#and to explain why a very white character's mother appears indian | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ontheoddoccasioniwritestuff · 5 years ago

Text

Goodnight, Aaron (Aaron Hotchner x OC) Chapter 1

Summary: After an informal interview, Hotch is surprised to find himself inviting his son’s potential nanny - a complete stranger - over to his home for a visit.

AN: Thank you for the love on the prologue! My niche lil series is thriving because of it <3

The instrument Sebastian has in his bag is a venu. It is a flute made of bamboo, used in Indian music.

Sebastian is half Indian on his mother's side - his father's ethnicity isn't disclosed in this story. While I have researched and included parts of his heritage in his character and the story, I'm not going to write about being a POC or being raised a Muslim because that's not my story to tell.

If you are a POC or a Muslim, and you have any advice for me on including his ethnicity as part of the story without speaking over POC voices or perpetuating harmful stereotypes, I would greatly appreciate it.

Tagging: @sunlight-moonrise, @clean-bands-dirty-stories, @genevievedarcygranger, and @davidrossi-ismydad

Prologue // Masterlist // AO3 Link // Chapter 2

“I still think I should have been there for a second opinion.”

“It was just meeting up for a discussion about what this job might entail,” Hotch sighed as Rossi pressed the button on the elevator. The doors slid closed and a jolt hit Hotch’s stomach as they began rising towards their floor.

Rossi tapped his side twice before making the leap, “So, what was he like?”

“He seemed the most genuine, if a little…” He paused, his eyebrows moving a fraction of an inch closer before settling on - “Nonchalant for an interview. But his references check out. He looked after a set of twins for seven years, and the parents were more than pleased with him.”

“He started early. Must have been like a big brother to them.”

“It was clear they mean a lot to him; he’s still buying them birthday presents.”

---> ---> ---> ---> --->

Sebastian was dressed on the edge of smart casual to parallel Hotch’s suit: a bright patterned short-sleeved shirt plus chinos against the well-matched simple button-up and tie respectively. But it was the thick Mancunian accent that nearly tripped Hotch up when Sebastian called his name.

“Aaron Hotchner, right?”

“Yes, and you must be Sebastian. Good to meet you,” Hotch gave a polite smile and offered his hand once Sebastian had dropped his satchel and two boxes from Build-A-Bear onto his side of the booth. He gave a firm shake twice. Out of nowhere, a thought popped into Hotch’s head that his hand had gotten sweaty in the ten second interval that he had seen his interviewee.

Sebastian didn’t seem phased, smiling back as he dropped his hand, “You too.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“I’m alright, thank you.”

Both sat down in the booth of the quiet cafe Hotch had chosen to meet Sebastian at. Across the next fifteen minutes, Hotch mentally noted everything he could about the man he was interviewing behind Sebastian’s resume and references which had printed off earlier in the day.

Sebastian would always take a few seconds to process the questions. When he answered, he used his hands a lot when he spoke. Not out of nerves though. He held Aaron’s eye contact too well, alternating between both eyes and a spot in the centre of his forehead, to be anxious. As Hotch offered to show him some photos of Jack, Sebastian stood then moved next to sit beside him without hesitation. A subtle woody scent accompanied him.

“Aw yeah, little bruiser,” Sebastian said as Jack ran around the field doing the Spiderman webshooter gesture at a teammate who did the same back at him, “And good taste in superheroes too.”

And from that moment on, Sebastian talked about what Hotch wanted for Jack. He listened with constant attention as Hotch spoke. Those smiles he shared with hi,, they had no force behind them, and Hotch found himself gesturing with his hands like Sebastian – albeit on a smaller scale.

They were just getting to talk about the logistics of wages when Hotch’s phone rang out.

“Excuse me,” Hotch stood up to take a moment of privacy, “Hotchner.”

Midway through the call, he spared a glance Sebastian’s way. The man was checking in his bag for something-

Oh. A wooden flute.

It disappeared back into the bag as quickly as it had been pulled out. Hotch turned his attention back to his phone call. That too was over rather fast and he was back to the booth.

“I’m sorry to cut this short, but I’ve been called back to work.” He shook Sebastian’s hand again once he had stood up, “I’ll be in touch. Thank you for meeting me at such short notice.”

“Not a problem. Part of this job too, isn’t it?”

---> ---> ---> ---> --->

“I think Jack would get on with him,” Hotch concluded.

“When do you find out if that’s true?”

“He’s coming to meet Jack this afternoon. If all goes well, then he can have a trial day. If that goes well, I’ll consider hiring him.”

“Thorough,” Rossi said just in time for the elevator doors to open.

Another good day followed – meaning it was mostly paperwork – but even with his time in his office mostly undisturbed, Hotch found himself packing several case files into his briefcase. At least he would have something to do instead of pressing his ear up against the wall to Jack’s room for the evening.

Jack charged out of the school gates, crashing into Hotch and flinging his arms around him. Hotch grunted as Jack’s P.E. kit smacked into back but it didn’t stop him from lifting his son off his feet. Those feet didn’t stop kicking, not even when Hotch lowered the volume of the Beatles’ tracks en route home. He listened dutifully while his father explained about the visitor that would be coming over that night.

“He might be around to help your Aunt Jessica look after you while I’m working.” Hotch said as they pulled into the garage, “But, if you don’t like him, we can find someone else, OK? He doesn’t have to stay.”

“OK,” Jack unclipped his seatbelt. Then he carried on talking about how his lunch break game of soccer had gone, all the way up to their apartment.

While Hotch checked on the slow cooker, Jack did his homework. He would occasionally pipe up to ask a question. Not because he didn’t know the answer, Hotch knew that, but because he enjoyed the conversations that would spawn from the homework. One such conversation was cut short at the sound of the doorbell. Jack carried on with his work, his head receiving a tussle from Hotch as he passed to get to the front door.

Waiting patiently in the hallway was Sebastian and Hotch greeted him, “Hello. Did you find us alright?”

“All good, got the third degree from your doorman about my ID though,” and Sebastian flashed the small card before pocketing it. The patterned shirt had been swapped for a muted red number but Sebastian had kept his satchel as part of his outfit. And it was then that Hotch noticed the various patches sewn onto it. Flags and symbols, likely from something Sebastian enjoyed but Hotch didn’t personally recognise any of them. It did, however, remind him a little of Penelope Garcia.

He had already taken one of his shoes off before Hotch could tell him that this was a shoes-on house, so Hotch decided to continue the small talk instead, “He’s very meticulous with his job.”

“Good,” and Sebastian spied Jack appearing around the corner, “Hey, you must be Jack. I’m Sebastian. Is it cool if we hang out for a bit while your dad works?”

Jack looked to between Hotch and Sebastian several times before he nodded.

“Jack, why don’t you show Sebastian your Lego?”

Hotch watched Jack lead Sebastian into his bedroom before he returned to his office, leaving the door ajar. Sebastian would have to walk past to make it out of the flat. Just a precaution.

Discarding his suit jacket on the back of his chair, Hotch lost himself in the slope of paperwork. His mind only strayed once when the toilet down the hall flushed. The conversation, too muffled by the walls to make out any words, became a comforting white noise.

The slowest and simultaneously fastest hour passed.

Hotch had just made a dent in his workload when he heard a shriek of laughter from Jack’s room. Clicking his pen, he abandoned his desk and crept around to the source of the noise. He could smell that the casserole was nearly done. As he peeked around the door frame to see, part of him wished he could blend into the background, just to catch more than a glimpse of what was happening.

Sebastian was lying on his back with his legs tucked into his chest and Jack astride his shins. Thankfully, Sebastian’s hands were around Jack’s middle as he pushed his legs up, and Jack’s arms were stretched up. Both were making sound effects that were fitting to the spacecraft Jack had constructed from random bricks and was currently flying over his head.

Hotch could watch Jack playing for so much longer. But he knew that he had to interrupt if he wanted him off to bed on time.

“And just what are you two doing?”

Both of their heads whipped around to see Hotch, now stood fully in view in the doorway. While Sebastian looked genuinely guilty, Jack just beamed at Hotch and waved his Lego model at him.

“Seb’s helping the spacecraft take off!”

“I see,” Hotch said, just as sternly but a smile creeping onto his lips betrayed him, “How about you go wash your hands, Jack? Dinner will be ready soon.”

Nodding eagerly, Jack dismounted his steed and a dishevelled Sebastian got to his feet.

“I’ll catch you later then, Jack. How do you prefer to say goodbye? High five?”

Jack opted to slap his palm against Sebastian’s then ran off to the bathroom. Both Hotch and Sebastian watched him go. When the door was safely closed, Hotch turned back to his interviewee.

“He’s crackin’,” Sebastian said, letting out an awkward laugh as he finished adjusting his hair.

He looked as pleasantly surprised as Hotch was when he offered a trial day with Jack. Trusting his gut, that’s what Hotch was doing. His gut was seldom wrong, and his gut told him that Jack getting along with Sebastian more in an hour than he had with his grandfather for years meant something was going right for them.

#aaron hotchner #aaron hotchner imagine #aaron hotchner x reader #aaron hotchner x oc #aaron hotchner fanfiction #criminal minds fanfic #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds x reader #criminal minds #series #my writing #r: male #goodnight aaron #wc: 1k+

50 notes · View notes

curewhimsy · 5 years ago

Text

Shiro-Sora masterpost

Here are plans for my Mega Project. It’s a visual novel concept.

But since I have no skill in making a VN, I’m just going to write a story. Like the anime that will be based off the VN. Like Clannad’s anime or something.

