#and if it IS then its a very orientalist view

[ayaarts]

i just started the acotar series and im now just starting acomaf but did everyone fail to mention how the night court is inspired by south asia???????

[onefleshonepod]

ID: A digital collage of "The High Priestess” tarot card as the Body from the Locked Tomb series. The card depicts the Body as a ghostly figure with both arms raised, dressed in a diaphanous blue-white robe, standing on a large crescent. In her left hand is a sword. In her right hand is a scroll. She is crowned with the headdress of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, a red sun disc with cow horns. At the top is another representation of the Body reaching out of a river, from Mermaids by Arthur Rackham. In the background is the Bird and Pomegranate pattern by William Morris. Behind that, providing the abstract landscape, is Avignon by Ralph Hotere, an influential Māori artist. The image of the Body is from Allegory with a Woman by Luděk Marold. The left side of the card shows the upright meaning of The High Priestess and reads, “Inner Voice | Unconscious | Intuition | Mystery | Spiritual Insight in all caps. The right side of the card shows the reversed reading and reads “Repressed Feelings | Secrets | Hidden Motives | Cognitive Dissonance” in all caps. The base of the card reads "The High Priestess | The Body” in a retro 1970s-style font.

My goal with these tarot cards was to choose characters who embody the meanings of the cards when you think of them, to make the cards intuitive to grasp for Locked Tomb fans who might not be very familiar with tarot. Discussion below:

The Body haunting Harrow is quite literally an inner voice and a representation of Harrow’s subconscious. She’s the perfect figure for the High Priestess card. It’s hard to represent spiritual insight better than with. well. um. a spirit who is a religious figure who also provides insights. The nature of the Body is also one of the central mysteries of Harrow the Ninth.

Regarding the reversed meanings, the Body is also emblematic of Harrow’s secret which is hidden even from herself. My personal interpretation (along with many others') is that Harrow sublimated her forgotten and repressed feelings for Gideon onto the Body throughout Harrow the Ninth.

With my visual interpretation of this card, I tried to preserve or nod to some elements of the Rider-Waite-Smith High Priestess card. As a disclaimer, the hodge-podge orientalist imagery of the RWS deck is a shameful product of its time, but the illustrations are iconic and well known, so I wanted to acknowledge them. I also wanted to use images which evoked the dark wet ghost imagery of pre-Nona art and fanon of the Body.

The RWS High Priestess, and mine, presides over two pillars, representing the balance between them. The RWS pillars can be seen as multiple different dualities (such as good and evil), but are often called are the Pillar of Establishment and the Pillar of Strength. I interpreted the left side (with the scroll) as Harrow’s path of completing the process of Lyctorhood and becoming a fully functional tool of the empire. The right side, where the Body is holding a sword, represents Wake, Gideon, and the path of heresy. Just as the High Priestess’ role is to mediate between the two extremes, the Body’s role seems to be to help Harrow on her own chosen path.

The crescent moon at the Body’s feet, in the same place as in the RWS card, is seen also in many depictions of the Virgin Mary. This is meaningful because (as has been more thoroughly discussed elsewhere) the Ninth House’s worship of the Body and the way this is viewed as heretical and idolatrous by the other Houses can be seen as a parallel to Catholics’ veneration of Mary. I tried to continue the Marian imagery from the RWS card with a subtle blue tint to the figure’s robes.

The pomegranates in the background, also a detail preserved from the RWS card, are a symbol of — well, what aren’t they a symbol of. Many things that resonate in the Locked Tomb series. Death, eternal life, Hell, being torn between two realities… I used the William Morris pomegranates because I love his prints.

Finally, the RWS High Priestess wears the headdress of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, which I kept specifically because the cow horns are perfect: the Body being the Earth and wearing the symbol of John’s first transgression against the Earth while also trying to save it. Hathor’s domain was to help souls transition to the afterlife, and she was often depicted as a cow.

[gwenllian-in-the-abbey]

Is there anything good (positive achievement) about the Valyrian/ghiscarian empires? I feel GRRM didn't bother giving them nuanced and interesting history beside mass slavery, rape and genocide, esp the ghiscarians they are mash up of the all the racist oriental tropes you can think of

Hi anon, this is a really good question. I think you can look at it two ways.

On the one hand, if we're analyzing the books from a literary perspective, GRRM's portrayal of the entire continent of Essos is pretty Orientalist and doesn't hold up that well. And we can blame this to some extent on GRRM being a white boomer who clearly did not think all that deeply about the stereotypes he was playing into when he created his "exotic" eastern continent. 90s fantasy was rife with this stuff (even my beloved Robin Hobb is not completely immune-- I'm looking at you, Chalcedeans), and at the time Orientalism was, much like critical race theory or decolonization, a grad school level concept, unless you ran in activist circles. You didn't have Tumblr and Twitter and TikTok and Youtube generating Discourse, you had to actively seek out different perspectives. And ex-hippie liberal white boomers often assumed that they already had the right perspectives, that they knew what traps to avoid, and so you'd get 90s SFF authors thinking they were very cleverly subverting these tropes by going, "I know, I'll have an intensely misogynistic culture of desert dwelling nomads who have harems and slaves but I'll make them white." It was pretty bleak. Luckily for all of us, fantasy has come a long way since then.

And yeah, once you see the Orientalism in ASOIAF, you can't unsee it. Lys is basically the fantasy version of the "pleasure planet" trope, the Dothraki are a stereotype of the Mongol armies without any of the many positive contributions the Molgols made, Qarth is like the Coleridge poem come to life with people riding camels with jeweled saddles and wearing tiger skins, with its women baring one breast and it's sophisticated assassin's guild, and Mereen has its pyramids. The entire continent is brimming with spices and jewels and pleasure houses and people saying "Your Magnificence." It is also a place of blood magic and dragons and Red Gods and shadowlands. It is everything exciting and "exotic," juxtaposed against what appears to most readers to be very mundane--septas and pseudocatholicism and maesters in the citadel. So yeah, it's an Orientalist's fantasy world, and the point of all this is not necessarily to cast it as evil per se, but to cast it as "Other" (and to be clear, Orientalism is harmful and GRRM deserves the criticism he gets for leaning into stereotypes). Valyria and the Valyrians are certainly included in that-- they are explicitly Other as foreign born ruling family in Westeros, and they are treated that way both in-world and by the narrative.

The question then becomes, although GRRM's depictions of Essos lean heavily and inelegantly into Orientalist tropes, why did he create these worlds the way he did? Why is Valyria an "Other" and what significance does it have to the story? And I think that some of this is GRRM's shorthand for something magical that is lost and forgotten and fading away, just like Valyria itself is in the memories of the Targaryen family. It is the Xanadu of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, not just the East viewed from the West, but the past viewed from the present, a nostalgic yearning for a place that only ever existed in the imagination. When the narrative does visit these places in person, rather than telling us about them secondhand, they become ugly and brutal, the jeweled facade hiding a rot underneath. In ASOIAF we have Dany ripping that facade off of Meereen and Yunkai, but she idealizes her own Targaryen heritage, and that is not insignificant, and as readers, we are invited to idealize it right along with her, in spite of plenty of hints that perhaps we should not (like the aforementioned slavery). We even hear Astapori and Yunkish slavers speaking to Dany echo sentiments about the even older Ghiscari empire, also lost, "Ours is the blood of ancient Ghis, whose empire was old when Valyria was yet a squalling child." Old Ghis and the Valyrians who conquered them are both long gone at this point, and yet their descendants are clinging to the legacies of cultures that would be wholly foreign to both of them. Because if Valyria is Xanadu, the Old Valyrians and Old Ghiscari are also Ozymandias, the mighty who have fallen, their once grand civilizations nothing but forgotten ruins. The Targaryens don't yet realize that they are that "half-sunk shattered visage," that they are yearning for something that is gone and never returning, something they never really knew in the first place.

