#and like literally no native or indigenous characters and that's ...................... sad

[wrishwrosh]

the vaster wilds has the typical goodreads problem of all the negative reviews just being “this book was gross and sad and nothing happened :((“ “the prose was stylized and hard to understand”” but as a gross sad stylized prose enjoyer these critiques do not get to the MEAT of all the evils herein present

- the problem of the enlightened protagonist, where a character who has nominally lived in the real historical past until the book begins and yet somehow manages to individually develop a 21st century twitter-educated perspective on colonialism, god, and nature. classic groffism nothing new

- remember that tweet about how hiking is a bourgeois affectation and indigenous people never hiked before colonization. imagine if that was the premise of an entire novel. written by somebody who went to amherst

- another classic groffism is taking a real historical figure about whom almost nothing is known and constructing a history for them that can’t technically be ruled out as impossible given the dearth of records but IS ahistorical, implausible, and kind of stupid while also making sure that the one thing that is concretely known about this person is weirdly and smugly deemphasized in the narrative. in this case the historical figure is “jane” the anonymous teenage girl whose remains were found at jamestown exhibiting signs of butchering. the cannibalism is treated as a twist ending which is dumb as hell and made the pacing insanely frustrating as this was obvious from the beginning to any true jamestownheads in the audience. also the cannibalism of a young woman seems like an obvious place of exploration for a novel nominally about the exigencies of subsistence survival and how hard it was to be a girl in the dark ages before second wave feminism but what do i know. obviously you should just kind of shoehorn it in as a gotcha in the last 20 pages serving as the millionth indication that the bad guys in this narrative are bad and do bad things

- speaking of the bad guys every single character aside from the narrator is a one dimensional paper doll present to essentially speak one of groffs points directly into camera and then vanish in a way that literally made me laugh out loud several times. Some Women Are Vain, Which Is Bad. Some Men Hurt Women And Native People For Fun, Which Is Evil.

- there was a stylistic decision made to not capitalize proper nouns which sure. it makes sense with what the book is trying to do to not capitalize god or english or powhatan. but then it was so inconsistently applied like why is atlantic (ocean) not capitalized but James (river) is. why is god lowercase but Sunday is uppercase. why are all the names capitalized but titles that function as names arent. stop the madness

- a personal nitpick now but i have spent a lot of time kicking around in the area where the book is set and was hoping at least there would be some evocative descriptions of this place that i love. and yet in this book nominally about wilderness there was so little specificity in the depiction of it! this could have been any forest! the specific natural setting did not feel like a tidewater forest! feels like groff wrote it based on a google search of pamunkey traditional lifestyles and a glance at a topographic map

- cant even get into all the reductive and underresearched gender stuff but know it’s there. classic groffism

- finally and most minimally yet perhaps most egregiously groff has yet again failed to internalize a religious worldview in order to write a religious character. this narrator is a change from marie in matrix as we are sternly informed on page 4 that she believes what she has been told about christianity. like once every 20 pages groff remembers that and has her pray or something and then once she has been away from her culture for about 200 pages she realizes god is a lie and that’s the arc. cool!

- why bother! why bother with this setting, this character, this real place and real historical event and real belief system, if you arent going to USE any of it. this should have been a zine about climate change. it should have been like six tweets. if it needed to be fiction (and im not convinced it did) it should have been a contemporary novel and like three things could have been changed. why! bother!

in summary, i went so insane that i googled every single person mentioned in the acknowledgements to see how many were historians or archaeologists or librarians or ecologists or associates of the pamunkey tribe or anyone else who might be assumed to have expertise here and there was: one. illustrative i think!!!!

[actualalligator]

I'm gonna be a little critical about the author TJ Klune, so if you like him and don't want to read this, just jump on past.

-

So, like 3 years ago, I read a book by TJ Klune, and I loved it. I felt so moved by it. It made me want romance. It was just so good. It left me yearning, which is not normal for me.

And then after I found out that without attributing it at all, he had taken his idea from the 60s Sweep. Literally took the idea from native children being stolen from their homes and put into boarding schools and said nothing about it until after.

There are questions to be asked about who gets to tell stories and who gets to write about who, but I just think that if you take the story of families torn apart, most of whom were never reunited, you should be upfront about it. Say with your whole chest that you took indigenous trauma for your queer romance novel and didn't give any credit/attribution until after it had been published.

And it honestly ruined my opinion of him, and it made me never want to read the book again. Now there is a sequel. And I'm sad because the first one made me feel what I haven't felt when reading in years, and I wish I could have that again with these characters I loved, but I can't. I'm sure other books will come, but this one is on my mind.

[antianakin]

Oh wow someone actually got ASKED about this scene from the cast, that's incredible, I love that! I'd love to get quotes from Lucas, as well, but having an interview response from Natalie Portman is nearly as good! Thank you so much for this!

I actually DON'T think it's a misunderstanding to have Anakin say in the comic that he would do it again. Because guess what?

He does it again. He just does it to the Jedi instead.

So I don't disbelieve for a MOMENT that Anakin would look back on his choice here and go "yeah the Jedi would say it was evil, sure, but the Tuskens killed my mom and if I could go back I'd kill them again." That's kind-of the core of Anakin isn't it? He KNOWS he's doing evil things, he's just gonna do it anyway because it benefits him to do so and then twist around the story to make himself come off as the hero. He CONVINCES HIMSELF that he was right to do it, regardless of whether some teeny tiny part of himself recognizes it isn't. So I don't think the intent, even in the original script, was to recognize that Anakin "is sorry and sad because of his actions" quite honestly. Anakin is selfish and greedy at his core and the main reason for his remorse here is still focused on himself, not the innocents he's hurt (I don't want to hate them, I can't forgive them, I can't control it, etc etc). And that's exactly the behavior that leads right into ROTS and Order 66 and Anakin's betrayal. Which isn't dissimilar to showing us his defensiveness towards the Jedi Council in TPM and the way he won't acknowledge his own fears.

The other thing that's kind-of missing here for me in this explanation is that the entire storyline of Anakin killing the Tuskens is MIRED in Lucas's racism. It's based so immensely heavily on really awful tropes from Western movies for both Native American characters and Arab characters, he's not trying to hide that at all. To a modern audience, massacring the Tuskens very obviously looks pretty similar to genociding the Jedi. The Tuskens are SENTIENT PEOPLE, murdering them is BAD. They have children, they have pets, they have humor and traditions and they're an Indigenous population!

Except that's... not really true in this film. The most we've seen of them prior to this is when they attack Luke in ANH, and when they shoot at the podracers in TPM. So even though he SAYS he killed "children" and we see a very very quick shot of some Tusken children playing with a dog in the dark before Anakin goes murderbaby, the audience's ACTUAL impression of the Tuskens is that they're exactly what Cliegg and Anakin say they are. Animals. Savages. Because that's what Lucas has written them to be. They can't speak, just roar (utilizing literal animal noises to do it), and all they ever are is violent without reason. So when Anakin says "I killed them all, the women and children, too" I don't think we're supposed to be all that horrified, to be honest. It's kinda like a farmer coming back from a hunt saying "I killed the entire pack of wolves, even the puppies" after one wolf attacked their farm and caused some significant damage. Is it pretty violent? Yes. Do you now think this person is on the road to being a serial killer? Probably not.

Padme doesn't need to seem that horrified because, well, YOU'RE not supposed to be that horrified. Of course she's more focused on comforting the human being in front of her than being upset that he killed a pack of wolves who killed his mother. We as the audience know this is step 1 to becoming an evil villain, yes, but this isn't supposed to be as bad as the deaths of the Jedi in the next film. Except that with modern values, IT IS. And that makes Padme's reaction a LOT harder to swallow and it makes her look way worse than she was probably intended to be. She can appreciate and be attracted to the rage and the violence without suddenly becoming a space racist because of it.

Anakin doesn't need to be that remorseful if you don't see the Tuskens as deserving of your sympathy anyway. And both Anakin and Padme now suffer from this as a result, not because Lucas edited the scene to be shorter, but because he was a racist who pulled on racist tropes from older media to write his films.

Since people were talking about it recently: is there any official reason given of why Padme forgave Anakin immediatly after the Tusken Raider massacre? I always see a lot of diferent reasons given on the internet, from long and deep analises of theirs characters to "the writers didn't think about it".

Okay, folks (or single person who messaged me three times) I'm finally talking about this XD !

I got no official answer.

That said, here's a few points that I do think merit consideration, and I haven't really seen them mentioned anywhere.

1. Anakin is more regretful in the script.

If you look at how the scene is portrayed in the Attack of the Clones July 2001 draft of the screenplay, in Scene 118, pages 83-84...

... he's sorry and ashamed. He is in absolute shock of what he did. We get a bit of this, in the film...

... but in the script it's much more explicit. It starts out with him lashing out at Obi-Wan, at his own lack of power, but it ends with him breaking down and just apologizing over and over.

He didn't just kill them, he went Wolverine-style berseker and murdered EVERYTHING in his path, and he's thinking back on it with a clear-ish head now and realizing the gravity of his monstrous act.