It’s going to be long since I have (ahem...) FOURTY-SIX (46) WHOLE CHARACTERS WITH ROUTES THAT I’M GOING TO INCORPORATE.

This is why I said I will never ever finish it, even if I devote my entire life to it.

But it won’t feel right without all these characters. I WANT to have all these characters. I’m a “go big or go home” person. I’m too ambitious and I know that.

Well, since it has 46 characters, I’m thinking of calling it “Shiro-Sora” meaning “White-Sky” since 46 can be pronounced as “shiro.”

In kanji: 「白空」

In hiragana: 「しろそら」 (This will be the “official” Japanese spelling btw)

Alternatively: 「46そら」

Anyway...

Here are the characters.

In the story adaption, Uta Utane (Defoko) will take the role as the player/main character, and learns everyone’s backstories. She will be the one with the (gigantic) “harem” around her. Think, Tomoya from Clannad. But IF there’s ever an actual game, I’ll plan on Uta being one of the date-able characters. She’ll be your childhood friend.

The characters are all college students here, attending a predominantly music-oriented community college called Sonare Community College. There is also an acting branch as well, but it’s less predominant. This is why there is an emphasis on music, instruments, composing, and singing.

The reason the characters are all between 18-24 is so they can mostly be in the same age range. Therefore I can ship quite a lot of pairs...

Here are descriptions I thought of already. For some of these Loids, this is my first time EVER writing or portraying them. Ever.

(Full names are listed in Western order. This is partly due to the story taking place in the USA, in a “Japantown” sort of place to explain the prominent Japanese population.)

——————————————————

Haku Yowane- Age: 22 A shy, gloomy girl who is looking to join in the school’s choir. However, she isn’t confident to work up the courage to audition. The choir has been moving down in popularity every year, with more and more students pursuing solo stardom. When she gets the news the choir may be disbanded, Haku feels she has to do something soon. Haku has only a small bit of experience in both singing and the piano, but she came to Sonare Community College because music is her dream. Haku seems to depend on Neru, her only friend, to comfort her when she gets down. Haku is the cousin of the popular Miku Hatsune, who is the most popular girl in the school and a very talented musician in many ways. Haku ends up a musician who sings and plays the piano. Neru Akita- Age: 22 A tomboy with a hot temper. But inside, she hides delicate feelings. She seems to always be with Haku, cheering her up when she gets down. The two seem to only have each other. Neru didn’t go to Sonare Community College to pursue music, however, she ends up joining the choir with Haku, despite her shabby voice. She also ends up falling in love with musical theatre! Miku Hatsune- Age: 20 A very popular girl and talented singer, dancer, and performer. A bubbly, cheerful sweetheart. Has lots of friends and is always smiling. Idealistic and doesn’t believe in impossible. Miku dreams big, but apparently she gets very depressed when her dreams are crushed. Luckily that never seems to happen… for now. Miku is an all-star musical performer. Luka Megurine- Age: 24 A polite and elegant woman. She can appear aloof and intimidating at first, but is actually just shy. She is half Japanese, a quarter French, and a quarter German. A talented vocalist who can also play quite a few instruments. Teto Kasane- Age: 20 A bubbly girl who can be childish. Is playful, weird, and a bit demanding. Very clumsy. More inclined in visual arts than music, but started a music hobby on a whim. Gumi- Age: 21 A girl who can be a bit shy, but once you get past that, Gumi is unique, free-spirited, and chill. She likes art and reading books. She keeps a sketchbook with her at all times. More inclined in visual arts than music, but likes musical theatre. Meiko Sakine- Age: 24 The confident, mature woman of the group. Energetic and loves to party. Still responsible. Like a mother or older sister. Has quite a temper, though she mostly uses it to defend others… Has a love of karaoke, and wishes to improve her singing. Lapis Aoki- Age: 20 Merli’s stepsister, who seems to be the opposite of her. Bubbly and playful, and quite childish. Quite friendly. However, she can be a bit selfish at times. Lapis is Japanese, though her adoptive sister Merli is Indian. Loves singing and theatre. Merli Aoki- Age: 24 Lapis’ stepsister, who seems to be the opposite of her. She can seem cold and distant, even a bit harsh at first. But inside, she is very thoughtful and willing to help those important to her. Merli is Indian, though she was adopted into Lapis’ Japanese family after the death of her parents. Is a singer with a dramatic vocal, and has a secret love of theatre. However, she is often chosen to be the villain due to her voice. She wishes her voice were less “intimidating” so she could be the heroine. Lily- Age: 23 The school’s toughest female delinquent. People often wonder why or how she’s still in school. She gets into a lot of fights. What people fail to notice is that she’s usually defending the weak, bu she sometimes just goes overboard. Lily has a punk-rock style and plays the electric guitar. IA- Age: 22 An idolized girl in the school for her good looks and singing skills, along with being a great songwriter and composer! However, she hides dark feelings? Yukari Yuzuki- Age: 21 Half sister to Akari Kizuna. Looks up to IA but also feels she will never be as good as her. Composes music as a hobby, and sings. She feels her singing is horrible. Uta Utane- Age: 21 A rather plain, bluntly-spoken person who doesn’t see much in life. Usually bored, silent, and rather deadpan. Once a bright girl with lots of dreams. Deep inside, she is passionate and caring, really… Can it be restored? She is non-binary, going mostly by she/her. Uta is rather bored with life, including music, and really only keeps playing the violin because she’s come so far and doesn’t want to quit. Miku Zatsune- Age: 21 Edgy and hates Miku (out of mostly jealousy.) She would rather be called Zatsune, because her first name happens to be Miku, like the person she despises so much… But could there be something deeper to her? Zatsune’s music style is heavy and gritty. She considers it “harsh reality,” unlike Miku’s “bubblegum fluff.” Rin Kagamine- Age: 18 Rin is a bit chaotic. She is bold, brash, athletic, and charming. She is also just plain nuts. She plays the saxophone. Len Kagamine- Age: 18 Len fries to be cool and hip, but he is just a big dork. He is quite the comedian however, sometimes unintentionally. He plays the drums and trumpet. Kaito Shion- Age: 22 Kaito is a silly boy. He loves ice cream, unicorns, rainbows, and anything fluffy. But he also has moments of seriousness where he says really deep, philosophical things. He is quite romantic. He plays the piano and sings. Akaito Shion- Age: 24 Akaito is a sarcastic and grumpy boy, but when it comes to romance, he gets quite passionate. He sometimes flirts around with girls, but when he finally finds a true love with a girl (or guy) who truly changes his life… well… it’s a bit different. Akaito is a choir singer and he also plays electric bass. Dell Honne- Age: 24 Dell is usually in a bad mood. He currently lives with a father who barely acknowledges him. He tends to keep it all inside, and he’s really just lonely and needs to find someone to vent to. He is Haku’s half-brother, but they didn’t grow up together. He enjoys computer programming and composing electronic music. Gakupo Kamui- Age: 24 Gakupo likes doing kendo and martial arts, and is generally athletic. He is a nice guy who also loves animals and history. He seems serious, but can be unexpectedly silly sometimes. He likes embracing his Japanese and Ainu heritage. He often plays the shamisen, and also drums. He likes rock music. Yuuma- Age: 23 Yuuma likes music and is quite popular. He may seem hard to approach, because sometimes he doesn’t know what to say. He is a little blunt at times, but has a good heart. He has a crush on Mizuki. He likes orchestral music and EDM. Piko Utatane- Age: 21 Piko is a genius who loves astronomy and excels in mathematics and physics. He is a shy and compassionate person, but whenever he opens his mouth, he sounds very strict. He is bad at socializing and making friends, which leaves him quite lonely. On top of that, he is sickly and absent from school often. Piko wishes to make a friend. His first friend in the school is Lapis Aoki, who pretends to be a fairy to grant his wish. After a while, Lapis declares that she wants to be Piko’s friend. Piko ended up at Sonare Community College despite excelling in other studies due to his missing many high school days. However, Piko likes EDM and is inspired to be a singer after spending days at his college. Mizuki- Age: 21 Mizuki is a singer who also plays the a Japanese harp (koto.) She is quite a charming person and seems to flirt with many people… even girls… but not Yuuma. Since Yuuma has a crush on Mizuki, this discourages him. Nigaito Shion- Age: 19 The youngest of the three Shion bothers. Nigaito’s nicknames are Nini and Nii. He is rather sickly, but remains to have a warm and pure heart. Nigaito plays the clarinet. Dex- Age: 22 Daina’s childhood friend. Best friends, even though they are of completely different genders, and with very different personalities. Some people wonder how it works. Dex is silly, fun, a bit of a party animal, but he is still very caring and compassionate. He just needs a bit of help devoting himself to his studies. But he is quite intelligent when he is focused. He is Black, Creole, and is learning French. Dex plays piano and sings. Daina- Age: 22 Dex’s childhood friend. Best friends, even though they are of completely different genders, and with very different personalities. Some people wonder how it works. Daina likes to study and learn, and doesn’t like atmospheres like parties so much. She prefers quiet, peaceful places. She may seem a bit distant on the outside, but she is just a little shy. She is White, with English and French heritage. Daina composes music on the computer and sings. Ruby- Age: 21 Ruby is rather confident, yet nice, and will always give people a helping hand. She is Black and Latina. Ruby likes EDM and sings and dances. Taya Soune- Age: 21 Taya is incredibly polite, bowing at many occasions and also offering to do favors a lot. He speaks very formally. Taya has anemia and sometimes needs blood transfusions. He is non-binary, but go mostly by he/him. Taya likes musical theatre. He also plays the cello. Longya Yuezheng- Age: 24 A quite serious man who is dutiful and studious. Protective over his younger sister, Ling, and monitors her safety constantly. This is due to Ling nearly getting into a tragic accident when they were younger, traumatizing Longya. He is Chinese. He plays piano and flute. Ling Yuezheng- Age: 20 Ling is a hardworking student, however she has a playful side and she feels lonely that she doesn’t have many friends and is devoting her life to studying. She sings and dances. Momo Momone- Age: 19 A peaceful, sleepy girl. Rather low-energy and tranquil. However, Momo has quite a temper when it comes to injustice. Momo is a singer and theatre performer. SeeU- Age: 20 A rather eccentric, bold and energetic girl with “the light of the stars in her eyes.” She is Korean. SeeU is a singer and dancer. Ruko Yokune- Age: 24 Ruko is one of the most mature characters, having a lot of wisdom about life and many experiences. However, they still have moments where they need a helping hand. Ruko is non-binary, mostly going by she/her or they/them. Ruko is a talented vocalist with incredible range. Ritsu Namine- Age: 22 Ritsu is rather brash, but means well. He is non-binary and mostly go by he/him. He is a talented singer with a powerful voice. Miki- Age: 18 Loves romance anime/manga and is obsessed with “cute couples.” A true fangirl. Acts cute and animated. Iroha’s best friend. She is a singer, who also wants to be a voice actress in anime. Aku Yamine- Age: 19 Hates her name, because it’s pronounced the same as the word for “evil” in Japanese. Prefers to be called Akurin. Aku is a very nice and naive, somewhat clumsy girl with big dreams. Is half Black and half Japanese. She is a piano player and a theatre performer. She struggles with singing. Bruno- Age: 22 Black Latino, lived in the Dominican Republic. Polite and soft-spoken, but a talented acoustic guitarist. Sometimes sings. Clara- Age: 23 From Colombia, and is Latina. A rather doting girl who somehow feels like both a mother and a little sister. A singer and dancer. Iroha Nekomura- Age: 18 Loves cute things and stuffed animals. Is kind of insecure and doesn’t find herself very cute, though her best friend Miki constantly reassures her. A singer and drummer. Yuu- Age: 20 A sweet, cheerful guy who is always filled with energy. Half English, half Japanese. He is in a boy-band with Wil and Kyo called ZOLA PROJECT. He sings and plays electric guitar. Wil- Age: 22 A sophisticated, fashionable guy who is quite outgoing. He is Black. He is in a boy-band with Yuu and Kyo called ZOLA PROJECT. He sings and plays electric bass. Kyo- Age: 21 A wild, energetic guy who is always raring to go. He is Japanese. He is in a boy-band with Yuu and Wil called ZOLA PROJECT. He sings and plays drums, and adds sounds to their songs via computer programs. Akari Kizuna- Age: 18 Yukari Yuzuki’s half-sister. Cheerful and sweet, and wants to make others smile… even though many heavy thoughts are hiding behind her own smile. A singer who is also an actress. Qingxian Mo- Age: 23 She seems very nice, but she’s actually a bit self-absorbed. Since her name is hard to pronounce for English-speakers, she insists on being called Qing (pronounced like Ching.) A model who also sings and plays clarinet. Anon- Age: 21 A somewhat reserved girl who likes to read and play video games. Very resilient and tough. Does martial arts. Has a very strong punch. Is often annoyed by her sister, Kanon. Sings, dances, and composes music. Kanon- Age: 21 A cheerful girl who likes to annoy her sister, Anon. But like her sister, she does sometimes get kind of scary. Does martial arts. Has a very strong kick. Sings, dances, and composes music.