Westeros is not immune to this either. I think it's a consistent theme that GRRM plays with is the ways which the past is glorified and distorted and romanticized. Even in a meta-sense, his entire medieval world is, in many ways, a half-remembered medieval fantasy, the medieval world as imagined by people who read Ivanhoe, rather than a medieval world as actually was. And GRRM simultaneously presents this romanticized world alongside the brutality of the past (and to drive that point home, George's medieval world is much more brutal than the real medieval world was), and so he asks us, just like Dany must ask herself at some point, is the past really all that romantic? Or are we simply yearning for something unnamable and Other? And if we yearn for that, why?

On the other hand, from an in-world perspective, if you are Westerosi, are there any redeeming qualities to Valyrian culture? And I think we can answer that question by asking ourselves, is there anything salvageable from the past, even if the past was terrible? Even if what we perceive of Old Valyria wavers between a horrific empire based on conquest and slavery, and an idealized homeland full of magical dragonriders, depending on who is doing the telling, if we accept it as a fully fleshed out world, then I think we can remember no cultures are monoliths. Old Valyria had art, architecture, fashion, music, literature, and I like to imagine that there were good freeholders, perhaps even Valyrian versions of the Roman Stoics and the Cynics, who raised moral objections to slavery. Certainly the Valyrian "freeholder" government itself, a kind of proto-democracy, similar to that of Athens, was innovative for its particular time and place, even if it was not as democratic as our modern democracies are, and that model of government is replicated throughout Essos, where strict hereditary monarchy seems to be relatively uncommon. Valyria also had a great deal of religious freedom, which persists throughout Essos as well. And as with any empire, it's important to keep in mind that the ruling class made up only a small percentage of actual Valyria, and we know there were Valyrians who were not dragonlords but just normal people, going about their lives who had nothing to do with the atrocities committed, and those people were telling stories, creating art, writing songs, and producing culture too. So I think, tying back into how GRRM uses Valyria and Essos in his narrative, we do not have to discard the past entirely, nor do in-world Targaryens, but it's the romanticization that's the problem, and I think that's something that both in-world characters and readers are cautioned against.

[diaphin93]

Fantastical Misconceptions Part 2: The Safflower Chapter

And here is the second part where I go more in depth on some of the mischaracterizations, misinterpretations and at times outright misinformation that I've seen Fantasyinvader spreading. It initially started with me being widely amused by the very reaching claims about the inspirations of Fire Emblems Dragons he was making, combined with my awareness of his often orientalist and superficial fixation of interpreting 3 Houses on what he believes eastern religion entails, something I am by no means an expert on, but even I can see the reach and grasps in, especially since for me it always invokes the impression of this very fetishistic notion of Japan as this isolated, culturally 'pure' nation which certain groups also love to spread, often with the goal of molding Japan into a homogenous representation of the Idea they want to promote.

In this case I also felt the need to make the part centering Edelgard into its entirely own blogpost due to me becoming aware of some outright misogynistic and, I will say it openly, incel-esque sounding interpretations of Edelgard as a character, which is especially distasteful if you consider Edelgards status as one of the few actually central female main Lords in the series, but also as Fire emblems first ever canonically queer Non-Avatar Lord. So lets get started with reposting the screenshot that inspired me to this three part series:

In my first post I already made it clear that this is yet again just a very abstract and in my opinion somewhat orientalist interpretation of Dragons in the Fire Emblem Series, ignoring the series choice of designs and cultural inspirations as well as widely misinterpreting both western and japanese dragon folklore, which is already highly debunked by the existance of Duma and Mila as two Divine Dragons who have to be overthrown for humanity to creat a land free of divine intervention, akin to the Crimson Flower Route.

But then the issue is, that interpreting Edelgard as the evil dragon of the game doesn't work because she is plain and simply not a dragon, by no stretch of the imagination and her demonic transformation, an expression of the lengths she would go through for her ideals, is unique to one single route and bears no design elements associated with dragons. And interestingly, if anything her hegemon transformation plays into one of the games subversive elements, its deconstruction of divine bloodlines, which play into the games overall very anti-feudal and anti-theocratic attitudes, which Fantasyinvader loves to dismiss and actually argue in favor of feudalism and theocracy which is...yikes. Combined with whats to come, I can't view this guy and his personal views in no semblance of good faith, I'm honest in this regards.

The concept of a demonic beast is brought up as early chapter 5, when we see Miklan being transformed into a demonic beast by the Lance of Ruin, the first hint towards the true sinister nature of crests and heroes relics. With its power of turning those not belonging to them into demons, and even being capable of corrupting and transforming those who possess these bloodlines, the concept of the divine bloodline and the holy heroes relic itself is innately tied towards demonic powers, as is further supported by the energy they radiate being presented in a dark red and blackish color scheme, as opposed to the bright colors we associate with light and divinity. In Edelgards case, one could view it as another subversive element, as the form is connected to Edelgard awakening the full power of her twin-crests, her unleashing the Fire Emblem in service of her ideals.

But with the demonic connotations of the crests and her transformation, I think more than a traditional intsys evil dragon, Edelgard plays more into the influences that Koei Tecmo brought into 3 Houses, with it being confirmed through their Dream Interview that they borrowed heavily from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, while the team involved in the development of 3 Houses has a long history of Nobunaga-centric Sengoku era strategy games, I think what Edelgard invokes much more as the final boss of Azure Moon is the popular image that Cao Cao is associated with and that is also highly connected to Nobunaga, two historical figures Koei Tecmo has a history of interpreting and utilizing in their games and who clearly inspired central aspects of Edelgards personality and role, namely the popular image of the demon king. Thats right, Hegemon Edelgard is Edelgard, faced with those who want to preserve the old order of things and stand against her ideal, fully embraces her role as the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven.

And that is where it becomes interesting, as Team Kou Shibusawa, named after the companies founder and CEO, traces its and the companies history back to historical games and the Nobunagas Ambition Games, which did subvert the popular image of Nobunaga as the Demon King by presenting him as more nuanced and favorable, something they also started to do with Cao Cao in Koei Tecmos Dynasty Warrior Series. There is a great fondness and positive reception for this historical archetype deep in Koeis DNA and we know, that ultimately they contributed a majority of the writing team for 3 Houses. Thats were really Fantasyinvader's grasp for straws fall apart in trying to frame Edelgard as a purely villainous figure, it simply contradicts with the attitudes of the company which wrote the games journey. She does invoke the traditional Fire Emblem Archetype of the Rudolf, but subverts it while at the same time going way back into its foundations. Because after all, Rudolf himself was already a very morally grey and nuanced antagonist, who was revealed to actually voluntarily play the part of the villain and tyrant to set his plan in motion of creating a hero who is capable of ruling Valentia free of godly influences, which Edelgard does heavily imbody, only with the twist that the game indirectly encourages you to support, not oppose her. After all, the game itself heavily humanizes her even at the end of Azure Moon, where the mask of the Demon King, the Hegemon, she put on herself is lifted and she is El at the end, dying not at the Hegemon but as El. Visually the fact that the Hegemon Form is lifted from her at the end and Dimitri approaches her as El already shows, how the Hegemon itself was nothing but a facade, a role she was forced to play in service of her ideals. Even the ending theme is set up to be bittersweet, being Lady of Hresvelg which is entirely about Els perspective and her unfullfilled desires and wishes. Fantasyinvader's interpretation simply does not hold up under any scrutiny.