When it's on paper, it reads very differently, to me. He's more remorseful, so Padmé's reaction makes more sense.

But there's a big difference between what you write in a script and what comes out in the film. Once you're shooting, myriad other factors come into play. So Anakin's dialog changes as the delivery and the rhythm are narrowed down, the beats in the scene shift around... but Padmé's reaction stays the same.

And that's where you get the disconnect.

Because what sticks with the audience more is this moment, now.

The anger. Not the shock and remorse.

So why the change? Well, George Lucas had this to say:

"He's very unhappy about that. Very sad and depressed. There was some dialogue here before that I took out, because it seemed to get in the way of the emotional moment of this scene where she says, "To be angry is to be human," and he says, "But to control your anger is to be a Jedi." And so that issue was actually laid out in dialogue at one point, and I decided to pull back from it... because it seemed to me that it was pretty obvious that was what was there. And I didn't think I needed to state it quite as boldly as I did. And that issue will come up at a later time, and I just felt it took away from the moment of his sadness. And I thought the sadness pretty much said the same thing without words." - AotC, Commentary Track #2, 2002

The reasoning was: too much dialog takes away from emotion.

An audience member will have a stronger emotional reaction from Anakin crying than Anakin crying while screaming "woe is me!"

I get (and generally agree) with the reasoning. But, personally, I have mixed feelings about this particular artistic choice.

On the one hand... if the intent is to show that Anakin made a big mistake and is sorry and sad because of his actions, then I think it's safe to say that it's not what most people took away.

Which then leads to things like John Ostrander writing Anakin as thinking he'd kill them all over again.

Also, it makes the viewer question the wisdom of Padmé's judgment.

But on the other hand... whether Anakin was feeling apologetic or not, he still did it. He still effectively massacred a whole tribe, he made that choice.

And whether the intent in that specific scene is conveyed efficiently or not, Anakin's character flaws (which the Prequels are really about) aren't really impacted and still tie together perfectly.

The only real change to that scene is that Padmé goes from having a more understandable reaction to "missing a lot of red flags".

2. Padmé thinks she can fix Anakin.

Here's what Natalie Portman had to say on the scene, which I think is an interesting take.

"She's this very powerful woman, and I think Padmé is sort of intrigued by this darker side she sees to him, especially because she's such a person who tries to fix everything. She sees problems in the world and she still has that idealistic passion… to think she can change everything, and she can change people who have darkness to them. And she sees goodness in him. She sees this passion. And she sees that there's a lot of anger in that passion, that it's not just the goodness and purity of her passion. So I think that is definitely attractive for her- that there's something that she can try and help heal or mend. That might be a big surprise for her when she can't." - Natalie Portman, AotC, Commentary Track #2, 2002

A part of Padmé is intrigued by Anakin's darker side, the "handsome bad boy" part... but that's coming from a place of "I can change him".

But the only thing that can change Anakin... is Anakin himself. Unfortunately, he keeps:

indulging his darker selfish impulses because he lacks discipline, acting on emotion despite knowing better,

regretting it for a moment and acknowledging that it was wrong,

starting again, never learning from his mistakes.

Which is part of the reason why their relationship is sort of doomed from the get-go.

[ladyimaginarium]

tbh this should go without saying but just a casual reminder that native people, like any minority, do not all look and think the same, and they are certainly not a monolith.

Natives can have any skin color, whether that’s white passing, light skinned, tan skin, brown skin and dark skin, and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can have any natural eye color, be it brown, amber, blue, green or otherwise, and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can have any hair color, be it brown, black, blonde or red, or dyed any other unnatural hair color and hair texture, be it straight, wavy or curly, and any hairstyle, be it long, medium, short, traditional braids, pixie cuts, dyed bobs, blunt bangs, shaved heads, undercuts, fauxhawks, etc. and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can follow any religion and/or spirituality, there are Native people who follow their tribe’s traditional beliefs and nothing else, there’s also plenty of Native Christians, but Natives can also be Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Satanist, Shintoist, Kemeticist, Wiccan, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Pagan, animist, Atheist, Agnostic, etc. and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can be any gender, whether that’s male, female, both or neither, or Two Spirit, their tribe’s own specific names for those outside of the “gender binary”, or any other genders in Western terminology like trans, non-binary, genderfluid or agender, among others, if they so wish to use those terms, or mix them up, and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can be any romantic and sexual orientation, whether that’s straight, gay, lesbian, bi, pan, poly, aro, ace, queer, etc. etc. and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can be mixed with any race or ethnic group such as white passing Natives / Metis, Black / African Diaspora Natives, Central Asian Natives, East Asian Natives, East African Natives, Central African Natives, West African Natives, Southern African Natives, North African Natives, Mestizo Natives, Latinx Natives, Central American Natives, South American Natives, Caribbean Natives, Alaskan Natives, Greenlander Natives, Australian Natives, Southeast Asian Natives, South Asian Natives, Middle Eastern Natives, or indigenous in other ways too such as more than one Native ethnicity, Polynesian Natives, Inupiaq Natives, Inuit Natives, Micronesian Natives, Melanesian Natives, Eurasian Natives and Natives who have multiple ethnicities, who’re the children of interracial couples with mixed race parents ... and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can be in any social class, whether that’s lower class, middle class or upper class and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can be in any subculture, whether that’s anime, goth, punk, scene, lolita, grunge, or otherwise, and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can listen to any music genre, whether that’s their own tribe’s traditional music, country, rock, punk, hip hop, rap, etc. and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can be born on a reservation, in a small town, in a suburb or in a big city, or even outside of their home country, and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can be knowledgeable in their tribe’s culture/heritage, still reconnecting to it, or disconnected from it for many reasons, and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

Natives can be neurodivergent and/or disabled and that doesn’t make them any less Native.

There’s no one “Native look” and that Natives can dress however they want, wear their hair however they want, etc. etc. - one’s clothes aren’t what makes someone Native, one’s hair isn’t what makes someone Native, one’s coloration isn’t what makes someone Native and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, it’s the connection and willingness to learn that matters.

There’s literally no reason why y’all can’t write modern Natives.

[nmirah]

hi! obviously you don't have to answer this if you are uncomfortable/ don't feel up to it but what exactly would you say is appropriation and makes you uncomfortable regarding warrior cats names? i find the concept of the cats having nature based names that are descriptive of their personality and stuff interesting, and would like to think of a naming system that doesn't have the current issues and implications since obviously i don't want to encourage anything disrespectful or offensive. looking into native american names and comparing to wc i do get an icky feeling, but i still can't quite put my finger on why. is it the fact that they change throughout their lifetime? the fact that they are compund words? a mix of these? something entirely different? i couldn't find any info on what makes them offensive, is why i'm asking, but again please only answer this if you feel comfortable, i totally understand why you wouldn't want to engage with this issue any further, and thanks for taking the time to read this regardless. sending good vibes your way <3

It's all good! Had a break/aka I worked kjhvkhj but im home now and mentally good :3

Alright so, the names. Medicine cat is not a bad name, I don't find that insulting or literally anything to do with Native American culture. What tends to bother me is some names - but it actually doesn't bother me that much! I know people who have last names like Swift Current, Sand Storm, Red Willow etc etc - but I'm almost certain that it's a coincidence. I love warrior cat names. It's not really about changing throughout the lifetime, or the fact that they are compound names, I think personally it all comes down to language and the relationship Indigenous peoples have to the English version of their ancestral names/words. English is all a lot of us have left, having been through generations of trauma that ripped our culture from their roots and killed our languages. Being hunted, seen as savages and different, having our folklore bastardized (Wendigos, for example) by people who just think it's cool and don't bother consulting or even considering the opinions of the people who those cultural pieces belong to. But I'm 99% certain warrior cat names and the clans are not a part of this. This is not fuckin Wumba's Wigwam, these are British-coded cats living in a world that makes sense in the fantasy world they were written in, Warrior Cats is not where we should be focusing any of this on. Acknowledge, and move on.

Yes, the perpetuation of the fans with these names and connecting it back to Native American culture specifically with the feathers and the tribe and whatnot is in very poor taste. But I think do many of the complaints were meant to be generalized to a lot of different media - it's probably hurtful to people who think that Warrior Cats is based on Native American culture, but the fact is that it is not. It's just not. I know this because reading these you can tell that there's no fucking way these god fearing cats are Indigenous LMAO there's NO way! It actually bothers me MORE that this is coming up at all. Racism is a touchy topic, esp for Native Americans, ESP where I live and what my family has been through, but it takes one look outside the fury that might be felt to see "oh, actually, that's not it here man". The fact that people are thinking about stepping away from the series or hounding people about it makes me more sad. It feels like people are looking at angry twitter voices and perpetuating them more than Native American fans who have resonated in some way with these characters. All I'm asking is that you give us a voice, see how we are suffering and have suffered, and maybe read the series with a more critical eye.