——————————————————

Now, I made a list of couples... Who ends up with who by the end of the story? This is for the “novel adaption”, obviously.

Uta and whoever she ends up with might get a bit of an... “After Story” like CLANNAD After Story. And it might feature everyone else as a married couple too!

Spoilers below the cut.

——————————————————

Haku x Neru

Kaito x Dell

Miku x Gumi

IA x Yukari

Lapis x Piko

Teto x Luka

Meiko x Gakupo

Iroha x Miki

Ruko x Ritsu

Merli x Lily

Akaito x Yuuma

Bruno x Clara

Dex x Daina

Len x Nigaito

Rin x Akari

Ruby x SeeU

Anon x Mizuki

Zatsune x Aku

Wil x Longya

Yuu x Ling

Kyo x Qingxian

Kanon x Momo

Uta x Taya

Yes, the main couple by the end will be Uta and Taya. I think you MAY have seen it coming... considering I was all over Taya today. But also, as I was pairing up every Vocaloid, only a few remained, around six. Uta and Taya were two of the last ones, and I decided it worked. So yeah.

#vocaloid #life of pastell #my writing #wip #brainstorm #vn #fanfic #utau

3 notes · View notes

fauzhee10069 · 5 years ago

Text

Caato Higashikata, the case of a character getting overhyped

aka. Caato Higashikata, the most overhyped part 8 character or Caato and Jobin, the perfect mother & son duo.

Warning: This contains JoJolion (part 8) spoilers, if you are a fan of JJBA but haven’t caught up yet, I suggest to ignore this post (and/or save it from later). This was written when chapter 92 is the latest chapter in JoJolion. I’m not responsible for future errors and contradictions in this post caused by the retcon from the chapters onwards.

Yeah, currently she is one of the potential main villains nominated by the fans, besides Jobin and The Head Doctor.

However, lately Caato hasn't made any new appearance, but the hype from her fans is still raging. She is pretty cool character but sometimes her hype is getting annoying lately. It’s similar case with Suiryuu from One-Punch Man back during the Super Fight arc, when his fans were hyping him to be one of Saitama’s greatest threat, even as strong as Boros. Now, what is left is only the meme (“Suiryuu’s leg band is his limiter LOL”) and I don’t want Caato to be left as a meme.

This post is not about bashing Caato, it explains the problem in overhyping her. It contains about my thought about her, how I view her current role, the character study and how we should take her character at this moment.

Read carefully because if you’re speed-reading, you likely miss my points and accuse that I’m bashing her.

Contents:

What do you think about Caato?

Why don't you think that she will be the main villain?

What are the common reasons for Caato’s fans who want her to be the main villain and what are your thoughts?

What does Caato really need to be a proper main villain?

How about the other main villain candidates, Head Doctor and Jobin?

So how do you see Caato’s role currently?

How shall we consider Caato’s role right now?

<TL;DR is available at the end of the post>

What do you think about Caato?

Like what I said before, she is pretty cool character. Her first appearance is pretty iconic, when she was just released from prison and she coolly called her son. The way she threw away her wedding ring, symbolizes that she has left the past behind.

Then when she casually slipped into the Higashikata house, shocking her children and especially her ex-husband, owning Joshu for humiliating her. It’s pretty fun, reminds me of Joseph and Lisa Lisa’s interaction before he realized that she is his mother.

Then came the flashback, about her and Jobin. Her desire to save her son but on the other hand she also had the desire to live a long life. Resulted in her success in saving Jobin and staying alive by sacrificing the lives of stranger’s son, but at the expense of going to prison and becoming a criminal. Thus, sacrificing 15 years of her life, away from her family and freedom. And instead of lamenting, she casually returned to her normal life without considering her ex-husband’s objection while still supporting her son by providing information.

Her design is quite unique and attractive, though I don’t consider her being that hot and enchanting (not on Lisa Lisa and Lucy’s level). Her style and the way she dresses tends to be more eccentric (like any other Higashikatas).

Yeah, I ended up liking her character. She is normal as a character in JoJo standard but very fun as a mom character in every anime/manga. She is already a fine character, her portrayal is solid. She is already perfect as she is. Therefore, she does not have to be the main villain.

Why don't you think that she will be the main villain?

I have written my reasons before, why I won't like it if she becomes the Main Villain. To be honest, I don’t think her character concept and designation role are suitable for a main villain.

Introduction

First, her cool introduction. I like how Araki drew the angle and prespective in the day of Caato’s release scene. Her face that partially hidden then the angle trick that only reveal a little hint of how she looks. This surely gives us the vibe of major character, that she would be important in the future. Who is she and what is her role? Not only that, he also drew her fairly attractive in contrast to those ugly extras. The chapter also implied that there is something dangerous will be brought by this character.

Then does this mean that she is main villain? Nope. Araki’s introduction of how the main villain (and other major characters) appears is pretty unpredictable. Remember Lucy Steel? Her first appearance is “she was just there” besides Stephen Steel with no dialogue, her design (and face) also looked pretty generic (with that Steely Dan’s hairstyle). I didn’t expect her to be important, she was just a random girl happened to be Stephen’s eye candy (like Yuuya’s girlfriends). But then, fast forward later, she becomes the best girl in Steel Ball Run with prominent roles. Once she becomes important, Araki also draws her later as the hottest JoJo chick since Lisa Lisa.

Then, there is Sandman. We started the Steel Ball Run chapter with him. We saw his POV, he was greatly misunderstood by his fellow Indians from reading the white men’s books. If you are not familiar with JJBA and just happened to read this chapter as your first introduction to the series, you likely would misunderstand Sandman as the main protagonist. As we all know, the main protagonist must belong to the Joestar’s bloodline.

Then what about Caato and her cool intro? I can guarantee that she is important as a character. That’s all. I think between Caato and Lucy’s introductions, it’s only a matter of when Araki decides the role for his characters.