But here we also go into a darker territory which I need to express, namely what I learned about the misinformation and mischaracterization FI does spread about El, which goes far and above about your typical Edelgard Critical positions into a territory that is unambigiously rooted in some form of misogyny and, as I hinted at, kinda incel-esque attitudes. What I learned is that some time ago, Fantasyinvader started to refer to Crimson Flower as Safflower, based on the japanese name of the route which is Benibana translating into deep-red flower and being the japanese name of the flower, where he started to to push forward his personal blackpilled interpretation of CF and Edelgard as something of a seductress who seduces and manipulates the player and Byleth into being attracted to her in order to mislead them and manipulate them into rejecting enlightenment. What I gathered is really disgusting and dirty, as well as deeply problematic due to the context surrounding Edelgard as a character. As a non-sexualized, three-dimensional and nuanced female Lead character and central Lord of the game, as shown with her being the lead of the Engage 3 Houses Emblem, it is already kinda disgusting to really twist and bend the character into this kind of interpretation, especially with the added context of her backstory involving her being stripped of her bodily autonomy, something he seems to deny, as well as her position as Fire Emblems first canonically Non-Avatar Lord. It screams probelamtic and bad attitudes in every direction that he does go that low and I will not treat Fantasyinvader in any good faith after learning of that. For me it only supports the notion of the Edelcrit community having super misogynist and lesbophobic undertones, considering their vitriol and deranged hatred towards a character whose contemporary popcultural relevance is predominantly one of being a female queer gaming icon. Textually, the notion of Edelgard luring the player in with a seductive and adorable side is just...not what happens. Edelgard starts of as strict and less personable than the other leaders and requires active player effort by the player to show them her vulnerable and her more adorable side. For the most part she wears a mask of a strict class rep and later on, the flame emperor.

Then there is the issue of him outright lying. It begins with him seemingly pushing the interpretation that in flower language, Safflowers represent attraction, not love. Not helping with the I-Word image here, as this is outright untrue. What Safflowers actually represent is Good Luck and Happiness. In Folklore they are said to attract love and marriage. So in actuality, the meaning in flower language is the opposite of what he seems to want to push to his gullible audience. The Crimson Flower represents love and joy. Fantasyinvader also seems to spread lies about developer intentions and player receptions, seemingly talking about how the Developers talking about how Edelgard tricks the player and that Crimson Flower was made more accessible to trick them, which is simply a lie. There seems to be also comments about 'asian' players feeling tricked by Edelgard after playing Crimson Flower, which is not sourced and I feel rather skeptical about. It is reminiscent to claims that koreans hate Edelgard, when it was actually just posts from Kchan which were primarily motivated by bigotry and homophobia. Despite what many of the Edelcritical players try to tell themselves, most metrics indicate Edelgards popularity across the Fandom. She did bad in the Dream Interview Poll early on, but then sweeped her first round of CYL in Fire Emblem Heroes by being the most voted hero to this day, she consistently showed up as the most deployed unit of the game at its beginning and again in Heroes has her alts usually rank high before the voting gauntlet.

All in all, this bloggers particular points as far as I was made aware of them seem to be mostly based on misinformation, outright lies and some interpretations which he pushes forward with authority as truth that reflect more negatively on him than on Edelgard and again, in my opinion imply a bias coming from a darker place. It spreads a very problematic interpretation of the game that is simply not supported by the games text, subtext or presentation and sounds rooted in misogynist attitudes.

Having this out of my system and the blog already becoming very long, I will release a third part of the Blog where I will go deeper into the Demon King parallels between Edelgard and classical Koei Figures such as Cao Cao and especially Nobunaga and my thoughts on much of the roots of the attitudes towards Edelgards motives, goals and the war itself. Stay tuned for the upcoming part 3: Edelgard, Demon King of the Sixth Heaven.

[nanshe-of-nina]

Wrong definitions of Orientalism I’ve seen online:

Simply using elements from East, South, Southeast, and/or West Asian cultures and folklore as inspiration for fantasy. (This can be problematic, but it's not inherently so.)

A generally racist portrayal of Asian characters. (The portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's is pretty damn racist, but ain't particularly Orientalist.)

Mixing different elements from different Asian cultures together for a fantasy counterpart culture. (As with #1, it can be problematic, but mixing together elements of different cultures is rather common in fantasy works. Furthermore, while Asians are not a monolith, different Asian cultures have, in fact, influenced each other and they are not hermetically sealed.)

A White person liking anime, K-Pop, or any other Asian media.

A White person being attracted to an Asian person. (Do note: this is not the same thing as, say, "I want an East Asian wife because they're more feminine and submissive.")

Depicting Asian characters as having magical powers in a work that’s very clearly supposed to be a work of fantasy. (If this was enough to classify a work as Orientalist, then One Thousand and One Nights and the entire genre of wuxia would both qualify. Both are also generally vague about when and where they’re supposed to be set.)

Having a “stereotypical” villain. (Specifically, stereotypical how? A villain who twirls their mustache and kicks puppies isn't automatically Orientalist.)

The weird thing about these misconceptions is that the Wikipedia page on Orientalism actually does a decent and succinct job of explaining what Edward Said meant when he used the term:

In Said's analysis, the West essentializes these societies as static and undeveloped—thereby fabricating a view of Oriental culture that can be studied, depicted, and reproduced in the service of imperial power. Implicit in this fabrication, writes Said, is the idea that Western society is developed, rational, flexible, and superior.

This also tends to involve depicting “the Orient” as effeminate, misogynist, decadent, and inherently inclined to tyrannical rule and also conceiving of most, if not all, Easterners as a monstrous horde.

My default go-to when trying to show these attitudes in practice is depiction of the Persians in the comic and its film adaptation, 300. It uses ALL of the Orientalist stereotypes without the slightest bit of irony or nuance.

[oocca]

1 and 16

VIOLENCE!!!

going to answer 16 first because 1 is going to go into a long rant

16. you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

i don't understand why Linked Universe is so popular. i'm sorry LU fans. all the love but you guys are tumblr tag terrorists for those of us into loz who don't care about it. also i hate that fuckass bob one of the links in it has

1. the character everyone gets wrong

ganondorf. buckle up

i feel like seldom anyone really gets ganondorf truly right, from the bland merciless villain angle and the more sympathetic takes, coming from someone who does have a very soft-hearted view and interpretation of ganondorf. but the latter — i feel like nobody really understands why exactly ganondorf is portrayed the way he is in canon, the implications certain canon AND fanon has, etc. and that's not to say that my interpretation alone is the correct one or anything

ganondorf interpretations tend to come from two angles: one that presents him as an evil-for-evil's sake villain, and one that essentially defangs him, both of which are problematic in their own right. analyzing both those angles first requires acknowledging that the legend of zelda is very orientalist and imperialist in its themes.

these themes start with the decision to take the antagonist, originally portrayed as a monster, as a man from the desert, with every caricaturized trait one would expect. and, the storytelling of loz is influenced heavily by japanese myth and medieval europe, particularly the idea of a "divine right" to rule — which, of course, belongs to zelda, or rather the hylian monarchy as a whole. and ganondorf is the evil who is not divinely ordained to rule and thus would dismantle good society as we know it

and then there's wind waker, where a popular interpretation of ganondorf's monologue is that he desired better for his people... well, not quite! him and daphnes are essentially parallels of each other. nor is it ever really said by the gan man himself, as he never really says anything about his people in that monologue. it could be determined from subtext, but as far as authorial intent goes —

see. loz is my favorite franchise, but in it's current state since the introduction of ganondorf, functions more as propaganda at times in it's narrative setup, rather than any sort of fairy tale. not saying it IS propaganda, though — there is a distinction

so, that is to say, looking at JUST the origin material itself, you can't really "know" him as a character, or understand any coherent moral statement. any sort of analysis that tries to determine ganondorf's goals, what he has or has not done, and why, will eventually hit a dead end. because that isn't the purpose of propaganda. ganondorf as portrayed in canon is whatever he needs to be in order to justify the fantasy of killing him

which, as he is portrayed in canon, is a merciless villain with no coherent moral backing to his actions. he is greedy and desires power. but, of course, it's perfectly reasonable to want more from his character than just "evil desert guy wants our grass"

(although one thing i find super funny with the way ganondorf is portrayed in particularly oot and totk with nintendo doing that is the duality of him being called manipulative, but also very obviously and openly evil at the same time. so you get the rather funny canonical reality that everyone who meets him becomes incapable of doing anything about their gut instincts and just lets themselves get fucked despite being spitefully demeaning about it the entire time)

and this is where my issue comes in with most interpretations that try to "fix" ganondorf

most attempts at "fixing" ganondorf will

1. focus on him trying to break demise's curse

which, aside from being a misinterpretation of demise's curse, i feel robs ganondorf of any actual agency and boils all his actions down to "he has a demon in his head."