[akindplace]

4. on your most recent ask list: What cryptid being do you believe in? (And why? bc I feel like if you have a good story you need to share it 👀)

I don't really believe in cryptic beings BUT I will not fuck around to find out. Like, I wouldn't go to the woods to search for that, just in case hahaha. I realized I the creepiest beings that I would be scared to see and I would never fuck around trying to locate are mythical creatures from Brazilian folklore. There is the curupira, he protects the woods, his hair is fire and his feet are backwards. Or Saci, who is a one legged man who travels in wind swirls, loves pranking people and stealing food, will make you lose yourself in the woods and starve or just kill if you steal his cap. He might seem friendly, but he isn't.

Caipora also makes you lose yourself, might be also made of fire or moss, it depends on who tells it, also protects the woods. There is the commonly known chupacabra that drinks the blood out of cattle and sometimes kills people and no one actually has any idea what it should look like. There was a meme a few years ago of something called the chupacu, which is a twist on the original myth but he sucks out the assholes of people. Yeah. I know, it's dumb and therefore a meme. There is the mula sem cabeça which is literally a horse without it's fucking head that walks around during the full moon and the head is also fire, pure fire, no head. There is this incredibly sad story of a black slave that was tortured and killed only to come back riding a horse helping people and killing racist slave owners. There are some dumb urban legends, like the bathroom blonde, she is kind of like the Bloody Mary, except she has that dumb name and it's mostly a meme.

Curupira, caipora, chupacabra, mula sem cabeça, saci, they are myths from folklore that are deep in the history of the country itself, being made of woods, our very troubled past with slavery and native indigenous genocide. Those creatures are protective but they don't go along well with humans cause we did keep destroying nature. I don't particularly believe in them BUT I WILL NOT GO INTO THE WOODS TO SEE IF I FIND A CHILD WITH THEIR FEETS TURNED BACKWARDS AND HAIR MADE OUT OF FIRE. His feet are backwards because if you try to track him down you will only lose yourself and starve or be eaten by a wild animal in the forest. Nah.

The thing about people from Latin America is that we watch American horror movies screaming to the characters to stop being dumb and run away.

Those creatures are a huge part of folklore and I learned about them in school. There is a famous author that explored many of those myths but he wrote them over 100 years ago so I would NOT recommend it. Like. Not at all. If anyone wants to see stuff like this just search on Wikipedia or something. Those stories vary a lot from region to region. Just please beware that some stories are memes here.

Again I don't particularly believe in them but I will not go research stuff like that and get myself killed because places like the amazon forest are really dense and dangerous and people often starve to death because they do get lost there. Or they meet up with criminals. Or get eaten by animals. Whatever comes first honestly.

[panlight]

I saw a tiktok of another twilight fan saying she doesn’t think in a possible sequel the Renesme x Jacob thing will go like we are all assuming because Meyer would never have Jacob be a cullen and marry into the cullens because she doesn’t like him as much as them and he doesn’t fit the *fantasy* (referring in part to Meyer’s racism and classism amongst other things). Meyer never saw Jacob as a true romantic lead, he was more like a plot device the entire time. The imprint thing was because she didn’t know how to get out of the situation with a happy ending. So their ship is a plot convenience and not that she actually likes them together. I also think they may not be endgame because there needs to be a conflict or reason why the lovers can’t be initially together to fit a traditional romance narrative. If their love story is that they have known each other her entire life and he’s perfect for her and her family likes him then there’s no angst or drama. Do you think is possible a new romantic interest will be introduced?

Okay here's my hottest of hot takes: What if SM didn't make Jacob Like That in Eclipse to make everyone think Edward was the better option? I think she was already assuming everyone preferred Edward because to her it was obvious he was the Ideal Man. So what if she made Jacob Like That in Eclipse to seem like a more serious option/rival? Did she reveal some of her own biases and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about aggressive Native men while doing so? Oh, god, yeah. But I think in her head this wasn't "I've ruined Jacob and now everyone will like Edward more!" but "now Jacob will be taken seriously." Sweet, gentle, sunshiney Jacob couldn't--in SM's mind--compete with the intensity and single-minded devotion of Edward. So she had to make Jacob more intense and promoted Seth to resident Sunshine Boy.

I base this on comments she's made. One where she's comparing Edward Cullen to all the greatest romantic leads of all time and saying he's better than all of them, but when it comes to Gilbert Blythe from Anne of Green Gables, "he's more of a Jacob than an Edward." She also has lots of positive Jacob comments, especially around the Eclipse era, where she talked about how it made her so sad that people hated him and if they could see what she sees in her head, everyone would love him. And then there's that brain-breaking quote in the Guide in that first interview where she talks about how "worried" she was about Jacob in Eclipse "even knowing the eventually happy ending" and how happy and relieved she was when he laid eyes on Renesmee and "his life came together for him."

So I propose SM DOES like Jacob, and she butchered him trying to make him more Edward-y so he would come off as a more serious romantic rival, and in doing so stepped into a whole-ass minefield of consent issues, racist tropes about Indigenous men, and basically erased everything about the character that people had loved. Patient, gentle, happy Jacob was no threat to Edward's "I can't live in a world where you don't exist" brooding intensity and drama, so she felt Jacob had to become more intense and dramatic.

So, IMHO, Renemsee/Jacob is absolutely happening as much as I don't want it to be true. It happened in Forever Dawn, which was written before New Moon and Eclipse, and so Jacob's imprint on Bella's daughter was always part of the story. It wasn't 'how do I solve this love triangle?' It's even more baffling than THAT, because she KNEW Jacob/Renesmee imprint was endgame and still wrote Jacob/Bella the way she did in New Moon/Eclipse and I'm just like . . . why. Why would you do that? Why would you make this thing that is already weird (imprinting on a BABY) even weirder by developing this character into one who resented imprinting and having his choices taken away AND developing the J/B relationship to be "soulmates in another world" like . . . why. Why. WHY?!

All that said, I would bet cash money that future Renesmee books will feature a love triangle between Jacob, Nessie and Nahuel. It will be all "Jacob is my soulmate, my past, my present, my endless future. He would do anything for me. But Nahuel . . . he understands me in a way Jacob never could, he knows what it's like to be a hybrid, never fitting in . . ." I can just see it all so clearly and it's going to be cringy for this rich white girl with literal superpowers and a family who adores her going on and on about how she doesn't fit in but I think that's where this is going.

[elvesofnoldor]

like as much as i love playing bi//oshock i//nfinite, parts of the game really make me feel like the game is created just so the creators can draw anti-asian and anti-black racist art within the fictional white supremacist universe and have its white NPCs say racist things such as calling black people as the N word and calling asian people as orientals on the background without having people to call the game racist lol

in all honesty, the anti-captalism critique the original bio//shock series seems to be making sounds way more well-rounded than bio//shock inf//inite’s half ass and extremely flawed critique on white supremacism and racism in America 

[feralphoenix]

SONGS OF RESISTANCE: The View Myla Grants Us Of Hallownest’s Moths

hello again hollow knight fandom, i am back with my picante takes and ready to discuss two things i love: myla hollowknight and the moth tribe! Let Us Be Sad About Them Together.

as with my previous essay i’m going to be putting this fellow up on dreamwidth later for accessibility purposes since my layout text may be too small for high-res pc users. this time i’ll be attaching that in a reblog to avoid this post getting eaten by the dread tungle algorithms.

CONTENT WARNINGS FOR TONIGHT’S PROGRAM: This essay discusses colonialism and genocide both in real life and the fictional depictions in Hollow Knight, as well as racism in the zombie horror genre and in fandom.

ALSO: if youre from a christian cultural upbringing (whether currently practicing, agnostic/secular, or atheist now), understand that some of what i’m discussing here may challenge you. if thinking thru the implications of this particular part of hollow knight worldbuilding/lore is distressing for you, PLEASE only approach this essay when youre in a safe mindset & open to listening, and ask the help of a therapist or anti-racism teacher/mentor to help you process your thoughts & feelings. just like keep in mind that youre listening to an ethnoreligiously marginalized person and please be respectful here or wherever else youre discussing this dang essay

SONGS OF RESISTANCE: THE VIEW MYLA GRANTS US OF HALLOWNEST’S MOTHS

In this house we are all love Myla.

Well, in all fairness, there are probably plenty of Hollow Knight fans who aren’t interested in her character, since which fictional characters one attaches to is always a matter of personal preference. But she’s still well-loved for a minor NPC and inspires a high level of devotion in her fans. There’s nothing that whips folks into a frenzy like a cute character you can’t do anything to help, and unlike some other characters in Hollow Knight Myla’s fate leaves no room for ambiguity. Once you pick up the Crystal Heart you’re left with only two choices: Avoid her, or kill her.

A lot of Hollow Knight’s world is designed to make you care about it so that it will hurt more when Ghost’s violent skillset proves too limited to save something or someone. The consequences of Hallownest’s founding and policies have directly or indirectly caused a great deal of damage to everything, and chief among those consequences with massive damage and a wide splash range is the Infection. Much has been said elsewhere by other people about Hollow Knight’s predominating mood being a struggle against futility, with Ghost arriving at the eleventh hour and every new tragedy designed to make the player more desperate to find something actionable, only finding out by trial and error what’s beyond your personal ability to save.

Myla, in that sense, is a typical example of that worldbuilding. She’s a particular kind of stock character in the zombie horror genre, the innocent who falls victim to the plague and cannot be saved, wrenching audience hearts and demonstrating the stakes.

