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nyxshadowhawk · 1 year ago

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Art and Hedonism

Dorian Gray Weekly is over, so it’s finally time for me to post my analysis of my favorite gothic novel!

On the surface, The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to be a tragedy about what happens when you give yourself over to self-indulgence and sin. Dorian has been granted eternal youth so as to live out all his passions, and he spends his life becoming progressively more depraved until his conscience weighs upon him to the point of madness, and he destroys his own horcrux. Hedonism is bad, right? But it’s a little counter-intuitive for such a moral to come from Oscar Wilde. Why would Oscar Wilde, of all people, write a story that seems to condemn hedonism? Well… I don’t think he does. The book just doesn’t read that way. It’s a luxuriously self-indulgent, sensual book! I wouldn’t like it so much if it boiled down to “hedonism is bad.”

I think that this book is a metatextual critique of Wilde’s own philosophy. The Picture of Dorian Gray is not really about beauty, or pleasure, or sin. It is about art. It is about the nature of art and it’s relationship to the artist, and to the audience. It is a cautionary tale not about the dangers of hedonism, but the dangers of taking art too seriously. At least, that seems to be what it is according to its author. I’m not saying that I know definitively what the author’s intentions were, or that authors’ interpretations of their work are the only true and correct ones. Ultimately, an author’s interpretation of his or her own work is just one interpretation among many, and any true piece of art can be interpreted many different ways. But, looking at Dorian Gray through the lens of its own author might be the best way to answer this question. So, I am going to analyze that. For fun!

At first glance, Wilde’s preface doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the story. It’s a really short philosophical argument. Actually, it reads more like a pretentious internet comment, by making a bunch of beautifully-worded controversial claims and then sitting back and waiting for you to respond to them, almost as if it’s daring you to argue.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

[…]

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

There’s a lot more philosophical rambling that I cut out, but the short of it is this — art exists for its own sake. It exists to be admired, to be enjoyed. It exists to be beautiful, and that’s it. Anything that anyone else gets from it is simply what they get from it, and it says more about them than it does about the art. Creating art for any other primary purpose misses the point, if it isn’t outright dangerous.

Now, generally in literary analysis it’s a faux pas to psychoanalyze the author based on their work (which Wilde would probably agree with, since he writes that art should “conceal the artist”). There’s a lot of weird philosophy in this book, mostly put forth by the character of Lord Henry Wotton. Although Wilde identifies Lord Henry as something of a caricature of himself, we cannot say whether anything Lord Henry says is what Wilde really thinks. But this? The preface is written without the voice of a character or the context of a story. This is the author speaking as himself, in his own words, and therefore we can conclude that this is what he really thinks. That means that the only thing we can really say about Wilde and his philosophy based on this book alone comes from this preface.

Why is this preface even here? Why is it attached to this book? It might just be a futile attempt to cover his own ass, since he says things like “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book” and “Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.” That’s basically facing down the inevitable controversy that this book generated and saying, “don’t look at me, it’s just a story. It’s your fault for taking it seriously.” But, we could also use it as a framework within which to interpret the following story. Or, actually, wait, we’re not supposed to interpret it because it exists for its own sake, right? But why else would the this be the preface to Dorian Gray, if the story wasn’t meant to prove the preface’s point?

One more bit of metatextual content I want to bring up: Wilde said this about his characters:

Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be — in other ages, perhaps.

(I am way too proud of this outdated meme.)

So, all three of Dorian Gray’s main characters are meant to represent the author himself from various perspectives. Basil, the innocent and lovelorn painter, is how Wilde perceives himself. Lord Henry is how society perceives Wilde; he smoothly makes controversial philosophical statements about hedonism and beauty and whatnot, but doesn’t actually believe most of what he’s saying. And what a cryptic thing to say about Dorian, the naive-boy-turned-corrupt libertine. I guess I could interpret that as Wilde saying that he’d theoretically like to have the sheer daring and shamelessness needed to actually live out all of Henry’s philosophies. So… if that’s the case, then that puts a big question mark over Dorian’s entire character. If the message of the book is “hedonism is bad,” then why would Wilde want to be Dorian, even hypothetically? Dorian’s depravity is clearly a bad thing, right? Why would Wilde write him that way, then?

Because the book’s moral isn’t about hedonism, it’s about art.

Wilde warns the reader, “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.” But… that’s exactly what I plan to do. Sorry, Oscar.

So, let’s actually talk about the story now.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a weirdly paradoxical work for the reasons I just spelled out — it seems like it should be condemning hedonism, but it doesn’t quite. It seems like it is a story about a man whose life steadily ruined by pleasure-seeking at the expense of all else, and yet… it’s just so decadent, this book. It’s full of philosophy about hedonism and the nature of good and evil, and it’s hard to tell just how much is espoused by its author and how much is condemned. Often the philosophy comes through Lord Henry, but sometimes it’s just there in the narration. And I love this book for that reason. I love thinking about stuff like that, so much. I love that this book practically smells like opium and tastes like rich chocolate.

The reason why I’m so interested in Wilde’s relationship to his own work here is because I agree with a lot of the philosophy presented in it. I know that Dorian Gray is being corrupted by Lord Henry’s influence, and I can see how that happens. But… still. This book is interesting to me because it seems to simultaneously espouse and decry the philosophy presented in it, which is why I think it’s a critique. “Let’s let this philosophy play a bit, and see what it does.” What if someone really did live the kind of life that Wilde himself was accused of living? When is hedonism healthy, and when is it not? Where are the limits?

Henry is Wilde’s caricature of himself. A lot of readers hate him for just how infuriating he is. All Lord Henry really does is spout controversial and kind of offensive statements. I’m sure we all know at least one person like that on the internet. Henry’s like the super intellectual version of a troll; he just says stuff to make people deeply uncomfortable and see how they’ll react. But he’s also persuasive — he’s a Mephistophelian character with a “low, musical” voice. He views Dorian almost like a science experiment. He admits that influence is evil, but then actively goes after an impressionable and naive boy to turn him into… well, whatever that portrait looked like in the last chapter. In chapter 2, he makes a long speech about how a man should “live out his life fully and completely […] give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.” In short, screw Victorian morality. Life is to be experienced, so drink deeply of all it has to offer instead of wasting it constraining yourself. His best line, in my opinion, is:

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

—Chapter 2

I kind of agree with this. Kind of. I do think that temptation is impossible to resist. The more you attempt to repress your desires, the more intensely you feel those desires. The best thing to do to avoid being tempted by genuinely dangerous things is to either satisfy the temptation using some safer outlet (or otherwise redirect it), or to avoid potential temptations altogether. The second line of this quote makes it clear that what Henry is really saying here is, “don’t let society’s stupid restrictions keep you from living your best life.”

And… yeah. If society shames you for being gay, whip out the rainbow colors! A lot of things (especially “sexual deviancy”) are only “temptations” because society and culture says that they’re wrong, not because they’re actually morally wrong. That’s an important distinction. We’ll get back to that. I believe that the difference between a temptation and a desire is that you can only be tempted by something dangerous and forbidden. If feeling lust as a young woman or man is considered morally wrong, then sex is a “temptation” — as soon as it’s considered a normal part of existing as a human, then it’s suddenly not a “temptation,” it’s just desire, and is a lot easier to deal with. You can find a safe outlet for it without feeling any shame, and without making any dumb mistakes out of sheer desperation.

Another thing Harry says is,

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for.

—Chapter 2

Yes! I have no argument here. None at all. However, reading between the lines, it seems as though Harry’s definition of “realizing one’s nature perfectly” is just experiencing everything in life and living it to its fullest, literally without distinguishing between good and bad experiences, or good and evil deeds. “Every experience is of value,” he says at one point. I don’t define self-development this way. My definition is complete self-awareness. If you’re self-aware, then you can be as self-indulgent as you want because you know where your limits are. Drinking at a party is fine, but you have to know your alcohol tolerance.

Dorian buys into this philosophy pretty hard. By chapter 11, his whole life has become one of pleasure, and… I’m still not disagreeing with a lot of the philosophy put forth by this novel:

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stranger than themselves […] But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.

—Chapter 11

This is why I love this novel. I agree with this too. I have a fine instinct for beauty myself. Here, Dorian considers that maybe people in his society consider sensuality to be animalistic and savage only because they haven’t engaged with it at all, so it appears strange and dangerous. I also think that sensuality has been unfairly demonized for far too long, sometimes to the point where enjoying anything is sinful. I think it’s important to confront one’s passions (i.e. desires and emotions) and find a way to deal with them that’s both safe and satisfying. Like Dorian, I don’t have much patience for asceticism, or at least for the notion that it’s the most moral and spiritual way to live one’s life. Dorian attends church sometimes just out of curiosity, just becuase he finds it enjoyable or interesting, and he jumps around between different spiritualities the same way he collects jewels, textiles, and perfume:

But he [Dorian] never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system […] no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. […] He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.

—Chapter 11

I feel called out by this. This concept of jumping around between different belief systems, using belief as a tool… that’s basically Chaos Magic in a nutshell. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” definitely sounds like something Lord Henry would say. And I certainly don’t think that sensuality and spirituality are mutually exclusive, in fact, I think that the former can be a means of experiencing the latter. I worship Dionysus, for crying out loud. Often, the answer I give when someone on the internet asks me why I believe in magic or gods or anything else without evidence is “it’s fun,” i.e. pleasure.

And yet… my life could not be more different from Dorian’s. Perhaps the darkest part of my mind is something like Dorian, but in real life, I look like a stereotypical Victorian ingenue who’s always the first to die in a gothic novel like this one, and I’m quite pure and unsullied. I don’t do anything but sit in my dorm room and write on the internet all day. At parties, I freeze up and don’t speak to anyone. I’m still not much of a drinker, despite having been legally allowed to drink for several years now. My only real vice is sugar. I have no love life or sex life. I value pleasure becuase I can’t enjoy myself for the life of me, because I worry about everything all the time and waste energy on it. I’m not Dorian, and that’s probably why I can get away with hedonism.

Here’s the thing about our protagonist: he takes Harry much more seriously than he should. Harry doesn’t actually believe what he’s saying. He just says stuff, to be controversial and shocking. That’s what he does. But Dorian buys it, hard. Harry’s waxing lyrical about how there’s nothing in the world but youth and Dorian has the whole world at his fingertips because he’s pretty, makes Dorian obsessively concerned with his appearance. He barters his soul on a whim. And, then he proceeds to live the kind of lifestyle that Harry advocates for but doesn’t have the balls to actually commit to. Dorian is beautiful, rich, and able to do whatever he likes, which he often does. He has it all, but the truth is, he’s not really getting anything out of any experience. He goes through life like a passive spectator. This is probably because of the hedonism paradox, but it could also be because Dorian uses hedonism and collecting beautiful things as a means of escapism:

For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him a means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to bear.

— Chapter 11

Congratulations, Dorian, you ruined it for yourself.

I like beautiful things. I have more resin statues than I have space for. I have more perfumes than I actually wear. I spend a lot of my free time scrolling through artwork on Pinterest. I genuinely like museums and ballets and operas. I like dressing up in fancy Goth outfits even without an occasion. I like soft blankets. I like neoclassical music. I like decorating for holidays and making elaborate table displays and giving everything a distinctive theme. I deeply appreciate beauty. I don’t think it poisons me. I collect all these things because they make me happy, and that’s all. I think that happiness or pleasure is a worthy goal for its own sake.

But it has to be for its own sake, not for the sake of avoiding your problems, or to ignore the feeling of your sins crawling on your back. It’s like the difference between having a few drinks at a party for the fun of it, and becoming an alcoholic because you can’t come to terms with your psychological issues. Collect beautiful things because they make you happy, not because you hope they might fill the gaping void in your soul left behind by a portrait. Dorian definitely isn’t happy:

I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.

—Chapter 18

Dorian’s whole life has been what I call “empty pleasure,” pleasure that is ultimately unfulfilling because it’s covering up a problem instead of being enjoyed for its own sake. If you indulge for the sake of avoiding something, you’re not enjoying the thing for what it is, you’re just desperately trying to take your mind off the thing you want to avoid nagging at the back of your brain, and the result is that you can’t really enjoy anything. Another example is gorging yourself on a delicious feast because it’s delicious, as opposed to binge eating. Or having sex with several people that you feel genuine affection for, as opposed to people you can’t even remember the names of. “Empty pleasure” is bad for the soul, but pleasure itself is not. The threat of “empty pleasure” is what has caused pleasure itself to be demonized for so long. It’s not the pleasure that’s bad, it’s the avoidance. Pleasure can’t be spiritual at all if its so superficial. Dorian’s hedonism is hollow and meaningless, so it corrupts his soul.

Confront your damn problems, don’t lock them in your attic! Once you’ve done that, you can really get the most out of life.

Thank you for allowing me all of that gratuitous philosophizing. Where was I? Oh, right — this book is a warning about art. Right.

Lord Henry’s last real contribution to Dorian’s corruption is giving him the mysterious “yellow book.” The “yellow book” is often speculated to be À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. The book itself doesn’t really matter; what matters is the effect that it has on Dorian in-universe. It cements his hedonistic philosophy that had already been implanted by Lord Henry, and it seems to really drive him over the edge.

Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of beauty.

— Chapter 11

So, there is no good and evil, only beauty. Dorian doesn’t really have a concept of good and evil anymore, just experiences in life, just whether things are beautiful or not. This is another pretty big problem with Dorian’s approach towards hedonism — he has no moral compass.

This idea that the book is “poisonous” seems to directly contradict the point that Wilde makes in the preface. “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” Why the contradiction? Dorian has made the mistake of taking art too seriously. The yellow book is “poisonous” not because of anything about the book itself, but because of how Dorian responds to it — because he takes it too seriously. The book wouldn’t be immoral if he just enjoyed it at face-value and didn’t take it to heart, would it? The fact that he becomes so obsessed with it is another nail in his coffin.

The first nail in the coffin comes much earlier. The scene where Dorian dumps Sibyl is critical. First, there’s Sibyl’s explanation of her perspective on her art:

The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came — oh, by beautiful love! — and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. The stillness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. […] You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. You had made me understand what love really is. My love! My love! Prince Charming! Prince of life! I have grown sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be.

— Chapter 7

Until she met Dorian, Sibyl had been living through her plays. She quite literally “became” Juliet or Ophelia or whoever she was playing inside her mind, completely suspending her disbelief, because she just didn’t have much of a life outside of her acting. This made her a phenomenal actress, because watching an actor who’s that immersed in their role is also immersive for the audience. But when she met Dorian, life suddenly became more real to her and more meaningful to her than art. Sibyl completely lost that suspension of disbelief, and her acting skills along with it.

Dorian dumps her for saying so, in the most brutal way possible:

…you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination, Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You mean nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. […] Without your art, you are nothing. […] A third-rate actress with a pretty face.