as for the misinterpretation of canon, it somehow got into the minds of many that ganondorf is a reincarnation of demise. this is not the case. reincarnation gets talked about a lot in loz fandom for some reason, but there's only one canon instance of it — being hylia's reincarnation into sksw zelda. and, essentially implying that the guy from the desert is basically the antichrist is.......lol. the actual manifestation of demise's curse is basically every villain ever

and 2. will have him ally with link and/or zelda and eventually hyrule as a whole

my biggest issue with especially that part, is this idea that ganondorf would recognize hyrule as rightful if not for the above mentioned demon in his head. he is bad, or at the very least morally gray, because he rejects hyrule's authority. and in this angle of interpretation and fanon, hyrule stays static. throughout the series, we get bits and pieces of hyrule's wrongdoings through subtext, but rarely is this actually ever presented as something wrong. only as the reason certain circumstances are present in the current hyrule. and this approach woefully ignores link and zelda as agents of hyrule who uphold the status quo. and i think maybe a lot of people are even hesitant to acknowledge that, because they're the main characters that everyone loves

and tbh. sometimes it feels the two popular interpretations of ganondorf end up being over-corrections of each other. the ones who prefer him mercilessly evil for the sake of it feel like they're trying to over-correct the sympathetic "woobifying" interpretations, but then end up playing right into the orientalist tropes that nintendo set up. and the more sympathetic interpretations try to over-correct that but then end up robbing him of all agency and making him only a victim to a higher force

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

Doesn't Frankenstein deliberately build his creature to be beautiful? Dude's already doing eugenics by selecting the most aesthetic cadaver parts.

Well yes he did and it ended up the opposite despite his best efforts but to be honest the creature is described with black hair in conjunction with the line about making him beautiful so I would say that he's building a man to his aesthetic tastes rather then attempting to make a perfect Aryan or something. Which I suppose is a kind of eugenics technically maybe depending on how you define eugenics. But I don't think it's useful to our understanding of eugenics or to our understanding of the novel to apply that lense to it. Aesthetic choices need to be made in Victor Frankenstein's build a bitch laboratory. While he might be somewhat limited in skin color by being in Germany, he can pick more or less any hair or eye color he likes any bone structure he likes and so on. The monster is by necessity intentionally designed in a way that human beings are not. So any aesthetic choices made being made differently would result in the same moral outcome. It's less selective breeding for particular traits and more like basing the face mold of your android based off somebody's porn viewing habits like in that movie ex machina with Oscar Isaac.

All that being said he was designing a monster to impress German and Swiss scientists in the 17th century of course there were eugenics involved in his reasoning on the features. But the loosely implied eugenics are not even the most racist thing about the book either. It takes time out of its day to be orientalist as fuck. When Clerval comes to school he's taking fucking oriental studies which lumps together Arab Indian and Chinese philosophy, when the monster is living in the out house of the peasants an Arab woman named Safie arrives and her whole motive for being there is that she is trying to marry Felix because in the west women are allowed to have a station in society(citation needed) and if she went back to those barbaric Muslim countries she would be forced to join a harem. And then Clerval decides his calling is to quote "aid in the European colonization of India" and that line is just glossed over, he's a completely sympathetic character, and he dies at Adam's hands before he can do it. But I don't particularly blame Mary Shelley for any of that because who was gonna tell her that that's racist? It's the background radiation on society at the time. I hope if I ever get published people reading my book in 200 years will think of me as a pioneering trans author in my genre who was low key racist because it will mean society got better on the race issue.

Anyway tl;dr maybe, but reading the creature as a stand in for marginalized people is reading way against text (I think if you're reading it as a trans allegory the against text reading could work but a racial minority reading falls apart very quickly). The book contains orientalism that is jarring to a modern audience so let's not put the cart before the horse. It like most novels written in a year that starts with a 1, is a product of its time and requires that you read it with that in mind. it's part of how you read a book

[saintsenara]

Unhinged ships for you: Nagini/ the Basilisk ; Albus Dumbledore / Mrs. Cole ; Hagrid / Aragog. ; Snape / Vernon

cheers, anon. finally, some good fucking food.

nagini/the basilisk

which also got a separate shoutout of its own:

yes.

now, i want to be very clear that i am of the view that nagini is and has only ever been a snake - the tiresome orientalist backstory given for her in the fantastic beasts films is unwelcome in this house.

but nagini is also evidently not one of the two species of snake which is native to britain. the description of her in canon makes her sound like a reticulated python - albeit a reticulated python who is also venomous and fonder of biting than constricting - which means she would have come, were she born in the wild, from somewhere in south or south-east asia.

i very much like the idea of her having been captured from the wild for the exotic pet trade and having been transported thousands of miles from her homeland to the balkan coastline, ready to be sold in western europe, when she manages to escape from her cage and slither off to freedom. except - a stranger in a strange land - she's lost and afraid, and is therefore so very, very grateful to encounter an odd-looking man who can speak to her in her own language...

canon makes a lot of the fact that nagini is voldemort's only friend. the flip-side of this is that voldemort is her only friend too - and, while snakes aren't usually thought of as social creatures... maybe that's just what humans think because we've never actually asked.

we get flashes in canon which allow an author to flesh out nagini's inner life as quite lonely. she gets agitated when voldemort spends too long speaking english, or when the other death eaters are doing things and making noise which she doesn't understand. she doesn't like being back in a cage at the end of deathly hallows. she likes to feel useful - her describing her trip to see the prophecy as "important work" stands out to me, and i think it's lovely. her personal world is quite small - voldemort is not someone who gallivants around, and so she probably spends a lot of time behaving as she does at the start of goblet of fire: drifting around strange houses, homesick and half a world away from a life she once knew.

the basilisk, too, must be quite lonely. after all, if you were a cold-blooded creature, would you enjoy shivering in the dark under a school for a millennium? she too must be far from home - basilisks originate in greece, in canon, and i won't be pulled from the headcanon that slytherin [since salazar is a name from the iberian peninsula] arrives in britain from sunnier shores too.

i always like the idea of the basilisk being genuinely fond of the teenage voldemort - and their relationship mirroring the one his adult self has with nagini, with him popping down to the chamber for a chinwag - because he's presumably the first person she's spoken to in decades, the gaunts clearly having stopped [in the seven-book canon] sending their children to hogwarts as they became poorer and more isolated.

i am also wedded to the idea that basilisks pair-bond for life. but slytherin didn't realise this.

two lonely souls finding each other and making each other less lonely is my poison of choice. even when they're both snakes.

mrs cole/albus dumbledore

dumbledore immediately being willing to start day-drinking - while he's supposed to be working, no less - just because mrs cole displays a basic interest in the things he says has "desperate simp" written all over it.

i reckon he popped back to the orphanage a couple of times with flowers and whisked her off for a night at the pictures, while the assembled orphans gawked from the stairs.

it broke off because dumbledore is terrified of commitment - mrs cole tried to get him to make things official and he responded by wiping her memory [the ultimate ghosting]. despite what he will later tell harry, the real cause of his beef with the young voldemort is that he spends his first time at hogwarts trying to finagle them getting back together.

after all, being prepped to throw hands with an eleven-year-old would be pretty strange, wouldn't it albus?

unless that eleven-year-old was attempting to parent trap you...

rubeus hagrid/aragog

flopping, i'm afraid.

aragog's plausibly into it - he properly gasses up hagrid to harry and ron - but i don't think hagrid's going for it. not because he's not inclined towards a bit of monster-fucking but because he finds aragog - who is generally described in canon using the word "fretful" - to be a bit of fun sponge.

that's why he hooks aragog up with mosag. it makes him feel less guilty...

vernon dursley/severus snape

jesus christ this would be messy...

i think they might end up in some begrudging hate sex following a bit of arguing over whether snape's technique with a wand is more impressive than vernon's knowledge of how to properly wield a drill, and then their mutual loathing of harry sustains them through round two.

but that's it.

vernon's love for his solidly middle-class life is going to turn snape into a trotskyite, and vernon's taste in men is towards authoritative hotties with earrings - which is why him being canonically willing to risk it all for kingsley will never not send me - rather than scrawny goths.