But Hollow Knight plays with the trappings of zombie horror in a very unusual way, one I find thematically fascinating.

For a quick overview, the “zombie” as we know it in popular culture is an appropriation of a voudou (the Black American spiritual practice) concept that deals with the fear of slavery killing one’s spirit. (People more versed in/with roots in voudou culture can give a much more comprehensive overview than this simplistic one.)

The zombie horror genre, especially in Western media, is part of the great white fragility stock plot trifecta (the other two being alien invasions and robot uprisings). Zombie horror in particular expresses white fears that marginalized ethnic groups will rise up violently in revenge for their mistreatment and destroy white society. The fear of “that which is human, which ‘humanity’ is not” (to borrow mecha visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine’s pithy term) and the extreme levels of violence towards human-but-not bodies typical of zombie horror are often an expression of such bigotries. This is, again, a subject that’s been discussed in greater depth and with more nuance elsewhere.

But what Hollow Knight does is take the ugly metaphors and it makes them literal, makes it harder to ignore the toxic subtext of the genre. The Infection is literally a native god’s revenge on the settlers who committed genocide* against her people. How the Pale King’s colonization of the crater negatively affected the preexisting groups of bugs underpins every level of the worldbuilding, as does Hallownest’s cruelty towards its neighbors.

Hollow Knight is a game that is about the tragedy of Western imperialism. It is one of the work’s central themes. There are a lot of conversations that need to be had about the ways these themes manifest and, on a real-world level, about fandom’s predisposition to avoid the subject.

But, for now, let’s get back to Myla. If she fits such a stock zombie horror archetype, and Hollow Knight uses zombie horror tropes to underline the conversation it attempts to have about colonialism, then what has Myla got to teach us about the overall worldbuilding?

There's two topics I’d like to broach here: First we’ll get into how the circumstances of Myla’s infection fit in to the implied role of Crystal Peak in pre-Hallownest society. Then let’s take a long look at the lyrics of Myla’s song and what it implies.

MYLA, THE CRYSTALS, AND THE HOLY MOUNTAIN

If you think about it, Myla is an interesting outlier compared to the other NPCs we encounter on the verge of succumbing to the Infection. Both Bretta and Sly are unhappy: Bretta is a lonely, anxious bundle of abandonment issues yearning for someone to sweep her off her feet; Sly misses his pupils and loved ones who’ve left him in death (we never learn who Esmy is or what they were to Sly, but we sure can tell they’re not around anymore). The temptation to dream away those sadnesses seems to play a part in their vulnerability to the Infection, and also why Ghost’s interruption brings them back to reality.

Not so Myla. She appears to be blissfully unaware of her fellow miners’ fate, and most of her dialogue prior to her infection (besides the song - we’ll get to that later) is about how much fun she’s having at her job and how much she enjoys Ghost’s occasional company.

Yet she still winds up infected when Ghost’s back is turned. Why?

Not to discard the possibility that Myla’s got her own issues too, but in her case there seems to be another likely cause at hand: The crystals. If hit with the Dream Nail before infected, she mentions that she can hear them “singing” and “whispering”.

Under the The Hunter’s Hot Takes section of the Hunter’s Journal entries on various Crystal Peak enemies, we can learn more about the crystals - particularly in the entries for the Husk Miner and Crystallized Husk.

Crystal Peak’s crystals were thought of as particularly precious in Hallownest and harvested en masse for use in luxury items and the like. To do so, the mining operation was set up throughout most of the mountain, though the area around its peak still remains largely untouched. However, there’s more to the crystals than just that. Like Myla, the Hunter notes that the crystals can be heard to sing very very softly if one listens closely enough.

Perhaps of even more interest than that is this particular comment he gives us, from the Crystallized Husk journal entry: “There is some strange power hidden in the crystals that grow up there in the peaks. They gleam and glow in the darkness, a bright point of searing heat in each one.”

I don’t think it’s a particularly revolutionary idea to point out that there’s some connection between the crystals and Radiance’s power; this is something many players have intuited just based on Myla’s dialogue. But, in order to understand what Myla is demonstrating about the game’s world I think it’s important to think about what that connection is.

Speaking of which, the local Whispering Root has two important clues for us: The phrases “light refracted” and “energy contained”.

The very top of Crystal Peak is one of the only places in the crater where the moths’ architecture has escaped Hallownest destroying it, and is the only place in the entire game setting where their religious iconography remains fully intact. There are stone monuments covered in their language (which has been destroyed with the rest of their culture) and the statue of the Radiance - this is easier to see in the Wanderer’s Journal tie-in book, but the huge stone arches upon the Crown represent Radi’s halo and its rays and encircle her when viewed head-on or from a distance instead of the side view we get in the game.

The crystals grown here were used by the moths to store and cultivate Radiance’s light. It’s impossible to know what sort of architecture/infrastructure existed inside the mountain before Hallownest stole it from the moths. But between the massive scope of her statue and all the texts at the Crown, and the fact that the moths were working with their literal actual god’s freely given power here, it can be safely asserted that Crystal Peak was a holy ground to them.

Hallownest didn’t care about the mind-boggling level of spiritual significance Crystal Peak must have had to the natives, though. To the Pale King and his people, the crystals are just a natural resource to be harvested for personal profit.

This is unfortunately a conflict that still plays out in colonized countries today. If you’re American, #NoDAPL probably comes to mind; Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are filled with these sorts of horror stories too. Settler disrespect for indigenous sacred grounds is a huge problem that needs addressing. If you’re looking at the story of Crystal Peak and thinking it’s very on-the-nose... maybe it needs to be.

Anyway, Myla is nowhere near as miserable as Bretta or Sly, but she still notices that something’s up with these crystals. She hears the voice coming from inside, and she’s curious, and she tries very very hard to listen to it... so she DOES end up hearing Radiance’s voice. Radiance’s real voice, not the songs and whispers inside the crystals: The voice of a frightened, angry, grieving god who knows there’s a new vessel running around in Hallownest, and doesn’t want any part of that. A voice that’s pleading for someone, anyone to kill this dangerous creature, and save her from the threat Ghost poses.

Between how freaked out Radi is to know Ghost is poking around, the tendency we see in her boss battles for her to panic and kneejerk blast things at full volume/vibrance when she’s panicking, and the way her dream broadcast seems to be only a one-way communication line while she’s in the Black Egg... naturally this spells disaster for poor Myla.

Similar to the Moss Prophet, this small tragedy is a demonstration of the eleventh-hour state the conflict is in: The Pale King has escalated this situation so far, and Radiance is so traumatized and isolated, that bystanders who might in a kinder timeline have become Radi’s allies instead get caught up in her AOE. Myla’s definitely not as aware of the overall situation as the Moss Prophet, since she’s a Hallownest bug and not an indigenous one the way they are. But she noticed things were not as they seemed, and she was curious. Who knows what new possibilities could have opened up, if Radiance was able to truly communicate with bugs in the outside world?

Small side note before we move on, but I’ve noticed a tendency among some folks who notice the missed connections to come down extra hard on Radiance and chalk Myla’s infection/Moss Prophet’s death down to deliberate cruelty on her part. I’d like to gently push back against this.

Living in a post-colonial world we all absorb some level of prejudice from our surroundings, and it’s important to take a look at our first assumptions about people (or, in this case, fictional characters lol) to examine whether these prejudices we’ve inherited have influenced those assumptions.

So, if your first instinct is to look at this situation and say the problem is that Radiance is being too harsh and too angry where she should have stepped back and softened her emotions for others’ benefit to gently persuade them to her side... Please think about how when people of color and non-Christians express anger or hurt at our treatment, or even so much as calmly assert our boundaries, white/Christian viewers often view us as much more aggressive and threatening than we actually are. The “angry black woman” trope is a good example of this stereotype. You may want to look up the HuffPost article “Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism” and its discussion of white fragility to further understand this phenomenon.

It is absolutely essential to remember the complex power dynamics in play in Hollow Knight and that the Pale King deliberately imprisoned Radiance (who had at this point already gone through an extreme amount of trauma) in a way that would compromise her ability to communicate with others. If you can extend compassion to characters like Ghost or the Pale King and empathize with their motives/feelings when their actions cause harm, but you are not willing to do the same with Radiance... it’s important to sit down with yourself and examine why that is.

THE MEANING BEHIND MYLA’S SONG

Okay, let’s switch gears and take a look at the lyrics to the song Myla sings, since it’s got some interesting things to tell us too.

The first verse, which you can hear from Myla the first time you meet her/before you acquire Vengeful Spirit, goes:

Bury my mother, pale and slight Bury my father with his eyes shut tight Bury my sisters, two by two, And then when you’re done, let's bury me too

There’s not much particularly story-related going on here except foreshadowing that Myla may in fact wind up dying. Most of what we get here is that a) this is a song about burying the dead and b) it’s morbid as fuck.

Curious, a new player might think of the mention of burying the dead; there are a lot of corpses just lyin’ around all over the ground - something that might lead one to believe Hallownest didn’t have such a custom. Later players will discover the Resting Grounds, confirming Hallownest did bury its dead... and that the gravekeepers are all dead too.

