roles and their aesthetics in your dynamic but it should never erase communication, agency, and autonomy like I see some of these blogs promote. But I also understand how it can be fun to say "don't question your husband" or make lists detailing how to be a "good wife" in the right dynamic.

So I worry about the users who can't tell the difference between someone playing with these kinks because they're fun and an abuser who actually wants to strip rights away and isolate them because a lot of these blogs are roleplaying or only want to engage in promoting the aesthetic without promoting the core foundation of SSC or RACK-based BDSM underneath. A blog about tantric sex can be just about tantric sex without causing much of, if any harm, but a misogyny kink-based blog can't do that, because the underlying dangers are so much more severe and serious. The risk factor is huge.

As someone who likes to play with miso/patriarchy kink on occasion, the lack of labeling or tagging posts with those blogs has been something on my mind for a while that I think is harmful because it lets abusers hide in plain sight and misleads younger/inexperienced subs and that needs addressed. It's a similar issue to abusive hypno tops in the hypnokink community as well, but they do a better job of self-policing in my experience. But anyways, I'll stop mansplaining.

Misogyny kink lovers, you've got to start labeling your blogs better and not tolerating those who don't.

Seeing posts in the bdsm community like "Never question your husband because it's distrustful and damages his position as a man" on blogs where the ethics seem blurred or consent dubious always has me on edge. How is one supposed to know whether this is a post about consensual play within a relationship or an abuser finding a space where he feels normal saying things like that?

To those of us who are experienced, posts like these don't come across as misogyny or patriarchy kink when your blog makes no effort to clarify your stance on people's rights, instead they come across as exploitation hiding behind the guise of bdsm.

And for those less experienced in this kind of kink, the blogs of predators and the blogs of respectable individuals can look near identical. It's important to make sure it's perfectly clear what your blog is about so noobies and incels don't get the wrong idea.

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beowulfs-booty-call · 7 years ago

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SG Headcanons? SG Headcanons: Beowulf Edition™

Beowulf is stated to be very patriotic in his voice lines and Parasoul references his work “with” them, before rudely telling him to retire if she wins against him. This means that she also knew about the plan with the Medici Mafia to fight a drugged Grendel and win against him for the sake of the war against foreigners / the Skullgirls. However, this may also mean Beowulf participated in the war or had some sort of encounter with the royal family, if not being the entertainment for them in some manner. I personally think King Renoir oversaw his match against Grendel and made sure to work the deal so as to work up the favor for the canopy kingdom.

Beowulf also likes to drink Chamomile tea after first killing Grendel, it was offered to him as a way to sleep, and as such, it helped get over the restless nights where all he could sometimes do was realize… He may have actually killed a friend. I wanna think that there is some idea that he’s killed Grendel, but he’s repressed it into the psyche he plays off as Beowulf™

There’s been times Beowulf sits on the couch just to hope he can relax, but all he does is sit in his robe, boxers and tank top and just idles. His mind runs a whole bunch and he’s distracted with the idea of “What’s his purpose? What’s his use? What really is Beowulf?”

I actually project myself through Beowulf, lot like other characters such as Terra Branford or Eriko Kirishima, but I like to believe that Beowulf actually took his name up instead of being born with it. If not, he went with “Just Beowulf” instead because he’s a simple guy. That’s all he needs.

He’s also a really hard worker, but, he’s prone to sometimes over doing it AKA training every day with his weights or the gym because it’s been mentally drilled into him. If he wanted to be the best, he HAD to be the best. It’s one of the reasons he drinks Chamomile tea often: to relax and let things take place. At 37 years old, he was prone to feeling like he wouldn’t be able to finish every goal he wanted until he was “old”. He understands a bit better now that his accomplishments will last at the end of his storyline.

In the TV show Annie and Beowulf run, Beowulf is the superhero to the kids of New Meridian, while also taking on many new opponents in the ringside. He’s much more a WWE styled wrestler in that he’s back to being a celeb now, but still has his humble beginnings. He also has dated on and off again, but, even in the show he makes empty compliments / receives them from both genders. “What a strong man…” “Ah, thank you sir! Wulfman eats 8 dozen eggs every mornin’ just for trainin’!” “Oh… If only that amazing, handsome Captain Wulf was here…!” “Never fear, the Wulf is here! And… He’s free any time on Friday 8pm at Yu-Wan’s!”

Every morning he wakes up and does 125 squats, 200 pec decks, 225 crunches…

COMFORT CLOTHES EVERY DAY THIS MAN ONLY WEARS HIS BOXERS AND TANK TOPS OR SWEATS HE’S STILL A COLLEGE STUDENT.

When “incognito”, he just wears sunglasses and a baseball cap. Smooth.

Beowulf has also been a little on the chubby side as a kid, but mainly from eating well from backhome. I like to think he was born in the Canopian kingdom, but just has blood in other places he just hasn’t known or seen yet. It would make sense to the Geatish Trepak or Norse / Viking inspired moves to the original Beowulf anyhow. He came to the Canopy Kingdom fresh out the humble life and immediately found himself attracted to the rough and tumble before being let into the wrestling federation to prove his skills.

I like to think either he got his pelt from a Wolf he grew up with that later died peacefully, or, he hunted when he was younger before seeing a wolf die at the end of the hunt. No use for wolf meat where he came from, and in anger at the loss of life, he skinned the wolf for its pelt and vowed to take its place instead. He’s vehement of animal rights, but also tries his best to be open to nature despite hunting as his ideology is to live off the land with just what he needs.

I wanna also say that where Beo grew up in may have a cultural practice where the people take the pelts of animals they use to represent themselves. Bears for patriarchs/matriarchs, weasels / rats for children, otters for teens, and so on so forth. The wolf pelt was taboo and he later used it in rebellion to what he saw in it. Another idea is that the wrestling federation also has animal gimmicks as a way of bringing in the crowd Ala “The man from outta nowhere / Down under.”

Actually has a secret pen name and writes critiques about Operas / musicals and has an appreciation for Jazz as well as the late Contiello family. He has been known to show up, decked out, and seat himself in the best seat, only to scream at the singers / actors with critiques. “JEEZ, MARIA, CAN YOU SING ANY LOWER? I CAN’T HEAR YOU FROM THE BALCONY.” “HEY SKULLBETH, DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND BREAK A LEG WITH THAT CLASS ACT.” “YOU CALL THAT AN ARIA, I CALL THAT DIAR–” Of course no one expects this, so, the surprise comes in the form of a well made, thought out essay based on the finer points of the actions and tribulations the actors did or sang. He’s also a stickler for analysis!

The Hurting was actually a parting gift from the local wrestling federation: Just like Hrunting was given to him by Unferth, The Hurting was given to Beowulf by his old sleazy manager where ironically, hasn’t proven unuseful to this day

Immediately and utterly distracted by dogs, he can’t help it. He’s consumed with love over them and would postpone a battle just to pet one.

Unlike the public opinion, he has a master’s degree in English as well as Sociology, though, he’s not one to flex the brain muscles because he has to maintain the psyche of a warrior half the time. This is why he always whispers when fighting with people, while also pretending wrestling is “real” and “isnt”, he’s more focused on maintaining character

Grendel can in fact hear everything Beowulf is saying pre-Marie death, however, all he hears is Beowulf’s fighting quotes: “RUNNIN’ WILD, ALL’S CHAIR, TAKE A LOAD OFF!” (I have a comic planned for this lol)

Grendel’s arm is partially sentient, though he can hear and act, he still gets where his “friend” is coming from time to time.

The Hurting gets reupholstered time to time, lots of fashion choices to be really honest, too little time to decide.

Unironically, Beowulf actually digs wearing skimpy clothes / speedos when weather permitting / in the mood, however… He doesn’t understand the social aspects of one, so, one he ran into the ring in a regular wrestling speedo and well… Let’s just say there’s a reason the beta drew that ONLY.

Went to college with Adam Kapowski, though, he mainly spoke to him over complaining about his physical education courses / wrestling club “Look, man, I got this cute professor but like, he doesn’t know jack shit over suplexing. Why? BECAUSE EVEN VICTORIA CAN SUPLEX ME BETTER THAN HE CAN”

Has once met Ms. Victoria during his offseason time when retired and she thought he was a villain when he applied to be a librarian, however, when she shows up as D. Violet, and scopes him out “closing” up, she finds him… Bench pressing book cases before she hurries back, still very concerned over the fact that she has to share her students with a supposed gigan wrestler.

Children flock to him for advice and training, and he loves it. When working as a librarian, he would help tutoring or cheer on students, as well as the whacky prank of stealing the janitor’s mop and mobile and would ride it down the halls with the kids.

When time came to retire out of retirement, the kids came together and made him a botched card thanking him for all he did. Later, he would return to the ring and dedicate his first match to those very kids, and Ms. Victoria, who all sat in the front seats to the match, each with free Wulf™ merch.

Victoria respects him after this, though, she believes he may just be the silliest warrior to show up. D.Violet though has an unrequited crush on him. I’m tickled to fathom they maybe get married, but Beo isn’t one for really being tied down as he is now.

I’m biased to saying he marries me, but hey, that’s not what this post is about: Relationship wise, Beo is fine with no ring, but he’s not much for the ball and chain. He likes to build things up slow and steady, and extremely affectionate due to not receiving that love as much before.