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Both Sibyl and Dorian have made the fatal mistake of taking art too seriously. On Sybil’s end, she’s been living through her art in a way that’s unhealthy. She doesn’t have a life or an identity beyond the persona that she adopts on stage. It’s like if your entire life was online, and the only people you’ve ever been in love with are fictional characters, and you didn’t have any life to speak of beyond that — oh. Okay, well, at least I have a sense of myself. Sibyl doesn’t have an identity of her own, so she borrows her identity from Shakespeare characters. Dorian, meanwhile, has fallen in love with this false identity. He doesn’t actually care about the person Sibyl actually is, because there’s nothing really there. When Sibyl feels like she’s finally found herself and become a person, Dorian is disgusted with her because she can no longer act, and she’s no longer interesting to him. Sibyl became an art piece and Dorian loved that art piece, not the person beneath.

This scene is so often misrepresented in adaptations. In most adaptations, the breakup is Harry’s fault, usually through giving him bad romance advice and teaching him to devalue women. For example, in the 2009 adaptation, Harry tempts Dorian to go to a brothel instead of seeing Sibyl perform, and Sibyl is concerned that she’s just another whore to Dorian. That becomes the focus of their breakup. Blaming the breakup on Harry makes it about hedonism; Sibyl feeling like Dorian is exploiting her for sex makes it about hedonism. It’s not about hedonism, it’s about art, which relates back to the preface. In the book, the breakup is entirely Dorian’s fault. It’s also the first time we see any real cruelty out of Dorian, which is then reflected by the portrait. Because this has nothing to do with Harry’s influence, I consider it proof that Dorian was never really that good of a person to begin with. He completely lacks empathy for Sibyl.

This is what results in tragedy. Sibyl commits suicide because she’s the pretty and innocent blond ingenue who’s always the first to die in a gothic novel, and Dorian officially begins his downward slide. Sibyl’s death is absolutely Dorian’s fault in every way. He doesn’t dive headfirst into hedonism until after that happens, and his hedonism is “empty” because he’s trying to numb the pain of Sibyl’s death. And it’s all downhill from there.

When Basil finally comes to see Dorian again, he’s appalled by Dorian’s reputation. Apparently, everything Dorian touches rots from the inside, so to speak. Sibyl becomes the first of many. Every person he’s involved with ends up too ashamed to show themselves in public, if they don’t commit suicide.

“…you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with. […] Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?” [Basil proceeds to describe several men whom Dorian was “inseparable” with who then ended up with disgraced reputations.] They say that you corrupt everyone with whom you become intimate.”

— Chapter 12

Dorian’s reputation is so sordid that all of the young women and men who become intimate with Dorian (interesting word choice) all end up ruined in some way or another. The same is said of Alan Campbell, the young chemist Dorian blackmails into deposing of Basil’s body. Apparently, they were “almost inseparable, indeed. Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end.” Do I really need to spell this out? What does Dorian blackmail Allan with? We don’t know. It’s never said. But it’s heavily implied to be something about the very gay stuff that they almost definitely did together.

But — and this is one of the things that made the book so scandalous for its time — Dorian isn’t depraved because he’s bi. He’s just a bad person, and all of the poor young people who become involved with him suffer for it. Other characters in the story who are implied to be queer are not depicted as being evil. Basil, the most unambiguously gay character in the novel, is also one of the most innocent and the most undeserving of Dorian’s cruelty. Alan, too, is an innocent victim of Dorian, whatever he and Dorian might have done together in the past. During the scene in which Dorian blackmails Alan, his behavior implies that he is abusive as a partner, even outside the extraordinary circumstance of covering up a murder. Specifically, the “you made me do this” lines that he keeps throwing at Alan:

I tried to spare you. You will do me the justice to admit that. You were stern, harsh, offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat me—no living man, at any rate. I bore it all. Now it is for me to dictate terms.

— Chapter 14

How many other people has Dorian treated like this? How many of his lovers has he gaslit into believing that his abuse is their fault? How many people has he threatened with social ruin if they don’t do what he wants? (His own reputation can’t get any worse, after all.) He gives Alan a “look of pity,” as if to say, “this will hurt you way more than it hurts me.” Until the very end, Dorian seems completely oblivious (perhaps willingly so) to the effect that his actions have on other people, or worse, he actively enjoys it.

So, that brings me to Basil Hallward. Poor, poor Basil.

Basil knows his fatal flaw, and here we come back to taking art too seriously:

Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. […] I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away from me, you were still present in my art…. […] One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and your own time. […] …I know that as I worked on it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid that others would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it. […] Well, after a few days the thing left my studio, and as soon as I had gotten rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence, it seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good-looking and that I could paint. Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work that one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour — that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more than it reveals him.

— Chapter 9

This is all one paragraph, by the way, and the whole thing spans an entire page. It is probably the gayest paragraph of the entire body of Victorian literature. Basil is clearly infatuated. He becomes so obsessed with Dorian that it’s almost unhealthy. This anguished declaration of love obviously echoes the preface, which is to be expected if Wilde sees Basil as a representation of himself. “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.” Basil is afraid that the portrait doesn’t reveal Dorian as he is, instead revealing Basil’s salacious crush on Dorian. But he ultimately comes to the same conclusion as the preface — that art conceals the artist and simply exists for its own sake. Anyone is able to project onto art and see anything they want in it, but art simply is what it is, and taking it too seriously results in peril. Perhaps the true tragic figure of this book isn’t Dorian, it’s Basil, for having invested so much in this portrait. He doesn’t paint it for the sake of creating a beautiful thing, but for the sake of glorifying his crush. He treated Dorian like a god, and could not see past his projection of perfection to see that Dorian was becoming a monster until it was much too late. When Basil sees what has become of the portrait, he acknowledges that this is the only thing anyone is punished for in this novel: “I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.”

Dorian himself kind of becomes an art piece. He literally switches places with the portrait. The portrait shows the corruption of Dorian’s soul, and Dorian himself becomes a projection of both Harry “poisonous” philosophy and Basil’s unhealthy projection. He is admired intensely. He exists just to be beautiful, like an art piece, and no one can really see past his beauty. The novel’s premise is based around the idea that people’s sins are written across their face, and that beauty equals goodness. No one can believe anything bad about Dorian when they see him because he just looks so innocent and angelic. Before he learns the truth, Basil is disturbed by Dorian’s reputation but just can’t believe it: “But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth—I can’t believe anything against you.” Similar comments are made by other characters. Dorian is just too pretty to be as evil as he is. The subversiveness of the book comes from that premise. How often are beautiful people able to get away with anything in society, just because people tend to assume they’re innocent? It’s no wonder that Dorian is completely narcissistic.

Even Harry is incredulous when Dorian all but admits to having murdered Basil, thinking that he’s not capable of murder: “Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders […] I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.” Comparing crime to art is really interesting, to say the least. Most people would say that there’s nothing artistic about crime, but Harry isn’t most people, he’s a troll. And the only reason he gets off scot-free in this book is because he never commits the sin of taking art too seriously! Apparently, according to him, Dorian cannot commit a crime because he’s basically an art piece, and he just doesn’t have any need to kill someone. There’s another comment that Harry makes towards the end that suggests that he views Dorian as an art piece:

I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

—Chapter 19

This echoes an earlier comment that he made about Basil being boring because everything that’s interesting about him, he puts into his art. Dorian’s life is vibrant because he directs all that same creative energy into living instead of into an art piece. Dorian himself is an art piece. And yet, while Harry is saying this, Dorian is feeling Basil’s murder weighing upon him.

The title refers not to Dorian himself, but to the portrait — a piece of art. The portrait drives the story, and even Dorian himself realizes this. Dorian’s undoing is that he can’t live with the guilt of his reckless murder and probably all his other sins, especially when he has a literal conscience staring back at him. He would have gotten away with murder just for being pretty, if he didn’t have a conscience. It’s far too late for him to redeem himself, so he decides to destroy the conscience. And… we know how that turns out.

The true “moral” of this book is really hard to parse out, which is maybe why we shouldn’t attempt to read the symbol and just take the whole book at face-value, right? There’s a lot going on here. There’s the inability to face up to one’s problems and deal with them in a way that’s healthy, resulting in any form of enjoyment being “empty.” There’s the idolization of beauty, always assuming the best of beautiful people even when they’re really quite awful. And there’s art — treating art like life or life like art is always going to come back to bite you in the end. That would make this a cautionary tale about what happens when art isn’t appreciated for its own sake, and is projected on so much that one confuses it with life, or sought as a source of morality. Art is not moral, it just is — reading (or writing!) a book from the perspective of a serial killer will not make you a bad person. This book is not a bad influence, it just is.

Even after having written all of that, I’m still not really sure what Wilde was trying to say about hedonism, so let’s ask him. According to Wilde himself, the moral of The Picture of Dorian Gray is, “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.”

Both extremes are bad. Indulge in life, but make sure you do so with empathy, and for the right reasons! Find some middle ground. And most of all, don’t be afraid of your own portrait.

#dorian gray #the picture of dorian gray #dorian gray weekly #oscar wilde #literary analysis #gothic literature #gothic lit #art #hedonism #tpodg

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4th-make-quail · 2 months ago

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May I ask a clarifying question on your boundaries? I don’t consider myself “proship” or “anti” as I think those terms are reductive, and two people who may both fit under one label could have incredibly different opinions. However, I believe that the way I interact with media could be something that someone would call “anti”, in that I find it more interesting to look at fiction through the lens of reality rather than “fiction doesn’t effect reality”, by which I mean when reading Lolita I like to go “okay so what is this saying about how the psych profession saw csa at the time?” “How was this influenced by Nabokov’s own experiences?”, I see Marius and Armand as a reflection of child sexual abuse and enjoy analysing it under a more realistic lens, and would find wincest more interesting as a look at enmeshment between siblings under an abusive parent, rather than a ship (although what people mean by the term “ship” is also really vague and can differ wildly).

Based on that, and what you say in your pinned post, would you prefer I don’t interact? I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable!

Okay so to preface this, I don't go into much detail in my pinned because I hate the whole thing, and I hate spaces which are super dedicated to the pro/anti discourse. I try to keep my online spaces free of discourse and drama because its simply not fun! I don't want to spend my days steeping in negativity.

This got very long, so I'm gonna put it under a cut!

So. The thing is anon, the proship label originally came about as a response to antis, to describe people who don't actually care what other people ship ("ship and let ship", "your kink is not my kink and that's okay" and all that), but it's been massively conflated these days and now people take it to describe what they call problematic ships or art. You're right about them being reductive terms - and in fact, I have a lot of freak friends who are super into things I personally dislike or am outright squicked by (and vice versa), because we're not a monolith.

My stance entirely is this: I don't care what other people ship. I don't care how they ship it, or how they want to analyse and engage with that source material. I think what people ship and what art people enjoy has no say at all in what their morals might be.

What you describe as how you engage with those pairings is a completely valid interpretation! Preferring to look at a relationship through those lenses is perfectly fine, and in fact lots of people do this under the umbrella of meta.

What I personally mean by "ship" is the usual description - I want those two characters to have a romantic and sexual relationship. However, I also have no issues with people who don't have that viewpoint because it quite literally doesn't affect me unless they go about harassing others.

Liking a "problematic" ship dynamic doesn't mean you also condone that thing in real life. There's a reason one of the top sexual fantasies is noncon (see: any women's magazine list of these), and it's not because the person secretly really wants to be raped in real life. It's because human beings enjoy exploring taboo subjects in a safe and fictional environment.

Where my opinion stands on this is simple. If you think it's okay to harass people for the ships they like, if you think it's acceptable to write call out posts and smear people's names because of the ships they like, then I don't want to know you. If you think liking Marius/Armand makes that person a paedophile, or that liking underage ships leads to the person eventually moving on to real life kids, or that being an incest shipper means you're gonna go fuck your own sibling, again, I don't want to know you.

The same goes for both sides of this frankly stupid issue - far too many people who call themselves proship proudly love to dunk publicly on antis or people who don't share their viewpoints, which imo makes them just as bad! If someone's out there being awful to people who don't ship their problematic ships, then it's just as bad!

This is also why I don't do any DNIs or anything like that. If I see someone start to follow me and they have big obvious "PROSHIP DNI" in their info, then I will go ahead and block them, but otherwise I'm not interested in policing who can interact with me in that way. It's not for me to decide whether someone else wants to interact with me, it's on you to decide if you want to.

I'm not gonna be going out and ripping on people who dislike a ship I like, or who engage with art in a different way to me. However, if I come across posts in my tracked tags or on my dash expressing anti sentiments, or going on a negative rant about something I love, then I will also probably unfortunately be blocking that person. I don't like seeing negativity about shit I love on my dash or in the tags (really, does anybody? lol) so I'm proactive about that because a) it depresses me, and b) I spent a long time in the ffxiv fandom, where people think liking Garleans makes you a nazi apologist, and where they love to go on ranting screeds about how my favourite characters should die painfully, and I'm honestly not about that in my fandom life.

Anyway, all this to say: if you're comfortable interacting with me, a Marius/Armand bitch who does indeed enjoy their fucked up relationship because of how fucked up it is (and finds it incredibly sexy, actually), then I'm fine with you interacting with me. I'm not gonna be sharing or posting about that specific ship anyway, and I'm certainly not gonna be awful about people who find it distasteful or triggering or even just plain don't like it for whatever reason. It won't make me uncomfortable in any way to interact with you because you engage with those things in a different way to me, as long as you don't also engage in the other activities I discussed further up.

Sorry this got so long, anon! Hopefully it all makes sense. As an aside, I'm not interested in having any debates about these issues with anyone and will not be engaging with arguments about it. Sensible discussion, yes. Arguments, discourse and wank? No. Thank you for understanding! 💚

#ask quail #also as an aside: this is your free pass to unfollow and block me if my liking these things is a dealbreaker for you #this goes for anyone!#I have no issue with that at all #because at the end of the day we have to curate our own spaces #nonnybirds

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quixotin · 6 months ago

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I can't be the only one who wasn’t particularly impressed with Challengers, right?

I mean. The cinematography was great. The music made me feel like I was at a rave in Berlin with the hottest people on Feeld. And the premise was absolutely excellent. Chef's Kiss. Delectable. A pair of bisexual boys being dominated by Mother as they pathetically try to make her their girlfriend? Yes, please. It's the reason I watched it, because it had so much potential.

But.

Is this really it? Is this really all bi representation can come to in this, the year 2024?

I'm just tired.

I'm tired that bisexuals in adult media are represented as these messy, toxic, "don’t know what they want and make it everyone's problem" archetypes that are so demeaning. And that's if they're represented at all.

The bisexuality of Patrick and Art (but more so of Art) is completely left up to your interpretation, and in a world of media that has to come to represent lesbians and gay men in better light, the fact that the same cannot be said about bisexuals is a pity.

I guess, in a way, interpretation is all the bi's have both on and off screen, as it is difficult to pin-point a moment, or a look, or a way of acting that is undeniably Bisexual Coded™️ outside of the sexual spehere.