Let’s look at the second verse, which Myla remembers and will sing after you pick up Vengeful Spirit:

Bury the knight with her broken nail, Bury the lady, lovely and pale Bury the priest in his tattered gown, Then bury the beggar with his shining crown

This right here is where it gets interesting. The first verse describes the singer’s family as dead or dying, but the people we’re burying now sure do have some parallels to Hallownest's ruling body, don’t they?

Among Hallownest’s Great Knights, three of them - Dryya, Isma, and Ze’mer - were women. They are also very dead or might as well be: Dryya was killed by Traitor Lord’s resistance, Isma is a tree spreading acid through the kingdom’s waters to cut off access to the City of Tears, and Ze’mer hung up her nail after her mantis girlfriend’s death and only lingers on as a revenant.

While there aren’t any characters who are described in-text as “priests” in Hallownest, the idea of a tattered gown might bring Lurien the Watcher to mind, or perhaps the Soul Sanctum’s magicians before they went rogue.

The lovely, pale lady in the song can only refer to the White Lady, Hallownest’s queen. And there’s only one man in the game who has a shining crown: The Pale King. The lyrics are particularly derisive towards him in a way they aren’t to any of the other figures listed, too.

So, it seems like whoever came up with this song didn’t think much of Hallownest. With that in mind it’s hard to think that it originated from any sort of faction loyal to the king.

We’re missing a line from the third verse, which Myla sings after you’ve beaten Soul Master and she’s beginning to become infected. But what we do see of it is Huge in terms of lore:

Bury my body and cover my shell, [...] What meaning in darkness? Yet here I remain I’ll wait here forever ‘til light blooms again

So. The “protagonist” of this song’s family has died, and they expect to die as well, but even unto death they're waiting for Hallownest to fall and the light to return.

The moths became Hallownest’s gravekeepers after the Pale King forcibly assimilated them. Under the Pale King’s light, the moths forgot Radiance and most of their original culture, but Seer tells us in her final monologue that a few individuals remembered just enough to pass bits and pieces down through the generations. This secret resistance among the moths was what kept Radiance alive and prevented her from being sealed away entirely.

This song Myla sings comes from that moth resistance.

Code songs amongst oppressed ethnic groups are very much a real thing, especially when groups have to communicate or signal each other within hostile parties’ hearing. Since I’m American (and had a big ol crush on Harriet Tubman as a little kid lmao!) the first thing that came to mind for me when I made this connection was the working songs escaped Black slaves used in the Underground Railroad.

These have another point in common with the moth gravedigger song Myla sings, in that they enter the general cultural consciousness through out-group people who don’t know the true context. If you ever pick up a book of American baby songs, you’ll probably find some Underground Railroad code songs in there - often because generations ago white kids heard these songs from Black slaves or servants, and went on to sing the same songs to their children with zero awareness of what the songs were really for.

So some Hallownest bug somewhere probably heard the moths’ song and liked it and sang it in a context totally divorced from its original one, and it got spread around and passed down to become one of Myla’s old favorites, with her seemingly not realizing the meaning behind the lyrics. The moths’ song of devotion to their lost god survived them as a people.

This is some VERY realistic and layered worldbuilding. There is so much to glean from just one NPC’s dialogue when put together with other clues. Of course all of it is SAD and DEPRESSING, but Hollow Knight is a tragedy with a super unsubtle point to make about the unsustainability of Western imperialism.

What happens to Myla is awful, and upsetting, and unfair. So was what happened to the moths and their sacred ground, and to Radiance too. It’s important to understand the scope of the conflict that led to all this happening, trace it to its roots, and lay it at the feet of the ones responsible for engendering all this tragedy in the first place: Hallownest and the Pale King.

*A NOTE ABOUT MY USE OF THE TERM “GENOCIDE”

This is a tangent, but since there’s some debate about whether it’s appropriate to define the Pale King’s actions towards indigenous bug nations as genocide, allow me to cite the official definition of genocide here.

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention for short) defines genocide like this:

Genocide is any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, religious, or racial group, as such:

A) Killing members of the group

B) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

C) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

D) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

E) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Among the abovelisted, Hallownest is guilty of A (Deepnest and the moths), B (Deepnest physically/the moths vis a vis brainwashing), C (the mantis tribe and the hive), and E (the moths, which we know from Marmu, and possibly the mosskin also - Isma is mosskin).

Then there is cultural genocide, i.e. acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, religious, or racial group's way of life. Let’s look at the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (DRIP) and how it defines cultural genocide:

A) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities

B) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources

C) Any form of population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights

D) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures

E) Any form of propaganda directed against them

Hallownest is guilty of every item on this list. A: The moths, attempted with Deepnest. B: The moths, the mantises, the flukes, the mosskin; also attempted with Deepnest. C: The moths, the mantises, the flukes. D: The moths; attempted with the mantises and Deepnest. E: The mantises and Deepnest.

Any sort of discussion of the wide-reaching harm Radiance caused MUST include the context that the Infection is her response to multiple levels of genocide. Discussion that does not include this context loses nuance and simplifies the conflict and power dynamics portrayed in the game in ways that reflect real-life racism and Christian supersessionism.

Now, this is NOT some sort of holier than thou Fandom Purity dunk to say that it’s Bad or Wrong to care about Hallownest’s nobility. Like, one of my favorite characters in this dang game is the White Lady, who spent a long ass time enabling her husband’s actions before she finally walked out on him over the mass infanticide thing. You can, and it is okay to, love TPK and want rehabilitation for him while acknowledging that the dude has done objectively bad things.

I just feel that it’s important to keep things in perspective so that we don’t wind up stirring a bunch of real-world bigotry into our fandom funtimes. A lot of us don’t have the luxury of turning our brains off and simply Not Seeing It, because these same sorts of dynamics are behind a lot of the hardships that threaten our everyday stability.

It’s pretty hard to have conversations about those things in real life if one can’t even recognize them in fiction. So, this might be a good opportunity to start practicing anti-racism so we can better utilize that ideology in real life, where the stakes are much higher.

[princessnijireiki]

everytime you post a yello wstone gifset im really filled with regret and rage not at you but at what the show could have been I truly don't care about that Kevin coaster family or anything at all the show should have been about the res, thomas rainwater, etc etc

Sorry for the late reply! And yeah, it feels bizarrely overdue to have any actual contentious land disputes & fleshed out Native characters— it seems* like the other main Native female role is Kelsey Chow being the tragic exemplification of tragic statistics around Native women, somehow isolated or exiled from the rez herself, married to the tragic outcast White Family's son who's been booted from the big house, and mother to a tragic biracial child. And Gil sits around looking real concerned while Mo drives him around so he has someone with whom to make meaningful ethnic eye contact.

*I say "seems" because I've actually gone pretty far out of my way NOT to watch the show, I know other Native actors have had cameos in the same way as Longmire was the last big "modern white western with a revolving door of one-guest-star-per-week Native talent" at the rodeo (similar to how 24 was the revolving door for Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian actors to play terrorist and/or terrorist's victim of the week— and both these kinds of typecasting serve American nationalist mythmaking propaganda, warping even positive, but still 2 dimensional, ethnic caricatures in the service of a white hero/"complex" antihero).

All of which is a digression but Afghanistan looms large right now for obvious reasons and the parallels between Keifer Sutherland profiting off glorifying "the war on terror" while Kevin Costner grimly scowls his way into bank by promoting the same kind of bullshit heroes of the frontier American individualism Manifest Destiny nonsense (spoiler alert: Yellowstone's been greenlit for an 1800s era prequel series establishing the family's uninterrupted settlement of their ranch next to Yellowstone).

ANYWAY. My point being... maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, idk, Gil has secret depths or something. (Kelsey definitely doesn't lol, I'm not saying that to be a hater, I'm saying I watched the episodes I clipped at 5-10x speed and her plot was entirely trying to convince her sad husband to reconcile with his angry ass family, and then trying to investigate a murderer/being stalked and almost killed by that same man in an isolated field for a pithy MMIW plot moment.) But I doubt it!

And it seems like people involved on the show have good intentions. Even if Angela's relegated to being a sort of one-note vampy Wicked Indian Woman, the monologue they gave Q'orianka was slamming! Somebody put in some work on that, and I'm choosing to enjoy that before it inevitably gets shut down in a "LandBack evil, Kevin Costner good" moment, probably by Gil or Mo's own hand. And white audiences sure do seem to enjoy the white characters. But I don't trust the show (soon to be its own franchise with the upcoming spinoff series) as a whole, and I don't like or appreciate the way Indigenous & Black chars are relegated to background texture and Greek chorus mirroring the "proper" emotional reactions to Costner & co. if not literal property to be moved around the set until the writers need to set up a villain to mirror a real world political movement (remember how people called out the writing & design for the Flag Smashers in Falcons & Winter Soldier? same diff y'all) as pins to be knocked down by the face of Western Expansion macho white man with a gun might makes right bullshit, even if fans think it's groundbreaking because Blonde Woman Defies Patriarch in Dysfunctional Home.