Despite his exterior, his chest hair is like, soft af. Arm hair though isn’t easy and lemme tell you, dude is hairy everywhere. So, he makes it a point to not care and just trim the beard here and there. Also made a very bad commercial about hair loss and body hair despite the fact he doesn’t have those issues.

His hair is super curly so he just brushes it to the side. That’s it. That’s the goddamn cowlick hair cut we all love

Is the only one to know Annie’s true self, but pretends not to for the sake of being another “dumb mortal”. He implies he knows Annie isn’t the same Annie as “before”, but only to draw her ire. At the end of the story line, though, Annie and him grow closer enough that he admits his knowledge and Annie becomes his wingman and bro.

And I mean bro as in, homegirl screens all would be dates / gf / bf and also manages to make time to meet at their favorite local diner. She hates the amount of hate he gets time to time for being “basic” but she herself is your run of the mill “anime magical girl”. Annie chalks it up to the fact no one cares about talent anymore, but Beowulf still believes Annie has some talent left in her, despite her not seeing it. It’s one of those key reasons she’s very big on his wellbeing: He trusts and believes in her when not many people do. They just believe in the girl of the stars, not Annie.

Annie likes to WHUMP her face on him when embarrassed, and many a time people have walked into his chest or abs because he’s 6��7″ HE’S A FUCKING GIANT. He doesn’t mind it, in fact, he’s flattered by it on the inside ‘cuz he’s a smug Wulf.

Annie, after about 2 weeks being his best friend, cracks many raunchy jokes with him, though, he also brags about certain things he knows she probably won’t experience to her dismay. “Man, Annie, I would have really taken you out to the bar, but oh, I forgot, they don’t serve children!” “Wulf, you’re lucky a 12 year old can’t stab a middle aged man.” “Excuse me princess, would you like another helping of Dinosaur nuggets and fries?”

Tired Wulf Boi Curls Up and Sleps

Cried because he saw those ASPCA commercials

Would fuck a werewolf. Would fuck a monster for the ride of his life. Would also have the gas running and the car ready in case you need the body hid. He’s a ride or die sort of dude, he makes it known when you wake him up too early without context.

“Oh, gosh, golly, gee” is something he copies from Annie time to time

Struggles also, not to curse around her. Dick-tionary, Ass-ets, Douche-Nozzler the gobbledygook. All Annie™ words.

Broke a laptop just by touching it, can now hold a toaster in his hands.

Would not get the reality of wearing a collar. “Wow, you must have a nice do–”

Is still waking up each morning ready to find and craft his purpose in life. He’s used to it not knowing, but he’s clearing his head so far

#whoo!#that's it for now peeps!#beowulf #beowulf skullgirls #skullgirls #my writing #my headcanons #sg headcanons #Skullgirls headcanons

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graciecatfamilyband · 7 years ago

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To the reviewer of Just A Little of that Human Touch on AO3 who wrote:

YES YES YES to your portrayal of Alderaan as a liberal feminist society with sex education and Leia being a crusader of that! THIS feels real. THIS feels like the kind of society Breha Organa and Leia by extension would have cultivated.

I already thanked you for your review, but I wanted to add (and the comment box on AO3 didn’t feel like it was the right place to do so)-

A lot of time we fanfic authors borrow from Earth and its history as we conceptualize societies in the GFFA. There's a lot of fun royal customs that people like to explore in relation to Alderaan. A lot of us grew up reading about the British monarchy and other European monarchies (what can I say, a lot of us are nerds! Raise your hands if you read those Royal Diaries books growing up? Other historical fiction dealing with this stuff? How many we got in the house?), and that seems to have inspired a lot of Alderaanian customs in fic, which is cool!

Personally I'm interested in how Alderaan as a matriarchal planet with at least a traditionally female power structure (although I like headcanons that Alderaan moved long ago towards a real gender equality model rather than actually denying men opportunities, including to rule!) might differ from a lot of the patriarchal monarchies in our Western history. Virginity and female-centered sexual purity focus makes a lot more sense when the heir of the throne needs to be related to the King (and the heir of any given family needs to be related to the father); much less so when traditionally the heir needs to be related to the Queen (and the heir of any given family related to the mother- if Alderaan even has such a concept of family heirs!). And then of course with Leia's open adoption (in the sense that the people know about it- and I think they must because she is not the same ethnicity as her parents, although I've seen some takes on it where its like an open/fake secret that work well), that seems to indicate modern-day Alderaan may not give an F about biological lineage anyway. Which I think also says some things about the society and how it views sex and reproduction.

That, combined with our knowledge of Alderaan as a place that puts such a high degree of value on education (and a good sexual education is an important part of ensuring people have access to all those other kinds of higher education, as babies too early really can make that so much harder) as well as the value the society places on art and, in my head canon at least, the well-being of children (parents having children too early is also associated with very poor outcomes for children; parents having unstable or abusive relationships also is associated with very poor outcomes for children)- well, it just makes sense to me that Alderaan would care deeply about good sexual education that involves, as Leia said, not just contraception but things like healthy relationship skills. Important elements that are too often left out of a discussion of practices that take place in the context of relationships!

So yes, I agree that this approach seems to fit Bail and Breha’s personalities well (and Leia’s for that matter!), but also think that this is the kind of society that likely shaped those personalities, you know?

And of course Leia never shies away from pushing envelopes galaxy-wide, and supporting such an organization would (hopefully- although fascist regimes get weird about this sort of thing!) be a way for her to advocate for something she believes in that is valuable, and, while pushing the envelope, actually do-able (as opposed to openly advocating for overthrowing the Empire).

I received an anon message about how I was ruining Star Wars and Star Wars fanfiction with my naked sociopolitical agenda, and how its absurd to apply Earth morality to Star Wars in- any? such a?- way. At the time I didn’t want to post it, but it seems relevant to mention here. Honestly, what “hurts”- other than the fact that someone felt the need to go out of their way to share this opinion with me without signing their name- is that it implies I have no “legitimate” thought process behind this choice for the story. I believe that I have sound reasons why I think Alderaan was this way. Sure, it’s in line with my own points of view- but that’s in part because I think Alderaan is intended by George Lucas to be a beacon of democratic values under a repressive regime, and a symbol of all that is nurturing in the Galaxy, and to me that fits with these ideas. Other people may disagree with my interpretation of Alderaan, as well as how democratic values and a value placed on life would translate into sexual mores. Other people do disagree, and write it differently! That’s fine. But I don’t feel that I’m drawing it out of nowhere. And as usual, this is only a critique when the Earth morality we’re drawing from is “progressive”- no one feels the need to go into the inbox of authors who wrIte about Alderaanian courtiers planning to check Leia’s hymen before her wedding night to tell them not to project specific Earth cultural practices onto the GFFA. Their incorporation of Earth history is seen as well thought-out, valuable, and detailed world-building; mine is considered a cheap trick.

And no one should go bother those writers either! Their stories have something to offer, just as I believe mine does. (And I know fanfiction is free, amateur authors, blah blah blah- but honestly, fanfiction being free isn’t the primary reason to behave supportively and decently toward people who make themselves available on the internet. Sure, you can post a negative review of Claudia Gray’s books on your own blog- and sure, you really should not do that with fanfiction, because its unnecessarily mean for people who hare having fun in their free time and doing what’s meaningful to them- but its still rude to go to Claudia Gray directly and tell her she’s ruining Han and Leia, or Star Wars, or how much you hated her stuff! Direct-to-author contact should always be polite, whatever the context.) I believe strongly that everyone should be able to bring whats interesting and meaningful to them to the stories they want to tell in fanfiction, and I personally think there should be room for both approaches!

From my perspective, there has been a lot of handwringing lately about fanfic being ruined by “overly political” agendas and about authors (mis?)using Han and Leia to work out “ideas about female empowerment.” (Although perhaps that perspective is colored by the anon message!) I’d be lying if I said that didn’t dull my enthusiasm about writing Han and Leia, period- no matter how light or fluffy or smutty or “divorced from real-life”. Because even if my past pieces are not considered to fall into that category, that atmosphere makes me feel stifled, like I’m no longer writing for me but like I’m writing to prove that I am still valuable in this community by coloring in the right lines. So while the entire bones of the story were written in August, as I “colored it in”, it did come to include more sociopolitical elements than I originally conceived of it having. I only did so in ways, however, that I felt enhanced the human story at the core, rather than took away from it. They came to me naturally, organically, as the story unfolded, rather than me sitting back and trying to find places to jam them in. Another kind reviewer whose words are etched in my heart noted that “it's all the details that really make it, that tell the story,” and while she was referring to things like body language, I like to think that these details were no less a part of that, and added to rather than drew from the story. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have included them. People may of disagree about whether or not I succeeded, and its possible that my own skill deficit was part of that! But, while I may have failed, I don’t like the idea that they couldn’t have been included in such a story in a way that was relevant.

I do affectionately like to think of this- even if I am being somewhat tongue-in-cheek/ironic- as my “political screed” fic, because a) I recognized upfront that I was powerless to stop it from being taken that way, even if I took out every possibly “political” element, simply because it involved Leia having previous partners; b) it’s as “political” as I think I’m capable of getting, which is to say (to me)- not very! its a story about the characters above everything, so it gave me a chuckle to call it political; c) it was a way to prepare myself for a comment like the one I received, which I thought was probably inevitable; and d) it was my way of proving to myself that I did not need to live in fear of writing a “wrong” fic and being tossed out on my ass. I can continue to write whatever is meaningful to me and take whatever response I get. If many people don't want to read it but are still down to read my other stuff, that’s great! If some people don’t want a voice like mine around at all, its better that I know that now rather than worrying about it for the next eight months before finally gathering the courage to publish a prompt I promised to write for a friend, and having my heart broken all over again after spending a lot of time and energy mending it.