Conclusion: Caato might be a character with important role, full stop.

Character Background

What is Caato’s background? She is introduced as the mother of four Higashikata children, ex-wife of Higashikata Norisuke IV, the current patriarch of the family and the head of its family business (The Fruit Company). An ex-convict as her interesting background. Kinda weak character background for a main villain imo, but this does not automatically debunk her to be the main villain. Some JoJo main villains have very flashy backgrounds, we got non-human entity like The Pillar Men and that flashy vampire, mafia boss, the priest and U.S president. But we also got a mere salary man who wants a quiet life. Jobin himself is just an heir to his family (and business).

However, let’s compare their respective settings, especially in part 4. Kira Yoshikage is just a salary man with his hand fetish who wants a quiet life. Let’s focus on his salary man part first. While Kira only held such ordinary occupation as a main villain, the setting of part 4 in JoJo doesn't have anyone else in more glorious positions. Okay wrong, there are grandpa Joseph as a real estate tycoon and Jotaro as marine biologist. But what do their careers have to do with the plot and main goal in part 4? Nothing. Those career are not required to chase a serial murderer, it requires Stand users.

What about part 8? At least there are currently two people who hold more prominent occupations than the Higashikata mother and son duo. They are The Head Doctor and Holy Joestar-Kira. There was also Damo as the head of the smuggling cartel in the Locacaca Organization but he was already ruled out from the main villain candidate. Is there any correlation between their occupations and the main theme in part 8? Of course, because the main focus in this part is The Locacaca fruit. Both Head Doctor and Holy have conducted research on the fruit as scientists. Just like Caato and Jobin, all of them need (and are fighting over) that fruit. But Head Doctor and Holy were few steps closer in utilizing the fruit for greater purpose. Not only that, the Head Doctor is also the presumed mastermind of the Locacaca Organization and its members are extremely knowledgeable in the nature of the Locacaca.

Besides come from the rich family who can buy that worth hundreds of billions fruit, the lack of prominent position held by Caato and Jobin weakens their potential as the main villain, but that doesn't mean I eliminate them as candidates.

On the other hand, if I really want a female to be the main villain, surely I would prefer Holy over Caato. Sadly but fortunately (and just as I thought), chapter 92 seems to have debunked Holy as the potential villain.

Conclusion: Caato’s character background got challenged.

Objective and Motivation

What is Caato’s objectives likely? What I know so far are: she wanted to save her son’s life, freeing him from the Rock Disease. But it had been solved in the past. After she got released from prison, she wants the Higashikata’s fortune, to take back what she thinks her right. She holds revenge on her ex-husband due to him abandoned her. Her other possibly objective is helping Jobin to get the New Locacaca fruit to save her grandson, maybe… but so far she is still MIA.

Okay, let’s compare her objective with the other main villain’s candidates. What about The Head Doctor? What exactly is his goal? His goal is not very clear yet, but being the presumed mastermind of the Locacaca organization makes me feel that he has grand plan. We can guess that among of them is to gain the power of the New Locacaca's equivalent exchange along with the refinement of Locacaca fruit for medical applications. Also, his current objective is to secure the New Locacaca for its medicinal properties along with the benefit of at the very least the members of his organization and possibly the Rock Human race at large (implied by Urban Guerrilla).

With this, Caato’s motive becomes very personal and ordinarily plain but also more humane and relatable to us whereas the Head Doctor’s motive sounds more grandiose and idealistic. Though personally, I’m more interested in the Head Doctor’s objective because it sounds more interesting to be challenged by our protagonists. Besides that, I'm also not interested in the Higashikata family drama that Caato will bring likely. To get the family’s fortune and take over its business (by controlling her son ala queen mother?). Why would I bother to read a seinen battle manga with a conflict like this if I could just watch some TV dramas with similar plot? Not that I completely reject this plot, but for me this kind of conflict should not be the main focus (and goal) in this story.

Then, what about Jobin’s objective? He finally got the grafted branch and betrayed the Locacaca group. His priority right now is to save Tsurugi and cure him of the rock disease. He is also motivated to improve his family's business with innovation (with this, he often at odds with his father).

Caato might shares similar goal with Jobin, but for me her motivation to achieve one of her goals (in saving Tsurugi) sounds rather weak. I'm not saying that she doesn't care, of course she cares about her family. But I do not feel that her will to save her grandchild would be as strong as her will to save her son years ago. Because for me the family bond between mother and child is definitely stronger than grandmother and her grandchild.

Unless when she has lost all her children and her grandchild is the only offspring left for her (coughErinacough). Of course at this time Caato does not experience that, all of her children are still well and there. Moreover, we haven't seen her interaction with her grandchild yet, how could she develop a strong bond with him? But for Jobin, he was feeling a great urge to save Tsurugi, a feeling similar to what Caato has felt in “Mother & Child” flashback.

So, Caato’s motivation in fulfilling the objective to save her family is more likely for the sake of Jobin than for Tsurugi. Chances are, she will help Jobin due to her empathy. She might just do anything for her son Jobin, including saving her grandchild Tsurugi. But that is because it started from Jobin who really wanted to save his son. Because her motivation is not based on her own will, but from her son’s urge, this motivation is not suitable for a main villain but perfect for a supportive character (either for villain or protagonist).

But what about Pucci? Isn't his motivation and objective largely due to DIO’s influence? Yeah, that’s true. But in my opinion it is also because Pucci and DIO are already match-made-in-heaven (beginning with their friendship). I mean, they are perfect as friends. Before Pucci met DIO, he was already the person who would do anything he can to accomplish his goals, even kill and manipulate others, because he really believes it is for a greater good for everyone. After DIO influenced his belief, Pucci aspires to implement a plan long formulated by DIO to "achieve heaven" to obtain the true happiness. So, from the beginning they have the same goal and when Pucci can fulfill it (with DIO’s help posthumously), why not?

Even if you are not satisfied by this explanation, let’s say that Pucci and Caato's motivations are equally weak, the role of the main villain still favors Pucci more since DIO is posthumous character in part 6 (which is already dead and only appeared in flashbacks), unlike Caato and Jobin which are both still alive and exist in the storyline. Pucci’s objective also sounds grandiose and idealistic just like The Head Doctor. This is fit for the main villain. He achieved heaven by speeding up the time until the universe reset itself. Then the souls of the living would be transferred over to the 'new' universe. Everyone in the new universe gained a sort of clairvoyance, predicting the events just before they happen, something which Pucci believes is true happiness. Pucci’s desire is to make sure everyone knows about their destiny and have them accept it. Demanding alimony and divorce settlements or saving her family member is relatively small goal compared to attaining heaven.

If so, how about part 4 Kira? He doesn’t have any motivation besides wanting a quiet life with his girlfriend. Again, the theme in part 4 and part 8 is completely different. The main objective of part 4 is to pursue a serial murderer who cleverly manages to hide his identity and crime. That serial murderer is Kira Yoshikage, he is the main target in the story. Prior to become a target, he was casually committing his crime. Only when he realized that people began to hunt for him, he developed his new motivation to protect himself. Then, what is the main focus in part 8? It’s about breaking the curse and the Locacaca fruit. The target is not an individual, but rather an object. If so, how will we get the main villain? Either we get none or it will be someone in a high position and has a very big influence, someone that is closest to take the advantage of that fruit, the biggest mastermind or… character that we’re already very familiar with, Jobin. So, comparing part 4 and part 8 wouldn’t work (besides they took in the same setting).

Conclusion: Caato either needs motivation that will affect many characters or a high ground. It doesn't have to be grandiose, but her motivation must be independent from anyone especially Jobin.

What are the common reasons for Caato’s fans who want her to be the main villain and what are your thoughts?

”Her Stand had space-themed ability, just like D4C.”

Caato's Stand appears to take the form of a simple deck of playing cards. However, by placing an object between two cards of the deck, she can store that object in the deck itself as if nothing was there. She can store objects that are considerably larger than the deck, as seen when she brings forth a chair. Currently, its name is still unknown. “Placing an object between two cards” part kinda reminds of D4C in application. Many people also consider Caato's Stand to be space-themed like D4C. Considering that the main villains’ Stands were time-based on the original verse, many fans assume that the main villain’s Stand in the rebooted SBR verse will be space-themed. Thus, the hype of Caato's Stand and conspiracy theory of Kaato as part 8 main villain began.

Not only that, Caato also successfully surprised her family when she managed to sneak into his residence suddenly. How can it possible? Did she use her Stand? It's possible, but this is not always the case. Instead of Stand ability, it could just be a simple comedy scene. You can’t really judge the character’s power from a comical scene, do you think that Nami is physically stronger than Luffy just because she can punch him occasionally? Seriously. Judging a character’s power would be more accurate if that happens in a tense/menacing moment. This is just another fun dynamic of The Higashikata family, but this time also featured the mom/grandma. Come on, she just wanted to be reunited with her family.

If you still demand in-universe explanation, well... JJBA has a rule that Stand users with the same bloodline are be able to feel each other's presence. Since all members of the Higashikata family are Stand users, they should be able to sense each other's presence. But as Joseph from part 3 had said that they are unable to tell exactly whom and how many they sense.

SC chapter 138: DIO’s World - Part 5

if this rule still applies, it would make sense that those Higashikata did not even realize that someone (who is related by blood) had sneaked in their home and they were not aware that their numbers were increasing.