[adarkrainbow]

I am currently re-reading Jack Zipes' "Fairytales and the art of subversion". Well I am re-reading this book's chapter on French fairytales, and I do plan on reading the rest of the work. And I have to say I might have been a bit too harsh about Zipes. I still wouldn't recommend him as a way to understand French literary fairytales - but at least now I understand why he is wrong, despite seemingly getting so many things right.

Because there ARE many right and true things in this book's second chapter. The summarized chronology of French literary fairytales ; the double inheritage of French folklore and Italian literature ; the enormous influence French literary fairytales had on the 18th and 19th century Germany... It's all there, correct and good.

But the main problem of Jack Zipes' interpretation and description of French fairytales remain. However I don't blame Zipes for it because this book was clearly written in the 80s United-States, for the 80s Americans, and as such yes there are things debunked now and yes Zipes evokes things that "nobody" does when in fact some people have done them before - just in Europe (like the whole segment in the first chapter about nobody caring about the social or historical analysis of fairytales). Similarly, the main flaw of this second chapter is very simply put a widespread misinformation, a common incorrect belief, but that is unfortunately still surviving to this day, and that is no surprising to see in 80s works - this misconception still is seen today, and its debunking is relatively "recent", at least recent enough to not be widespread.

And here's the problem: Jack Zipes writes his chapter and his analysis with one preconception and one thesis. Perrault (and others like mademoiselle L'Héritier or madame d'Aulnoy) wrote their fairytales for both adults and children, but with a strong focus on children ; if they added morals to their stories it was because these fairytales were moralistic education tools ; and the main goal and nature of these fairytales was a social and cultural endoctrinment to shape the "adults of tomorrow".

The idea that Perrault and others wrote exclusively or mainly for children was indeed widespread thanks to the 19th century mishandling of fairytales as a whole ; but this is false. And from this false basis that fairytales were mainly aimed at children, Zipes creates an analysis that could have worked... But is actually false, or very, very superficial - because to consider that Perrault and co.'s fairytales were aimed at children is a superficial reading of the stories with a strong lack of critical view or context-knowledge.

The real deal of the thing is this - yes, the "wave of fairytales" started out for adults and ended up for children, as Zipes himself explains. But Zipes (and all the others he based himself on) are wrong in believing the fairytales were aimed at children since the beginnings. Perrault, madame d'Aulnoy, mademoiselle L'Héritier and the others, did NOT write for children - they wrote for adults. And yes, Perrault evoked how his stories were "for children"... But he also wrote about how his stories had been written by his teenage son and not himself - but a careful look proves that Perrault's fairytales were only aimed at children as a "pretense", as a sort of stylistic ornament, as a literary "game" so to speak, the same way Perrault had to pretend the stories had not been written by him but collected by his youngest son - it was all part of the... "persona" if you will. It was only by the mid 18th century, with the renewal of the "literary French fairytale (non-orientalist)" that some authors started to think "Wait... Maybe we could use fairytales to teach children while entertaining them! Actually do pedagogic fairytales instead of just "playing pretend" at being literary moralists!". The most defining and prominent of those authors was madame Leprince de Beaumont, the first to ACTUALLY write literary fairytales for children, as in REALLY for children, not as in "Yeah, we say we write for children but clearly only adults will read it". One might argue Fénelon did wrote, at the end of the 17th century, pedagogic fairytales for the child he was supposed to teach (THE ROYAL HEIR!)... But unlike Perrault or d'Aulnoy's fairytales, which were public, Fénelon's story were private and only published after his death, in the 18th century.

As for how Perrault and d'Aulnoy's stories, written by adults for adults, ended up as "classics of childhood literature"... Well its simple: the Blue Library and the peddling books. The Blue Library, the most famous and renowned collection of cheap books sold to the uneducated masses by peddlers, did their money by taking great classics or massively popular works and printing out heavily edited or simplified versions of them - and the Blue Library immediately took all the most successful literary fairytales of the salons, and printed them out, and shared them massively across France for the non-aristocratic folks, and the uneducated folks, and the poor peasants... Which is how the stories became part of French popular culture, but which is also why the entire literary context and socio-cultural meaning of these tales was completely lost. How could the barely-alphabetized countryside family understand the refined puns, the courtly caricatures and the book references made in these stories (often very simplified, chaotically edited or misprinted?). People only remember pretty princesses and talking cats and fairy godmothers, and thus they classified it all back into "children stories" and, in a full circle, these literary stories invented out of the folklore became in turn folktales of the French countryside...

So yes, Jack Zipes' chapter on French fairytales is wrong, and spread misinformation, but it isn't his fault - he just did with what was widespread at the time, and he did his best as a foreigner dealing with works even misunderstood in their own country, AND his work is simply a bit outdated. Its not bad, it just... Didn't age well

[dolphin1812]

“Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where centres of labor should exist.”

I think Hugo accidentally made me pro-monastery.

In all seriousness, while I understand what Hugo’s trying to do here (prove that convents are harmful and that society has moved past the need for them), I despise his approach. First of all, the idea that a “civilization” must “develop” in stages is harmful, and his argument is very reliant on that: 

“The monastic regime, good at the beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the spiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood.”

The idea that civilization grows in the same way that a person does (reaching “manhood”) was closely tied to colonial rhetoric, with the colonized portrayed as “children.” It’s also a simplification of history, which is more engaging when it’s complicated! Even this very period in French history was really turbulent. Hugo’s arguing that the political and social order no longer reflected the values of the people, which were changed by the Revolution, and while that may be true, there were a bunch of other shifts going on at the same time (like industrialization) that couldn’t be tied to the Revolution in the same way because they happened later. That’s not to say that there is no connection at all, but rather that this view of history excludes part of what I most enjoy about this book, which is seeing the complexities of France from the early 1800s (when this book is set) to the 1860s (when it was published). 

Again, while I don’t know a lot about convents, I find it cruel to be so dismissive of Spanish nuns:

“Do these women think? No. Have they any will? No. Do they love? No. Do they live? No.”

It’s likely that all the abuses in the convent system Hugo describes are true (the last paragraph even tells us where to go to see proof). However, as we’ve seen from the Petit-Picpus convent, there are many good reasons why a woman would become a nun. Aside from wanting an alternative to marriage or genuine religious devotion, many of the women staying in the convent were, for instance, noblewomen who had sought shelter there after the Revolution. They may be part of the social order Hugo condemns on the broader level, but on the individual level, it makes sense that a noblewoman - especially if she had no family to help her - would consider a convent a place of safety. It wasn’t a pleasant choice; the Petit-Picpus convent might be the creepiest place we’ve read about. But it was still a choice, rationally decided upon based on the circumstances of those women.

His description of the Spanish convent also draws on Orientalist tropes around the harem, even calling it a “seraglio of souls.” He positions Jesus as the “sultan” and the nuns as “sultanas,” with the priest as the “eunuch” who guards them. He laments their lack of romantic and sexual relationships even as he sexualizes the relationship between them and Jesus, stressing his nudity on the cross and the nuns’ devotion to this image. This trope was often used to deny women’s agency outside of “the West” and position them as objects of fascination for the viewer, and it serves a similar purpose here. Hugo denies that the nuns even “think,” and he’s stressed repeatedly that we’re peering in on an otherwise forbidden space (to an assumed audience of 19th-century men) in a way that maintains the objectifying aspect of this trope. It’s honestly quite disturbing to read.

It’s not all bad, though. I love how he highlights the way new regimes erase and re-make the past:

“To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, have adopted the expedient of smiling at them. There has come into fashion a strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassing facts and all gloomy questions. A matter for declamations, say the clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer; Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers. I know not who has recently discovered that Tacitus was a declaimer, that Nero was a victim, and that pity is decidedly due to “that poor Holofernes.””

The last sentence here is especially fascinating (and kind of amusing), with how even “ancient” history that seems “settled” can rapidly change based on the political moment. Even Nero is up for re-interpretation when a rapid re-configuration of the past is needed to maintain the structure of the present. It’s simpler to dismiss figures as “declaimers” than analyze their critiques and evaluate their validity, and it’s certainly more convenient for a monarchy to do so as well, particularly when the structures they criticized are part of the monarchy’s legitimacy. 