And honestly, the overall response has just been so heartening. So many people have recognized it as fundamentally a story about Han and Leia connecting with each other and it just warms me to my toes to hear that it resonated. The recipient who it was for was thrilled to see some of her own headcanons included too, so I feel like I’ve done my job and gained a meaningful writing experience (that prompt- “and we never talked after that”- was really hard to right a nice, hopeful Han/Leia story for!).

So thanks, dear reviewer(s), and I hope I added something interesting to your comments about Alderaan! 💚💙💚💙

#alderaan #alderaanian culture #alderaanian headcanons #meta?#fic meta?#virginity discourse (goddess help us)#???#my fic Just a Little of that Human Touch #longpost yikes #sorry

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decadesofhorror-blog · 8 years ago

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Night of the Living Dead (1968)

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” -W.B. Yeats

The zombie that we know today, the decaying, slow-walking monster who wants to feast on our brains, is a relatively new version of the zombie. When zombies first made their way onto American movie screens, they weren’t travelling in cannibalistic hordes; they were mindless, subservient slaves. Their origins can be traced back to the American occupation of Haiti [1915 – 1934], where many of the marines stationed in Haiti would return to the United States with sensationalist accounts of Haitian voodoo practices — most notably the folkloric tradition of raising the dead into personal slaves by a sorcerer or bokor.

While Americans brought back a [misappropriated] idea of the zombie, it nevertheless struck a chord with depression-era society. The zombie is a creature that is consistently associated with labour; the zombie’s labour is its sole purpose as they are brought back from the dead as slaves dead to toil endlessly in fields and factories. The surplus of labour that encompassed the great-depression no doubt had striking similarities to the idea of a mindless zombie, performing alienating labour at the hands of wealthy landowners.

The first film to solidify this image was White Zombie (1932), starring Bela Lugosi as the antagonist Murder Legendre, a wealthy Haitian factory owner who raises the dead to slave at his sugar cane factory. The scene in which the protagonist first visits the factory illustrates, in a depressing parable, the physical embodiment of assembly lines of workers — the zombies are no more than mindless cogs performing monotonous labour. The camera lingers for several minutes in a long take on this scene, capturing its dreariness and eerie familiarity.

“They work faithfully,” says a stoic Lugosi. “And they do not worry about long hours.” This echoes the sentiments of the depression-era bosses who took advantage of the economic crisis to bind desperate unemployed people to poor working conditions and long hours. And at this time, labour struggles were intensifying alongside rapidly expanding union membership in an attempt to fight this phenomenon.

The fate of the zombie is a stolen consciousness and livelihood, or spiritual connection to their labour, by another (the bosses/voodoo masters). As Peter Dendle says, zombification is the logical conclusion of human reductionism; it is to reduce a person to a body, to reduce behavior to basic motor functions and to reduce social utility to raw labour. It is the displacement of one’s right to experience life, spirit, passion, autonomy, and creativity for another person’s exploitative gain.

During the ‘30s and ‘40s, the zombie also served as a parable for the plight of women in patriarchal society. Zombie movies consistently depicted undead, zombified women who were subservient to a domineering male [I Walked with a Zombie, 1943]

In the ‘50s, zombies are taken away from “exotic” landscapes and find a home in middle class America. The zombies are mindless victims of an unseen external force that forces everyday people to turn on each other [Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956]. Many readings of these films suggest a clear relationship to the looming threat of a communist invasion, essentially rendering American individualism into a mindless hoard of red zombies. But it also marks the first time that the zombies became a threat to American society, assuming their role as the dangerous “other.” This is the continued essence of the zombie to this day.

Zombies are a significant symbol in popular culture. As cultural objects, they reveal and reflect their social context through their position as the other. Anything “otherized”— feared, marginalized, or repressed—will find its way into the construction of zombies. Zombies are a barometer of which we can use to observe the collective anxieties and fears of any period or society.

This brings us to Romero’s zombie in Night of the Living Dead, the film that transformed zombies into cannibalistic ghouls that travel in hordes and turn innocent people into their kind.

Romero shot Night of the Living Dead on a small budget with the cheapest film possible: black and white 33m film. The idea came from a short story Romero wrote in college called “Anubis,” which he called an “allegory about what happens when a new society—in this case hordes of the living dead hungry for human flesh—replaces the old order.” Another economical factor was the decision to film at an abandoned farm house in Evans City, Pennsylvania.

Over two hundred and fifty extras were cast as zombies; they used chocolate Bosco syrup for blood and mortician’s wax for the decaying flesh wounds on the zombies. One of the extras owned a meat shop, and he gave Romero pounds of meat and innards to use as human guts. The scenes where the zombies feed on human flesh look so realistic because the extras were actually eating animal innards.

Romero’s zombies can be read in many ways, but the focus of the film has much more to do with how living humans react to a society on the verge of collapse. Its temporal urgency has both a narrative function and a psychological function; it takes place in the span of one day, giving it a true-to-life feel and a terrifying warning of just how quickly we can be engulfed by disaster. Romero’s conception of a contagious, cannibalistic zombie horde uniquely manifests modern apprehensions about the horrors of the Vietnam War, the struggles of the civil rights movement, and a questioning of patriotic American exceptionalism. The first scene at the graveyard has a fluttering American flag in the foreground, which represents the meaningless of patriotism as a moral compass at a time of social decay.

Only two minutes into the film, Romero introduces audiences to the new American zombie. Almost immediately after the infamous line: “they’re coming to get you Barbara,” a lone zombie appears in the graveyard and kills the protagonist Barbara’s brother Johnny. As we find out with this swift, senseless killing, the zombies cannot be reasoned with or dissuaded by logical discourse. The rationalized, civilized “morals” of America are not enough to suppress a full blown epidemic.

Just as the early enslaved zombie resonated with recession-era America, the infected decaying zombie struck a chord with Vietnam-era America. Graphic images of death and decay by photojournalists were surfacing, and the senselessness of war was stirring anger and hopelessness. Romero suggests the destruction of America is brought on by its own ruthless ventures, and it cannot be sustained by its faulty moralizing and patriotism. The dog eat dog nature of survival apocalypse is not a dismal diagnoses of human nature, but a forecast of how Americans will be left scrambling to rationalize their own survival as their moral code is rendered useless.

Romero is justifiably pessimistic in his vision of America under crisis. He suggests, and rightly so, that on the verge of collapse, the lack of solidarity caused by an alienating system rife with racism and misogyny is the ultimate damnation of humankind.

In 1964, after Kennedy was shot, president Lyndon B. Johnson declared that he would make the United Sates into a “great society,” where racial injustice and poverty had no place. But the civil rights act and the voting rights act did little to erase racism and poverty, and the Vietnam War raged on, plucking working-class blacks and whites from their communities and sending them off to die. Mass dissatisfaction — and the realization that “the great society” was nothing more than an empty echo — gave way to the radical anti-war movements and the black power movements. Still, Americans were divided on how to fix the crises their country was facing. What they did know, however, was that something was horrifically wrong.

If only the living could work together, it seems that the zombies would be easy to control. But the living can’t work together, Romero suggests. In Bowling Alone (a book I will frequently mention in my blogs), Robert Putnam notes that the proportion of Americans saying that most people can be trusted fell by more than a third between the 60s and the 90s. This was also a time when the nuclear family was turning inwards to an isolated unit preoccupied with post-war consumption.

By 1965, a majority of Americans made their homes in suburbs rather than cities. And through their greater access to home mortgages, credit, and tax advantages, men benefitted over women, whites over blacks, and middle-class Americans over working-class ones. White Americans more easily qualified for mortgages through discriminatory banking institutions, and more readily found suburban houses to buy than African Americans could.

As a result, a metropolitan landscape emerged where whole communities were increasingly being stratified along class and racial lines, while simultaneously, mass consumption was becoming commonplace in American society. Business leaders, the government, and advertisements and mass media were eager to convince Americans that mass consumption was not a personal indulgence, but a civic responsibility that was tied to standard of living.

In Night of the Living Dead, the house is no longer a home, but a site of entrapment and a prison—objects like the radio are no longer for entertainment, they are for survival. Doors, a symbolic device of many Hollywood films, are used as barricades on the windows. And just as objects are scrutinized for their utility (which can be read as a critique of the rising consumerism of post-war America) humans are reduced to their functionality and self-interest.

Gender roles and the subservience of women seems to only doom the people in the house even further. Barbara is reduced to a docile couch-ridden mute, and Helen Cooper has little say in her husband’s destructive decisions. Barbara’s clear lack of distrust for Ben (illustrated in the scene where she stares ambiguously at the knife) is also a hindrance on their mutual survival.

Romero also takes a jab at the insular nuclear family as an institution that cannot survive, and he illustrates this with the scene in which the young daughter eats her parents (Harry and Helen Cooper). In most horror films, the family is usually the prevailing site of the restoration of order, but Romero blatantly rejects the bourgeois notion of family as a site of mutual respect and meaningful existence.