But that's precisely the point. That is what is so tiring about this conversation. The fact that society's interpretation of bisexuality never moves past a codification, and it's a catch-22. Bisexuality cannot be put in an either/or box. The orientation, and even identity at some points, is fully dependent on context, so it is difficult to grasp by people only attracted to one gender, regardless of context. But because it is contextual and therefore difficult to grasp by society at large, it is often overlooked and misinterpreted, leading to an internalization of negative perceptions and a lack of a third space in the social and mediatic imaginary.

What I am saying is that Challengers had an opportunity to celebrate the bisexuality of Art and Patrick. But instead, it made it a problem. It made it the conflict and called it a day.

And I haven't even mentioned the absolute shit it took on polyamory. Because boy.

It is the same complaint, though. It's about the conflict being based on the miscommunications and unspoken affections of these three people, them clearly being suited for each other, and then throwing in the expectation that the girl HAS to pick one and handling it in the worst possible way. It felt cheap. It felt unintellingent. It felt as "queer" and as "spicy" as that one Saltburn scene was to anyone who has spent more than 5 seconds on Wattpad or AO3: Absolutely mild.

It was baiting at its best for poor polyamory. It was bastardized as a sexy little fantasy the straights and monogamists could indulge in for 2 hours of running time, but now, now, kids. Remember to take your moral of the story with you: Polyamory is Bad, and you can only have The One™️. I mean, there wouldn't have been any toxicity if the conflict had been handled through the lens of normalization of polyamory, and that’s what makes it so frustrating. It would've been funnier, steamier, to have these three come to terms with what they felt and find an arrangement. It would have been more interesting to have Art and Tashi find a way to make ammends with Patrick and reconcile. It would've been wittier if an external force came in between their polyamorous arrangement. Hell, if you wanted to keep your crappy plot, you could've had Patrick fuck Art instead of Tashi as a moment of conflict resolution and that would have sufficed to improve it. But no. Writers in Hollywood have tiny T-Rex hands, and low-hanging fruit is all they're good for.

And look, I get it. I know the movie wasn't supposed to spell it out for you. I know the point was to read between the lines, because this was a tennis movie that wasn't at all about tennis. I know that in the end, there's room for interpretation, to believe that Tashi was hoping they would reconcile and that in the end, they do. I know that. But my point is that the arguments that build the movie's identity as bisexual (and even poly) are blink-and-you-miss-it moments. And on top of that, the qualities that make these characters arguably queer are painted in a negative light.

So, like, yeah. I don’t know who the audience was for this movie. But clearly not the bi's and not the poly's lol.

I saw it with my own polycule, and we couldn't stop raging lol.

#challengers #bisexual #polyamory #bi representation in this day and age can be so trying #challengers criticism #queer #lgbtqia

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rachell-redacted · 1 year ago

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Here's my review of The Talos Principle 2. It's not a flattering one, but it felt like some things needed to be said.

First of all, let’s get all of ad hominems out the way. This is not a review in bad faith, nor is in written out of malice. I’m not politically opposed to democracy, liberalism, individualism, humanism and women’s rights. I’m somewhat a nihilist, yeah, but a rather practical one. Meanings can be constructed for ease of living and efficiency and all that jazz. I’m also not a puzzle genre hater. I’ve 100%ed Portal 2, and the only reason I do not have 100% at TTP1 is because I could never bring myself to kill Milton off. Who I am though is a huge fan of the first game. This is clearly affecting my perception of this one, so this is relevant, I think.

I’m a huge fan of TTP1 and I hugely disliked TTP2. Is this game a sequel, does it continue the story? Yes. Is it a spiritual successor, does it continue the _narrative_? No, not at all. It feels different, hits different, and for me it wasn’t in a good kind of way.

First of all, TTP2 is overwhelmingly naïve. I do see that this is a deliberate creative choice, but I strongly believe it does not fit the series. It was a bad idea to take a thought-provoking piece of art and continue it as a message rather than as a discussion. TTP1 had space within itself to engage with its ideas and to form individual conclusions. TTP2 clearly wants to tell you something specific, but to truly listen you need to suspend your disbelief a lot more than before. Where the first game would have tackled a question with some degree of nuance, this one tends to postulate an answer. Would like to explore space for some other reasons than our moral duty to light up the Universe with cognition and life? Do not believe in such things? Good luck. Do not think that beauty exists / is inherently good / matters? Good luck once again, now with a chance to disappoint your companions. The list goes on, and while I’m all for humanism, technocracy and progress, I still felt trapped in reasonings game offered me for it all.

There’s also a huge problem with the narrative as a whole – there is no whole. Plot seems strangely fragmented, with Somnodrome arc being a bitter mix of an afterthought and a cut plotline. What was it for? Same goes for the secret society plot. And the main story, including Miranda, is just flat. Writers want us to care for their characters, but with characters being mouthpieces for ideas this is rather hard.

Also, there’s a Theory of Everything is this game. It just is. With it, the Universe is _postulated_ as being fundamentally knowable and understandable, which is unsettling for such a huge philosophical debate. (Put your ad hominem down, I do believe that the world is cognizable, I just don’t think making this a knowable fact is a good choice for this particular game). Moreover, with the Theory of Everything the science is solved. By one person, who consciously excluded their peers out of scientific progress. One person solved science and nowhere in the game is anyone upset about it. Why? Because writers needed a magical solve-all-problems device, and without it nothing would work plot wise. But with it the plot just seems plastic and cheap.

This story has no room for me to challenge it from the inside, it forces me to go and start a one-sided conversation with its authors, which I do not like. In short, it feels rushed, naïve and incomplete. But this is a puzzle game, not a text adventure. So, are the puzzles any good?

Well, I did not like them. I’m not sure if it means that they are bad, but in my opinion, they are somewhat boring. Most of the time solving them feels mechanical, not that much of ah-a! moments for me. More of the “finally, get this, stupid new puzzle element” and “after 500 hours in portal my brain solves this without thinking”. The other category is “to convoluted to be interesting”. But there’s non zero chance this is me and not the game.

Really bad stuff happens between the puzzles, in those huge open spaces. They get old very fast, and fast travel option isn’t helping much. Some regions are almost impossible to navigate even with the compass, and solving for stars just becomes a chore.

Well, most of the game felt like a chore to me. There are other things I’m upset about, like making Athena, seemingly our main character from TTP1, a chosen-one with a God complex (she IS that even without the myth around her) or not including Milton, but otherwise good plot could have made it work. This one did not. It disregards a very personal thing for a fan of the first game – their unique experience. Maybe the new audience will find this alluring. I certainly did not.

#the talos principle spoilers #the talos principle #the talos principle 2

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mueritos · 1 year ago

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Hey. Idk if this is me growing up or just being disillusioned with inter celebs etc. Im a 23 yr old trans man so I grew up and was inspired by chella on the YouTube community. But now I just…don’t like chella man anymore. I feel like…he became an industry plant? Over the pandemic asking fans for money to send to him directly to help others and not showing where the money was going exactly incident as well as just becoming older I noticed he seemed to almost want to become the next Keith haring or basquiat? He almost…now seems very fake? He takes deals with brands to be representation but doesn’t do much to call out certain brands for their faults etc.

Idk anymore

I give Chella credit in that he was one of the few transmen that I looked up while I was young, especially with him being BIPOC. Showing him to my family helped them understand me. But that's where the inspiration kinda stops, because it was painful to be surrounded by years-in-transition trans men online when I was absolutely nowhere I wanted to be. That was a me problem tho. But I also didn't know much about his whole donation incident.

Ig heres what I have to say. It's not great to view other people as your justification of your morals. We don't know how people have had to live or how they live now, we don't know what decisions they have to make, and we dont know what kind of fears or goals they have. Chella is allowed to do whatever he wants with his art or his modelling career, just like how I genuinely believe anyone else in the world is capable of making the right decisions for themselves (even if we dont like those decisions!). Im not really concerned with figuring out if hes an industry plant or a "class traitor" (lol) or even if he's "fake". To be honest, I'm all for BIPOC folks getting their $. Does that mean I enjoy seeing wealthy BIPOC folk perpetuate classism and racism? No. Just cuz someone is succeeding for themselves doesn't mean people cant critique them. I guess what Im saying is I see waaay too many people online take the things they enjoy and the people they follow as projections of their morals: "no! stop [Insert celebrity name] you're being problematic and its makes us fans look bad!" Like....Okay lmfao. People are grown adults and are going to make decisions for themselves. Just because you might enjoy a celebrity does not mean your morals are based on how good of a person they are.

and youre allowed to not like the same things anymore just like how people are allowed to change, for better or for worse. I think within online communities there is way too much pressure on "looking" like a good person versus actually being one...because sometimes BEING a good person makes you look absolutely vile in terms of online spaces/communities love of isolating, removing, and deleting "problematic" (and vulnerable) people from their spaces with no trial, discussion, or attempt at conflict mediation. Yea yea I do think people have every right to be criticized just as they have every right to make whatever decision they want, but what Im trying to get at is to really stop viewing anyone with a platform as someone you can other once they dont meet your standards. This is not the same as denouncing or critiquing someone for really egregious behavior (white supremacy, harrassment, bullying, interpersonal violence). Once you kinda start living by your own morals without needing other people's actions/behaviors to justify/define them, you learn to focus on building connections rather than destroying them.

again, this is a much nuanced topic and you prolly werent expecting me to go into this. but ive grown over the years and have engaged in some nasty and vile mob mentality behavior that i just dont vibe with anymore. im not really the kind of person now to speculate online or publicly what other people are doing or should be doing or whether theyre problematic or not. I don't really care about Chella man or most celebrities rn. People r just gonna be people, and I will always have empathy for those of marginalized identities. Free will, autonomy, and self determination goes both ways, but so does accountability, transformative justice, and reconciliation.

but also like kill ur idols lol

#muertoresponds #like yea its fun having people u follow and look up to man #does it take a lot of time to be following celebrities #there would be days i would just check up on all my micro celebrities #now i just dont give a fuck #theyre people im people we're people #we're all gonna change and do bad and do good #i dont like holding myself or anyone anymore to these fucked up online standards of looking like good people #idc idc idc #this was def not the answer u prolly wanted but its where im at and thats what i gotta say #have ur micro celebrities if u want but like yea #people r people #and so are u #critiques r valid but u cant hold anyone accountable unless they consent to be held accountable #like being held accountable means u choose to be part of the accountability process #not make a lil 5 min notes app apology and be forgotten about in a week because people find their next target #yadda yadda yadda #these r my thoughts

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letstalkwhump · 1 year ago

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Let's Talk Whump

Welcome to Let’s Talk Whump, a series of interviews that spotlight the amazing people in our whump community! I’m Malice and I’ll be your host today.

Today I’m talking whump with the amazing @studyofwhump!

Welcome to the show! Do you mind starting with a fact or two about yourself?

I’m Kay and I just turned 26 a few days ago! When not torturing my ocs, I am studying planetary geochemistry and having fun playing with spicy chemicals. I also really enjoy cooking, jewelry making and pen pal letters!

And what does whump mean to you?

I’ve often thought of whump as a facet of the hurt/comfort genre, with a greater focus on the physical, psychological, and emotional hurt and trauma inflicted on characters. Whump looks into not only characters experiencing intensely painful and overwhelming circumstances, but the hard road to recovery that comes afterward. There can be a lot of overlap with ‘angst’ in that regard, but it becomes whump when direct harm to the character’s well-being comes into play (for me that includes more of the physical harm).

How did you find the whump community? What made you want to join?

I followed the bad things happen bingo tumblr blog for a few years, writing down their prompts for my own story ideas as a little checklist. Then through that, I came across @whump-tr0pes Honor Bound series in its early stages and found the term ‘whump.’ Turns out, it was a concept I had enjoyed nearly all my life and had a flourishing online community! I decided to create a dedicated whump blog since a few irl friends followed my main and weren’t fans of fictional violence, and it’s been one of my favorite pastimes ever since!

That’s awesome as! Do you think your view on whump changed since you joined?

I started out mostly making generic prompts and reblogging whump art, not really sure about sharing my own fics since I barely shared my writing with anyone irl. I enjoyed fandom whump more, but as I started reading more original work from other whump writers, I grew a greater appreciation for it. Sharing more of my writings for my alien sci-fi series Titan Guard brought some positive feedback, and I’ve felt encouraged to open up my stories to a growing community as well.

And now everyone’s favourite question: Favourite whump tropes?

WHIPPING (favourite since I was a kid and whipped my Polly Pocket and Lego figures for the plot!), interrogation, used as bait, bound and gagged (again, tying up all my toys for the plot haha), manhandling, stress positions, slavery, POW situations, isolation, nightmares, forced to watch or choose, caretaker turned whumpee, whumpers who are cold and calculating and don’t hold back, and so many more!

Torturing your childhood dolls is such a universal whump experience! Would you mind sharing a favourite piece you've written?

Ooh that’s a hard one…

Alek’s First Whipping was one of the earliest scenes I had for Alek’s backstory in Titan Guard that I was really excited to share. It’s one of the first instances of Alek experiencing intense and body-altering pain that is public and degrading. It was a fic I had written several years prior to sharing it, and while some minor changes were made as I developed the story more, it’s still largely the same as the original which I really enjoy. And of course, it uses one of my all-time favorite tropes!

The explosion arc I’ve been writing has also been a favorite because I wanted to use the circumstances of that arc to show how dire the situation for the Pax Rebel group stranded on Earth is, essentially showing one of their lowest points. This arc also is the most effort I’ve dedicated to laying out more of the actual plot for Titan Guard and what it’s about. With this, I’ve also tried including some morally gray situations where there’s no clear answer to dealing with a friend’s impeding death, and opening it to readers to think on what they think is ‘right’ in just a scenario.

Public whipping is so good! And I loved Alek’s reaction, the poor guy. Do you mind sharing what your writing routine looks like?

I try to write 200 words a day in one form or another (although the past couple of weeks I’ve definitely fallen behind), and usually like to work on one WIP to fill that quota. I’m not a morning person at all, so I’m writing mainly in the afternoon or evening. I’ve found that if I’m able to sit outside while it’s nice and dark, that’s actually the most productive time for me!

Do you find that your ability to write varies between topics?

I have the most fun writing dialogue, both spoken between characters and internally, and especially if the two contradict each other. The dialogue for a scene is usually the first thing that comes to me, revealing an oc’s inner feeling and fears that guide their actions through the rest of the scene. I’ve been writing more arguments between characters recently, which has been really interesting sorting out group dynamics and complicating relationships.

I’ve also been told I’m good at delivering soul-crushing angst suddenly during an already whumpy moment!

And is there anything you're working on at the moment?