[entrapdaknation]

Racism, Misogyny, and Pathologic 2

Note: this commentary contains spoilers for Pathologic 2.

Trigger warning for violent content.

Weeks ago, someone in my Tumblr feed had been praising a video game called Pathologic 2, about a doctor in early 20th century Russia trying to stop a plague in a Russian steppe town. The game sounded intriguing, and the commentary I found online was positive, so I bought the game ... and got a nasty surprise.

Pathologic 2 depicts indigenous steppe people, especially indigenous women, in deeply offensive ways. At first, the indigenous steppe people (the Kin) are depicted as hyperspiritualized and superstitious. Their culture is frozen and stagnant, rather than a vibrant, evolving culture. Several of the kin, such as Aspity and the Worms, are quite literally inhuman. The “magical Native American” stereotype comes to mind when the ways of the Kin are introduced in the game. They come across as mystical, alien, and at times inhuman, but rarely as three-dimensional people.

As I delved deeper into the story, depictions of the Kin became even more offensive. We meet Worms who mindlessly obey their elder’s commands to murder a doctor. We meet Worms who murdered someone (it’s unclear if their victim was innocent or evil) so as to provide the main character with human organs for medical use. We meet a Kin man, Oyun, who likens the Kin to cattle who need a strong leader to dominate them. These NPCs make the Kin seem mindlessly obedient and savage.

The Abbatoir scene depicts Kin religious mysteries as blood-soaked and murderous, all in the service of an eldritch abomination Earth deity who wants to keep humans in a mindless, animalistic state. The Sand Plague ravaging the town was created by this Earth deity, and the disease strikes down Russian and Kin townsfolk alike who do not live in harmony with the Earth. Years before, the plague was deliberately introduced into the town by a Kin man, Isidor (the main character’s father), as a deranged means of bringing about the town’s rebirth. The unspoken message seems to be, “See? The Kin are stupid. They worship an evil god who kills them and keeps them primitive.”

The most prominent Kin women in the game are the Herb Brides, depicted as young women scantily clad in shredded dresses. Herb Brides practice a spiritual tradition that involves ecstatic dancing out on the steppe so as to encourage the Earth to bring forth herbs. Their dancing is so wild that their dresses rip, revealing a lot of skin. The idea of Herb Brides was creative, but the execution was objectifying, as they seem to be an excuse to introduce cleavage and nudity into the game. Yep. The Herb Brides were definitely designed by and for cishet men, I thought.

Herb Brides play a major role in the Kin religious mysteries of the Abbatoir. The Herb Brides of the Abbatoir are indifferent to death, both their own and those of others. Their words and worldview are alien. They dance with the Sand Plague in disturbing eldritch rites.

Around the world, real-life indigenous women experience astronomical rates of violence, but Pathologic 2 trivializes and eroticizes violence against indigenous women. At the start of the game, panic-stricken townsfolk murder several Herb Brides, convinced that the women are monsters from folk lore. A cinematic scene depicts an Herb Bride burning at a stake, but the scene seems intended for titillation rather than horror or sympathy. Another murdered Herb Bride is found naked, likely for titillation purposes. Their deaths are inexplicably forgotten afterwards.

In the Abbatoir scene, a trio of Herb Brides instruct the main character to dissect another Herb Bride alive. The dissection victim goes along with the dissection willingly, indifferent to her own life and death. (The fact that the player must perform this dissection to secure ingredients for a plague cure and escape the Abbatoir makes the scene even worse, as it robs the player of the moral self-determination they previously had in the game.) Throughout the game, the Herb Brides are depicted as alien, titillating, dehumanized, and expendable, but never truly human.

In the hands of better game designers, the Kin of Pathologic 2 could have been used to offer commentary on the plight of indigenous people and violence against indigenous women. Instead, the game depicts indigenous people as inhuman, subhuman, objectified, alien, and barbaric.

The game developers didn’t have to do this. The Kin could have been depicted as complex, fully human characters. The game could have either dispensed with violence against Kin women, or depicted such violence in ways that evoked sympathy and empathy for the victims. Kin religion could have been depicted as a realistic tradition, rather than a Lovecraftian death cult. Alternatively, the eldritch death cult could have been retained in the game as a cult introduced to the town by non-indigenous parties, allowing the game to keep one of its horror elements without any of the racism.

The sad part is that if not for the racism and misogyny, Pathologic 2 would have been one of my favorite games of all time. The premise is creative, the music is beautiful, the story is engaging, and the game-play is edge-of-your-seat and fun. Unfortunately, the racist and misogynist elements spoiled the game for me, and after one play-through, I won’t be playing the game again.

Ice-Pick Lodge, what were you thinking?

[jadelotusflower]

November Roundup

Some writing success this month - I finished and posted a new chapter for Against the Dying of the Light, and made progress on The Lady of the Lake and Turn Your Face to the Sun. I didn’t work much on my novel, but I did do some editing on the first third so that’s progress.

Words written this month: 6647

Total this year: 67,514

November books

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo - joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize (with The Testaments by Margaret Atwood) this was an engrossing and interesting read. Stylistically unusual formatting and scant use of punctuation that is a bit jarring at first, but you quickly adapt as you read. There’s no plot as such - instead the story is formed by vignettes of twelve black women and their disparate yet interconnected lives. We have mothers and daughters, close friends, teachers and students, although the connections aren’t always obvious at first - we can be exposed to a character briefly in the story of another with no idea that she will be a focus later on. It’s very skillfully done, to the point whereupon finishing I wanted immediately to re-read (but alas, it was already overdue back to the library). There is so much ground covered that we are really only given a glimpse into the characters lives, but there is a diversity of intergenerational perspectives of the African diaspora in the UK, and I highly recommend.

The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett - after finishing The Pillars of the Earth I had intended to read the sequel, but this was available on the library shelf and I had to place a hold on World Without End, so the prequel came first. Set sixty years before the Conquest (150 before Pillars) it primarily addresses the growth of the hamlet of Dreng’s Ferry into the town of Kingsbridge, through the lives of a monk with a strong moral code, a clever and beautiful noblewoman, and a skilled builder, working against the machinations of an evil bishop. Sound familiar? This is Follet’s most recent work, and I do wonder if he’s running out of ideas as this covers very similar thematic ground.

Ragna is a compelling female character, but once again the romance-that-cannot-be with Edgar is tepid, Aldred is a very watered down version of Prior Philip, and there’s no grand framing device such as building the cathedral to really tie to all together (although things do Get Built, and it’s interesting but not on the level of Pillars). This is the tail end of the Dark Ages and it shows - Viking raids, slavery, infanticide - and while it seems Follett’s style is to put his characters through much tragedy and tribulation before their happy ending, I wish writers would stop going to the rape well so readily. But at least the sexual violence isn’t as...lasciviously written as in Pillars? Scant praise, I know. But Follett’s strength in drawing the reader into the world and time period is on display, made even more interesting in this era about which we know very little.

Women and Leadership by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala - I have a great deal of respect for Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister who was treated utterly shamefully during her tenure and never got the credit she deserved, perhaps excepting the reaction to her iconic “misogny speech” whichyou can enjoy in full here:

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was the first woman to be Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs in Nigeria, was also the former Managing Director of the World Bank, and currently a candidate for Director-General of the WTO.

This is an interesting examination of women in leadership roles, comparing and contrasting the lives and experiences of a select few including (those I found the most interesting) Ellen Sirleaf, the first female President of Liberia, Joyce Banda, the first female President of Malawi, New Zealand’s current Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and of course, Gillard and Okonjo-Iweala themselves.

November shows/movies

The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult - I’ve been following the NXIVM case for a while now, when the news broke in 2017 I was surprised and intrigued that it involved actresses from some of my fandom interests - Alison Mack (Smallville), Grace Park and Nikki Clyne (Battlestar Galactica), and Bonnie Piasse (Star Wars). Uncovered: Escaping NXIVM is an excellent podcast from that point in time that’s well worth a listen. There’s been a lot of discussion comparing these two documentaries and which one is better, but I feel they’re both worthwhile.

The Vow gives a primer of NXIVM as a predatory “self improvement” pyramid scheme/cult run by human garbage Keith Reniere, from the perspective of former members turned whistleblowers Bonnie Piasse, who first suspected things were wrong, her husband Mark Vicente who was high up in the organisation, and Sarah Edmondson who was a member of DOS, the secret group within NXIVM that involved branding and sex trafficking. Seduced gives more insight into the depravity and criminality of DOS from the pov of India Oxenburg, just 19 when she joined the group and who became Alison Mack’s “slave” in DOS - she was required to give monthly “collateral” in the form of explicit photographs or incriminating information about herself or her family, had to ask Mack’s permission before eating anything (only 500 calories allowed per day), was ordered to have sex with Reniere, and other horrific treatment - Mack herself was slave to Reniere (as was Nikki Clyne) and there were even more horrific crimes including rape and imprisonments of underage girls.