And through the deaths of Barbara and her brother Johnny, we learn that being altruistic and good offers little redemption. Both characters die in their attempts to help another person. Individual acts of goodness, as well-meaning as possible, do little to save humanity. The character Ben (not quite Hollywood’s idea of “the good black man”) despite his noble actions, still meets his demise at the refusal of the white men to cooperate with him. In the scene where Ben first meets Harry Cooper, a middle-aged white man who is hiding his family in the cellar, Ben and Cooper argue over whether the cellar is the safest place in the house. Cooper insists the cellar is the safest place, while Ben argues that it is a death trap. The two men never reach a consensus, and this tension reflects the very real lack of consensus with Americans on how to address the political and economic crises of the ‘60s. A young black man, who simply wants to survive a crisis, arguing with an older white man is a perfect cinematic snapshot of racial tensions in the United States. The tension eventually blows up when Ben shoots Cooper.

When Ben recounts his first encounter with the zombies, the manner in which he reminisces about the situation evokes a pain that is clearly very real with the actor Duane Jones, and can draw a parable to the racist mob riots and even the violent police reaction to anti-war riots and civil rights riots of the ‘60s—especially the Watts riot in 1965, where 34 people were killed after the California National Guard was called in to quell the riots.

The emotional reminiscence of Ben casts a solemn mood and leaves room for reflection of the horrific state of American society. Romero prompts audiences to think of how America can continue to exist as it is, especially during wartime as it campaigns as the champion of the free world. The characters on screen undoubtedly feel this sense of doom.

Jones’ performance as Ben quickly draws in the audience’s sympathy. The look on Ben’s face immediately after he shoots Cooper quickly changes from satisfaction to pained. This self-realization encapsulates the major theme—the zombies are not the enemy; rather, the people have become their own enemies. With a lack of solidarity, there is no plausible way for humanity to survive the crisis. In the end, when Ben emerges from the dark cellar as the lone survivor, he is shot point blank by a posse of gun-toting vigilante rednecks. Following Ben’s death is a montage of still frames of Ben’s body being dragged by meat hooks into a pile of bodies that are light on fire—a scene reminiscent of the lynchings and racist violence of the Jim Crow era.

By this point, it is clear who the real monsters are. Unlike most horror films, there is no return to order. Order was disrupted almost immediately at the beginning of the film, and the audience does not get to see that same sense of order returned. On a superficial level, order is restored by the men who shoot and kill Ben, but the audience knows that this order has been achieved at the cost of an innocent man’s life.

The return to order in apocalyptic horror films, or any horror film, suggests a major obsession with the need to be constantly reassured about the strength of the status quo. For a while, horror films in the ‘40s and ‘50s had to have an ending that indicated a restoration of order. But a progressive director can suggest the fragility of the status quo. And this is exactly what Romero does.

#night of the living dead #1968 #george a. romero

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kristallioness · 8 years ago

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"North and South: Part Two" - a review

My copy of "North and South: Part Two" arrived last week and I reread it. Now, I'm gonna write down my thoughts and opinion as a contrast to some of the critique I've already seen.

First off, I'd like to point out that I've already established how I feel about Sokka and Katara considering Malina as their stepmother dad's new girlfriend, Aang and Katara naming their daughter Kya, as well as Hakoda and Katara's heartfelt conversation over here (I'm forever glad I managed to see this before the rest because I loved it so much and could analyze it to pieces without focusing on the mess that goes down later). Plus, a few other things here and in the description of this mournful drawing.

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Let me start with the way Katara acts towards Malina. Since they met, Katara has felt offended by Malina and the way she (unintentionally) insults her culture. Katara comes from a culture that's always had a rather simple, freer, more gender-equal lifestyle, nothing fancy, strict or patriarchal like in the north. Because of this, she and the southerners as a whole are considered to be lower class, even less competent or intelligent, if you will. Hence the idea that they might not be ready to handle the extracting and shipping of the oil that rightfully belongs to them (as it's found under their land). Offering to build a fancy palace, saying the taste of their food is "off", that their tribe needs lifting up, leaving the impression that they're just stupid snow rats who can be easily manipulated or used - I for one can clearly see why Katara is offended and damn right she should be (I'm most likely gonna protect her a lot in this discussion, so be prepared).

After her conversation with her dad, Katara feels a bit more reassured that Malina truly is trying to help them. It's very important that it was her father who helped her come to this point. Hakoda has known Malina for a longer period of time, so it's logical that Katara eventually believes him when he comforts her that she's not up to anything nefarious. I mean.. it's Hakoda and Katara, father and daughter - she trusts her father, there's no doubt about that. And he certainly helped along by letting her see things from his point of view, plus making the connection with how she feels about Aang was lovely.

So Katara lightens up and sort of understands that Malina is still learning their ways, that maybe she shouldn't be so hostile towards her and instead give her a chance (or much rather, the benefit of a doubt - I'll come back to this soon). But just then, Malina reveals what their initial plans were. Here's something that's worth noting - Katara wouldn't have jumped up on that stage to protect Malina (and Maliq) if there hadn't been a tiny part of her that still believed she was telling the truth and didn't want any harm to the southerners. Yes, Aang did say that they didn't deserve to die and hoped that Katara would go protect them while he dealt with the soldiers, which definitely was the main reason she slid to the rescue. But at that moment, I believe her feelings about Malina were so mixed due to the betrayal that she didn't realize this yet (and I hope she will in the third part).

Finally, I reach the part that has the most parallels to certain scenes, even episodes from the original series. Where have we seen the same events play out? When was the last time Katara used to hate somebody because he was their biggest enemy, then let her guard down when he sympathized with her, which ended up with him turning his back on her, her loved one (almost) getting killed and her having to heal them back to health (not to mention the emotional pain she had to live through)? That's right - with Zuko. When they were trapped in the Crystal Catacombs.

In the end, Katara is acting towards Malina just like she acted towards Zuko, justifiably. Whenever she lets someone she doesn't completely trust too close, the people she loves almost get killed or hurt as a result because that person ends up betraying her. Katara is vicious and overprotective by claiming that Malina doesn't deserve to say goodbye to her dad. Don't tell me I'm the only one who doesn't blame her. I wouldn't want someone like that anywhere near my dad (or loved ones) either, especially after everything that's happened. This is an amazing parallel to the death threat she gave to Zuko after he'd joined their group. She's letting them know that she doesn't trust them and wants them nowhere near her family. This raises the question of how will Malina regain Katara's trust, which is one of the most intriguing aspects I hope to see getting a solution in the third part. Because Katara can hold a grudge.

While I was writing my opinion about Katara and Malina's relationship, I realized that Jet would actually be a rather good parallel besides Zuko, too. But since she didn't dislike him at first and everything else went pretty much in a similar pattern, I chose to leave him out for now. Plus, Zuko and Malina's betrayals sort of go deeper.

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Moving on, I'm gonna speak about another one of my favourite parts - Aang and Katara's reunion. Starting with the impression like Aang's arrival seems to be too well timed. I don't believe this to be the case (because then we could say that things are too well timed throughout the series), even though it does give such an impression. During the events of "Smoke and Shadow", it took them a couple of days to solve the mystery. We should add the hours or days Aang needed to travel from Ba Sing Se to the Fire Nation capital, then to the Southern Water Tribe. It's a long journey, so it's highly likely that Aang would've made a pit stop on some island or in a village along the way. Sokka and Katara had to walk to the train station, take it to the Outer Wall, then reach the shores of the Earth Kingdom (probably on foot), find a boat that'd take them to the Southern Water Tribe (maybe even switch boats if it wasn't heading home directly) - all of which would've taken a few days too, plus the two days they actually managed to spend at home. I find that Aang's arrival at the Southern Water Tribe isn't as random as we'd think, it seems to be quite realistic.

Enough of that, it was just something that someone pointed out and it kind of irked me, so I wanted to present my arguments. Onto the sweetest part where my favourite young lovers reunite and hug each other. Let me just say - it was beautiful! I loved that Aang asked for permission to kiss her first. I've recently learned that it's such a sweet and polite thing to do, especially if you're not sure whether your partner is okay with it (something I've put to the back of my mind when I eventually have a boyfriend/ develop a crush on someone and am not sure whether he's okay with it/ knows about my feelings). And what's most important - when Katara said that maybe not now, Aang respected her choice and didn't kiss her. Also, they were holding hands practically the entire time and that was so adorable! I love the way this heartwarming scene ends, with the loving way Katara looks at her dad - I had the most beautiful father-daughter feels.. I still do (with every moment the two share tbh).

Let's continue with some other small tidbits I found to be rather lovely, starting with Sokka. I remember how I burst out laughing when he began riding and eventually crashed that forklift at Satoru's factory - his enthusiasm about the machine is so funny. Besides that, Sokka claiming Malina is his dad's new girlfriend had me with such a Jinora-like vibe, where she told the Equalists to stay away from her dad's ex-girlfriend. And speaking of Malina, I have to admit that she really is a beautiful woman. Also, did you notice Momo blushing after he finds a plush version of himself in the pile of prizes Toph's carrying and hugs it? So cute!