I’ve got a list of fics I’m trying to work on at the moment! Now that I’m over the hill on graduation and family stuff, I’ll hopefully have more time to get working on them. Alek and Lulan are in the line of fire right now, and the next few fics with them will be pretty pivotal! Some of their defining moments are coming up…

I’ve also tried to start focusing more on worldbuilding for my verse and the history of the main conflict leading up to the main story. Part of that is trying to get back into conlang, which is one of my favorite things!

Do you have a joke or pun you would like to share to spread some smiles today?

Of quartz I have good puns! As a geologist, I must never take puns for granite. And it’s always gneiss to spread smiles and laughter when schist happens and things get wacke. Not to get too sediment-al, but the whump community is like geology puns…

They rock.

I’m dying at that last line. That was awful but also very good! Is there any writing advice you’d like to share?

If you’re planning a larger project, let the ideas flow. I’m sometimes pretty rigid when it comes to sticking to the main canon of my own writing, but I still try to create alternate scenes for my own enjoyment and to help get through writer’s block. Even if you have a set plot or idea in mind for how you want the story to go, if a cool idea gets stuck in your head just write it out or take notes or do whatever even if it’s completely random! Write that AU, create alternate endings and any kind of ‘what if’ scenarios. You never know what random little ideas you’ve collected over time will become the answer to a writing block or a new idea you love.

Are there any blogs you’d like to shout out?

@whump-tr0pes @ashintheairlikesnow and @wildfaewhump for being the first few whump blogs whose original work I found captivating and inspiring as an introduction into the whump community!

@for-the-love-of-angst @noirineverysense @justplainwhump @aprilwaters @sableflynn @actress4him @tormentum-ab-intra @clockworknightmares @sweetwhumpandhellacomf @winedark-whump @straight-to-the-pain and @lektricwhump who are all amazing creators and lovely people I’ve gotten to know over the past couple of years. Go check out their work!

A special shout-out to @gritpyre, connoisseur of buff women and lycanthropic turmoil who I’ve commissioned artwork from in the past and is seriously talented! Frankie is truly amazing!

And while not whump specific, my two irl writing fiend friends @chaotic-tired-cat and @buggy-about-town who have enabled my whump obsession and found some connection to the genre as well! I love you both!!

And finally, anything you'd like to add? <

Just to say that the whump community has been there to help me get through some pretty tough times, and I am so, so grateful for it. I’ve met some truly kind and wonderful people here I can call friends, and I look forward to seeing what creations are coming in the future!

Thank you for joining us, @studyofwhump!

And to all you lovely folks at home, have a whump-derful day!

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inbarfink · 1 year ago

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Okay so there’s a lot of DHMIS fans out there who try to rank or analyze the Teachers and which ones are worse and which are better, and I thought I might as well throw my own proverbial hat in the proverbial ring and give my own take on the matter.

I’m going to go over all of the (central) Teachers in the DHMIS Web Show + DHMIS TV Show and give my own read of how ‘bad’ they are. I’ll be looking primarily at their focus episode where they actually act as teachers. I know a lot of the Webshow teachers came back in a much more chill and friendly role in the TV Show, but for me the things they did while they were acting as teachers is more important than how they act on their ‘off hours’ (if those even count as the same people in the same continuity)

And obviously, this is going to be a very personal sort of reading, very much based on my interpretation of DHMIS and its themes.

So let’s start with the Teacher who started it all! Sketchbook!

So I am gonna… try and start with the pros. So, before Sketchbook comes into the scene, our Trio was just sitting very, very still around the breakfast table. As per the creators’ own word, this is meant to show that our trio lacks creativity. So, learning how to Get Creative is a lesson that, in general terms, our trio could use to learn. Plus, not all of her lessons are that bad. Like, imagining silly faces on oranges, seeing images in clouds, using hair to express oneself - that’s all… alright I guess. And she can sometimes be entertaining and engaging to our trio, even including the not-easily-impressed Red Guy!

Sketchbook: Now, when you stare at the clouds in the sky, don't you find it exciting? Red, Duck, and Yellow Guy: No. Sketchbook: Come on, take another look! Yellow Guy: Oh wait! Together: I can see a hat! I can see a cat! I can see a man with a baseball bat! Together: I can see a dog! I can see a frog! I can see a ladder leaning on a log!

But, as we all know, the devil’s in the details. Alongside her kinda-alright lessons in creative thinking, she hides a pretty strong overcontrolling tendencies.

She has no way to engage her students when they go ‘off-script’ by not being immediately impressed with her lesson - outside of just vaguely telling them they’re ‘not thinking right’ -

Duck Guy: I don't see what you mean. Sketchbook: 'Cause you're not thinking creatively!

Or just ignoring their words entirely.

Sketchbook: I use my hair to express myself! Red Guy: That sounds really boring. Sketchbook: I use my hair to express myself!

And she clearly has a pretty strong idea of what is ‘good’ or ‘correct’ creativity. Making her shut Yellow Guy’s creative expressions down if he’s ‘doing it wrong’ according to her inexplicable restrictive standards.

And, well, this seems to be the Point where my opinion diverges quite a bit from that of the majority of the fandom… But, I’ve seen people say that the Sketchbook’s ‘never be creative again’ line proves that she might not be that evil, cause, well, look at all the horrifying shit the trio did while they were Creative! Not wanting this to happen is a perfectly understandable and moral position! And shows that she can actually be a responsible and moral teacher!

Well…that’s not my interpretation.

Yeah, the Creative scene is creepy and gross. But… I dunno if it represents something truly harmful and evil going on. Yeah they were using organs as decorations and baked that awful meat cake but… but while that gore is Gross, there’s not really the implication that they killed or harmed something to get it, you know?

I think the Creative scene is not just our characters ‘going CRAAAZY’, I think it’s more like… both literally and metaphorically, the characters are being Creative in those kinda weird and off-beat ways. Expressing their creativity and feelings in messy and odd ways found in art pieces much like… well, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared itself.

That awful gore cake is almost a perfect metaphor for DHMIS, actually. A pleasant childish facade revealing an inner layer of gore and horror.

They’re just making art that’s maybe a little gross. And maybe a little scary. And maybe a little too raw and visceral for themselves to handle. But that’s not inherently a bad thing. You know, even if it is pretty messy and they are kinda emotionally rattled from their own creative expressions, that might be something they would need a guiding hand in channeling in healthy and better ways…

But certainly not just “well, don’t you ever do this again”.

Now let's all agree to never be creative again.

For me this is just an extension of pouring oil all over Yellow’s Clown Painting. The Trio is still Doing Creativity Wrong by the Sketchbook’s standards - and she has decided they are doing it so Wrong that they shouldn’t be Creative ever again. It’s basically equivalent to some sort of hypothetical art teacher who watches DHMIS and goes “this is so creepy! I don’t think the people who made this should make art ever again!”. I think it’s clear why this kind of person would be a bad teacher when it comes to teaching art or anything to do with creativity!

Well, look at the time, looks like we should move on to...

Tony the Talking Clock! Okay, so I think… Pretty much all of the pros I was giving the Sketchbook are lessened with Tony. It certainly feels like there is an escalation with the Badness of the teachers going on. While one can argue that the trio needed to learn about the basics of Creativity - just not from a person like the Sketchbook - I think it’s harder to make the same argument about Tony’s very basic Time lesson. Like, before he shows up Red Guy and Duck just make a super-generic comment about time -

Red Guy: Come on, guys, stop mucking around. We only have five minutes until our show is on. Duck Guy: It's not enough time!

And if you just compare the way the trio participate in Tony’s song versus Sketchbook’s song….

Sketchbook: I see a silly face! Yellow Guy: Wow! Sketchbook: Walking along and smiling at me! Duck Guy: I don't see what you mean. Sketchbook: 'Cause you're not thinking creatively!

Yellow Guy: This tree that is old, has circles inside! Tony: This tree that is older has shriveled and died. Duck Guy: The apple that's fresh is ripe to the core!

They don’t really appear confused by the concept of time or surprised by Tony’s explanation of time. Red Guy asks one question (“And then what happened after the olden days?”) but that just might be out of politeness. It all seems to be stuff that they already understand about time. And he was doing this while the trio had other things planned.

But we don't really want to, we're going to miss our show.

And he just whisked them away on a musical adventure repeating ideas they already knew. So even if he didn’t do all of the Bad Shit that he did, he’d still be wasting their time.

But of course, we can’t forget about all the Bad Shit he does!

First and foremost, he’s got the same Issues as Sketchbook with his students going ‘off-script’, but he is even less patient. Almost immediately resorting to name-calling and violence.

Don't be STUPID, friends!

There's a time and a place for mucking around!

And in addition to just being a very simplistic view of Time, his lesson also contains some stuff that’s closer to straight-up inaccuracies. Namely his overly-romanticized presentation of both the past and the future.

And once they start actually questioning the lesson, and asking questions more advanced than he was prepared too, at first he deflects in a similar manner to the Sketchbook -

Duck Guy: But when did it start? Yellow Guy: And when will it stop? Tony: Time is important and I am a clock.

But then he quickly resorts to shutting them down with his loud beeping, until their ears bleed. Just a more indirect form of violence. It’s clear that his idea of ‘teaching’ is not one that encourages actual curiosity about the world, it’s just about following and repeating his points. And while the Sketchbook had a similar worldview, she never seemed to have more than Words and Oil to shut her students down, Tony has Time on his hands.

Namely the infamous final scene of the episode, where the group withers away and dies.

Here, there is no doubt that what is happening is harmful and is causing them suffering, and while Tony denies it, the Trio seems to believe that he is responsible for it. Considering the amount of seeming-reality-warping he was capable of during the rest of his musical number, it’s not that implausible.

It’s unclear WHY he did that, I think it’s most likely yet another way to punish them for not respecting him and his lesson, and for asking questions they shouldn’t. It’s also possible he just has a sadistic streak and tormenting them was always his goal, but considering how much his Control Freak aspect was emphasized during the rest of the episode, I am kinda leaning towards the former option.

Also in general “teacher bad because they are a control freak who ties too much of their ego into being smarter than their students” is more compelling to me than “teacher bad because they love cruelty”

Oh! did I just mention... LOVE?

And now, Shrignold (and the rest of the Love Cult!)

Okay, so let’s cut to the chase here. The thing about Shrignold is that he’s literally a cult recruiter. And that fact invariably corrupts any sort of ‘positive’ I could possibly say about him.

Like, yeah, Yellow Guy was very emotionally distressed and in need of a pick-me-up and Shrignold’s lesson seems to be comforting him - at least at first. But that’s less of a matter of his Lesson having some useful elements as it is a matter of Shrignold finding an emotionally vulnerable and isolated person to prey on - because he’s a cult recruiter.

And yeah, some of Shringnold’s initial explanations of love weren’t all bad and they only turned restrictive and Weird later. But that’s because his whole strategy is to sell Yellow Guy on Love as a general concept representing happiness and togetherness -

But you know it doesn't have to be; I hate you, you hate me. Cause even though we're different, it doesn't make a difference and we can live in harmony. I know you don't know who I am, but maybe I can hold your hand and together we can understand about love!

Shrignold: To love each other is to care, to be kind… Flower: …and to share! Rabbit: I love my friend, so I give them a hug! Purple Guy: I made this for you cause I love you so much! Beaver: I love my pet cause he's a crab.

And once he is committed to the idea that he needs Love to be happy, that is when Shrignold starts to conflate that general concept of Love with a more restrictive one and start shoving Heteronormativity down the child’s throat. Because he’s a cult recruiter.

Shrignold: No, no, no, that's not how it's done. You must save your love for your special one! Yellow Guy: My special one? Unicorn: Everyone has a special one.

Beaver: He's made for her… Unicorn: …and she's made for him! Rabbit: And that's the way it's always been. Beaver: And it's perfect. Purple Guy: And it's pure. Shrignold: And it's protected with a ring. Tree: That's the way that old love goes. Unicorn: Like a flower it grows and grows! Purple Guy: And it's forever. Flower: And forever.

And yeah, Shrignold is one of the only teachers who never loses his temper with the students, even when they’re doing something that is ‘wrong’ in his eyes. But that’s because he is trying to Lovebomb Yellow Guy in every meaning of the word. Because he’s a cult recruiter.

There’s a level where I’m, like, ‘well does that make him that textually different from all the other Teachers in the show?” I mean, you can very well argue that Sketchbook didn’t have a ‘few decent points in her lesson before it turned sinister’ - she was just trying to make them follow her ideas of creativity by getting them excited about the idea of being Creative in general and then narrowing the focus into just the creative expressions that she liked.

Buuut… this is still more obviously textually what’s going on when it comes to Shrignold. And the fact that he seems to be intentionally trying to isolate Yellow Guy from his friends and preying on him when he’s especially emotionally vulnerable, trying to manipulate his emotions and decide for him what's he feeling and why

Yellow Guy: But what is love, is it in the sky? Cloud: No it's a feeling, deep inside. Yellow Guy: Because I'm hungry? Shrignold: No, you're lonely. I can see it in your eyes.

Just gives him that extra edge of Sinister. Tony might be more obviously violent, but something about Shrignold and his friends’ passive-aggressive manipulation of Yellow Guy that feels even more dangerous.

So yeah, Shrignold’s lesson was self-contradictory and nonsensical, he keeps reinforcing obviously wrong falsehoods about relationships and emotions, he condescends to his student when he’s just trying to apply his lesson. But most importantly, he’s a cult recruiter.

And also probably homophobic.

I don't have a clever segway this time but anyway, here's...

Colin the Computer!

So while ‘Creativity’ and ‘Love’ featured the characters arguably needing to learn the Lesson (just not specifically from these terrible teachers) and ‘Time’ featured the characters just kinda minding their own business before being pulled into a totally unnecessary lesson - ‘Computers’ add a new wrinkle in the situation. In this episode, the characters are explicitly unquestionably interested in learning - just not about the subject the teacher has come to teach.

If you wanna talk about DHMIS as a metaphor for an education system that forces children to conform and recite information mindlessly while punishing their genuine curiosity - you really can’t find a better example. The Trio was practically seeking a lesson this time, but their will was overridden because that is not what they were supposed to learn.

And with the fact that they were robbed from learning about the world in favor of computers could be a metaphor for people isolating themselves from the ‘real world’ by focusing on technology. Or, to go more in line with the themes of DHMIS and how I interpret them - a metaphor for the internet and digital culture spreading misinformation and thus distorting one’s understanding of the world.

And not only is Colin taking the Trio away from a topic they actually sincerely want to learn about - his lesson is about as uselessly overly-simplistic as Tony’s. Like Red Guy said, they already have a computer - and it actually seems a bit more advanced than Colin is.

So it’s probable that they actually know all about the Wonders of Computers. The vibe I get from Colin’s song is that Duck and Yellow Guy are kinda dazzled by Colin’s bells and whistles, but Red Guy’s bored reaction is the correct one - there really is nothing new to learn here.

If anything, Colin is limiting their information of the digital world by shoving them into this infinite feedback loop of doing the same three things over and over again. Rather than the countless other things you could do in the digital world (including, you know, learning more about the world).