Of course each show has an interest in portraying its subjects as less culpable than perhaps they were (there were people above and below them all in the pyramid after all) - Vicente and Edmondson in The Vow and Oxenburg in Seduced, but what I did appreciate about Seduced was the multiple experts to explain how and why people were indoctrinated into this cult, and why it was so difficult to break free from it. This is a story of victims who were also victimisers and all the complications that come along with that, although I’m not sure any of these people are in the place yet to really reckon with what happened and all need a lot of therapy.

Focusing on individual journeys also narrows the scope - there are other NXIVM members interviewed I would have liked to have heard a lot more from. There is also a lot of jumping back and forth in time in both docos so the timeline is never quite clear unless you do further research. I would actually like to see another documentary one day a bit further removed from events dealing with the whole thing from start to finish from a neutral perspective. The good news is that Reniere was recently sentenced to 120 years in prison so he can rot.

I saw value in both, but you’re only going to watch one of these, I would say go for Seduced - if you’re interested in as much information as possible, watch The Vow first to get a primer on all the main players and then Seduced for the full(er) story.

The Crown (season 4) - While I love absolutely everything Olivia Coleman does, I thought it took a while for her to settle in as the Queen last season and it’s almost sad that she really nailed it this season, just in time for the next cast changeover (but I also love everything Imelda Staunton does so...) This may be an unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t completely sold on Gillian Anderson as Thatcher - yes I know she sounded somewhat Like That, but for me the performance was a little too...affected? (and someone get her a cough drop, please!) 

It is also an almost sympathetic portrayal of Thatcher - even though it does demonstrate her classism and internalised misogyny, it doesn’t really explore the full impact of Thatcherism, why she was such a polarising figure to the extent that some would react like this to her death:

But I suppose it’s called The Crown, not The PM.

Emma Corrin is wonderful as Diana, and boy do they take no prisoners with Charles (or the other male spawn). I was actually surprised at how terrible they made Charles seem rather than both sidesing it as I had expected (but perhaps that’s being saved for season 5). It does hammer home just how young Diana was when they were married (19 to Charles’ 32), how incompatible they were and the toxicity of their marriage (standard disclaimer yes it’s all fictionalised blah blah). The performances are exceptional across the board - Tobias Menzies and Josh O’Conner were also standouts and it’s a shame to see them go.

I was however disappointed to see that the episode covering Charles and Di’s tour of Australia was not only called “Terra Nullius” but the term was used as a very tone deaf metephor that modern Australia was no longer “nobody’s land/country”. For those who aren’t aware, terra nullius was the disgraceful legal justification for British invasion/colonisation of Australia despite the fact that the Indigenous people had inhabited the continent for 50,000 years or more. While the tour was pre-Mabo (the decision that overturned the doctrine of terra nullius and acknowledged native title), there was no need to use this to make the point, especially when there was no mention at all of the true meaning/implication of the term.

The Spanish Princess (season 2, episodes 4-8)- Sigh. I guess I’m more annoyed at the squandered potential of this show, since the purpose ostensibly was to focus on the time before The Great Matter and give Katherine “her due” - and instead they went and made her the most unsympathetic, unlikeable character in the whole damn show. (Spoilers) She literally rips Bessie Blount’s baby from her body and, heedless to a mother’s pleas to hold her child, runs off to Henry so she can present him with “a son”. I mean, what the actual fuck?

I’m not a stickler for historical accuracy so long as it’s accurate to the spirit of history (The Tudors had its flaws, but it threaded this needle most of the time), but this Katherine isn’t even a shadow of her historical figure - she’s not a troubled heroine, she’s cruel and vindictive, Margaret Pole is a sanctimonious prig, and Margaret Tudor does little but sneer and shout - the only one who comes out unscathed is Mary Tudor (the elder), and it’s only because she’s barely in it at all. It’s a shame because I like all of these actresses (especially Georgie Henley and Laura Carmichael) but they are just given dreck to work with.

This is not an issue with flawed characters, it’s the bizarre presentation of these characters that seems to want to be girl power rah rah, and yet at the same time feels utterly misogynistic by pitting the women against each other or making them spiteful, stupid, or crazy for The Drama. I realise this is based on Gregory so par for the course, but it feels particularly egregious here. (Spoilers) At one point Margaret Pole is banished from court by Henry, and because Katherine won’t help her (because she cant!) she decides to spill the beans about Katherine’s non-virginity. Yes, her revenge against the hated Tudors is...to give Henry exactly what he wants? Even though it will result in young Mary, who she loves and cares for, being disinherited? Girlboss!

This season also missed the opportunity to build on its predecessors The White Queen/Princess and show why it was so important to Henry to have a male heir - the Tudor reign wasn’t built on the firmest foundations and so needed uncontested transfer of power, at the time there was historic precedent that passing the throne to a daughter led to Anarchy, and wars of succession were very recent in everyone’s memory. At least no one was bleating about The Curse this time, which is actually kind of surprising, because the point of the stupid curse is the Tudor dynasty drama.

But it’s not all terrible. Lina and Oviedo are the best part of the show, and (spoilers) thankfully make it out alive. Both are a delight to watch and I wish the show had been just about them.

Oh well. One day maybe we’ll get the Katherine of Aragon show we deserve - at least I can say that the costumes were pretty, small consolation though it is.

[ursie]

☕ + Jesse Cosay

INDIGENOUS KING!! people pleaser king!! Mlm king!! It’s actually v sad he was a protagonist w Lake because in any other season he would be my fav I would relate so hard and so would other people but w Lake around he can’t help but look like a less complex character eps in light of the characters in s3. Love him though!! I think the fandom should at least pretend to care about him separate from lake like..literally one of the few Native characters I can think of so..yeah but again tbh it’s not quite the fandoms fault that time s2 is quite obviously Lakes season

send me ☕️ + [topic] and i’ll tell you my opinion on it! 

[neechees]

If there was a videogame (rpg style) about NDNs for NDNs what sorta things would you wanna see in it. I’m always fantasizing about cool games with a full indigenous cast

I’ve literally wanted one of those my ENTIRE life and I’m so sad there isn’t one yet, there’s so much untapped potential :( I want a FULL-ON create your own character open world pre-contact rpg were you just do cool shit as an ndn, choose what region you’re from, your tribe, your name, gender identity (including twospirit ones), etc and you can wander around and meet other charas, do missions, meet spirits, hunt and trade for cool clothing, shit like that! I’ve ALWAYS wanted one like that

A Native fantasy rpg would also be fuckin sick, like... The Elder Scrolls esque.

[lodahlz]

The Problem with Media and American History

Recently I read an article called “History is Weapon” by Howard Zinn about the history of America and how they “discovered” parts of the country. It made me wonder why America idolizes these white men and makes them seem like such great explorers when in reality, they murdered, stole and enslaved various indigenous groups. In the case of the explorer, Christopher Columbus, he travelled around to different islands, being met with such great hospitality but in return he stole their gold, enslaved half of their people and killed the other half when they did not provide him with the information he desired. Columbus is described as a courageous voyager who put his life on the line and went through hardships to discover America. Although, the history books never mentioned that “half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead, either through murder, mutilation or suicide,” because of him and his men (ZInn). Which made me realize how glorified these explorers are. Whether in media or in history books, these men are always described as such great people because they helped discover the country, we now call The United States.

             Media is everywhere and effects all parts of our lives, even as children we are influenced by media. While doing research, I found the Disney animation Pocahontas, the movie 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and the video game Sid Meier’s Colonization as examples on how media glorifies colonization. When first thinking about it, Pocahontas did not seem like it was glorifying this issue, but the more I sat with it, the more it made sense. The movie focuses on a Native American girl falling in love with the friendly colonizer John Smith after he came with his men to take over their land. By having the main focus of the movie be their love story it takes away from the problem at hand. These men started a war between the two groups when they decided they wanted to steal the Native’s land. When watching this movie as a child I thought that John Smith was just a friendly guy and had pure intentions, but thinking about it now feels like Disney was trying to say what happened is okay and that colonization I just a part of American history. It is true that it is in our history but like most things that happened in history, it’s not good.

             The movie 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a movie to celebrate Christopher Columbus for his “discovery” of America. Although a lot of movies around the time are very similar and celebrate him for what he did, it makes me extremely sad. Seeing people celebrate someone who committed mass genocide but label him as some kind of legend. Making these kinds of movies glorifies the idea of colonization by making it seem like the taking of someone’s land and hurting their people is okay because it benefited the white people. Why make movies like this? Why watch movies like this? What was the true motive behind making this movie? It truly confuses me as to why we celebrate Columbus and even have a national holiday for him. The media paints him and many other explorers of the time as such great men but never talk about all the bad things they did. Christopher Columbus killed millions of people and enslaved a large majority of Native Americans. In modern day, this behavior would be punished and those people would be thrown in jail. So, should we as a country be celebrating it and acting like what he did was okay?