There's also a mysterious matter, namely what is up with those two little southern waterbender girls? They're from Katara's tribe, right? Pakku said they were hiding deep in the mainland, in a village that wasn't visible from the shores, which is probably why they survived throughout those hundred years of war (the Fire Nation didn't search for waterbenders so far away). I know I've heard that the small village where Katara and Sokka lived at the beginning of the series wasn't the only one in the South Pole.. but this is intriguing. Katara has always been the last southern waterbender, but this would mean that she isn't anymore (plus, her daughter Kya wouldn't be the only southern waterbender besides her many years later), which is unbelievable, yet great news. What I don't seem to understand is the reason why those two don't wanna share their waterbending with anyone else but themselves. Does it have something to do with the war and having to hide their abilities in order to protect their village (like Haru was forbidden to earthbend)? I'd really like to see an explanation for this and I'm hoping this subplot in the third part will end with Katara and Pakku teaching the little girls together while Aang observes them proudly (or joins them to teach, too), just like Katara watched him teach the air acolytes at the end of "The Promise".

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Onto more serious matters from now on, like the way Katara's worried why it'd be a good thing to have so many machines in every part of their lives. To understand this better and be aware of what I'm talking about, I specifically reread "The Rift" (and shed tears since I didn't even remember half of the story, which had one of the most bittersweet as well as beautiful plots) to see how everybody reacted there. I can see why, she reacted the same way - what if there's an accident with the oil rigs inside the factory and the machinery fails? How will that affect their environment, her home? They saw what'd happened to the river near Satoru's factory, Katara even supported Aang that they shouldn't have built the refinery there. To add to this, after there were three major earthquakes, each stronger than the last one, they witnessed what happened - one of those machines broke, a secret mine collapsed, with them getting trapped underneath it, and a lot of people suffered from various injuries. Katara's afraid that something similar might happen, which explains why she's unsure about all of this, because she's seen the negative effects.

Which brings me to an argument that I've seen and really bothers me - Katara is out of character. I totally have to disagree with this (considering everything I talked about before as well). Katara wasn't really excited like Sokka when Satoru gave them a tour around the Earthern Fire Refinery either. She's acting rather similarly to Aang (hence her flashback in the end of the first part) - this is her home that's been rebuilt (her sacred place). Nothing seems familiar to the round igloos and uneven paths between them like it used to be (in her dream) - it's in orderly fashion, angular, straight, more like the buildings in the Northern Water Tribe. This unfamiliarity is what bothers her - she'd like the image of her tribe to reflect what it used to look like, not how their sister tribe looks like. This doesn't feel like home to her, which is hard to accept, and that's the problem. I just don't get it, why does this seem so weird for some people? It's completely natural to feel this way.

One more thing to continue with the idea like Katara isn't quite herself here. She's never thought of nonbenders as not equal - this is true. There are several examples from the series to back this up, which helps make sense. When Sokka was downhearted because he felt like the regular guy in their group, it was Katara who comforted him because she knew very well that he was an irreplaceable asset to their team and capable of so much more as a nonbender. Katara was completely defenceless against Mai and Ty Lee three times during their battles. The point is that she's seen what nonbenders can do using their own special skills.

And now I reach Maliq, the boasting arrogant northerner, who can't see beyond his own innovative plans. He blatantly believes that the citizens of the Southern Water Tribe are a bunch of morons who don't know anything, not to mention how to live in a civilized way. Simple country folk, like Toph once joked.. Being a nonbender, he sort of has this need to prove himself - because he's more educated (having gone to Ba Sing Se University after all), he thinks he's smarter and better than the southerners and has the right to decide what to do with their resources, how to organize their life. But these are his greatest faults, which ultimately turn against him.

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Now I can talk about Gilak and his extremist views. First off, he accuses the northerners for hiding behind their snowy barriers to stay safe while the southerners had to sacrifice blood just to survive. Gilak is playing with our emotions, but it won't work on me (nor Katara). I can easily counter his accusation with a simple question - what were they supposed to do? Take a long risky trip down to the south, to the other side of the world, abandon their homes and leave their tribe even more defenceless with no guarantee of returning safely, avoid dozens of Fire Navy ships and hopefully not get captured, or worse? No. This is where the Northern Water Tribe did the reasonable and right thing - deciding not to send their already small number of warriors into certain death. We could say that the south shares the blame for not sending anyone up north to help them (neither side knew what condition their sister tribe was in!), but I won't. Since the Southern Water Tribe was raided more often, after the last raid, they couldn't just sit by and do nothing anymore. Yes, I believe them leaving to fight in the war was influenced by Hakoda's personal loss as well.

So I've nullified one point Gilak's using to win us over. Secondly, he believes that the northerners living in the south have to be wiped out or driven out of there because they're not a part of their tribe (or culture) and have to pay for their actions. Because the Southern Water Tribe is in danger of losing its identity by being forced to become a colony of the Northern Tribe. Is this.. xenophobia? When I read the description in English and Estonian, it sure sounds like what I'm trying to say in one word. This is where Gilak's crossing the line again - it's immoral to kill someone just because of their ethnicity. These are the reasons why Katara doesn't support him either, remaining a neutral party (which gives him a reason to attempt to kill her, or Aang, since she was the one who stopped him, foiling his plans to take Malina and Maliq, even Hakoda out of the picture).

I'm gonna take a sudden leap to the end of the second part so I could provide a real-life example. The last things Sokka and Katara say to each other before leaving their Gran Gran's igloo actually show that they're both correct. It's a new era where the nations cannot remain separate anymore, a parallel to "The Promise" where the Fire Nation colonies elected governments of mixed nations, so they do need to get with the times. But.. without forgetting who they are, a parallel to Aang deciding to begin teaching the air acolytes about the ways of the air nomads instead of keeping that knowledge to himself. That's what the southerners should do - teach the northerners their culture and ways of life, if they want to become a part of their tribe and settle there.

All of this is very similar to what's happening in the real world, in my country, too, which is why I can relate. Estonia (along with many other countries) is facing a similar problem with the refugees (and other immigrants of foreign cultures). Our President talked about this in her speech on our Independence Day this Friday, urging us to be more tolerant without forgetting our identity (which I believe is the right thing to do). Populists (the EKRE party in our Parliament) are spreading hate and toying with our emotions to get us to support them by claiming that we shouldn't support the refugees (only a select few have terrorist ties or committed terrorist attacks) because they are the threat and we are superior, preserving our culture is the most important thing that matters. Honestly, this attitude drives me mad and makes me sick at the same time. And it's the exact same rhetoric of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and other populists here in Europe. They take their views too far, exactly like Gilak has, and become extremists. I just wanna scream some sense into them and their supporters (that refugees and foreigners are simple, normal people like us) and kick their pathetic butts out of politics. I was already so frustrated with this situation that I actually wrote my feelings down through Katara's eyes in a fanfic called "Seeking refuge" last year. I'm ashamed to see how such idiotic politicians keep winning people over, all over the world. But that only fuels my anger and passion to keep fighting against their nonsense and fake news with intelligence, awareness and traditional media that speaks the truth.

----------x----------

Okay, I wanted to show how I can connect these events with real-life events. Enough ranting, let's focus on some stuff that happens during the fighting. For instance, I'd been trying to figure out the meaning behind Thod's story by reading it several times, especially since I felt like it wasn't put in there randomly and it must've been foreshadowing something. But I didn't fully get it until I'd read the second part. Thod turning out to be a chi blocker made him seem even creepier and more terrifying - Katara's face says it all after she's attacked. I'm glad he underestimated her, which provided her with an opportunity to detain him in that ice by waterbending using only her feet. Proof that Katara is one of the best waterbenders in the world.

Plus, those two kids, who also turned out to be chi blockers in training, are really annoying and I hope they get what's coming to them (thank you for not letting them escape, Aang!). Some of Gilak's troops are actually kind of stupid - let's grab the Avatar's hands, then he can't bend (I think you might've forgotten his legs, dumbbells)! This sounds like I'm hinting that the southerners really do tend to be less intelligent than the northerners - no, this isn't my intention. I'm trying to point out that, other than being nonbenders, his army has weaknesses (or is weak, Sokka beat those two guys with his boomerang so easily). And speaking of revenge, I'd like to praise Toph for getting those three construction "artists" for beating up Katara. Those jerks totally deserved it, that blow to the back must've been pretty strong and dangerous for her. A few pages forward and there's another powerful parallel I'd like to bring up here - Hakoda saying he believes that people can change is exactly what Iroh said, not to mention they're both referring to Zuko.

Like I stated in the very beginning, I've summed up my feelings about Hakoda getting stabbed in the description of my drawing. What I didn't mention though is that every time I read Malina and Katara's screams, I can hear them so loud and clear in my head that it's heartbreaking. Seeing that blood on Hakoda's coat makes my stomach churn, even drawing that crimson in the midst of all those blue tones was a sharp contrast. And Katara's genuine reaction when he finally wakes up.. can I just cry forever together with her?

----------x----------

My expectations for the third part? I haven't really thought about those, though some ideas did come up within my discussion, so I guess those are the ones. The Southern Water Tribe must remain a colony in some acceptable way, because that's what we see during Korra's time. We know Hakoda will remain chief (most likely, hopefully until he passes away) and Sokka will be his successor at some point. I'd like the third part to offer some clarity to some extent, and see in what conditions do the two tribes come to an agreement.

In conclusion, this discussion became way longer than I'd originally wanted.. I spent hours trying to figure out how to get my point across, that I didn't use the wrong words which might give the wrong idea and that I didn't forget anything important I wanted to mention. Well, I hope you've enjoyed reading my opinion! It's my first thorough review I've written for any of the Avatar comic trilogies, so I hope you liked it!