The D4C-alike theory sounds nice but let's look at the facts we have currently: has it been confirmed that Araki will use space as the new theme for his main villain’s Stand? Or will he try out new creative ways by not sticking to the theme? Time-based Stand started in part 3 and we could only see the pattern after at least two villains onwards have the same type of ability. But what about part 1 and part 2? The main villains did not use Stand at that time didn’t have time-based ability, are we going to ignore this possibility in the future?

What I see so far in Caato's Stand is that it works similar to Enigma but limited to her 52 deck of cards, of course it’s still early to judge that its ability is only limited to that, given that the first time we saw D4C, it wasn't very impressive either. But it’s also too soon in hyping that she will demonstrate OP ability. It’s hard to predict whether we will see further into her Stand again or not, but we need to if we really want her to be the main villain. However, problem is that we are getting closer to the climax and end-game. Is there still enough time to hype Caato? Speaking of further abilities, do you remember when Jobin said that there is hidden ability from Speed King that he had not demonstrated yet? Flash forward, we finally have seen more of Speed King ability in his fight with Ojiro.

In addition, there are also those who say that Caato uses cards as medium for her Stand, her French playing cards are used to symbolize the game and she likely holds the trump card, meaning that she would be the master of the game and likely would be the winner. What is the game? The main plot in part 8: the race of the Locacaca fruit. This also related to her name being named after “Card”. But wait, doesn’t Daiya’s Stand also use a game namely chess as a medium? Even compared to playing cards, chess game is closer to symbolizing strategy and mastermind. Moreover, California King Bed’s ability deals on memory, it's more fitting for mastermind.

Read further: Caato’s Stand and its mechanism so far

”Her eyes look split, she could be rock human, or fusion human like Josuke.”

Due to her strange eyes close up in her first introduction chapter coupled with her youthful look, a quite popular theory emerged that Caato’s having the split eyes like Josuke due to the strange dark shadow in the middle of her iris. Speculation that she is a rock human or fusion human of two individuals like Josuke had sprung up (and it still continues among her fans).

However when the official colored JoJolion chapters got released, the coloring team didn't color Caato’s eyes in two different colors. Why did they decide that?

I had tried to break down it and this is the result:

For further explanation, please click here.

”She looks young and the reproduction between human male and rock-human female is possible now, she could be rock human.”

What about her youthful look? Sure, she indeed looks young for a 52 years old gilf compared to Holy who’s also 52. But unlike Lisa Lisa who is indeed considered to be ageless in the story (being a hamon user, Joseph estimated her being around 20s and was shocked when he discovered that she was actually 50), Caato’s sudden appearance in front of her family only surprised them and made them wonder who she is? No comment about her supposedly youthful look, Hato even immediately mentioned her age correctly.

Not only that, her youthful look seemed to have been debunked once Holy made her new appearance in recent chapter and she is no less young looking than her. In the end, this is just a matter of Araki’s new art style. In short, Caato’s youthful looking ended up being irrelevant to the plot.

Read further: Caato Higashikata, is she Lisa Lisa 2.0?

Apart from those matters, chapter 81 also stated that rock humans are able to have sex with humans, but they’re always incompatible (相容れない) with them. It’s still not known whether it means “they can’t reproduce” or “conflict will be inevitable”. But chapter 46 actually said in the pages about Rock Humans that they can’t have children with humans. Unfortunatelly, I could not check whether there is a translation error or not because I can’t find the Japanese raw with the size large enough to be able to read the kanji.

However, recent chapter of JoJolion (99) updated the information regarding the rock-human that only rock-women and humans can have children, but it also showed us how rock-women give birth to their children. If Caato was a rock-human, then that would've meant everyone except Norisuke and Mitsuba were rock-humans, and Tsurugi wouldn't have existed.

Read further: Is Caato a Rock-Woman?

”She got that menacing Aura and she might has hidden agenda, what if she is the mastermind behind all this?”

Based on the theory above, it develops into conspiracy that she becomes the mastermind behind The Locacaca Organization, even she is allegedly the Head Doctor’s superior. I don’t know what basis could have produced this theory other than the assumption that she is a rock human. Could it be due to her menacing aura and being full of mystery? Or how Jobin is being respectful to her? Or maybe is it because her little charm as the officers in the prison like her, because main villain always needs charisma (but Kira and Diavolo). But, of course when you’re leading something, you need charisma (except Diavolo).

We all know that menacing aura, especially among JoJo females, is not limited to villains or people with very high positions. Remember Lisa Lisa’s cold glare to Joseph during his pillar training?

Or Yukako’s horror aura to Koichi in that window scene which is so iconic till it becomes a meme?

Even though menacing Caato looks the best thanks for Araki’s evolving art style, her simple cold glare and menacing aura do not guarantee her to be the main villain… just not enough yet. Yeah sure, her family were wary of her, but it's more because Hato heard the little info about her mother that she was in prison for a murder that she doesn’t recall the full story, Joshu was wary of this unknown woman and Norisuke IV was surprised to her sudden arrival as she did not notify him first. Nothing about her being ultra dangerous.

What about Jobin’s respect for her? Isn't it nice to have a main villain who is well respected… by one person? Why is being respected by Jobin making her potential main villain? Most likely because after all this time the fans predicted Jobin as the main villain, they saw at him as he is subject to her. I think the train of thought like this is still too hasty. For me what's wrong with a child respecting his mother? Of course Caato deserves his respect, she is a loving mother, wanting to save her son’s life from the rock disease. It might sound selfish since she didn't want to sacrifice her life but it’s also very humane. Perhaps she thought that Jobin shouldn’t lose his mother figure too young. Moreover, Jobin is not the only child she had. What about his younger siblings if they have to live without their mother. Although this very ironic, because despite being alive, she eventually left her children and made them grow up without mother figure. Jobin’s respect to his mother is exactly the same as Joseph’s respect to his grandma Erina.

Then, since Jobin shows his respect to Caato, there is also emerging rumor that Caato is controlling Jobin as the mastermind. Does this mean that all this time Jobin's actions have been under her control? How is that possible? Since Jobin might had been the only child who had ever visited her in prison, do you think she often instructed him to do something at that time? So far, have we really seen Caato give any instructions to him? I do not remember. What I can remember the most is when she called and warned Jobin that:

“There is something fishy between Norisuke IV and Josuke but actually I don't really know what. I was married with him for years so I know his habits. There must be something your father is hiding now, you must be careful!” (JJL ch 59 "Dolomite's Blue Lagoon - part 1")

What I really take in her character based on this scene is that she is very supportive mom, taking her time to help Jobin while she also has her own business with Norisuke IV, not controlling him. This reminds me of Yoshihiro’s role in part 4. She even caught their suspicious behavior from them based on her spending time with Norisuke IV as his wife. This kind of intuition commonly can be felt by any married women, no need to be the mastermind to be able to do it.

Is it possible that Caato is the true mastermind? How does she take care of her organization? If indeed she is secretly managing a secret organization, since when? If it's been a long time and she was very busy with it, why did she married a human who is fruit parlor owner, wasting her life for around 17 years and produced 4 children with him? For what purpose? How does she manage of her organization while hiding this fact from her family?

”Surely she was very busy managing the organization.”

If it's been since she was being incarcerated, how was it done? More importantly, does Jobin know? If Caato is indeed leading a secret organization, there's still a lot we need to see: what kind of organization is that? How does Caato run it? What is its main goal? Who are the members? When will they begin to act?

I also hate when they treat Caato as if she is omniscient. One thing that is certain is that she did not know about Mamezuku Rai, the plant appraiser employed by Norisuke IV a year after she was incarcerated (unless Jobin tells her later). Then:

This could have double meaning as well, either she really just learned that the house has been renovated or simply commented about the renovation (I still bet the former). Take a note that the renovation was done 2 years ago (she was still incarcerated atm). But if Caato already knew about renovation (and that shaddy business), how could she not figure out the details of Norisuke IV and Josuke’s secret plans?

As for Locacaca, we still don’t know whether Caato knows about it or not. However, Holy is already ahead of her as Holy even tried to do scientific analysis of it.

Lastly, I also don't think that Caato is really that powerful (as in influence/not Stand) as she was unable to get out of prison earlier (unless you argue that she did it on purpose). Even being a model prisoner didn’t grant her remission. In fact, I become suspicious, is there anyone who intentionally keep her in prison?

”Caato is the true mastermind who led/works with Damokan group as Jobin is just a gofer.”

There is also theory that Caato is the true mastermind from Higashikata family who works with Damokan group in money-laundering and smuggling the Locacaca, instead of Jobin. How so? I bet the theory was born because of this little panel:

They said the timeline with Jobin does not match, I don’t know it doesn’t match with what? I guess it’s about the time between “when Jobin first met Damokan group” and when “Kira discovered Rock Humans’ existence and their illegal fruit business”. Regarding the timeline, actually I've just compiled the timeline of JoJolion events. The thing is that Jobin met Damokan group around 2008 whereas Kira discovered the Rock Humans & it’s shady business in 2009. The key panels here:

JJL chapter 30: King Nothing

JJL chapter 72: The Northern Higashikata Estate, The Orchard

JJL chapter 49: Hato-chan Brought a Boyfriend Over – part 3

So, the time is still match if Jobin is the one who started cooperating with Damokan group. Even if Caato was the actual perpetrator, shouldn't she was still in prison at the time? Can you guarantee that she can act in the outside world while incarcerated? If we look at her backstory, we don't see her using her Stand at all, so we can assume that she didn't have Stand yet at the time (or that her Stand was useless).