Colin also tends to ignore questions that are Inconvenient for him to acknowledge, constantly talks over his students…

Red Guy: Oh, maybe you could help us answer this question. "What is the biggest thing--" Colin: Clever! I'm very clevery guy. Yellow Guy: Wow!

…and there is his infamous freakout.

The notable thing for me is that just before that moment he himself already got all up in the personal space of his students. He’s a hypocrite, he thinks that he’s allowed to do whatever he wants to the Trio but they should respect him. Just another variation of that egotistical prideful streak that Tony also showed.

Also, I feel like a lot of people tend to kinda gloss over his bombardment of questions just before that freakout.

Colin: Great! Great news! Now before we begin our journey, I need to get some information from you! What's your name? Where do you live? What do you like to eat?

But to me this is clearly, like, a reference to websites collecting data from their users to sell to advertisers and suchlike. Colin is trying to pull the trio into using him more and more so he could spy on them and sell their data or whatever is the DHMISverse equivalent of that is.

But his big episode climax breakdown by the end is… a bit complicated. Like I said, I think the climax of ‘Creativity’ is both caused by our protagonists and is mostly benign - while the climaxes of Eps 2 + 3 are under the control of the teachers (Tony sped up time to punish his Students, Shrignold is a cult recruiter). But with ‘Computers’… I think what’s going on is Colin’s fault but not necessarily under Colin’s control.

Like, what’s happening here is that the digital world is getting overloaded due to Colin’s endless and repetitive lesson, right? He wanted to keep them in his digital world as much as possible, and when keeping their attention constantly focused on his digital wonders became too much for him - he started to glitch. It’s his fault, since it’s driven by his own ego and control-freak nature (and desire to harvest their data), and I don’t know if he’s necessarily feeling bad about that - but it is distinctive from Tony actively and knowingly punishing them.

(Also I know some people say that he intentionally caused Red Guy’s head to explode somehow and killed him at the end but considering he is unscathed in the next two episodes I am choosing to read it as Red Guy simply having his mind metaphorically blown)

So while Colin (at least Webshow Continuity Colin) is absolutely a Bastard, this is the first case where it is hard for me to say there is an escalation in the Terribleness of the teachers?? Maybe it’s just my personal biases talking? like, is spreading misinformation to manipulate you to join a cult better or worse than spreading misinformation to manipulate you into spending all your time on social media so he can monitor, harvest and sell your data? I can at least see the argument that the latter is worse?

And I do think the intention is to continue the escalation, considering that up next is…

Lamb Chop and the Rest of the Healthy Band!

Okay, so, I think it’s pretty clear by now that I’m doing this list with an attempt to prioritize actually evaluating the Teachers as teachers. You know, how bad their lessons are, how mean they are to the students, who much their behavior discourages actual curiousity or creative thinking… But, well, with these guys - there’s kind of a big elephant in the room about it.

Like, yes, their lesson is basically self-contradictory nonsense, they do nothing but ignore and override their students’ words and desire, and they don’t even seem particularly good at the ‘entertainment’ part of ‘edutainment’ - their song does nothing but annoy and distress the puppets for the most part. I mean, the circumstances around the song are probably a bigger factor but it certainly doesn’t help it’s so disjointed and chaotic.

But all of this feels kinda small potatoes (small potatoes make your teeth go gray!) against the fact they had one of their students killed and force-fed to another!

And unlike the thing with Tony, this doesn’t seem like a punishment for misbehaving (at least not on their specific lesson), it seems like Duck was doomed to die since the episode began.

It feels more like the Healthy Band was sent here to distract the puppets from Red’s disappearance and Duck’s oncoming demise over any attempt in education, even a very misinformed and misguided one.

But also, yeah, their level of education is quite bad and the way they treat their students even when they’re not killing them is very shitty. It's just kinda the culmination of all of the badness we already seen so I don't really have anything new to say about that.

Don’t murder your own students. That’s bad.

Anyways!

Lamp!

Lamp might be a bit harder to judge, because despite ‘officially’ being the main Teacher in Ep 6, he basically has like, a total of a scene-and-a-half to really show off his lesson. But… even in this scene-and-a-half he really demonstrates that he is a terrible teacher.

Much like the Healthy Band, he totally ignores and overrides his students… urn, student’s adamant refusal to join in on his lesson. Which is espacially obvious this time as Yellow is just TERRIFIED through the whole lesson.

And similar to Tony, he punishes Yellow for ‘misbehaving’ in a terribly cruel manner.

And there’s one more thing unique to him, and that is that the subject of his lesson is even more ludicrous than normal.

How can you be sleepy if you don't know how to have dreams?

It’s not something like ‘what are dreams’, but specifically ‘how to have dreams’. There were already a few lessons in DHMIS that seemed to teach the students stuff they already knew (or at the very least, stuff that they knew more/as much about as the teachers did) but now we’re really moving into the territory of things no one needs to learn. Just another way to demonstrate the continued degradation of the teachers even with Lamp's limited screentime and also this time no one gets murdered.

And now, let’s pull the plug on the Webshow Teachers…

And start up the TV Teachers with…

Briefcase! Again, I will start with whatever pros I can find… I think you can argue the Trio at least needed some sort of lesson about jobs? In the sense that Duck at least wanted to do something with his time - and also Yellow thought his welch was a ‘Job’. So I think that the Trio could probably use a lesson about what jobs are, just you know… not from this asshole.

Because while Briefcase isn’t as actively punishing or hostile as some of the DHMIS Web Teachers, he is incredibly misleading - first presenting an idealized version of the working world…

you can be anything you want to do It's totally up to you

Presenting work as a wonderland of infinite choices, including artistic pursuits…

But also publicly shaming his own brother for trying to chase his own career aspirations because they’re not successful at the moment.

And then trapping our Three of Us in a drab, unrewarding and utterly superfluous job.

He might not be as big of a jerk as some of the Webshow Teachers but he’s certainly pretty condescending - and he adds a new wrinkle into the wide tapestry of Teacher Awfulness: he is intentionally misleading.

Like, okay. This is kind of up for interpretation. But to me it feels like most of the teachers we’ve seen so far are true believers in their bullshit. Maybe not the Healthy Band or Lamp due to just how incoherent their lessons are and how much they’re seemingly motivated to just distract/punish their students. But even with them I’m not sure, the forces behind them might be more actively malicious, but the Teachers themselves could be just warped enough that they believe they make sense.

But this isn’t the vibe I get from Briefcase. I mean, there’s his blatant broad-daylight hypocrisy with Unemployed Brendon. And… he seems to be fully aware that he’s trapping them in Peterson's and Sons and Friends Bits & Parts Limited - doing the exact opposite of what his song says by forcing them into one of the least desirable workplaces he has access to. I feel like he must know that his song is just a way to entice suckers to give their life to the Capitalism Machine.

Like, y’know, maybe in his mind it was “it’s for their own good, they need to have jobs! Any jobs! And that’s the only one they’re good for!” but he certainly doesn’t believe ‘you can be anything you want to be’.

Especially when all that’s needed to get them back home is for him to finish his song, and yet he instead watches over quietly in disguise until Duck accidentally uncovers him. So while he might not be directly responsible for everything that happened to the trio over the factor, he’s at the very least complicit in it.

Was he planning to wait until they all retire before finishing his song? Was he planning to have them all die from old age at Petersons? Did he pull them out due to Yellow’s workplace accident or just because Duck ruined his cover?

Not to mention the way he pulled them into and back from that Time Hole proves his general emotional callousness, especially when you consider the effect this whole thing had on Yellow Guy.

My hand... My child...

Nor does it seem like he cares about his pound being lodged in Duck’s eye, which reinforces the idea he would’ve just let Yellow Guy bleed out and die in his retirement party if Duck hadn’t forced him out.

Speaking of Death…

Coffin

So Coffin’s the guy who really starts the trend of DHMIS TV Teachers being… different from their Webshow Equivalents. Both in the sense that they tend to be less actively and obviously malicious and in the sense that they tend to suffer some sort of Terrible Fate - this, combined with the main trio themselves proving they are capable of some Fucked Up Shit, make them more sympathetic to the audience. For a lot of people, folks like Coffin are actually pretty decent teachers.

My opinion is… a bit more complicated. Now, it is true that he showed up offering an important and necessary service to the trio - he’s basically a funeral director who got summoned because someone died. While he can be a bit of a jerk and that’s Bad-

This level of jerkiness is, like, the maximum he reaches when even Duck pees inside him. Compared to basically every other teacher and even our protagonists, that makes him remarkably even-tempered. Even the more seemingly-fucked-up stuff he did - like removing Duck’s organs and y’know, sealing him underground forever while he’s still conscious - seem to be pretty normal for Dead people in this bizarre world.

So yeah, I do generally agree that Coffin is not nearly as bad the teachers we’ve had before and he certainly did not deserve to get pissed in and then die, but…

The important thing to remember, from my perspective, is that Coffin isn’t just a Funeral Director. He’s still supposed to be a teacher, who teaches the trio about death. And judging him from this metric, he did an abysmal job. Literally all of the troubles in this episode; from Red and Yellow’s emotional anguish, their shitty treatment of Stain Edwards to, again, poor Coffin himself getting pissed in and smashed to bits - those all stem from the same root cause. Which is that our Main Trio just doesn’t know shit about dealing with Death.

Out of the Three of Them, Red Guy seems to be the only one who’s mostly aware of what Death even means and even then only from the perspective of the deceased - he had absolutely no idea how to deal with the grief of losing Duck. TEACHING the Trio about Death IS supposed to be Coffin's responsibility. And instead of making sure they actually understand what is going on, he pretty much immediately roped them into the excitement of preparing for the Big Day, Big Day - leading to pretty much every conflict in the episode.

Plus, the funeral he arranged (the part of his job he seemed to actually put effort into), had a bunch of inaccuracies (most notably the David Blunder)... And he might be the one responsible for sending the mourners to the house with the Make a New Friend Kit. All of these - seeing Duck being memorialized inaccurately, and having all of these super-performative grief forced on him, and then being pushed to explicitly move on and replace Duck as quickly as possible… Although it seems they were done with some good intentions, all of these pretty much exacerbated Yellow Guy’s Issues with dealing with his grief - in addition to never really having the permanence of Death explained to him before the event.

I mean, you have to make some consideration towards the fact that the Puppets themselves were not really able to admit that they didn’t really understand Death - so it’s not like Coffin was willfully ignoring requests for knowledge from his students. He didn’t know that they didn’t know! But I also feel like it is his responsibility as their teacher to take the initiative and make sure they understand the material he is teaching. (and of course, the Puppets not taking the initiative to ask questions themselves is pretty understandable when their educational environment has a history of punishing questions).

Coffin is a pretty interesting anomaly in the continuum of DHMIS Teachers. Because a lot of the time the Teachers are, implicitly or explicitly, redundant at best. Telling the Trio about things they already know in a way that is condescending, or overly simplistic, or just filled with inaccuracies even the Trio can spot. Coffin, however, is here to teach the Trio about something they legitimately don’t know and should probably know about - but he just fails to divulge that basic information that our main characters need. I think you can read it as, like, a statement about the way our society stigmatizes the discussion about Death. Especially with all the performative inaccurate mourning and then the quick push to move on (in this case by literally replacing Duck).

But whatever he was motivated by a desire to avoid actually discussing the ramifications of Death, or it was literally just a goofy misunderstanding and he thought the Trio knew what they were getting themselves into - I still feel like it was his responsibility and his failure that caused all of the troubles. I mean, it still puts him pretty high in the ranking as far as DHMIS Teacher Quality goes just cause the bar is so low - and it still doesn’t mean he deserved the Duck Piss. But this is why I don’t feel 100% comfortable with calling him a ‘Good Teacher’.

Lily and Todney!

Now with these two, the Terribleness is a lot more clear-cut. Lily and Todney are a pretty classic example of what I was talking about just before in the Coffin entry. The Trio already had a pretty good understanding of the ACTUAL concept of Family at the start of the episode.

Sure, we're not technically a family, but we live together and we have the same lawyer and it works for us.

They didn’t need a lesson about that. And Lily and Todney were less ‘teaching’ them as much as trying to ingrain in them arbitrary nuclear standards for ‘Family’ in their heads. ‘Your idea of ‘Family’ is Wrong, we are here to teach you how Wrong you are’ is their thing, basically.

They are also pretty condescending to the puppets, put them in many uncomfortable situations, and do the Classic DHMIS Teacher Move of being deflective and avoidant when one of their students calls them out on their bullshit.

Faulbchdt... That's not a word! That's right, isn't it, Lily? Family is much more than just a word!

They punish their students for failing to follow rules they have not actually properly established to them before they ‘broke’ them (see: the Mother's Piece debacle).

They also, like, ate a fellow Teacher???

All of these are pretty standard practice for DHMIS Teachers by now (I guess not the Teacher-Cannibalism), the thing that makes Lily and Todney notable is the way they try and exploit our puppets. Their main motivation is explictly not just to 'educate' the trio/make them think the 'right' things.

The reason why they try to reinforce the idea that the trio is doing family Wrong and only the twins can teach them how to do it Right is because they have something to gain out of it. On the micro-scale you can see it in the Family Tree sequence. Where Lily and Todney’s, um, roommate (relative?) is literally sustained by the blood of Red Guy - which was given willingly because Red Guy bought into L&T’s constant insinuations that he needs to be with his ‘real’ biological family in order to belong.

But more obviously, there’s the whole scheme of turning Yellow Guy into their new mother. In fact, if you watch the episode closely, it’s pretty clear they had their eyes on him from very early on.

So this whole ‘lesson’, with all of its nonsense arbitrary morals and rules, was nothing but a ploy to get the Trio into their house and isolate Yellow Guy from his friends.

But the interesting thing for me is the motivation. On some level, Lily and Todney might be the most sympathetic Teachers we’ve had - because we actually know for certain what motivates them. And that’s desperation.

Lily and Todney are HUNGRY. It’s implied that it’s not actually an uncommon occurrence in that family, since it's also mentioned in the home movie that they made before Mother was gone.

Despite having a bigger house than the Trio, it seems like this family is really financially struggling to keep themselves fed. And the Grolton Chicken Family Discount seems to be the only affordable food option they have. I mean, it doesn’t justify, y’know, driving the trio apart with their nonsense or drinking Red Guy’s blood or kidnapping Yellow Guy. They would definitely be a lot more sympathetic if they just stole food from the trio’s kitchen or something. But it gives them some sort of non-abstract material reason to do what they do where most teachers seem to do the same or worse purely out of a sense of ego, or a warped ideology, or just plain sadism.