Btw, Caroline (@thecaroliner), to answer your question of where is Bato? With everything that's going on, I think he would've gotten in the way of the plot, so that might be the main reason why he was left out. Or who knows, maybe we'll see him in the third part?

#personal #shards of Kristal #North and South

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Hyperallergic: In Search of the Authentic Selfie

Screenshot of Google Image search results for “selfie”

Editor’s note: The following excerpt is the ninth chapter of The Selfie Generation: How Our Self-Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture, Alicia Eler’s new book from Skyhorse Publishing building on ideas first developed in a series of posts on Hyperallergic starting in June 2013.

* * *

The selfie is an aspirational image, but it also an integral aspect of socializing, interacting, and being seen by others online. In an attention economy of likes that demands performance and absolute connectivity, the selfie is a way to visually grab some- one’s attention, mimicking a face-to-face interaction. In order to exist, the selfie most be produced by the individual, and consumed by the network. Even though the selfie is a singular image object, it exists as a continual piece of content when posted to the network because of the people on the network who interact with it. Yet upon posting, it also becomes an archive of one’s presence on the network. The selfie that is posted to the network is always about being seen the way you want others to see you. (#putyourbestfaceforward)

Though the selfie is a millennial phenomena, there are noticeably different selfie-ing habits between older millennials such as myself, who grew up using AIM and then joined Friendster and early MySpace; younger millennials who had Facebook in high school; and members of Generation Z who, born after 1996, are teens now or in their early twenties and regularly use Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr. One thing that distinguishes older and younger millennials and Gen Z is the question of online privacy. Older millennials remember a time when there was such a thing as online privacy, whereas younger Gen Zs do not.

“One of the reasons I (and a lot of us ‘older millennials’ in tech) get so nostalgic for the old days is because we believed in the power of living in public and the tools we used never got in the way of that; and the tools were for the most part, super naive about the potential privacy violations they presented,” says Harlo Holmes, director of newsroom digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Infinite mirror // selfie-ing

The selfie is perpetually here and now, but where is it headed? Madison Malone Kirscher writes regularly about selfies for New York Magazine’s section Select All, which asks questions about how we live online. I was intrigued by her stories about sealfies (selfies with seals), handless selfies (selfies taken with a timer in front of the mirror while the phone is flying in the air) and ballot selfies, and figured she’d have some answers to these questions.

“Anytime anybody whips out a phone to take a photo, people will call it a selfie,” said Kirscher when we spoke by phone. “If you can put ‘selfie’ in a headline, people will click it and people will care.” The word “selfie,” as we saw in chapter 4, is buzzy, cute, and clickworthy.

“When I think about people like my parents, they know what [the selfie] is,” Kirscher said. “Suddenly, this trend that maybe they don’t give a damn about — people taking pictures in their bedroom mirrors throwing their phones in the air, which is this ridiculous teen thing — there’s a touchstone there now because everyone knows what a selfie is this side of point-and-shoot cameras circa 2003.”

The social appropriateness of the selfie is constantly in flux. It was intensely vilified during its upswing, but now it has settled in to being an accepted aspect of how we live.

The selfie is fun. When shared, it becomes a social image. Ultimately, self-imaging is enjoyable and something that most every millennial does at some point, to see how they look on-screen and to connect with friends.

Willingly returned to my high school to see this year's musical so now I'm hiding out in the bathroom because time is a flat circle. http://pic.twitter.com/IrMeGz9Twg

— Madison M. K. (@4evrmalone) March 11, 2017

“I have this series of tweets where I take a selfie every time I wear tech fleece — [the other day, I was doing it, and] I watched some person who was probably thirty to thirty-five years older look at me and then pantomime, ‘Are you kidding me?’” says Kirscher. “And that’s not even an inappropriate setting. I’m just walking up 1st Avenue, I’m not bothering anyone, I’m not impeding on anything — I’m just taking a picture of my face.”

That’s one way of selfie-ing, and it’s also specific to millennials who are in their 20s. Because selfie-ing is largely a teen phenomena, as discussed in chapter 1, what about kids who are part of Generation Z, people who were born after 1996? If we’re talking about the future, this is who will determine it.

“I don’t use Facebook because Facebook is boring,” says George Yocom, thirteen, who’s in the eighth grade and lives in Minneapolis. “That’s where all the old people go and write about weird weather and stuff. I don’t want to hear about what you are doing right now.”

I’d been on Facebook just moments before talking to George. After talking with him, I felt incredibly lame. I’d met his mom the week before when she came by the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, where I work, to give a talk to journalists about covering the trans community.

George and I talked about his social media — he really only uses Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr because that’s where his friends hang out, and that’s mostly who he follows on social media. He goes on every day, often first thing in the morning, and of course social media does affect his friendships and how he sees people in the world. It’s also important for him to post about the stuff he cares about and is doing.

“As a trans activist, I am more like trying to get people to support this organization, or do stuff and not just sit there and think about it — which is good, but to actually go out there and do stuff,” he says.

But really, I just wanted to talk with George about his selfies. Maybe, I wrote this whole book just so I could get to this part of it. I asked him, how often do you post selfies?

“I feel like, mainly I probably do because I don’t know what else to post and I don’t have any other pictures and like, why not?” he says. The selfies that he notices get the most likes are ones where he’s wearing really cute outfits, and doesn’t have his face in them.

“[When people see those photos they] are like, ‘Oh cute,’ and I’m like, ‘I know.’”

There’s an assumption out in the world, as mentioned in Nancy Jo Sales’ book American Girls that social media is affecting the lives of teenage girls in a negative way, and that they would leave the network if they could. Certainly, social media is changing the social behavior of teens today. When I asked George if social media has been a helpful way for him to connect with friends, he replied, “It definitely helps me connect with people because obviously I can’t be with people 24/7, but I want to know what they’re doing,” he says. “And like, sometimes it’s hard to talk to people because I have social anxiety, so it’s cool to see them online and be like, ‘Hey, you’re having a good time, that’s great!’”

Two artists of the selfie generation: RaFiA Santana & Brannon Rockwell-Charland

Selfies are a completely mainstream phenomenon. And like any pop culture phenomena, they are ripe for critique by artists of the selfie generation. Artists of the selfie generation use social media as part of building their persona or brand, and they also use themselves in their work. In this IRL-URL fluid space, artists of the selfie generation criss-cross from the digital to the physical, exploring and playing with the overlap between the two.

Artists of the selfie generation are diverse, geographically scattered about (location optional!), and connected by the Internet and social media. Artists of the selfie generation engage with intersectional feminism, a term originally coined by Black feminists to point out the unique intersection of oppression that they experience both as women and people of color. It now has come to include anyone who experiences oppression under white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society. As the blog Intersectional Feminism 101 writes: “Those with disabilities, mental ill- ness, non-Western religious identities, nonwhite ethnic or racial identities, nonthin bodies, non-Eurocentric features, low income, those who are not alloromantic, allosexual, heterosexual, or cis-gender [specically cis male by Western standards], or those who simply do not adhere to a Western model of gender or sexuality all experience oppression due to their relative ‘disadvantage.’”

One such artist who uses the selfie as one of her many means of self-expression is Brooklyn-based artist RaFiA Santana, age twenty-six. She is a millennial who selfies as a way to both create an archive of herself, and to make sure she is seen the way she wants to be seen. On social media she has said that she has a separate account just for people of color, and one where she creates a persona that’s read more by non-POC folks. Creating such distinct personas on social media is one way to navigate fluid social media identities.

Her selfie art is also a necessity in part because of systemic racism that she experiences. Santana knows that someone who takes her photo will come to it with their own visual memory and baggage of historical images of Black people. Santana works across platforms, and often uses herself in her work. She comes from a family of artists — her mother is a photographer and archivist, and her father is a photographer and filmmaker — and she started using a camera as a teenager.

On the top of her website, she has category for “selfie,” but this wasn’t on purpose. It just happened because she tagged a lot of images with #selfie, and that created a larger tag cloud on the top of her website.

“I have a ton of images of myself, and it does stretch across photography, graphic design, and just like Instagram pictures,” says Santana. “That was a way of categorizing it and putting it into different compartments — how to show it. Somebody picked it up as a series, and I was like, ‘Oh I guess it’s kinda like that, but I was like, oh wait it’s not a self-portrait series,’ but whenever I post a picture of me that I made, I put it under ‘selfie.’”

The main draw of the selfie, especially for people who have seen results they aren’t happy with when turning over the lens to a photographer, is that we can shape our own narratives based on how we want to be seen.

“You get these narratives with photography but if somebody else is taking your picture they are seeing you through their lens, and a lot of what I have been taking issue with and just noticing with a lot of Black photography in major magazines — a lot of the photographers are white and if they shoot Black people they are not conscious about the inherent biases they have — because they’ve been seeing Black people through the white lens forever. That’s like all they’ve been seeing — they’ll still photograph Black people the same way, making them look demonic or just the standard ghetto and not lit properly, they don’t understand how Black people want to look — they don’t understand the Black aesthetic.”

For Santana, she’s often had to go back and retouch photos that were taken of her at major magazines, because the photographer didn’t know how to photograph her. With the selfie, such issues don’t come up because she’s taught herself how to shoot, she knows what looks good, and she knows how to make it so.