They said that this could be a hint:

I think she just meant: “I was helping your business too, how dare you ignore my merits just because I went to prison?”

Her claim that she also helped the family business running smoothly for 15 years is a hint that relates to smuggling, perhaps because the 15 years she said happened to coincide with the length of time she was in prison. However, this word still have double meaning, it’s still possible that 15 years she meant is the time during her marriage with Norisuke IV prior to her incarceration and divorce. When she got arrested, Jobin was a teenager who was around 15 or older (hm… actually he was 17 at the time).

Even if her 15 years of contribution was done during her time in prison, how is that automatically related to the smuggling of Locacaca? I don’t think that Damokan group started operating as long as 15 years ago, at least there is no hint yet that the Rock Humans (and Locacaca) had been invading Morioh 15 years ago.

Read further:

JoJolion Cardspiracy: Caato and Damokan group

What actually happened in Mamezuku Rai’s past? (chapter 99 spoilers)

”She already got her flashback.”

First, what is the purpose of flashback? Flashback is a literary device in a story that provides some background information on events, situations or a character's past history; flashback’s often used to reveal some important truth about a character's past. Have we ever seen Kaato on a flashback? Yes, on JoJolion chapter 64 “Mother & Child”. What did we get from that chapter? The reason why Caato went to prison. She wanted to cure Jobin of his Rock Disease through Equivalent Exchange without sacrificing her life. When a random boy (who bullied Jobin) was dying (due to Speed King’s attack), that's when the opportunity arrived. Jobin successfully cured and Caato was still alive. Alas a few years later the boy's body was found and Caato became the only suspect (and went to prison).

The question is: who is this flashback about? Certainly Jobin and Caato. But who does this flashback actually belong to? If we look at whose point of view was being used in this flashback, this actually used Jobin’s point of view. How so? Surely this flashback have been told by Tsurugi’s POV. But let's think of it, where did he hear this story from? Certainly from his father who is none other than Jobin. It makes no sense if Tsurugi got this story directly from Caato, Tsurugi is currently 10 years old whereas Caato was incarcerated 15 years ago.

That sounds possible, but are you sure? Unless Tsurugi ever visited her grandma in prison so that Caato got a chance to tell him this story in her version. But I can tell that chapter “Mother & Child” uses Jobin’s perspective. At the beginning of the flashback we saw Jobin and Caato in one location. They were still in the same place until Jobin finally joined the scout group. After that we see how Jobin was bullied by the Boy-scout Bully.

Until finally the bully got attacked by Speed King and Jobin rushed to his house and went to see Caato in a panic. Jobin who was deeply scared and did not know what to do really needed his mother’s help. That's when we see Caato took an action and made her decision to do equivalent exchange for Jobin. Jobin had constantly been seen in this flashback whereas there was moment where we didn't see Caato. We have never seen what she was doing when Jobin was away.

The flashback tells us nothing about Caato or Jobin’s motivations, but it serves well in showing the growth of a certain character. Who is it? Of course it’s Jobin. What we got from Caato is that she wanted to save her son but also wanted to stay alive, she succeeded but had to pay for her action by going to prison, full stop. What we got from Jobin is that this incident and what his mother had done have evoked his ambition, he aspires to do innovation for his family business, expanding the trade, getting rid of his competitors and elevating his family’s social standing, to be on top. Despite her absent for 15 years, Caato is the parent who had the biggest influence on Jobin, becoming what he is today.

If to be a main villain requires flashback, sadly this is not her flashback, this one belong to Jobin. Most people focus on the theme of Stand ability as the main villain pattern. If we really rely on pattern to determine the main villain, we shouldn’t forget the flashback that shows the growth of main villain, aka childhood flashback.

Then, whose childhood flashback did we get in part 8? Of course it’s Jobin, again.

Read further: Caato Higashikata, 34 chapters (8 volumes) MIA and still overhyped

What does Caato really need to be a proper main villain?

Her own motivation which does not depend on anyone and will affect all players on the game

In her case, a motivation that is not shared with Jobin and the motivation/objective that will interconnect with other characters, affecting their actions and in this part 8, it shall be related to the Locacaca.

The Higashikata alimony dispute can’t be the main villain’s objective because that objective will only have an internal impact on the Higashikata family, not on the Head Doctor, Holy’s side and Locacaca Organization. The desire to cure her grandchild Tsurugi which requires Locacaca is also not good enough to be her main villain’s motivation because it more belongs to Jobin. Caato requires motivation that comes from her individually and that is not the kind of motivation "to help muh family."

However, those two motivations/objectives do not devalue Caato as a character, the alimony dispute makes her stand out as a character that has her own motivation and doesn’t depend on other characters. Helping Jobin will make her a very supportive character that's a solid role.

Flashback that really tells about her, preferably her childhood (or at least her origin that is outside the Higashikata)

We still need to know more about her a lot, where was she born from and where was her social standing prior to her married life with the Higashikata? How was her childhood life? Her origin? Why did she marry Norisuke IV? And most importantly what past events caused her to be the individual we know today?

How her current position can work to achieve her goals

Will being an ex-convict and Higashikata widow really help her achieve her goals? If not, is there any other status/position that she is currently hiding?

Further ability of her Stand

We need to know the name of her Stand and what else it can do? Of course she also needs ability that must be very difficult to be challenged to by most Stand users.

How about the other main villain candidates, Head Doctor and Jobin?

Head Doctor Akefu (Tooru?)

The head doctor (which his real identity might be Tooru) already seemingly has a grand objective that sounds grandiose and idealistic. A rock human being, allegedly he was the leader of the Locacaca Organization and the mastermind. Even if it’s false, as The Head Doctor working in T.G. University Hospital, it was clear that he’s holding a high position. His Stand, 「Wonder of U」 is already considered dangerous, seeing how our protagonists are struggling with it.

However, his real identity and his origin as an individual is still unknown, his personal motive is also still in the dark. How about his personality? What things he likes? What is his hobby? His relationship with other characters? Daily habits outside his role as villain?

Even so, slowly but surely, his identity is being revealed. Chapter after chapter increasingly assures us that Tooru will be the actual “Head Doctor” that is undercover. Chapter 99 confirmed that he is a rock-human and also the perpetrator who ruined Rai's family & his life in the past. It's clear that Tooru also wants New Locacaca. It’s also implied that being a rock-human, he is older than he looks, which means that there is still a possibility that we will see his connection with the pasts that have not been revealed yet. We need to see more about him and I’m sure we will, because Araki is putting his focus on Tooru’s character arc right now.

Jobin Higashikata

We already know who he is and are pretty familiar with him, we know what thing he likes, his relationship with his family, and his background is pretty clear. We have seen his flashback, we also have seen plenty enough about Speed King. The motivation is not grandiose and idealistic but very humane, he only cares to his family and it’s always about his family. He has a pretty good standing but his position making his relation with the Locacaca less direct compared to Head Doctor. Although he is my best main villain candidate, he is still a wild card in reality. He is closer to be a villain but there is also possibility that he would be reluctant ally for Josuke.

So how do you see Caato’s role currently?

Despite her relatively small appearance, Araki really wrote her character pretty well. We can see a little of her personality, her little background and her relationship with her family. I’ve seen her own motivation as stand-alone individual. Her character is humane and relatable, wanting to save her son while wanting to stay alive as well. Her character is established based on the mother’s role. Like all mothers, she was willing to sacrifice her life for her son. However, her action makes an interesting contrast to Norisuke IV and his mother, both of them chose to sacrifice their own lives. By sacrificing other people's lives, she might be seen as a selfish person. But perhaps because she had more than one child, she needed to stay alive so that they won’t lose their mother figure too young. Eventually she had to pay for her action by going to prison as another form of her sacrifice. Ironically, her selfish way in saving Jobin made her lose 15 years of mother role for her children. Nevertheless, she readily accepted that consequence.

Caato is the parent who earned Jobin’s respect more than Norisuke IV. Her sacrifice (which Norisuke IV did not do) had a huge influence on Jobin and his growth, her action had shaped him, making him the man we know today. Even at this present time, as a mother, she remains supportive for Jobin by trying to warn him and provide him information as best as she could. Jobin often mentions her positively.

Caato’s portrayal might be largely based on the mother’s role, but her characterization doesn’t always revolve around her being a mother. This is shown by her personal intention who wants half of the Higashikata fortune as the payback for her sacrifice. She wants to take back what's rightfully hers.

Only appeared in a few chapters, Araki successfully wrote Caato as a solid character. As a character with "the mom" role, she is already in relatively high tier compared to the other JoJo moms. Regarding her role against the protagonists, she is still the wild card. We do not know yet whether she will fight them or help them later, what's clear is that she's on Jobin’s side. However, I agree with JoJo wikia which compares her role to Yoshihiro (part 4 Kira’s dad).

How shall we consider Caato’s role right now?

I think we should just wait and see, surely she is an interesting character. There is nothing wrong in wanting a female gets a major role, especially as the main villain. Because so far we have never gotten a female as the main villain in JJBA and this is the era where a lot of entertainment media become "woke" and sided with feminism. However in Caato’s character, her potential to be main villain is still weak and not visible yet, although I feel there is already the potential of her to be a villain. My suggestion is we should treat her as a wild card character for the moment.

So for those of you who want Caato to be the main villain, please shut up, just wait and see! Stop overhyping her in every JoJo thread that she will be the main villain, at least don't treat her like she already is, especially when JoJolion's focus is on the Head Doctor right now. Sure, I still want to see more of Caato again as I believe that her role is not finished yet.