Plus, there is the factor of the terms and conditions of the Family Discount themselves. Where, like, either Grolton’s Chicken refuses to give a Family Discount to any Group of People that is not a “Real Family” as defined by having a ‘dad’ and a ‘mom - or Lily and Todney are simply under the false impression that the Family Discount require that they’ll be a ‘Real Family’. So either there is a restaurant out there reinforcing this restrictive idea of family through financial discrimination. Or Lily and Todney have this concept of ‘family’ so deeply ingrained in them that they can see no other way.

Even with their ulterior motive to get the trio to listen to them, they probably actually believe only Real Families can open Family Packs. A lot of teachers seem to be True Believers in the nonsense they enforce, but Lily and Todney are our first example where the implication is that this ideology harms them just as much as it does the puppets. Either BECAUSE of that deluded belief or because there's a more influential organization that is also enforcing it. It’s a much bigger social system, and Lily and Todney are just cogs bringing it along to the next victim.

I mean, at the end of the day, I am trying to judge their value as teachers to the Puppets. And while this aspect makes them maybe a bit more sympathetic, it doesn’t make them any better as Teachers. This is just a new interesting flavor of Teacher-Badness - where they are directly harmed by the values they try to enforce and harm our trio with. Just one more link in a chain of harm, kinda reminds me of the way our trio treated Stain, actually. A new Wrinkle to consider when thinking of the teachers’ awfulness, I suppose.

And speaking on things that are Wrinkly, it is time for…

Warren the Eagle!

So the thing about Warren is, the lesson he has to teach our Trio was actually a necessary one. While all Three of Them care about each other, their friendship is also really dysfunctional for a variety of reasons - as you can see in this very episode’s ending.

So yeah, a lesson about how to ‘be better best friends’ would be something they needed, and especially on that day when they were so mean to Yellow Guy! And most of the lessons he has to teach them make good points! It’s just that Warren is the worst person who could deliver them. Like, leaving aside he’s a negative hole of charisma and talent the trio just does not want to listen to. He’s also a huge-ass hypocrite!

The lessons he says are actually good friendship advice (presumably just parroted verbatim from the ‘Okay Stop! learning materials) - but he himself fails to follow them even on the most basic level. For him, these are lessons he needs to Teach others, not anything he needs to learn from himself. He only interacts with them when they can be an Excuse for his own shitiness. They’re just slogans to repeat without actually understanding them himself. (Which is extra sad cause Warren IS primarily motivated by his lonliness. If HE could learn how to be a Better Best Friend, that would benfit him more than anything!)

Much like many other Teachers on DHMIS, this also feels like a reflection of problems in Real Life Early Childhood Education. How often are children taught basic concepts such as friendship, honesty, respect or kindness by parents, teachers and other authority figures - who utterly fail to actually follow these same ‘basic childhood lessons’ themselves and especially towards their own students? How many children are taught 'kindness' by the unkind?

So while Warren being an obnoxious and toxic person who shows no remorse as he destroys Yellow Guy’s mind for the sake of his own ego and self-satisfaction and, y’know, turned into a giant monster is bad enough if he was simply the puppets’ peer - the fact that he is also supposed to be ‘teaching’ an actually important lesson to them, kinda makes it worse? Because now they all know that Warren sucks, it’s also a lot easier for them to just ignore everything he told them. To just process them as empty slogans like Warren himself did, and therefore…

Anyways!

Choo-Choo!

This one’s another kinda Complicated one, and much like Lily and Todney, a rare case where we might need to consider Outside Factors when evaluating the character - so let’s take this one at a time.

First, while there is not much Wrong in his lesson - it’s unclear how necessary it is. While the puppets didn’t know much about, like, travel and driving a car - all of those are things that Red Guy taught himself on his own while Choo-Choo was kinda MIA. Choo-Choo’s own lesson was mainly just about listing various kinds of vehicles and transportations methods and I think the Trio are at least aware of what a bicycle is. So it’s probably yet another case of a Teacher giving them a lesson so simplistic and condescending it’s totally unnecessary.

Yeah, he came as a reaction to a Need one of the Puppets had, but in the sense he seems to be here as a way to try and passively placate Red Guy’s dreams of escape by offering him a faux ‘trip to the outside’ that actually never leaves their living room. It’s kinda like the Healthy Band maybe, although at least Choo-Choo isn’t distracting them from anything terrible well at least not anything more terrible than the general background terribleness of their existence.

And while he’s certainly not the worst Teacher we’ve had so far, he’s got a rather short temper, he tends to hit his students, even if it seems to be mostly by accident, but not always… And he often fails to engage with the actual questions his students ask of him…

Now, that’s the whole thing of Outside Factors. Because all of these issues with Choo-Choo’s teaching methods aren’t really Flaws In His Personality, as much as it is just… him being old and not-in-very-good-health. He’s not really ignoring or dismissing his students’ questions, he just legit has a problem hearing them properly. And he seems to be straining himself very much to the point of pain and death just to give them that lesson - which makes him easier to read as genuinely, if misguidedly, invested in Educating the Youth.

Plus, while he’s got a bit of a temper, it never really gets beyond ‘exasperated gruffness’ - not even when the trio hijack his own body to go on their little escape plan and drink all of his oil and force-fed him raisins and cigarettes -which would certainly be a justified point for someone to get angry!

And then there is the fact that he’s yet another Teacher who ends up dead due to the Actions of of the Students, so a lot like Coffin, that automatically makes him more sympathetic. (I think the Students actually killed Choo-Choo like three different times in that episode). I can totally see why he’s considered, at least, one of the ‘least evil’ teachers.

But… Well, while he might be one of the better-intentioned and least villainous teachers out there - he’s still not very good at his job? If you want to talk about how good the Teachers function as actual Edutainment for their students… yeah, Choo-Choo is not very good. We’ve certainly seen worse teachers, but his interactions with the students are generally unpleasant, the contents of his lesson are probably entirely redundant, he can't really engage with the students, and - you know- he DIED mid-lesson. Which is generally considered a downside.

I mean, Choo-Choo can’t help but be Sick and Old, I don’t want to blame him for that… There are people who can manage to be good teachers while being Sick and/or Old. The important factor here is that… while on some level it might seem admirable that he’s pushing himself despite his health - that just kinda made things worse both for everyone involved! If Choo-Choo toned things down a bit to make the lesson plan more accommodating to his own health problems (as in, take Duck's advice and Stop Morphing), that would’ve led to a more pleasant experience for both his students and himself (as in: he wouldn't have died!)

The question, I guess, is why did he feel the need to physically push himself like that? I know for a lot of people, Choo-Choo’s whole vibe reminded them of elderly and/or sick people who are forced to work and unable to retire due to financial pressures or other kinda crappy job conditions. I noticed the parallels too and it’s possible Choo-Choo is going through the anthropomorphic puppet train equivalent of this dire situation. On the other hand, part of Choo-Choo jerkish behavior is constant denial and insecurity about his own health problems. Being super-defensive about them even when his students bring them up with genuine concern.

Yellow Guy: Is that supposed to…? Choo Choo: Doesn't matter.

Duck: Can you stop morphing? Yellow Guy: Yeah! Stop morphing! Choo Choo: I'm not morphing, you're morphing!

Which of course, reminds me of the General Vibe of insecurity and condescension coming from a lot of the DHMIS teachers - clearly having their ego harmed by being outsmarted by their students or even just being asked questions they are not sure about. You know, it’s this mindset of ‘I’m the teacher and you’re the students, therefore you must Respect everything that I say because I’m always right and if you disagree with me you are Wrong’. And I think Choo-Choo’s defensiveness might come from that same source? That it is embarrassing if you have to admit your students are actually right about something, even when this thing is literally threatening your life and health.

It might be a balance of both of these. Maybe Choo-Choo has been forced into Teaching by, like, Lesley’s lackluster pension fund for her inanimate-object-nightmare-puppet-teachers or something but ALSO he feels too proud to admit any of this in front of his students or even ‘tone down’ the physical intensity of his lesson-plan once called out on his health problems by his students of all people!

Much like Coffin, Choo-Choo is sympathetic because his flaws cause mostly problems (and death) for himself. I think more so in Choo-Choo’s case since he didn’t even cause a lot of anguish for other people. His sense of pride over his students only harmed himself - in the worst possible way.

Farther complicating the issue is the fact that Red Guy was literally encouraging all of this! While Yellow Guy and Duck were clearly worried about Choo-Choo's health, Red Guy was goading him to keep going!

Yellow Guy: Maybe you should have a sit-down. Red Guy: No, don't sit down.

I dunno if that makes Choo-Choo's death Red Guy's fault (I mean this FIRST death after the song, the other two are absolutely Red Guy's fault) - I think it's likely things would've gone just the same with Choo-Choo's personal pride even if Red Guy was on Team Stop Morphing. But this moment seems so intentful and calculated (I mean, even YELLOW GUY noticed that Choo-Choo is not doing well) - that it feels even harsher than Yellow Guy smashing Coffin in his grief. Maybe Red Guy was just that hopeful that the song will eventually actually take them Elsewhere that he was willing to risk that guy's health. Maybe he was already considering hijacking his corpse?

And unlike with Coffin's death, I can't say this was caused by the problems in Choo-Choo's lesson. So it's not even a teacher's flaws coming back at him. I mean, I GUESS that was caused by the fact this supposed song about Transport wasn't actually going anywhere which was agitating Red Guy - but REALLY, Red Guy is more motivated by larger-scale wider issues about how he's trapped within the Format and thus he is THAT desperate to have a chance to escape, not anything to do with Choo-Choo individually.

I guess that's actually something you can connect with Choo-Choo's 'old teacher unable to retire' coding. Both Choo-Choo's problems as a teacher and the way Red Guy treated him are caused by wider-scale and more powerful systemic issues inflicted on them, which then reflect back on the way the act during the lesson.

Electracey

So good ol’ Electracey the Meter is generally regarded as one of the best Teachers in the whole show and that is… a pretty accurate assessment. But it’s also kinda grading on a curve, y’know? Being the Best Teacher on DHMIS is a pretty low bar to clear. So I am going to go over her problems - because I think they are often overlooked - but I do want to emphasize that, yes, while she is far from perfect, she is also the Best One we’ve had so far!

First things first, her lesson is entirely necessary and important. The Trio legit did not know what Electricity was and why it was important before she showed up.

Duck: I always assumed it was some kind of natural phenomenon, some sort of weather or something. Electracey: No, what about the lamps, and the lights, and the plug-in blanket? Red Guy: Uh… magic? Some kind… Like a spell?

And she obviously excels in the Entertainment Part of Education.

And just genuinely seem nice and cordial towards her students, which is a welcome change of pace!

She’s not even very angry when Duck steals her batteries and leaves her almost to die.

But while all of these are true, it is important to remember that she still has some Issues. For a starter, she seems to not have a Full Grasp of the Mortality of Organic Beings.

AND, like a lot of other teachers, she kinda Struggles when her students go off-screen:

"Now tell me, could you make a phone call on a phone that was just made out of rocks and soil?" "No, probably not" "Go on, try it!" "N- Why?" "Try it!"

Which honestly kinda reminds me, of, well

"I use my hair to express myself!"

And the most important thing is… there is another Point to her Lesson outside of ‘electricity is useful and you should pay your bills’. Electracey doesn’t just believe Electric Devices are cool, she believes they are superior to non-electric-devices.

"Soon everything in the home will be plugged-in and part of the electric family!"

Which is a pretty Dubious message to send to the impressionable puppets.

Now, Electracey’s saving grace is what happens when the students actually start following her lesson - as a combination of their newfound excitement for electricity and trying to distract themselves from Yellow Guy being Smart now, Red Guy and Duck do indeed start making sure everything in the house is ‘plugged in and part of the electric family'. Filling it with useless and gimmicky Smart Gadgets.

And Electracey, through her low-power shitty-battery gaze does actually try and warn them this is not a good idea.

(And it was not a good idea, obviously)

So while some of her lines are a bit ominous, maybe she at least didn’t want them to go that far, and that’s something, at least. Or maybe it was only a problem specifically because it was overloading the power on herself and the house?

Like I said, definitely the Best Teacher we’ve had so far, but she’s still far from flawless…

The big thing I am thinking about is the general fandom assessment that the TV Show had Better Teachers in general compared to the Web Show. It is true, but I think it’s important to consider why it is like this.

First and foremost, it’s because the Webshow had a clear element of escalation in the awfulness that the TV Show does not have. The difference in quality between the two Teacher Groups would’ve been a lot less clear cut if we had to compare all the TV Teachers just with Notebook, for example.

In addition , I think part of the reason the Badness of the TV Teachers is a lot more subdued has less to do with a change in tone and more to do with a change in the format. The longer, more character-driven narrative of the show allows for a more subtle and complex exploration of what makes the Teachers terrible - as well as having to explore a more diverse range of motivations and reasons for their terribleness.

Again, this is a very personal look at DHMIS Teachers, I would be happy to hear your perspectives on the matter assuming anyone made it this far into the post.

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davekat-sucks · 7 days ago

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I think the Solar Sands idea has the right idea but the wrong vision. The start of his video talks about the flaws and problems in modern cinema using IPs that have been in film for decades now, when originality should be viewed independent of the quality of an IPs existence in the market.

This sure works well as a video by appealing to the consensus that modern remakes and sequels suck, but what if I actually like the Star Wars sequels? I can like the Star Wars sequels and think they were unnecessary, it’s not a contradiction of opinion! I want new ideas because I feel like it, not out of some crusade for art, because objectively everything crafted by humans is art, even the bottom of the barrel pop culture schlok like superhero comics, anime, tokusatsu, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Even if all the new IPs that came out and were unoriginal and crappy there is at least a challenge put up by a person to try a different direction and make new characters and a story for others to critique and react to!

Also I just personally don’t like the “punk” segments he was doing between each chapter, because it’s so fake to me.

You started your YouTube channel critiquing bad DeviantArt and used thumbnails with characters from popular indie and mainstream media. You are a consumer like the rest of us, suck it up, bite your tongue and watch Transformers One.

If you like Star Wars sequels, that's on you. If someone likes modern Disney, that's on them. Of course, it may not save them from critique or people who are ready to mock them for supporting and liking shitty stuff. But hey, people will dislike something in a medium. Majority of Western audiences hate loli while Japan tolerates it as an an example. And I also think it varies on the original IP itself it does try to push the challenge to try and stand out, but often times, it would not land as right. I mean, look at Disney's Wish. All the concept ideas as seen in the artbook and the original music for At All Costs, were scrapped in favor for safe play and modernization. The same Disney that had brought similar childhood wonder and magic that reached to not only kids, but adults. Why step back from 2D animation? Why step back from making musicals? Why step back from telling an actual decent story? Part of it comes from company not letting the creator's have their freedom to make the work they want. Another could be the creator's themselves, not knowing how to adapt the restrictions placed on them or if they tried, the execution of it may not end up as great. Look in Hazbin Hotel when it was brought upon Amazon. It's a bit of a double-edged sword going on with the media these days. I just want to enjoy what I like and happy to critique when there is something wrong in a work. Be artistically, narratively, business, or morally standpoint. There is also some bad fans within people that defend it blindly. That's what more people hate and I think SolarSands forgot to relay this. People who just throw money at the company and never question its flaws. Stuff you see like modern Pokemon games and people defending it.