“The selfie has been super empowering in that way, just being able to show myself as I am,” she says. In addition, selfie-ing is a way for her to self-reflect — she sees selfie-ing and self-reflection as overlapping.

“Self-reflection is important because you need that to grow,” she says. “If you don’t know where you’re at you don’t know where you need to be. Even if you are in a bad place, you usually want to get out of that bad place. You want to think about that and break down all the things that you do like and things that you don’t like, how do I change this, enhance this, the selfie is very important to me in that respect — it’s sort of like a record.”

It’s not impossible to get an image of yourself that you like that wasn’t taken by you, but it’s definitely harder. Finding a photographer who not only gets your aesthetic, but gets the essence of you and can bring that out in an image — heighten it to ensure that you look even better than you would in everyday life — is a rarity.

“I want to show myself how I wanted to be seen and that’s not going to happen if I let someone else take over my image,” says RaFiA. “Unless we have that relationship and are close with each other, and they know what I want to look like.”

Similarly, Brannon Rockwell-Charland, twenty-four, is an artist working on her MFA in the interdisciplinary studio program at UCLA. She engages often with the selfie, and for her it is a way to connect with herself and assert a sense of power. Rather than tell you more, I asked Brannon for her thoughts on her relationship to the selfie. Here’s what she shared:

Every time I make an image of myself, whether I make it in a darkroom or on an iPhone, I feel that I am reclaiming some kind of power. Selfies give me a sense of control in the face of the always-impending fetishization of black women’s bodies.

The way I’m “read” by others visually is at the center of my work, and there’s a lot at stake for me when I render myself. I’m attempting to clear some space to be able to express my full range of humanity while engaged with whatever aspects of my history I choose but without respectability politics.

I think about history all the time — my own personal history and the contentiousness with which we tend to view images of black woman-ness throughout time. Jezebel. Mammy. Slut. Superwoman. Tragic Mulatto. The list goes on. I’m as tired of that list as I am intrigued by that list. I want to be able to be all of those women simultaneously and at will. I want to be able to be none of them.

I resist erasure by redefining, by embodying, by existing artistically in spaces that are amazing and problematic when it comes to the image of the black woman. The thing about selfies as a form of image-making that is so tied to social media is that, as we discussed in our queer Tumblr article, we are wrapped up in this paradox of self-reclamation and the social capitalist currency of the Internet. “We are subject to market logic.”

I think maybe I used to be more concerned with resisting and transcending late capitalism. But these days, having just moved to LA, having just started an MFA program, still feeling very uprooted in my art practice, wondering how I’ll afford to live in this city, I find myself wanting to engage with capitalism like I want to engage with the labels of black womanhood. I find myself wondering if I should make my Instagram public. Instagram is where I post most of my selfies; it’s the online space where I am my weirdest self. I find myself wondering how to sell my work. I am in my work. I’m sitting in this perpetually ambivalent space.

For Brannon, selfies are a continual part of her work, ever evolving and complicated in their multifacetedness. As an artist, she curates her image online as well, making her selfie collection unique to her aesthetic and sense of self. By being what she describes as her “weirdest self,” Brannon creates a type of artist persona through selfies and other content she posts to Instagram, while also recognizing that the images she is making are connected to capitalizing on one’s own body and image likeness.

In this way, there is a projected and curated vulnerability dis- played through sel es that traverses issues of privacy online. “When I talk about our ‘right to privacy,’ I usually frame it as a choice, or a positive action, rather than a defense,” says Harlo Holmes, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “There is indeed a lot of power in creating a public self; everyone is going to share stuff, but make sure you use technology in a way that only you get to choose which version of yourself exists for public consumption.”

Genevieve Gaignard is another artist who creates work around complicated racial identities. As a self-identi ed mixed-race woman, she contends with different stereotypes and personas in her work, creating alter-egos in a way that is more Nicki Minaj and less Cindy Sherman. She also takes many, many selfies.

As I wrote in a review of her exhibition Us Only at Shulamit Nazarin Gallery in Venice, California, for CRAVE magazine, I discussed how her “high yellow femme” identity complicates her relationship to Blackness and how she is read out in the world, yet isn’t necessarily a conversation about what it’s like to “pass.” In her show she explores the multiple identities that she could embody based on the ways she is perceived.

I wrote about Gaignard’s art several times in Los Angeles. In a review of her exhibition Smell the Roses at the California African-American Museum for Hyperallergic, I was curious to think about her work as more than either selfie or self-portrait, and more like creating new mythologies that blend autobiography and fiction. I pointed to UCLA associate English professor Uri McMillian’s essay “Masquerade, Surface, and Mourning: The Performance of Memory-Work in Genevieve Gaignard: Smell the Roses,” which he wrote for the exhibition:

Gaignard’s performances can be positioned in a genealogy of feminist persona-play, including Adrian Piper’s The Mythic Being, Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, and Howardena Pindell’s Free, White, and 21, as well as Nikki S. Lee’s Projects, Eleanor Antin’s black ballerina, Eleanora Antinova, and Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight.

Because of their shared interest in characters, Gaignard’s work is often compared to Cindy Sherman. But whereas Sherman reveals nothing about herself, Gaignard reveals a lot. And instead of working with female archetypes in the media, Gaignard makes the personal explicitly political.

She’s also damn funny. So I’ll leave you with this tongue-in-cheek work of hers. It’s called “Selfie Stick,” and points to the selfie’s origins: the mirror.

No selfies allowed but plenty of rewards received at Jumbo’s Clown Room

Speaking of the production and consumption of (cis)female bodies, there are no selfies or other types of photography allowed at Jumbo’s Clown Room, a strip club on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. I had driven by it many times while cruising through Hollywood, noticing the bouncer who eyed IDs at the door. The red-brick facade reminded me of how few brick buildings there are in Los Angeles because of earthquakes. There are no windows in the facade of Jumbo’s. There are no free shows for passersby.

I initially resisted going to Jumbo’s. I had seen amateur burlesque shows in Chicago, at dimly-lit dive bars on makeshift stages, and at storefront theaters squeezed between warehouses on diagonally directional streets. I didn’t want to pay an admission fee to see women’s bodies commodified, and then throw dollar bills at them, which felt even more demoralizing. Even though I am a cis queer woman, I grapple with questions of objectifying women. Also, why go watch live when this commodification is so readily available on TV, the Internet, and in porn? With all this screened play, why would anyone go see girls, like, real human beings, simulating what we are already seeing on screens all the time already?

Jumbo’s was different from other strip clubs. Unlike the plethora of other XXX nude girl joints, which I noticed the most when I first moved to LA, this one has been around since 1970, it’s not nude, and it is burlesque. It is rumored that workers there are treated more ethically. As with any strip club though, there are still plenty of dollar bills that patrons throw onto the stage, ready to be swept up after the dance is over. It’s the business of selling bodies, sex, desire, pleasure.

Curious and open to this new experience, I decided to go — but not on my own, of course. BFF Che Landon, who you remember from previous chapters, thought it would be hilarious to take our eight-months-pregnant-and-about-to-pop friend to Jumbo’s. What funnier place to spot a pregnant woman, am I right?? And who knows, maybe the baby would decide to make an appearance that evening!

There are no photos allowed inside the red-brick facade of Jumbo’s. A packed bar and a stage with a single golden pole erected into it sandwich the available seating area. A series of chairs lined the perimeter of the stage, just beyond the rail that separated the dancer and the audience members who have decided to sit right there in front of the stage and fling bills at the dancers rather than lounge on a black leather booth or on stools at a high stooled circular table further away. The bar that wraps its way around the stage is painted red, and dotted with yellow stars. Mirrors line the back wall of the stage, the ceiling above the stage, and another side of the wall adjacent to the stage.

No matter where you are sitting in the audience, you can see the dancer from multiple angles. Or you can just look straight ahead at her. There is no screen or screened bodies. Just sit back and look into the mirror — see yourself watching her, see her reflected back in the mirror, see reflections of bodies in space.

Sitting in the front row that night at Jumbo’s, I had the overwhelming sense that I’d experienced this dynamic before — this wanting to sit in the front row and look but not be seen looking. I turned to my left, watching as one of my friends gleefully dispensed dollar bills like a blissed-out bank teller to a happily receiving customer.

That’s when it hit me. I remembered this experience. My desire to look but not be seen reminded me of being at a comedy show and making the bold choice to sit in the front row, experiencing that same sensation — hoping that the comedian would make eye contact with me and single me out, put me on the spot with eye contact, but not actually acknowledge my presence. I was there to listen and be an objectified voyeur, but not to be seen.

There’s another important element of Jumbo’s that I mentioned earlier, but I want to reinforce. There are no phones allowed. No one can photograph the girls. They cannot photograph themselves, either. In essence, they are protected against the threat of social media and the Internet. Their bodies will not exist in data form. Their essence will never leave that room. The memories of their bodies will exist only in the minds of visitors that evening, hundreds of eyes gazing in, skin-deep, on the surface. They can only be seen directly, never in a meta-way or through a third-party app. They can only ever be performers and reflections in mirrors, various angles, ass, face, right here, right now.

Anyone seen with their phone out is reprimanded. I took mine out at one point just to check an app quick, and immediately a bouncer noticed and approached me, yelling: “No phones!” I was putting the phone away when the dancer on stage who donned an obviously sexy Halloween costume that included a fake bloodied sword moved toward me. I played along with her slashing roleplay motion. Then she slunk off, dropping to the floor where she gyrated awhile, then wrapped her legs around a pole, sliding up and down it until the song ended and she exited.