             Plenty of people in my life, especially when I was growing up, told me to be careful of what I read and do on the internet. Playing online video games never seemed harmful, but I also only really played girly games where you decorate and dress up characters. Never once did I play games where you could colonize your own countries. Sid Meier’s Colonization is a game where you literally colonize a country and based on which European country you came from, you got special perks to make it easier. I feel like this example doesn’t really need a lot of explanation because it very obviously promotes colonization, but I just wanted to discuss it because it doesn’t sit right with me. The media can be extremely harmful in ways it doesn’t even realize. By promoting this video game, the media was telling us that what happened in history was fun and exciting. Pushing people out of their homes and taking it over for a person’s own joy and benefit. Obviously, it’s a video game and no one is physically being harmed but producing a game like this should be considered unethical. I think we as a country should all reflect on the history of America and realize how the majority of the things that happened were ill-intentioned and not something we should be celebrating.

[siriusist]

3, 7, 9, 15, 18

booknet ask game (Apologies for the delay!):

3. what was the last book you rated 1/5? 

Probably this horrific and justifiably priced 0.25 cent paperback I got from the library book sale. I care so little about the title I’m not even going to bother getting up to look at it, but basically it was somehow involving a mystery on a liner heading to New York, and The Kennedys circa 1941 when Joe (’God what a terrible person’) Kennedy was ambassador to England (And casual Nazi supporter/isolationist, lovely).

But the book promises you that it will mostly talk about Rosemary Kennedy as a character. Which I liked, because in case you don’t know, Rosemary Kennedy was JFK’s sister who was considered the ‘prettiest’ of all the Kennedy girls, but also constantly was on a diet because she ‘put on weight easily’ (Poor girl), and because she was seen as ‘simple.’ Supposedly when she was in her early twenties, she had the mental capacities or a naive thirteen year old/ writing level of an eight year old. They kept basically shoving her into boarding schools to try to push her forward in terms of education, but obviously when she most likely had something like a severe case of autism, there weren’t exactly many programs that directly addressed those who were learning disabled, and being a Kennedy, they most likely were like PUSH HER THROUGH IT AND SHE’LL BE FINE (Great, thanks guys).

All this being said, there is proof in terms of letters that basically everyone was afraid, because once she became a teenager, she started running away from these schools or sneaking out late at night, and they were literally worried because of how ‘naive’ she was, that she’d end up getting pregnant by some weirdo guy forcing himself on her/ convincing her to have sex. What most normal people/historians think now, is that she saw her brother being John F. Kennedy, El Primo Playboy of the World 1941, dating movie stars and having a buttload of friends (As my older brother used to say), and she obviously wanted to be involved in this glamorous, fun life with the rest of her family, rather than shoved away at some crappy boarding school with nuns the age of time immemorial (Understandable). (Also, for what it’s worth, JFK basically WAS a great older brother, for what I’ve heard, and wanted his parents to loosen up on her. He involved her in his social groups if she was around and never pushed her into anything that someone with her ‘limitations’ might be hurt by).

So of course the natural thing would be to do is to give her a lobotomy so she doesn’t run away, and of course, it had some horrific side effects and basically killed her personality entirely from all accounts, making her basically a human vegetable with only a shadow of the person she’d been before. After that Joe ‘I’m the Worst’ Kennedy carted his daughter off, and debatably, depending on who you ask, she was basically ignored by most of the family for 60+ years of her living in a care home, or embraced in private (The Kennedy message/propaganda/nice try guys). There’s really only consistent public photos of Ted Kennedy visiting her, because besides the whole ‘I accidentally murdered a woman I was having an affair with’ thing, Ted was the baby and seemed actually like ironically the most ‘Christian’ in the most broadest sense of the word besides Bobby Kennedy (Yes, I know they’re Catholic, it’s an analogy).

So bringing this back to this awful book, the ‘mystery’ on the cruise liner shit basically seemingly revolves around Rosemary pre-lobotomy and how she wants to get married to a ‘coloured jazz man.’ BUT THIS NEVER FACTORS INTO THE PLOT. NONE OF THE HISTORICAL FIGURES ABOARD DO EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE ‘POV’ CHAPTERS ASIDE ORIGINAL CHARACTERS.

You heard me right. xD I KNOW IT’S THE 1940S IN THE BOOKS AND THERE’S FAR WORSE THAT COULD HAVE BEEN DONE AND THE JAZZ MAN IS NICE AND ALL BUT DAMN IT’S SORT OF THE WORST, BECAUSE THEY BASICALLY MAKE THIS THE ENTIRE REASON FOR HER LOBOTOMY AND WHILE THEORETICALLY IT WOULD FIT IN WITH JOE’S MOTIVATIONS HISTORICALLY, IT JUST CAME OFF AS SUPER SKEEZY AND UGH. Mostly the book A) Actually did a considerable job giving Rosemary a sweet and loving personality that you like, but considering what you know if you’re probably reading this book and how they’re just dropping bread crumbs the entire way through, it’s just incredibly morbid and bleh. 

If you’re going to write historical characters and fiction well, at least have something more to back it up than ‘Racism was more (outwardly) prevalent back then so she was going to be in an interracial relationship so lobotomy.” It just came off as conflating two important issues (The rights of the learning disabled to date and have families of their own, and interracial romances versus status in society), and just came out to justify it for a lobotomy we never even see. (Trust me, I’m making it sound far more interesting than it is).

Plus the mystery on the liner is the main aspect of the story, and I think that’s what makes it the worst: This author just chose to have these random historical figures on BECAUSE, and considering Rosemary’s background and what we know happened to her, it just seemed like a pretty desperate ploy to reel people in (like myself), and have them go, “Wait, this is just a sub-par mystery book, not a historical mystery book: She used that whole actual living person who existed and who was screwed over by her own family as ‘shock value’ and a ‘hook’ for the audience.” Double EW.

7. what was the last book that made you cry? 

Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, who is unfortunately no longer with us but a BEACON of Canadian Literature, and I'm SO sad he didn’t get to write more books, because his writing style is BEAUTIFUL and poetic.

“Saul Indian Horse is an alcoholic Ojibway man who finds himself the reluctant resident of an alcohol treatment centre after his latest binge. To come to peace with himself, he must tell his story. Richard Wagamese takes readers on the often difficult journey through Saul's life, from his painful forced separation from his family and land when he's sent to a residential school to the brief salvation he finds in playing hockey. The novel is an unflinching portrayal of the harsh reality of life in 1960s Canada, where racism reigns and Saul's spirit is destroyed by the alienating effects of cultural displacement.”

What you also don’t get about the book from this review, is the role hockey plays as being central to the narrative. In that moment, and when Saul is young, inside his own head, he is just what we as the reader see him as: A young boy who loves a sport and finds it freeing. A PERSON. A kid who loves hockey. 

He’s so good that he has a chance to make it to the NHL. He’s good enough to play on the ‘white teams,’ but when he starts beating white players, grown men and women throw things at him, like plastic ‘Indians’ from a ‘Cowboy and Indian’ set. 

He is a skilled player. He has raw talent. But to make it to the next level, and because they won’t let him be on the team in any other role, because a Native man can’t become a skilled star in 1960s Canada, he has to become a ‘goon.’ There’s actually a moment in the book where he snaps, and it’s so well written and heartbreaking, where it’s like this Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde dynamic inside of him, where he literally just goes, “Okay? You want me to be a bloodthirsty ‘Indian’? Then I’ll be that for you.”

There’s also a movie I haven’t had the guts to watch all the way through, because I tried watching it on a plane ride from Australia to Canada without actually having read the book first, and having no idea what the movie was about aside from hockey and Indigenous culture, and Jesus Christ IT KILLED ME. I’m terrible at flying, had been throwing up and thoroughly miserable for about three hours at that point on the plane, tried to turn on a movie to distract myself, and within ten minutes, I was like “No, I think sticking to the vomiting is justified.” (To give you an idea of the directing style, it’s bizarrely produced by uber-Republican yet ‘weirdly-obsessed with Indigenous people’ movie star Clint Eastwood. If you’ve seen his other films and how sparse and depressing they can be, you can only IMAGINE what this material lends itself to. So I’d really stick to reading the book first. Because Wagamese’s voice is so much stronger within the book, and the pain and horror poor Saul is exposed to serves a purpose within the larger narrative much more clearly, and even when he is an alcoholic, he still is able to find hope within himself and returning to his people, and that’s a beautiful thing that I think was lost in the portions of the film I was able to catch.) Check it out: It was only written in 2012, but it’s already being heralded as a ‘classic’ in Canadian Indigenous Literature.

9. do you actually check out books that have been recommended for you?

I do. I might not actually READ them, but I’ll at least check out a snippet on Amazon to see if it’s my cup of tea. So if anyone has any recommendations, go right on ahead <3

15. how do you feel about reading buddies?  

I would love a reading buddy! <3 Feel free to message me if you’re keen. <3

18. what was your favourite book when you were 10?

Probably something by Roald Dahl or The Hobbit, if we’re talking sheer escapism or enjoyment (Or the original run of Harry Potter). My Dad is an English teacher, so I was always reading older books than were probably age-appropriate (I was placed at a college-reading level at twelve on an assessment test), so other than that, a lot of classic literature: Just name it, I’ve probably read it. 

I also was a nerd who decided to read the entire dictionary back to front somewhere around this time and copy down all the words I actually didn’t know on a list, so that was a hobby. xD I guess I could count that as a ‘favourite book.’ (-Insert Homer Simpson “NEEeeeRRRddddd” gif here-).