[onewomancitadel]

A smattering of thoughts

I was really into classic science fiction when I was a teenager and liked collecting oddities (this really started with The Avery Cates Series when I was ten, which was not classic sci-fi but was cyberpunk) and my tastes have evolved so I'm despairing at the fact that if I had read the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy at said age I probably would've loved it, and it was published in English at the right time for it. Two ships in the night...

I don't derive that same comfort or intrigue from it. I think especially as an 'artsy' type I felt like it was more of the approximate correct path to understanding how the world ought to work and how it ought to work in storytelling. If anything, I think that the reason I really understand #narrative cynicism is because that is a natural phase for adolescence. But separate to that, it was very attractive to me that you could prove fundamental things about humanity, or lack thereof, in a newer neutral context: space. And I think that that idea still interests me, in terms of where my research interests ended up, just not really in that context.

There are other problems I have with the series, not just that I'm not in the right position to love it anymore, but also I struggle with the fact that the reason I would read it then and the reason I've read it now is really still for the same reason: there is no horror to me like existential horror. Every other horror falls short of it. Monsters - they can be saved and redeemed or they can just hurt you. Psychological torment - that is part of being alive and can be as cathartic as it could be scary. Whatever, name it, it can be scary, but I don't think anything is as bone-deep searing, fundamentally disturbing and unsettling, enough to make me scared to sleep and wake up, than existential horror. And what is existential horror? I mean, that's just the nature of existence: the nature of consciousness, the afterlife, the heat death of the universe. Yeah, it's terrifying to think of humanity wiped out because of aliens. That hurts. Existential horror here crosses over a bit with body horror too: brains in vats, robots... that's the really terrifying stuff.

Also, of course, I haven't even touched on the feminist mindset here. But would you believe me if one of the reasons I really love Dune is because I honestly believe it's more progressive than a lot of classic science fiction? Hahaha. It's not because I believe Frank Herbert had a conscious feminist mindset, far from it, but that the setting and overall aims of his themes managed to overcome classic misogynistic blindspots, and in turn I think it suggested something subconsciously quite interesting. Don't get me wrong, the Orientalist problem is not something I easily forget, so that's not the only issue I care about, but it is a common criticism aimed at the series. The homophobia is probably one of the least excusable, but for me my metric for reading a series is how much it manages to overwhelm the specific ideas the author has. It's a very subjective metric, and obviously based on my own personal taste, but when I can tell that the author's hatred overcomes their actual intellectual or artistic intentions, that's when I start scrutinising it much harder. I guess in this sense I'm much more of an apologetic than some: I do think there is a difference between implicit bias and explicit bias which is indulged in, and though ultimately those harms interact and maximise each other, I do take a more 'harm reduction' view. I guess what I am trying to say is that I think Dune is smart enough and thoughtful enough about its entire cast, and I say this of the whole series, that it has a certain artistic integrity which makes me a bit softer on it... gender, race, sexuality are all modes of expression in that setting.

That was sort of what I was getting at in the post from yesterday: the misogyny in the storytelling services thematic expression, which is where I was taking a specific quibble with it even though I understand it. The feminisation of humanity, the infantilism, the death of good men, facilitated the devastating loss of humanity... and this was where I absolutely could not ignore it. I had been giving the series the benefit of the doubt up until then - and in this case, it really can't be ignored that the suffering and sacrifice of men is considered necessary by the narrative, which is a related tin of worms - but it was at that point that it all crystallised into a problem. It is in itself so infantile, so rooted in basic banal assumptions about humanity that I find the aspirational hard science, speculative science fiction, totally laughable juxtaposed against it. Yes, this is about Remembrance of Earth's Past.

I guess this post is walking all over the place, but I don't really feel like segmenting my ideas across different posts right now. This is part of the same stream of thought. I guess an ongoing issue I have with feminist analysis is that on one side, you have a lot of antifeminist beliefs becoming mainstreamed in previously feminist spaces - just look at the state of Tumblr now, which harms more than just your archetypal most privileged woman on earth - just think of trans women, who always mysteriously vanish from the converation - or the glee with which ostensible leftists make rape jokes now - and then on the other side, there is a total rejection of looking at gender through an anthropological lense, and more specifically, how it organises men's behaviour as much as it organises women's. I don't mean in the sense of 'toxic masculinity' - how that was mainstreamed was completely irresponsible, in my view, but it's a catchy phrase - and I don't mean in the sense, really, that 'patriarchy hurts men too' - because it's not a case of 'too', as if that were not the intention to start with. Traditional class analysis borrowed from Marxism starts to fracture under the fact that I don't think that class solidarity amongst men exists in the sense that Marxists really mean (this in itself is a polemic on its own, so I won't make this any longer than it needs to be, but if it did exist in the sense they mean, then it would be insurmountable). I also really think you get a superimposing problem of reality reflecting theory than theory reflecting reality, and sorting the evidence as such therein. I don't really know what the answer is here; I don't really know many feminist scholars who integrate the same research interests as me into their work, and of the scholars who do look at similar things to me, well, they are less feminist minded. And it's not to diminish misogyny as an issue: the reason I think misogyny is so all-encompassing, and crossculturally evolving, is because of its historic utility, not because it is inevitable in our biology, or because of God (and in my hated nemesis evopsych, it tends to be that 'evolution' replaces 'God').

I was actually thinking about this because there was a study I had seen passed around disputing that men leave their wives when they're ill at a grosser rate than women leave their ill husbands (obviously a heteronormative study, let's move on); it was bandied around as proof that men do not have the same concrete emotional attachment to women that women do to men, and subsequently discard their wives once they no longer served them, for all the good that 'in sickness and in health' does as a vow. The study was retracted because it suffered from extremely fucked values which counted couples leaving the study as male partners leaving their wives. But it was a study which affirmed their beliefs, and so it was taken at first glance. This is why you must have a certain degree of science literacy when looking at statistical surveys to back up your political beliefs. This wasn't even just a replication problem, which is the most common issue which crops up, but straight up bad science. If you think this is an outlier, it is most certainly not. This is not to reject science by any means either, as bad faith readers might be quick to point out: you can only criticise it insofar as you trust scientific analysis.

And, I know, the common belief espoused right now about the return to misogyny in leftist spaces is because they were just waiting for it. But in some ways I wonder if it were a strategic failure and what that means for feminism going forward. This isn't a popular view, and it is unsurprising that leftism doesn't support unpopular views, not least because this position would challenge the idea that oppression is cosmically inevitable. But I find this attitude unconscionable myself, not least because I don't think the majority of people are inherently evil. There are good things in the world and there can be good things in the world, and people are complex creatures.

But this is really obviously informed by my interest in cultural criticism and more specifically fiction, which ranks pretty low in terms of immediate material problems. It's easy to say that gender has a place in society when you know that it makes life hard accessing treatment for endometriosis or HRT or whatever. That's the thing feminists are interested in, the symptoms of misogyny and how to cure the underlying pathology. Does anybody care why it exists? Some dispute it's a biological inevitability, some dispute it is necessary on the basis that society would be chaos without it. How else could men possibly know who might pay for the date? And then when you get down to it, who excuses rapists and who excuses rape? But then to me, I think it is a matter of patriarchy and human cowardice and the excusal of evil. There are baser things which patriarchy expresses. This is important for me to think about because I don't think you either are or you aren't a misogyny machine who outputs a misogynistic belief or not. Misogyny is a vehicle for human expression, and it is in itself a hatred.

There is an ease to my perspective that makes many people uncomfortable. But the reason I can take that anthropological lense that other women don't have the liberty to is precisely because of the fruits of feminism, and that is not something to castigate oneself for. It's aspirational. I don't know why that sort of thing can't be celebrated but is instead condemned as a libertine hedonism. But it's part of that misogynistic mythology, I suppose. Is it wrong to say that everybody on earth deserves drinkable water, and I enjoy drinkable water on demand, and want to understand why others cannot access such?