To be honest, I also want a JoJo main villain to be female, but with how Caato was created and established, I don’t think that she is set to be the main villain. Sure, it's still too early to say, if indeed Araki would make her the main villain, hopefully he could play it correctly. I also want to see a female main villain in JJBA, but I won’t be disappointed if the main villain we get in this part 8 is another man. Because honestly, I don’t want JJBA becomes woke just for the sake being woke by putting political correctness and feminist agenda over the quality of storyline.

Caato are you ok?

So, Caato are you ok?

Are you ok Caato?

They don’t want you

They don’t think you

Will be main villain

”I’m okay, so what?”

TL;DR: Caato is already a well written character, she doesn’t have to be the main villain to make her standing out and be a prominent character, not being the main villain doesn't make her lack of anything. It’s fine if you hype her as the main villain but we still need to see her further. So please don't tell us that she will definitely become the one as if it becomes a fact. There is still long way to go and we need to see more of her.

See also:

The legit hype Caatofags once had

JoJolion: The Main Villain and The Red Herrings

JoJolion timeline LOG

#kaato higashikata #jojolion theory #jjba main villain #character study #my thoughts #jojolion #jobin higashikata #satoru akefu #tooru jojo #jjba meta #meta post #character analysis #main villain theory #jojo's bizarre adventure #jjba part 8 #jojo spoilers #caato #stfu caatofags

14 notes · View notes

arty-e · 6 years ago

Photo

Heya! I’m back with more world lore and Ocs! This is just a post on Hearts and i guess my thought process on the whole thing. All this will be under the cut if you guys are interested at all! :)

A brief sort of explanation and thought process about my world (Cards). I was getting kind of bored and somewhat fed up with fantasy worlds that focus on western medieval times (don’t get me wrong i’m weak for the aesthetic) so when i started developing my world i wanted to combine cultures with one another. also i love the 1700s-1800s aesthetic the most. Another important thing i need to add is that this world though appears old to us is actually around 11,000 years, with the Fae having been a heavy influence on how the world changed really slowly, so slowly guns don’t exist. Since Cards it is so old it has been fully integrated and it’s perfectly normal. Racism is not a thing but xenophobia is, i just need to clear that up right now. Now that’s out of the way i can focus on talking about Hearts! :)

Hearts: I’ve based Hearts on Indian (Primary) and American (Secondary) cultures. Admittedly sounds like a strange combination but i felt they like fit with Hearts sort of theme of emotions (I’ve always felt that America as a nation was sort led by emotions and India’s culture and fashion always spoke to me emotionally (vibrant and colourful)). With these two nations combined i must add i combined three cultures, India, America and Native American cultures. Originally i had just based it on ‘white’ America but the more i thought about it i realised the importance of representing Native American culture in this. Hearts fashion is mostly based off of India but i have taken some creative liberties as this is still a fantasy world of my creation. Hearts is a much more practical nation and values practicality and comfort over style and fashion. Jewellery is not often worn (only on special and grand occasions) and clothes are loose and easily movable in.

Royals:

As Hearts is an egalitarian society, men and women are equal to one another and succession only matters if you were born first. The second picture you will see there is a royal portrait of the Royal family (the third shows them next to the Cards they represent). I’ll explain them left to right.

First up is Prince Mercury Cor, the Ace of Hearts. He’s the main character in my story hence the reason for me making a timeline of him growing up. His mark is on his right cheek. I’m not going to talk about him much here as i will talk about him in his own post.

To the right of Mercury is his father, the Queen of Hearts, King-Consort Alvis Wilson-Cor. He was born a Heart (via his mark on his neck) however he was born in Spades. His mother (Camilla Ennis) was a Spade Common while his father was a Heart Noble/Number (Four). He married Mahira three years after their eldest son, Adrian, was born. He is a very sickly man (from being poisoned) and has a damaged lung from the Deck Wars hence why he is confined to his wheelchair, he can walk but he can’t do it without his cane and he can’t do it for long before requiring his chair again. Out of the rest of his family he is much more level headed and is well respected in Hearts Court. Alvis’ main goal is prevent a war like the one he had fought in ever breaking out ever again and takes a stronger interest in foreign policy than domestic ones.

Standing just behind Alvis is the King of Hearts, Queen Mahira Cor. Known as the Warrior of Hearts she became the King of Hearts after her father was killed during the Deck Wars, she has a fierce and serious personality that scares most people who aren’t very close to her. She hates dressing up and prefers much more practical clothes. Mahira’s moral code is simply the law and believes everything is black and white and nothing is ever grey. Luckily for the rest of Hearts her husband takes a much more pragmatic approach when making decisions which she listens to. She has a small hatred for Nobles because of how they had conspired against her husband and tried to kill him with poison as they had considered he was unfit, now she only ever listens to him and the Nobles must go through him before they can even convince Mahira on certain matters.

Prince Adrian Cor is the Jack of Hearts and heir to his mother’s title. He is a lot like his mother as he is quite keen on a fight or two and prefers to take action than sit around and talk about the problem. This has lead him into getting into a few fights growing up but nothing too serious. He is obsessed with his family and loves them endless, especially his little brother. In the picture he is 17 years old (he gets a growth spurt suddenly and he gets taller than his mother (by 1inch but that’s a lot considering she’s 6ft tall)). Anyway he’s a good boy who is a bit of an idiot at the same time.

Nobles/Numbers:

The Nobility in Hearts is deeply unpopular with their King and Queen especially after they had attempted to kill Alvis before he could marry Mahira (purely for xenophobic reasons (he’s half-spades)). Despite this the nobility have come to respect him. One of the only Nobles that aren’t hated by the Royals is the House of Six. Moriel Harjo had not been involved in conspiracy and had been the one to reveal it to the couple. As in all the Kingdoms the Houses of Six always become the Royals tutors. Moriel has been teaching Adrian since he was six years old (he has been a handful for the poor man) while he has been tutoring Mercury since he was four years (insisted on joining his brothers lessons). He cares deeply about the two boys as if they were his own sons. (He is important to Mercury’s past) Moriel has two children of his own, his youngest being Latifa. As she born with magic (something very rare and respected within Cards (only 1% of each kingdoms population has magic)) she was sent to a monastery of Masou to be taught to control her magic and Masou’s teachings. When she turned 20 (she’s two years older than Mercury) she was free to leave and she was first introduced to court. She became good friends with Mercury and Adrian. (She and Adrian become romantically interested in one another later).

The last picture is of a glass stained window of Masou that would be seen in a monastery. Each segment of the picture is supposed to represent Hearts and what Masou is Fae of. (on the top right is the Hearts Palace)

Anyway that’s all i’ve got for Hearts at the moment! I hope you enjoyed this! It was a rather large post i hop you guys don’t mind, i just really like talking about my worlds and ocs!

I hope you enjoyed! See you all later! :)

74 notes · View notes

trashkweeen-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Class with the Countess - LuAnn de Lesseps

Oh, sweet LuAnn. Where do I start?

I have a love for the Countess that I truly cannot explain. I’m struggling to think of an instance where I was ever on her side. Literally every cool thing she does is almost immediately undone by an equal or greater uncool thing.

Fucking a Jack Sparrow look alike on vacation was pretty cool. Trying to cover it up with the worst French i have ever heard come out of a French Canadian Mi’kmaw with parents from New Brunswick and Quebec was pretty uncool. I can’t really decide whether forcibly inviting herself on Bethenny’s Mexico trip that never happened, while wearing a white Armani suit, then leaving Bethenny with the bill was cool or not. I mean, it was objectively uncool, but I’m kinda here for anyone who pulls a power move on Bethenny.

She called Carole a pedophile, then couldn’t spell it to apologize over text. Like, she just can’t help herself. She’s just self-aware enough to realize the moments in which we root for her, but not quite self-aware enough to carry them through. Like the fact that she literally sends this gif to people over text when they call her out on being the worst.

You give her one inch of approval and she will use it to the worst ends. She’s at her best when she’s raw and vulnerable and decidedly un-countess, but then she’ll invariably use those cool points to do something very countess. She’s like a snake eating her own tail, and I honestly can’t figure out why I love her so much for it.

The best I can determine is that she’s like the Tony Soprano of the Real Housewives franchise. Not for obvious reasons - because our Lady Guidice wins there - but because she is such a compelling anti-hero that you kind of hate to love.

Like Tony, she’s trapped in this inescapable delusion that romanticizes a golden age she caught glimpses of during her rise. She can’t keep from referencing royalty and high society she met and idolized in her youth, skiing in Gstaad, and dining with kings. Instead of seeing the absurdity and temporariness of it all, she bought right in. She saw her trash ass husband cycle through a handful of wives before her, but thought she was bulletproof. And now she coasts on the fantasy.

And there’s hardly a moment that your sympathies don’t lie with whoever LuAnn is mistreating at any given time. You’re watching a character who can’t help but fuck up and hurt people, but who manages to mitigate our condemnation with rare moments of vulnerable confessionals.

She’s a tragic anti-hero; you can watch her get arrested while threatening to kill cops, but when she shows up in an open robe and makes you laugh, you’re like well, maybe that cop deserved it.

So, i love LuAnn, and Class with the Countess was the book I was looking forward to reviewing the most. It was published right as the second season of #RHONY was airing, so we’re in a pre-Countless era here. We’re at peak Countess, getting advice from a woman who thinks she’s locked it all down, and who has yet to bang a pirate.