#Disney #Warner Bros

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faroreswinds · 2 years ago

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I’m sure sending you an ask off anon will probably get me put on a list of some kind but fuck it, I’ve already got one unhinged stalker, what’s another one in the mix lmao, and i want to make it extremely clear that I support you in this.

Like it really says something that these stannies absolutely do not quit after four damn years of the same thing. Doesn’t matter how factual you are (correctly citing art history in its original intent and context, canon game dialogue and timelines, interviews, etc), how polite you are, how straightforward you and others are because none of that matters at all to these chumps. This is a straight up gamergate-style sealioning campaign that in the end isn’t really about edelgard at all—she’s just the convenient platform for these people to expound their insane maximalist fandom-as-politics viewpoint that has irreparably damaged houses’ reputation for fans and has conflated videogame communities as a testing ground for in-group loyalty metrics.

Aside from what you and others have already said, it’s telling that they always follow a set script: Church Evil and Fascist, Edelgard Revolutionary and Morally Good, alongside truly reprehensible weaponisation of identity politics and socjus buzzwords. It’s not enough to assert that Edelgard is a pure lesbian hero (biphobia what), it must mean that by diametrically opposing her, Dimitri has to be evil, straight (but when they grudgingly acknowledge his queerness, it’s then asserting that said queerness can only exist within him being repressed and tamping it down because of evil Faerghian misogynist politics, never mind that Adrestia is the biggest misogynist of the continent lol), and singularly obsessed with targeting what she represents; Rhea, the chief architect of all that is evil in Fódlan and directly responsible for its misogyny, homophobia, and whatever else alongside with lobbing assertions of her being a “groomer” (which anyone with half a brain cell not dedicated to being chronically online know is now a popular right-wing argot used to directly target the lgbt community with truly heinous accusations equating them to paedophilia), among other things.

Only extreme statements and buzzwords for the characters, all the time: Edelgard as a hero, Dimitri and Rhea as representatives of ontological evil that Edelgard must defeat with extreme prejudice.

Let’s also point out the fact that in a true debate—because they’re not really debating at all and I say this as a professional debater myself who has won medals for this shit and trained youth teams in my country—the onus on the opposing side has to accept neutral statements from their counterparts. They cannot seriously say that their statements on Edelgard must be taken as fact while simultaneously discounting yours as fiction, because at best that would obviously be called out as ad hoc attempt to muddy the waters; at worst, blatantly trying to control the debate solely with their own parameters as the only acceptable ones, and thus openly attempting to silence dissenting opinions. If they really want to try to convince others that they’re really presenting legitimate debate, they cannot seriously pretend that their actions support that claim when they:

Approach you first and then continue to hound you

Constantly repeat themselves in an attempt to wear you down and confuse you, which is absolutely something that can be penalised in formal debate

Get offended and then accuse you of abuse when you firmly disagree with them and draw boundaries

Let’s also not forget the fact that their actions as a community absolutely do constitute harassment when they’ve been caught gloating about running moonlitboar off tumblr, the revelation that they keep a list of Edelgard critics to monitor them, forcing vas to apologise for expressing negative opinions about Edelgard (note how Rhea gets called so much bad shit but you don’t see Rhea fans calling for her haters’ blood), and even prompting YouTubers to change entire videos to avoid backlash, if not to simply stay in their good graces (and milk them for views and ad cash)

Aside from absolutely garbage essentialist Pure Lesbian Women are from Venus, Evil Repressed Hettie Obsessed Men are from Mars viewpoints, it’s truly mind boggling that they’ve bought into the belief that f/f is somehow purer and “less problematic” than m/m solely because they’ve decided that the heavy mlm moments for the Lions must point to their inherent moral degeneracy, which I would again like to remind them that that is actually homophobic; hell, I’ve seen quite a few using fujoshi as an insult. Let me take the time to explain that fujoshi and mlm fandom in Asia (explained by Asian fans themselves!) has always been seen as a symptom of mostly women fans being disgusting and “rotten,” and that their interest in mlm relationships is not only a betrayal of their gender (and ofc fujoshi as an insult in the west is a popular argument with terfs), but a sign that they’re degenerate and that something is deeply wrong with them.

Never mind that across the world, ff in media has sadly mostly been used as porn fodder for straight, misogynist men, because lesbian sex titillates them while gay sex repulses them. Utena is the outlier in a sea of garbage and said ff garbage is mostly shown as porn anyways. Gengoroh Tagame, a popular gay mangaka, has spoken about how female fans of mlm in japan are often big supporters of lgbt rights. Let’s not even get into the fact that the demographics of most edelgard spaces (like r/edelgard) are of straight men.

I also really despise how they’ve discovered “antisemitic” as a new buzzword. I’m Jewish. I loathe how most people only seem to care about opposing antisemitism when it’s in a videogame or movie, instead of in real life when we get hatecrimed. But it’d be remiss of me not to mention the way my blood boils when edelstans seriously repeat church slander of the nabateans being fake humans, evil reptilians wearing human skins as a disguise for them to manipulate the world from the shadows and using a fake, evil religion as their cover (not to mention how they describe the tenets of said religion as evil and conveniently forge and misrepresent its texts to make it look worse…where have i seen that before), who impede societal development to keep themselves on top, and, as the cherry on the shit cake, as miserly hoarders who keep monumental wealth to themselves and refuse to use it to help others.

Really makes you think then that it doesn’t take much for them to admit they see the Nabatean genocide as a positive, that its completion is necessary for edelgard to succeed (even if they hem and haw about what they think would happen to byleth, Seteth, and flayn), and borrowing from blatant irl genocide denial rhetoric saying that the agarthans (who are literal moustache twirling evil villains) were the original inhabitants who actually got genocided by the nasty coloniser lizards and that their retribution is absolutely justified and understandable. I laugh to think what their though process will be like if they even play the jugdral games.

And finally, since it bears mentioning, they should keep byleths name out of their fucking mouths. As a huge self admitted Byleth stan, seeing them whinge and whine and bitch and moan about poor Edelgard getting criticised really grinds my gears when the last four years has been seeing me constantly trying to navigate a fandom space that relentlessly shits on byleth and says they ruin the games and are nothing but player pandering or when people fucking celebrated the scene of shez killing them in hopes. Edelstans don’t get to try and use them as a prop to prove how edelgard is so good to them (and is so pure as a whole) when we have quantifiable data showing that Byleth smiles the most in verdant wind, has an incredibly strong character arc in azure moon, and that for THREE ROUTES OUT OF FOUR in houses (two if you count hopes scenarios when they’re kept alive) they always end up opposing her, because that is their actual character. Let’s talk about how r/byleth is mostly populated by r/edelgard fans who mostly post porn of fem byleth but have admitted to actually hating her, but liking the fact that she’s got big tits and can be used for yuri fanservice. Or let’s talk about feh: all their alts so far show their loyalty and closeness TO THE NABATEANS. And fuck it, I’m of the opinion that actually the devs’ edelgard bias is what ruined byleth and what made them silent. Because when they’re separated from houses (and thus not in her immediate focus), they fucking shine!!!

Tldr: hi raxis, what’s good!!

Addendum: edelgard has the most 3h alts in feh, cipher card art showing her naked and/or with suggestive costumes, is the most attached to the avatar characters in 3h/hopes/feh of her roster, is named first in the dlc for 3h in engage, has the tea set paired with hreslveg blend, ETC. if that’s not obv favouritism by an obv mostly male dev team, then, well…

Hey, how are you? Hope things are well!

When thinking about that exchange from the other day, @butwhatifidothis had an excellent post that put into words more eloquently than I could about issue:

They are right - I never mentioned it myself because my brain didn't quite go there, but many of the arguments were basically "this character would do this hypothetically", which is nothing more than mere headcanon.

Full disclosure, but I am not a professional debater. I am not even trained. Back in school I famously hated debates because I always felt they relied on twisting facts rather than empirical data. I liked data, that's why I went into the Sciences.

The only debating in Science is whether your results are accurate and if your method is indisputable. Is this ethical? What are we basing our ethnics off of? Proper science doesn't care about your opinions, or how bad so and so was back in the 1700s. Science - and Math - liked numbers, and numbers are cold and inflexible.

So I must admit that debating (not discussions, but debating) do tend to make me nervous at times. I like to learn, and to be challenged on how I view the world. But debating is not a skill I am honestly good at. I can lost track of the original point. I can get discombobulated by the lexicon and factoids when they are rapid fired at me.

That's why I engage in them. It's practice. If I don't do it, I will never get better.

And my untrained eyes could see that this debate... was not really a debate, but a shake-down. I was curious to see where it would go.

If anyone else finds this in this situation, here is my unprofessional advice:

Do not insult or use language that could be misconstrued as aggressive. Remain polite and sincere. Remaining polite does not mean agreeing to everything they say. But, instead of saying something like "You are wrong!" re-word it as "I don't agree with your view" or "I do not believe that is correct".

Do not let yourself be bullied. If this means you wish to disengage, just disengage. Make it comfortable for yourself. In my case, I was comfortable to keep going, but that may not be true for you. They make take this as a win, but you aren't being graded on this and this isn't politics. It's video game stuff.

Use only facts, do not use headcanons or opinions. This makes it harder for the other person to fight you, because you are remaining neutral. If you wish to discuss or bring up something that is not based on text, be sure to make it clear.

Call out when they twist your words. One user claimed that I had once used their name in my post. I never did, so I asked them where I had said that. It forces the other user, if they wish to respond, to either acknowledge they made a mistake, or they risk making themselves look like liars.

Never take it personally. They don't really know you. They are just bored and angry.

Always try to get them to think. This one I am still trying to master. When they make a claim, ask them why they think that. Why are they drawing that conclusion? What if they thought about it this way? If they are regurgitating whatever they have heard from others, they may get tripped up by this. This does run the risk of irritating the other person, but I find it is a helpful tool to both learn and to challenge your opponent to explaining themselves better.

This is the hardest one of all. Do not lose sight of the topic. It is not uncommon for these discussions to go a million different directions. If you lose sight, you may end up on a path you don't want to be on. Stay on topic. I'm still working on this too.

It's really cool that you are a trained debater. If you have any other further advice, or if my advice is terrible, I would love to hear it!

Ultimately, I think many of these types of fans just want to use whatever buzzwords and language they can to not only guilt the other party into bending a knee to their opinions, but to also shame anyone who likes another fictional character.

It's really a shame that other fans feel the need to go to such lengths over someone who is not real.

But per your addenhem, it is true that Edelgard gets a lot of love and attention from IS. She is popular. She doesn't need someone to come sweeping in defending her fictional honor.

Poor Claude really gets the shortest end of the stick in all this. This guy doesn't even have the same number of alts as Dimitri in FEH.

The sexuality stuff confuses me the most. Perhaps it is because my particular sexuality makes up 1% of the population, but I usually don't see why it is such a big deal when it comes to FE. FE doesn't make statements about sexuality. It is not try to teach about sexuality. It is not trying to push an agenda of any kind except the Make Money Agenda.

This weird vilifying fans of who likes mlm content, often framed as disgusting straight fujos who fetishize men. I find this an odd statement. From my point of view, anything that has any sort of sex is fetishizing, period. Straight, gay, whatever.

Well, regardless, thank you for the nice ask. I hope I could give is an answer that gives it justice. :)

#asks #Three Houses discourse #Edelgard discourse

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jess-moloney-malarkey · 8 months ago

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The other blog and their minions are currently having a meltdown over that McKamey Manor shirt Jamie wore. Obviously I know what goes on in that place and its overall controversial, but I mean Jamie has always openly liked extreme horror stuff and we’ve even seen him be into bdsm kink several times before, so I don’t know why they are losing their minds over something he never kept a secret to begin with.

Their excuse is that “since what happened at McKamey Manor happened irl he shouldn’t support it” but we’re talking about people who willingly signed waivers to participate in it, and those people know what they’re getting themselves into and are consenting to it because they’re also adults who are into extreme stuff. It’s not like they were kidnapped and forced to go there against their will.

Shocking to them, since they always want to make Jamie appear to be an innocent, naive angel who’s the victim of his own partner.

I remember that time they lost their minds when it’s revealed Jamie was gonna star in a French erotic film because, according to them, “why would he do this?🥺 doesn’t he know p0*n is bad and the majority of his fans are children uwu” - He’s a grown adult who’s never been shy about his interests in dark art and adult material, and he’s not responsible for anybody’s kids, that’s their parents’ job. And I’m sure he’s not gonna force his minor fans to watch his erotic movie, and he’s not gonna kidnap any of his fans and drop them off at McKamey Manor either.

It’s interesting though, to see that blog and their followers lost their minds whenever he let them know he’s not that naive angel they want him to be. And honestly, good for him. And if he likes taboo or extreme stuff, then good for him too. Dude’s a grown adult who is living his life and isn’t hurting anybody.

Straight up, it’s a shirt... A shirt that says “hey this place is terrible, don’t go”. He didn’t break anyone’s kneecaps himself, he didn’t tell people to go, he didn’t even make mention of the shirt…. Just, take the biggest seat right now over there, honestly. The level of moral outrage for this is a bit much. The same level of too much as their outrage over his cigarette merch and Jess’s nipples. Acting like a bunch of pearl clutching grannies lol. Is McKamey Manor a good place? No, of course not. But the guy is just wearing a shirt, probably because he’s intrigued by it as a concept, with his inclination for all things dark and macabre. Chill out.