And when it comes to my fictional interests, which is my own personal hobby and something I get to enjoy outside of pure political utility, it is impossible to think about its cultural thesis without thinking about the question of all of this; I don't 'take off' my feminist hat to enjoy something, because otherwise I couldn't appreciate its contribution to a cultural canon. But I am still able to enjoy storytelling with a pretty wide berth of tolerance because of this background I have outlined here, and I think it is the most enjoyable middleground. I'm not someone who reads stories or watches films to turn my brain off; to me, comfort and relaxation comes from the liberty of being able to think!

Of course, my issues with Remembrance of Earth's Past actually go beyond the question of gender. I've torn through the series in the past couple of days because I've been rather unwell, and in terms of personal taste, I have just really changed. The third book especially ends up sounding like an encyclopaedia entry. I am pleased with myself for predicting most of the twists. The ones I didn't were character-based betrayals in the second book, but I think that can be excused because the character foreshadowing and development is somewhat weak, and it was designed to be shocking. I do find the Chinese default, as opposed to the English default, very diverting, though, and I think illuminates a lot of interesting things about Western science fiction. In some ways, a cultural default is natural, but there's a whole new cultural hegemony to analyse.

But it is so ambitious, and I have to admire that fact about the series. It's a modern book which feels like it could've been published in the golden age of sci-fi, and I think that partially explains its popularity. It's all the good bits with better character work and even more developed science, which you really only could have if you worked in STEM. I think my problems with it are philosophical and artistic. There are fundamental differences between the author and myself. Before I've conducted any fandom surveys, I suspect that people loathe Ye Wenjie; naturally, I think she's fascinating.

So that's the end of the post. A lot of people online are quick to assume that not liking something or taking quibbles with something is tantamount to personal insult and/or finding the experience a waste of time, which it isn't for me. I've enjoyed a nostalgic return to the things I was really interested in when I was a teenager and I have semi-enjoyed torturing myself with existential horror. I get to write Tumblr posts exploring the issue; I am having fun. You are allowed to like things and no one is more of a proponent of that than me. This liberty you enjoy is the same liberty I enjoy in disliking something or being mean. Being mean isn't oppression.

But I think this is an online problem. When I discuss these things with people in real life they are generally quite good about it. My best friend and I have lots of interesting conversations about our differences and it's a source of fun, not discord. I am a romantic and she is not a romantic. But I also think the online world can tell us some scary things about humans, no? Especially if you're used to your online world as being your safe, expressive space. That cyberbully Seraphina onewomancitadel is being mean again about my animes...

Hahah. I hope you are all doing well and taking care of yourselves. I guess I am 'signing off' on a more classic blog post... wonder of wonders. The microblogging platform is now a macroblogging platform.

[transmutationisms]

I just discovered your Succession analysis posts, and I LOVE your vampire and gothic connections. I literally thought I was insane for getting gothic vibes from Succession. Anyway, you vampire posts remind me of this Voltaire quote: " I confess that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces. "

yeah! from the dictionnaire philosophique, right? vampires were all the rage in france in the early eighteenth century, largely fuelled by some reports coming in of them from eastern europe. so i think in the full quote here, voltaire is saying that this is a superstition endemic to the backwards east, whereas he has never encountered vampire myths in paris or london---capitals of the 'enlightenment'---yet the true bloodsucking is actually done by the well-heeled in these cities. marx (among others) later picked up on the metaphor of bourgeoisie as vampires, though by his formulation in das kapital, he had completed the theoretical move of describing the bourgeoisie as nothing more than a personification of capital, and thus described capital itself as vampiric: a dead thing with an insatiable appetite. for marx the metaphor was less moralised and more a way of capturing capital's dialectical transmutation from money to commodity to money again, and from agent to patient to agent of the whole political economy.

anyway this is one of the more reactionary elements of bram stoker's dracula. for stoker, dracula is an anachronism, even an atavism: old nobility, nostalgic about the warfare of bygone days, unable to blend into the bustle of modern england (this latter is also a function of stoker's orientalist view of eastern europe). dracula's appetite for literal blood is also a holdover from a 'pre-industrial' era; he's a creature out of time. this is why vampirism continually confounds the logic of the doctor and the psychiatrist; the only one who understands dracula is van helsing, who’s “a philosopher” (read: doctor in a pre-19th century sense: pre-specialisation, pre-clinical gaze; a man of metaphysics and natural philosophy whose knowledge of the human body is explicitly linked to religiosity). so we have a critique of wealthy people (voltaire) and later the modern value-form of capital itself (marx) as sucking life from the living... and stoker flips that and uses the vampire archetype to implicate only the ancient aristocracy and eastern europeans. quite funny, if irritating.

i think more people could do with reading succession as a gothic, honestly, and when i joined succblr i was surprised that wasn't a more common view. in addition to logan's body as a gothic monster, waystar itself is kind of a looming vampire entity, feeding off the inherent dysfunction of capitalist politics and operating on the logic of legacy media in a digital world. kendall and roman in particular can both function as gothic heroine figures: overwrought emotion, constantly distressed. all of the roy kids are menaced by their father; i've also used the cannibalism metaphor to describe the predation on one generation by its progenitor, but of course this idea of the old consuming the new is also common in gothics. you could even see the glass-and-steel waystar offices as a kind of castle for the 21st century. certainly logan and waystar have the insatiable appetite for expansion that characterises capital and the vampire. this is all a hugely underrated aspect of the show imo!

[kroashent]

Val-Cula Daily - May 29

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Deep Dive: Stoker and Orientalism. This is gonna be a long one...

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The "Szgany" peoples are heavily featured in today's story, starting on an iconic, but often problematic association between the Romani ethnic group, the supernatural world, and Western European prejudices. The word Szgany appears to be Stoker's attempt to trasliterate a Romanian word, rather than one that existed in widespread use. There's a more in-depth deep-dive into this than I can provide here: https://screamscenepodcast.tumblr.com/post/699604864253214720/a-point-of-clarification-more-linguistics-cw

Its often said that the past is a foreign country and the context of Stoker's time, while it does not excuse the problems, might help inform them.

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Let's open this can of worms...

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Stoker lived and wrote in the 19th century, the height of an art-historical trend called Orientalism, a renewed Western interest in the Middle East and Islamic culture, brought about by changes to travel and communications technology. African colonization, increased trade and travel with North Africa, South Asia and the Ottoman empire, opened up Western European cultures to an entirely new set of cultures and aesthetics, and interest exploded.

From a cynical view, Orientalism is a problematic movement, a patronizing Colonial and Imperialist coinciding with racist depictions, exploitation and the forced homogenization of cultures resulting from the spread of European Colonialism in Africa and Southeast Asia. But it is also one of fascination and awe at new concepts of expression and thought, a genuine attempt to understand and adapt these expressions and cultures, but through a very removed and warped view brought on by Europe's own ethno-religious struggles, state/religious propaganda of earlier times, geographic distance and linguistic ignorance.

Orientalism was especially prevalent in France, where the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français (Society of French Orientalist Painters) was founded a mere 4 years prior to Dracula's publication, inspired by French Colonial ties to Algeria and Morocco. French Orientalist painters could be split into two groups: Those who traveled, lived and worked in the areas they painted, and those who never left their own studios. The SPOF often held promotions and dinners, not just of French Orientalist painters, but also showcases of Islamic art, cuisine, language and culture. Similar trends existed in England, although to a lesser extent, and it is evident from Stoker's work that he was often exposed to these movements. The first unabridged and unexpurgated English Language editions of the seminal Orientalist collection, Tales of 1,001 Nights were published in 1882 and 1885, after earlier, heavily censored and altered versions had been in circulation up to that point.

While it is easy to dismiss the movement as another example of Western colonialism, it was also one driven by a genuine desire to understand and share the cultural beauty they encountered, albeit through the often blunt and blundering lens of Belle Epoque/Victorian society. Stoker is making a real attempt to showcase the peoples of Eastern Europe, commonly drawing on food, clothing and architecture in his drawings, but sometimes, as is the case with the Szgany, he falls flat to the standards of contemporary review.