While she did this, I watched the mirrors. They created multiple reflected versions of her in this physical space that replicated the infinite reflection of a sexualized selfie put out on the Internet, available for anyone to see through the smartphone in their hands, a face appearing in the palm of your hand. Except instead of direct gazes and dollar bills landing on her as she moved across the stage, such a selfie would garner likes and retweets and comments, shares and often creepy @ messages. Every click is feedback, a like, a reward. Every dollar dropped on-stage is a monetary reward.

“The human reward system tends to be responsive to a variety of things that lead to a subjective pleasurable response,” says Dr. Mauricio Delgado, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University. “This includes the most basic of rewards such as food or money. This also includes more social rewards; things such as a simple smile, receiving compliments, or feeling accepted by peers.”

I was thinking about this effect of the body and face as a woman’s first and last weapon in the digital age and IRL, online as a selfie-er versus in-person as a body. In both spaces, the body becomes not just a brand or a means of gaining social capital, but a literal commodity.

I tell this story not to take issue with strip clubs, burlesque/ erotic dancers, or the act of voyeurism. My experience at Jumbo’s made me think more deeply about some of the recurring critiques of selfie culture, particularly those aimed at young women who find the act of selfie-ing to be empowering, experimenting with their bodies and sexuality in the way that they want to, being seen in the way that they want to be seen. It is empowering as a way to capture attention and to connect quickly, but it comes with the reality of literally releasing one’s selfie as data to the network.

Often, the young women who are purveyors of selfie culture replicate the same types of sexual submissiveness that wouldn’t be seen as “strong” or empowering at all. Women’s bodies are always sexualized. This becomes even more complicated within the realm of selfie culture, because while the image is of her and for her, it becomes something that is also consumed by others who see her as a sexualized object. It’s impossible to escape the gaze or the commodification of bodies under patriarchy.

Can the selfie ever be radical?

I’m a millennial who voted and then selfie-d about voting. I felt conflicted about this. Why did I need to share something I did? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall? (#picsoritdidnthappen) Similarly, if I voted and didn’t take a selfie of that instance, did I ever vote? (#ballotselfieoritneverhappened) The answer is obviously yes, but considering that it’s only 2017 and women only gained the right to vote in 1920, not even one hundred years ago, I decided that I wanted to be part of the voting selfie moment on social media. This begs the question: Are selfies tools of empowerment for women in the digital age, or for other people and bodies that are usually othered? Is it meaningful to post a photo like this?

Professor Derek Conrad Murphy makes a case for selfies as a “means to resist the male-dominated media culture’s obsession with and oppressive hold over their lives and bodies.” Murray pulls out the ways that selfie-ing and self-imaging for women on and for the Internet do feel revolutionary, like a sea of faces all rallying together, even if there is no political motivation behind the selfie-ing. “Even if there is no overt political intent, they are indeed contending with the manner in which capitalism is enacted upon their lives,” writes Murray in his paper, Notes to self: the visual culture of selfies in the age of social media.

Murray is self-aware of this generous read on selfie culture, a seemingly ostentatious remark against the blanket accusations of narcissism. Despite the view that your dad might give about “the kids these days being such narcissists,” Murray disagrees, instead taking a more positive approach to the phenomena on the whole, noting the ways that it can be used to dismantle the repression and control of female sexuality.

“Teaching a lot of young women, I see them struggling with societal expectation around how they should behave and look, which often grates against their own desires,” Murray said to me, when we emailed about these questions. “For many women, pornography is very liberating, while others feel demeaned by it, and that’s OK. Antiporn stances, however, often exert just another form of moralistic control and shaming — and often strip women who participate in and consume it of their agency. In terms of the selfie, seeing young women in control of their own image and expressing an unapologetically bold form of sexuality, simply grates against a very repressive social role that women are meant to perform.”

In an attention economy on and offline that demands performance and absolute connectivity, a young woman must continue defining herself. At the end of the day, the selfie is a way to visually grab someone’s attention, mimicking a face-to-face interaction. It is a way to hold space.

The approval of others is not meaningless. I’ve long since wondered if taking and posting a selfie connotes anything beyond surface likes. Self-imaging ultimately comes down to a desire, perhaps even a need, to see oneself — not for someone else’s enjoyment, but just for oneself, to be seen. It is a mechanism for survival, a truly stark negation against invisibility, an action against erasure.

Get selfie-aware

On social media, narratives are fragmented and stories drift off, consumed by the network. Facebook was originally conceived as a way to “tell your life story online,” which seems laughable at this point in time. Who except the people closest to you give a shit about what you ate today? (As I write this, the friend who sits next to me at this café is taking a picture of the cupcake she is about to eat. But she’s a foodie, so . . .) Yet the networks demand content, and everyone has their niche online.

To cast a social media narrative like a screenplay, reality TV show, memoir-like narrative, or series of jokes at a standup comedy show requires constant checking and posting. Plus, the narrative flow is much harder to accomplish on social media. Doing so would mean constantly anticipating reactions. Not everyone has time or interest to strategize that, unless there is a monetary incentive. Think back to chapter 5, the women in China who earn money live-streaming themselves on one ore more of the two hundred livestream platforms. But in the United States, this is less common. Becoming a believable character on social media is to create oneself as a character that is consumable for an audience of social media onlookers, and it is work. Plus, on social media there is an expectation of giving away content for free.

For those who do put time and energy into their social media realms, the article “Social Media Got You Down? Be More Like Beyoncé” by Jenna Wortham for New York Times Magazine rings true. Wortham takes a more optimistic approach to creating a persona or character for yourself online, especially if the rawness of just posting your life to the Internet is bumming you out. (#truth) Taking the time to figure out how to craft your own image, how you want to be seen, is also decidedly individualistic in nature.

Things got more live on social media in 2016, upping the possibilities for content creation. In Spring 2016, Facebook introduced Facebook Live, which allows anyone anywhere to broadcast anything they want to their network. Similarly, in August 2016, Instagram introduced Stories, which are like public versions of snaps, varying in length, but created throughout the day and logged as tiny videos to see and perhaps direct message someone about. Instagram described Stories as a way to “share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep.” By November 2016, Instagram introduced live videos on their Stories feature. Facebook owns Instagram, but no matter — this is always more content for the network. (There is also an archival feature.)

In Wortham’s article, she argues that this ability to share practically further toes the line of what is socially acceptable. In other words, what’s something to talk about and work out with people IRL, and what’s something to post about as part of one’s online brand?

“There’s nothing necessarily wrong with either example — but they each clearly underline the ways that social media has stripped away our ability to tell what is OK to share and what is not,” writes Wortham. “It’s not just that watching people vie for your attention can feel gross. It’s also that there’s a fine line between appearing savvy online and appearing desperate.”

Wortham suggests that actually, if people thought more about creating a persona for themselves online — in other words, more showing and less telling — audiences could spend more time just enjoying projecting a fantasy. She cites various examples of ways that Beyoncé has quelled rumors about her sister Solange and her marriage to rapper Jay Z through either playing into the drama or creating more of it for the sake of wonderment. In short, Beyoncé has found a way to create a fantasy, holographic selfie through her creative work and Internet presence that leaves people guessing based on what she shows them rather than what she tells them.

“Most people treat social media like the stage for their own reality show, but Beyoncé treats her public persona more like a Barbie — she offers up images and little more, allowing people to project their own ideas, fantasies, and narratives about her life onto it,” writes Wortham.

This is one way to go about creating the selfie, one that will get you the attention you want. It’s Creative Writing 101, to show the story, not tell it. Let the joke unfurl on its own — don’t give away the punchline up front. When it comes to just easily learning how to “be more like Beyoncé,” as Wortham suggests, making it seem like a casual, easy, fun-filled adventure for a leisure class that has time to even think about this, the joke is actually on anyone who thinks that it could be this easy to be like Beyoncé. She’s a celeb. You better believe that she’s got a PR team that guides her through the treacherous swamps, nooks, and crannies of the Internet’s social media landscape.

Despite the controversial nature of presenting any personal information online through social media, we keep doing it. The social media companies that house our selfies and accounts are using our personal data in ways we are not entirely aware of.

“So, while selfie-taking can be a powerful, radical means for expressing and championing forms of identity that have been historically rejected by a racist/patriarchal mainstream culture (think, queer selfies, selfies at BLM protests, hijab selfies, fourth wave soft nude selfies) all selfies shared on social networks are inadvertently participating in capitalism — the same structures that are marginalizing their identities in the first place,” says Alexis Avedisian, Communications Manager at the NYC Media Lab. “Digital formats of activism (like radical selfies) allow for inclusivity within that user’s network, but fully honoring inclusivity is made difficult due to the often apolitical, commercial goals specific to the social media platforms which host the activist action.”

The selfie is the most easily accessible and powerful image for asserting a sense of personhood and connecting with others in a fragmented, networked, and hyperconnected world. It is done without any cost other than the agreement that your image becomes quantifiable data, demonstrative of complacency within techno-capitalism. Yet we cling to the selfie: It is one of the last modes of self-expression and immediacy, an opportunity to create space online, and to connect for (the illusion of) free in a digital age that will transform our personalized interests, purchases, browsing history, and social relations into currency for them. The only social requirement is you.

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