#jamie campbell bower #jamie bower #asks i obviously sent myself :)

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rollercoasterwords · 2 years ago

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hey rae, i’m experiencing a bit of a moral dilemma (ish) bc like… i’ve always more or less had this view that its wrong on some level to like “police” people on the kind of media they are creating, even mainstream tbh and now… well… let’s just say a little bee flew in rather aggressively into my eardrums and it won’t stop buzzing about the moral implications and suddenly the pretty stable ground that i was standing on is slowing crumbling beneath my feet but like… that’s okay??? i’m accepting the fall bc i’m actually always thrilled to free fall. that is to say, i love the way things around me can make me question my own ideas of what i believe to be true sometimes like i love love love it. i love looking at smth ekth a new lens and more information and then yk, rebuilding thag ground with more stable material. anyways, sry i’m rambling, but you see, everything this bee was buzzing abt started to increasingly make more sense and like, i started to rly think about it in the way of like… evaluating the consequences right? like if a specific media trope has very real contributions to a stigma abt a certain group and manifests in the society in multiple ways, then rly, why can’t i condemn it? bc the way i used to look at it was like “well yes, the media is harmful, but like, i also don’t think we have the right to dictate other people’s liberties when it come to art”. but now… especially considering that this “art” is mainstream and like reaches millions of people, why tf not? bc when you rly put it on the scale, what has more weight, ppl being mad/annoyed that engaging with this is “bad” and they shouldn’t/ being limited in creating it or ppl suffering the real life implications of this. and to make myself a little clearer, the specific thing thag kinda made me realize this more was how media a lot of the times portrays certain mental illness in an overly negative and harmful way, and how in thrn, society discriminates against those individuals in part bc of the skewed perception thag media has portrayed about them. and i feel like this kinda of made me like… think more about this view that i used to defend strongly, and kinda of go, wait, hold up… and i’m still a little like… conflicted bc as much as like i say this, i don’t think there are any viable means of like combatting this issue bc at the end of the day, what creators for mainstream media want is money and these things get them money and so it’s never rly gonna stop, and i still am a little iffy on the idea thag it’s essentially like… an objective moral no no, but like i can see the other side more clearly and it’s just… man it’s so frustrating in a way. and like as much as some ppl may engage with their media critically and liek recognize these stereotypes and shit, a majority of ppl don’t and it’s so frustrating to see itttt. but yeah, idk im still like… gathering materials before fully building this floor, but like, what are your thoughts on this if any? (i’m literally going to everyone with this i an truly a menace, i need to talkkkk abt it like the way this brings me so much joy) (unfortunately i don’t have many ppl in my life that care or are willing to talk to me abt these things) (enter: rae)

hello!! interesting questions!! love that u are embracing the freefall of having a core belief challenged + opening urself to new ways of thinking rather than growing defensive + closing urself off!!

so, what i wanna start off by saying here is this: there is a very broad middle ground between "this art is bad and shouldn't exist/shouldn't be interacted with at all" versus "everyone should just create whatever they want with disregard for the consequences."

because different forms of art are going to be doing different things, reaching different audiences, and sending different messages. and there are plenty of ways that art/literature/media/etc can be harmful. for example, this recent open letter to the new york times is a great example of a critique on the way in which the nytimes' coverage of trans "issues" causes real-life harm to trans people. in this sort of instance, it's not okay for the nytimes to just continue writing as they have, however they want, because they have certain journalistic responsibilites which include not promoting/perpetuating harm against marginalized groups (not that they have an especially great track record in that regard, but i digress). part of critically evaluating media is evaluating whether that media has harmful real-life implications, and, if it does, figuring out whether/how to engage with that media in a way that does not perpetuate that harm.

so like--with the example you're talking about, portrayals of mental illness that contribute to stigma. part of evaluating those portrayals is going to start with asking what kind of media you're looking at, who it's reaching, and what it's trying to do. for example--a movie made by a large hollywood studio that's profiting off a stigmatizing portrayal of mental illness, reaching a broad audience, and contributing to widespread misconceptions is tangibly harmful, and it makes sense to vocally critique that portrayal or perhaps even encourage people not to engage with the movie at all, as it is profiting off something harmful. additionally, hollywood movies are invested in perpetuating a capitalist system such that they will often have an underlying goal of spreading messages/ideas that support that capitalist system, so there is much more to be wary of there in the intent of the media.

a fanfiction on the internet written by an individual that contains a stigmatizing portrayal of mental illness is something that is not accruing profit, not reaching a broad audience, and not harmful in the same way. an individual writing fanfiction on the internet is also not invested in perpetuating broader systems of capitalistic power in the same way a hollywood movie studio is, so the intent of their art is likely different. a better route here is probably to reach out to the individual, who probably wrote this portrayal out of ignorance and would most likely be open to educating themself and avoiding such portrayals in the future. this is a better response than trying to "cancel" the person completely, because it works to build community and has a much more direct impact in breaking the stigma around mental illness by educating an individual who previously internalized those stigmatized views.

when you're trying to critically evaluate a piece of media that contains something you view as potentially harmful, here are some important questions to ask:

who is making this? why are they making it? what is the stated goal of the creator(s) in creating this specific piece of media? are there any other goals that the creator is leaving unsaid?

who is the intended audience of this media? how large is that audience? in what ways is this media catered to appeal to that audience? what responsibilities does the creator hold towards that audience? will the audience response be monolithic, or is there room for varied impact amongst members of the same audience?

is this media a lecture or a conversation? is this media presenting a moral truth that i am expected to accept? or is it presenting moral questions and encouraging me to draw my own conclusions?

what role does profit play in the creation + distribution of this media? what systems of power is this media invested in upholding, if any? what institutions is this media invested in upholding, if any?

these are all questions which, depending on the answers, are going to change your evaluation on the media. this post kind of sums up what i mean, and i talk more here about when art becomes truly harmful. but also, i want to emphasize--engaging with media critically and coming to the conclusion that something is harmful is not the same thing as policing media, at least in my opinion. policing implies reinforcing set rules for how someone can or cannot create/engage with media, which doesn't allow for the necessary flexibility needed for actual critical thought. i think it's also important to note that policing typically says "if this media is Bad, you must destroy it/ignore it completely." but critically engaging with media means acknowledging harmful media when it exists, and analyzing why it exists + what it's trying to do. it also means acknowledging that not all media is going to fit cleanly into the harmful/harmless dichotomy. sometimes media will contain harmful stereotypes or stigmatizing portrayals in one sense, and really important representation or progressive ideas in another sense. other times, a portrayal that feels stigmatizing to one person will feel like representation to another. part of engaging critically with media means evaluating what it's doing as a whole and accounting for both the good and the bad. at the end of the day, we can't solve problems by refusing to engage with them at all, y'know?

#ask #ranting and raving

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and-then-there-were-n0ne · 1 year ago

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Years ago, Russiagate enthusiast David Klion really uncorked one.

It’s incredible how many years I wasted associating complexity and ambiguity with intelligence. Turns out the right answer is usually pretty simple, and complexity and ambiguity are how terrible people live with themselves.

This was handy to me, in the sense that it perfectly encapsulated the exact opposite of everything I believe. I remember reading this and turning it around in my head, over and over; I imagine a sociopath viewing it the way Patrick Bateman viewed that business card. It’s perfect. I mean, the sentiment behind it is utterly demented, but it’s still perfect, beautiful in the same way a virus is beautiful under a microscope.

I don’t even really know how I’d go about defending the essential concepts of complexity and ambiguity in the abstract. I guess I would point to the indisputable existence of chronic and intense complexity in our world. Like the complexity inherent to the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem, primogeniture in the British aristocracy, the relationship between extradimensional geometries and the potential for reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics, the linguistic dynamics of the Voynich manuscript, microtonal music, the geopolitical conditions that led to the Yemen-Saudi Arabia conflict and the tangle of alliances involved, Brownian motion, the anthropology of the Kula ring, programming a physics engine for a 3D video game, technical architecture involving uneven distribution of load-bearing elements in a limited space, escaping saṃsāra, parsing the various levels of linguistic etiquette in the Korean language, solving the Riemann hypothesis, rendering realistic computer-animated human faces in variable lighting, the history of anarchism and its various schools, the line of succession for the office of Holy Roman Emperor, Hungarian language case structure, Bernoulli’s principle, Microsoft Excel, black holes, the internal politics of the Chinese Communist Party, the legacy of brutalism in contemporary architecture, Finnegans Wake, cricket, Heiddegger’s dasein, making the perfect pizza dough, and literally every other thing that has ever crossed the human mind. You can wash your hands of nuance all you like; you live in a world that will always defy your clumsy, reductive efforts. Life’s complexity is irreducible.

But it’s not just that complexity is ubiquitous and inevitable. It’s that complexity is good. Complexity is what makes life interesting, and complexity is what makes art enjoyable. We have brains that have developed an exquisite ability to parse complicated, multivariate information - the fact that you are reading these words right now and understanding them is a miracle of raw processing - and we crave the opportunity to exercise them. We create all manner of strange hobbies specifically because they’re intellectually taxing, like those guys who do Rubic’s cube-style puzzles that have dozens of blocks. Overly simplistic games like Tic Tac Toe quickly bore us, and we go looking for deeper challenges. We inject our art with symbolism and reference in order to connect with it on a deeper and more satisfying level. Recently, the dominance of simplistic stories of good heroes and bad villains has robbed movies of some of their essential power. The injection of absurd rules into what stories can be told in Young Adult literature has rendered the genre a wasteland. Morally, the ability to traffic in complexity is absolutely essential, as the basic task of ethical development lies in expanding the moral imagination, and you can’t achieve that unless you’re willing to imagine that there are things about another person that go beyond your simplistic impressions, that they suffer under problems that are too (yes) complex for you to fully understand. Life would be powerfully boring without complexity.

Ambiguity, meanwhile, is just the state of most of life. We’re ambivalent, about most things, most of the time. I think that’s good, but either way - it just is.

I was inspired to remember Klion’s little koan by this bizarre piece of therapy-speak nonsense from Adam Grant in the New York Times. Grant is one of those 21st-century hucksters who peddle pseudo-psychology to unhappy people, dressing up everything they already want and think and feel in a patina of legitimacy derived from self-help ideology. The modern American cult of therapy takes a useful and necessary medical practice, meant for specific contexts and purposes, and generalizes its habits to the entirety of human life. Its folklore exists to justify what insecure people can’t justify for themselves. Narcissistic personality disorder is thought to occur in less than 1% of adults, and yet every ex-boyfriend in this country suffers from it. Curious! But not actually curious, given that an army of opportunists have built careers out of telling people just that kind of story - everyone you don’t like is a sociopath; every time you don’t get everything you want, you’re experiencing trauma; every conflict you get into, about anything, ever, is evidence of a toxic personality in the other person. Are you sure your boss is just another human being with legitimate pressures and needs, and your disagreements the product of the inevitable friction that results from a universe where friction is inevitable? Or could they be operating under the influence of the Dark Triad??? Sure. Why the fuck not. This is what therapeutic rhetoric has become, in this culture, an excuse architecture for every spare selfish impulse you ever have. And people like Grant get rich peddling it.

(That word, toxic - I think it’s a fallen soldier, at this point, a write-off. It has been applied so liberally, and so witlessly, that it no longer has any value. I’m sure I’ll still use it, out of habit, but today it suffers from a uniquely intense combination of lack of meaning and relentless overuse.)

Grant’s concern today is, I’m not kidding, the evil of ambivalent relationships. He presents several studies that show that, when we traffic in ambiguous interactions with other people, the stress takes a physical toll. He writes, “The most toxic relationships aren’t the purely negative ones. They’re the ones that are a mix of positive and negative.” Puzzlingly, Grant does not define what the actual boundaries of an ambiguous relationship might be; how would such a thing be quantified? InterPersonal Ambivalence Units (IPAUs)? I’m torn here, because taken literally that line means that the most toxic relationships are those that do not fall clearly into a binary of perfect affection or perfect enmity. Which, of course, is a category that includes every human relationship, ever, in the history of human relationships. To read more generously, we might take it that Grant means that relationships that don’t pass a particular threshold of certainty when it comes to friend or enemy status are the most toxic. But where is that threshold? If we’re going to be justifying all of this with reference to scientific research, shouldn’t there be some level of scientific precision in the essential question of what relationships are actually toxic? The studies here don’t inspire me with confidence; they’re exactly the kind that keep failing to replicate, and when you check how they’re operationalized, it’s always some sort of dubious self-reported scale. I don’t know. I’m confused as to who and how this helps.

The notion that human relationships fall simplistically and reliably onto a linear spectrum of “positive” and “negative” is so fundamentally contrary to my lived experience that I don’t really know how to begin here. We have multivariate, inscrutable, often unknowable personalities; these personalities are shaped by innumerable Byzantine internal forces and by a relentless stream of formative experiences. The notion that any two personalities are going to interact with each other in some kindergarten polarity of positivity and negativity seems farcical, just mathematically. And, personally, I find that ambiguous relationships can be among the most stimulating. In particular, they can be very sexy - when you’re first getting to know someone who might be (but might not be) a potential romantic interest, that ambiguity, that not knowing, is one of the best parts. Of course, sometimes the way that not knowing plays out is that you’re interested in them and they’re not interested in you, and it hurts. But that’s how it goes; it’s precisely the chance for failure that makes success sweeter. [...]

I would like to summon a charitable reading here, but there’s a kind of too-cute maximalism that makes it hard. Grant writes that “Even a single ambivalent interaction can take a toll.” Even a single ambivalent reaction! My God! What are we to take from this information? I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but we are a mortal species with finite lives that evolved by chance on an indifferent rock in a universe devoid of transcendent meaning, cursed to watch those we love die around us until we die in turn. We exist on a planet where our genetic endowment compels us to be selfish in pursuit of food, sex, and status, and there are 7 billion of us, all competing for limited resources and jockeying for status in competitions that are often inherently zero-sum. I’m going to go ahead and suggest that never having a single ambivalent interaction is perhaps an unrealistic expectation for anyone. And this gets to this paradox of self-help woowoo that I’ve talked about before: the vision of healthy human life becomes so unattainable that people end up developing guilt and shame over their inability to live without guilt and shame. Being “self-actualized” is just another unfair expectation nobody can reach. Which is perverse! I genuinely cannot comprehend what supposedly-therapeutic purpose is served by telling people that even a single ambivalent interaction is going to “take a toll.” Who is this helping?

Ambivalence is an invitation for rumination.

Well, yes, Adam. Yes it is. You’ve got me there. So, how could rumination be bad?

We agonize about ambiguous comments, unsure what to make of them and whether to trust the people who make them. We dwell on our mixed feelings, torn between avoiding our frenemies and holding out hope that they’ll change.

Again, this is presented as though what’s discussed is obviously something that we must try to avoid at all costs. But why? Is agonizing over things really that bad? I think I’ve done a lot of growing by agonizing over things in my life. That’s just part of the endowment of being a person, agonizing over things. Why are mixed feelings unhealthy? In a world this complicated, with relationships that are so full of interlocking and unconscious dynamics, aren’t mixed feelings unavoidable and ultimately benign? And why are we assuming that our “frenemies” are the ones who have to change? Is there really no chance at all that we’re the ones who should change? This gets to another point of mine about all this weird “everything is therapy all the time” self-help horseshit: life is full of zero-sum interactions between people with competing and legitimate interests. [...] This whole world of pop psychology insists that the individual is sacrosanct, that anyone who deals with insecurity or anxiety or self-doubt is the victim of injustice, and they are entitled to do whatever they want to self-actualize. But what do we do when two people are trying to self-actualize in ways that conflict with each other? I have no idea, and I don’t think these gurus know either. [...]

And, as I so often do, I have to say to this general ideology: the purpose of human life is not to feel comfortable all the time, bad and dark feelings are an essential part of being a person, and while you are entitled to having your physical self protected, your material needs met, and your basic autonomy respected, you aren’t entitled to never feel pain, sadness, insecurity, anxiety, self-doubt, or that you’re “invalid.” Society could never accommodate such an entitlement, and it’s a bad goal anyway.

#freddy deboer

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