------------

So, now that I've gotten everyone worked up over a 19th century artistic movement, how does the initial appearance of Dracula's "Gipsie" henchmen work out? I actually thought pretty well.

The Szgany have arrived to do some work for Drac, at which point I direct you to my earlier "Dracula is a crime lord of a technothriller. The Szgany are not following Dracula alone as a superstitious group, but one of a large network, including, but not limited to: A Romanian stagecoach line, a hotel, several British lawyers, several British realtors, a Russian shipping company, a British Zoo, a Bulgarian businessman, a pair of Hungarian Bankers, several British teamsters and a spider-eating man in a padded room. Its sort of weird how the Szgany get singled out, when its actually harder to find a group the ISN'T working for Dracula, however inadvertently. Drac's got connections, is my point.

Anyway, Jonathan writes some postcards to Mina and Hawkins, and drops them out a barred window with some gold. The Szgany turn them over to Dracula! A nefarious betrayal! Or is it?

Neither Jonathan, nor the Szgany share any language, as Jonathan points out when he drops some stuff without context or instruction on top of a caravaner's head. Seeing the crazy man throw things out a window shouting in a strange language, they turn them over to the homeowner, Dracula, for further instruction... which is probably what would have happened with a Romani trapped in an English Lord's remote castle as well, TBH. It doesn't go well.

The Count has come. He sat down beside me, and said in his smoothest voice as he opened two letters:—

"The Szgany has given me these, of which, though I know not whence they come, I shall, of course, take care. See!"—he must have looked at it—"one is from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins; the other"—here he caught sight of the strange symbols as he opened the envelope, and the dark look came into his face, and his eyes blazed wickedly—"the other is a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality! It is not signed. Well! so it cannot matter to us." And he calmly held letter and envelope in the flame of the lamp till they were consumed. Then he went on:—

"The letter to Hawkins—that I shall, of course, send on, since it is yours. Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon, my friend, that unknowingly I did break the seal. Will you not cover it again?" He held out the letter to me, and with a courteous bow handed me a clean envelope. I could only redirect it and hand it to him in silence. When he went out of the room I could hear the key turn softly. A minute later I went over and tried it, and the door was locked.

Dracula is at his creepiest when he does something threatening but poses it as a "friendly" conversation.

[c0rpsedemon]

naur but fate is genuinely The only piece of media to even semi-accurately depict my relationship with gender and sexuality and it's been Like That since the very beginning, and without fail the only reasons ppl say its rep is regressive or poorly handled or anything like that falls under three categories: a) the racist and orientalist belief that japan (and thus japanese media) has backwards views on lgbt issues and couldn't possibly depict anything well without some westerner showing them how, b) the sex-negative belief that anything which heavily involves/appeals to sexuality couldn't hold any substance, and, the only category which isn't an insta-block, c) piece of shit localizers

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

admittedly the only two dark skinned characters in Utena being an extreme enabling doormat of a woman and the other being the absolute worst irredeemable guy that the former essentially created always made me uncomfortable. Then it kind of happened again when that same writer made the most morally evil of the main characters in GWitch (orchestrated a massacre and several terrorist attacks) the darkest skinned one with an Arabic name. Like, 😬

I’d say anthy is a bit more complex than that, although utena has its own series of problems from what I’ve heard-I personally haven’t done a deep dive into it but the depiction of India in the episode when nanami ‘goes there’ had issues and there was at least one orientalist art piece of anthy done by a staff member when working in the show. There was actually a very good tumblr post abt it but I’m on mobile and struggling to find it right now. (It probably would’ve helped if there had been some darker bg characters as well although I’ve seen people argue that it was a deliberate choice so they would be ‘othered’ narratively, but again, I’m not very involved in the fandom)

But yeah, it’s a very common thing in a lot of anime where even if the dark skinned (or just tan) character isn’t evil they’re more aggressive or bitchy, stripped way down in their attire/overall more sexually promiscuous, or cast as a delinquent, or otherwise framed in a way that puts them as pushy overbearing, and ‘othered’ compared to the cast that’s given skin color that the audience is meant to understand to view as the ‘default.’ There’s exceptions, of course, but it happens enough that I’m generally aware of when it happens. And it’s happened here as well.

[transformers-mosaic]

Transformers: Mosaic #328 - "Shogun"

Originally posted on January 12th, 2009

Story, Art - Iván Mas

deviantART | Seibertron | TFW2005 | BotTalk

wada sez: A Bludgeon-focused strip set in an alternate version of IDW's continuity—sort of along the lines of Evolutions. Mas offered his own commentary on the strip on his deviantART; I’ve mirrored it and some behind-the-scenes material below, along with an entirely separate strip in a similar vein written by Enric Farguell that was apparently rejected by the Mosaic editors on the basis that it wasn’t “sequential art”. I decided to reach out to my friend Sam to get an independent view on the strip’s cultural background:

Sam sez: So Sekigahara was one of the last big battles of the warring states period. The narrator is a Toyotomi loyalist, while the Tokugawa he is talking about is Ieyasu Tokugawa, who will win the battle, establish the Tokugawa shogunate and his territory of Edo will become capital and eventually modern day Tokyo. It’s basically standard tonal samurai stuff, all “my death brings honour to my family” and that. A bit orientalist in tone here for sure, but there’s an element of truth to be had. The thing is there’s an official Transformers thing from Japan that is exactly this—not exactly, in that Bludgeon isn’t there, but there was a Warring States/Transformers crossover thing during the Age of Extinction windup. [wada sez: Sam was thinking of a collaboration between TakaraTomy and a company that made actual armor/swords inspired by Sengoku period factions, and also wanted to mention that one time the protagonist of Sengoku Basara showed up on Q-Transformers.] The thing about Japan is that this is all happening 500 years ago so it’s about far out enough for this to be easily mined for fantasy stories. Lots of fiction about what if there were literally demons on both sides and such.

Well, I think it's one of the mosaics I've made that I like the most.

I think it is quite complete in many aspects, we have on the one hand a small historical study of documentation.

It is one of the most famous battles in the history of Japan, Sekigahara, which ended up deciding the Tokugawa Shogunate with Oda Nobunaga, for the next 300 years and which was one of the bloodiest in memory.

So... somehow I link what is the IDW transformers universe with real facts, as we know, in the IDW universe some important politicians or military leaders are under decepticon influence, in Infiltration, but... because they couldn't start said infiltration from Japan?

It could have been, and that is what I wanted to propose, so whoever was Shogun won this battle thanks to some decepticons infiltrating their ranks, commanded by a Bludgeon, something that seems obvious to me since its samurai-style design always amazes me. It seemed a bit unjustifiable.

However, the story is told by a general in the ranks of Toyotomi. Trying to follow the samurai spirit a bit, it follows that this samurai is going to die. I took this image from a statue in Japan and it served me very well both for its pose and its shape to convey what I wanted, also, we can say that... it is another nod to something existing.

I know that maybe it is a bit complicated to read, but I was interested, since the story is told by a guy, that the typography was more calligraphic, so to speak.

The last balloon surely costs more, the one in Bludgeon, but it is intentional, as you can see, its appearance is very unpleasant, and I wanted the test globe to convey the same thing, that it be dirty, illegible, aesthetically ugly, unpleasant, in order to help give the personality of Bludgeon, who by the way, already gives a clue about the Infiltration that we said before.

Even so, I think that on the mosaics page there are problems with the resolution, a pity.

If you look closely, my signature appears with Japanese characters at the bottom left, and the whole frame has a great job, the blood stains are evident why I have put them, and if we look at the page as it progresses, it acquires that reddish tone, giving to understand that the battle hardens.

Another detail is the Mosaic logo, which... if we look closely, I decided to put a "What if..." implying that it was a kind of separate universe. In addition, in the header, we have the signs of the two banners, if you search a bit, as a curiosity you will see that the one on the left is the Tokugawa sign, mixed with the decep symbol.

And a little more.... I did the page in pencil with gradients, it is a very grateful technique but somewhat slow and tiring, however, it turned out well.