I have no intention of going after low-hanging fruit here, by the way. I’m not going to count the ways that LuAnn doesn’t practice what she preaches. That’s tedious. So here’s what I learned from my “crash course in manners from New York’s favourite countess”.

The first section of the book, The Art of Being Yourself, is all about confidence, adventure, and casually moving to Milan to appear on Italian TV as a Sharon Stone impersonator? I don’t know. The first thing I truly loved about this section was LuAnn’s stated purpose for appearing on #RHONY - to expose her children to how technicians make television happen. I’m sorry, no. No, you didn’t. You absolutely did not agree to #RHONY so your kids could learn lighting and sound production. If Bravo has any footage of Victoria and Noel taking notes behind the scenes, please, I would love to see this.

As long as I’m calling bullshit (and this is, like, the last time I will), I gotta address how LuAnn insists on referring to herself as American Indian. Carole has already schooled her on the preferred nomenclature (LuAnn’s iconic response below), so I’m not touching that.

No, my beef is that the bitch is Canadian. Her father was from NEW BRUNSWICK. Sorry, countess, but I’m now claiming you. ONE OF US. ONE OF US. ONE OF US.

Anyway, here are the highlights of the Canadian Countess’ advice for being your best self:

get a hobby (Jill Zarin!), preferably tennis or cabaret singing

don’t ever brush your hair in public. who was doing this? No, you know what, probably Ramona.

when wearing Jimmy Choos, take “normal-length strides”. this is very key and very helpful. do not walk in lunges. you will never be elegant if your strides are not of normal length

have healthy gums????????

literally chew your food. I’m 100% serious, this book for real says that while in a “monastic Austrian spa”, LuAnn learned that chewing your food “thoroughly” makes it taste better. She spent the money on monastic chewing lessons so you don’t have to. stop swallowing your food whole, there’s a better way!

dramatize your look with an “eye-catching belt buckle”. i hate this so much.

The majority of this section reads like a Cosmo article that spans 82 pages, and contains about 3 pages of useful information. I’m down to hear your favourite makeup products and your go-to weekend bag staples. Why I also had to read 79 pages of LuAnn teaching me how to walk and eat like a person, as if i’m some sort of cursed beast recluse is beyond me. It is my sincere wish that we send this book to space as a reference guide for visiting aliens.

The second section - The Art of Making People Comfortable - is my favourite. It somehow covers the gamut of social scenarios from like, eating at your friend’s house, to how you should address a king when in casual conversation for the second time. I now know not to wear gloves in the presence of a king, and that you can call a queen ma’am, which, like, does not sound right.

Royal greetings aside though, this section is actually pretty legit.

Which countries air kiss, and how many kisses to give?

What are you sniffing for when the sommelier brings you a bottle of wine to taste? (cork)

How much should you tip a restroom attendant? ($1)

Which fork is the salad fork?(the leftmost one)

Where do you put your napkin when you get up from the table, but you’re coming back? (the chair)

There are checklists for dinner parties, cocktail parties, and overnight guest hosting. There are go-to dinner party menus. There are gift ideas for hostesses. There are even template diplomatic answers to awkward questions, opening lines for cocktail small talk, and conversation-enders.

This section is actually super useful and I loved it. I’m not even touching the chapter on children. I’m saving all my capacity to judge parenting advice for Alex McCord’s book.

The last section, though. Ugh. The Art of Seduction.

I guess, first of all, I wanna say that LuAnn was a way hotter model than I expected. Whenever she talks about her modelling days, I always picture something like the cover of this book - a Wal-Mart portrait studio, waist-up shot of LuAnn in a statement necklace and a sensible blouse, selling me like, grapefruit spoons, or something. But this section opens with this photo:

and she was actually such a babe! good for you, Countess!

Anyway, this section made me barf into my hands. Here are some of LuAnn’s tips for catching your man:

have the kind of sex appeal that makes strangers on vespas pinch your ass as they drive by. This is not at all a chilling example of sexual harassment, but rather aspirational, and a sign that you’re doing something right. thank you, vespa man for validating my femininity!

find a good man by playing damsel in distress at tech shops. Listen, my boyfriend is a walking tech shop, and i can tell you for 100% certain that (a) he would not recognize a damsel in distress if his life depended on it, (b) his peripheral awareness while comparing gaming keyboards is slim to none, and (c ) he wants to explain RAM to me like my ex wanted to explain football scoring to me, which is zero amount. Do not do this.

you can also find a good man in upscale men’s stores by discussing ties with them. Please do not walk alone aimlessly in clothing stores, telling men about ties. They will literally just assume you work there. I cannot fathom a scenario in which this is not weird.

Maintain the romance in your relationship by surprising your husband on his business trip by showing up dressed as a Moroccan princess in disguise????? Maybe when the Count cheated with that Ethiopian princess, he just thought it was LuAnn again?????

Keep your grooming a mystery from your husband. Apply your skin care and makeup in private, and don’t let him see you pluck your eyebrows. How large of a house do you need in order to maintain this level of mystique? What if your husband finds your secret room filled with tweezers and lotion???

Don’t try to be emotional with your man, that’s what girlfriends are for!! Men aren’t as emotional as women, so don’t burden them with your hysterics. Do like they did in olden times, and get your hysteria cured by a doctor who gives orgasms. (also, like, that’s bananas, but I do very much wish that basic health insurance still covered getting beat off by a professional for emotional release)

make friends with doormen, including those at buildings you don’t live in, because you never know when they’ll lend you a helping hand. If this isn’t the most ho tip I’ve ever heard. I love it.

Overall, this book is much like the Countess herself: there are moments of sweet, new money Molly Brown gently helping you use the right fork to keep from embarrassing yourself in front of Billy Zane.

But there are also several moments of your status-hungry mother smothering your kidneys with a girdle, and telling you to speak softly, polish your jewels and get to fucking Billy Zane.

Quick Stats:

Pages: 258

Did it need to be that many pages: good sweet god, no

Did it change my mind about the housewife? It was better than I expected, but there’s no way to change my mind about LuAnn anyway. I’m a Countess apologist for life.

Real-ass book rating: 📖📖/5

Junk food book rating: 💎💎💎/5

#rhony #real housewives #real housewives of new york #luann de lesseps

21 notes · View notes

brigdh · 7 years ago

Text

What did you just finish? Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. A shallow, wealth-porn, frothy bauble of a book, but one which is lots of fun. Rachel Chu and Nicholas Young are both new professors at New York University (Nicholas in history, Rachel in economics, which I have to say seems like a weird choice for a character who spends the whole book being shocked by wealth) and have been dating for about two years, when Nicholas invites Rachel to come to Singapore with him for the summer, so he can participate in his best friend's wedding and she can meet his family. Rachel does so, only to discover that Nicholas is not generically middle-class as she'd always assumed, but rich. And not, like, normal rich, you guys: crazy rich. The rest of the book consists of Rachel gawking at the possessions of Nicholas's family and friends: private jets, personal islands, hotel chains, uncounted maids and drivers and servants, clothes from every top-name designer you can image, antiques and art and mansions and skyscrapers and on and on. Not all is absurdly wealthy bliss, however: various unmarried women try to drive Rachel away so that they can claim Nicholas for themselves, and Nicholas's mother is determined to keep her out of the family. She's shocked enough that Nicholas would marry beneath himself when she assumes Rachel is one of the Taiwanese plastics Chus (such trashy new money!); you can imagine how she feels when she realizes Rachel is actually the daughter of a single-mother real estate agent from Palo Alto, California. Meanwhile, the wedding brings to town every cousin, aunt, uncle, old childhood friend, ex-partner, and business connection from around the world back to town (seriously, this book has an oppressively long character list), and Nicholas's cousin Astrid, who also fell in love outside of the Singaporean elite, is dealing with the breakdown of her own marriage. The whole thing is a bit of a forgettable guilty pleasure, the sort where most of the fun comes from watching people who have such a vastly different lifestyle than me or anyone I know, like Gossip Girl or that Downtown Abbey scene where Maggie Smith asks "What is a week-end?" – except for the fact that pretty much every speaking character is Asian. Still, even if it's silly, it's a fun, fast-moving read. I will confess that my favorite part ended up being the footnotes, where Kwan translates the occasional word or phrase in Mandarin, Malaysian, Hokkien, or other languages and explains references to Singaporean places and people. A few of the ones that made me laugh: Malay slang used to express shock or exasperation like “oh dear” or “oh my God.” Alamak and lah are the two most commonly used slang words in Singapore. (Lah is a suffix that can be used at the end of any phrase for emphasis, but there’s no good explanation for why people use it, lah.) Among Singapore’s upper crust, only two boys’ schools matter: Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) and Raffles Institution (RI). Both are consistently ranked among the top schools in the world and have enjoyed a long, heated rivalry. RI, established in 1823, is known to attract the brainy crowd, while ACS, established in 1886, is popular with the more fashionable set and somewhat perceived to be a breeding ground for snobs. Much of this has to do with the 1980 article in the Sunday Nation entitled “The Little Horrors of ACS,” which exposed the rampant snobbery among its pampered students. This led to a shamed principal announcing to stunned students (including this author) the very next morning during assembly that, henceforth, students were no longer allowed to be dropped off at the front entrance by their chauffeurs. (They had to walk up the short driveway all by themselves, unless it was raining.) Expensive watches, eyeglasses, fountain pens, briefcases, satchels, pencil boxes, stationery, combs, electronic gadgets, comic books, and any other luxury items would also be banned from school property. (But within a few months, Lincoln Lee started wearing his Fila socks again and no one seemed to notice.) The exotic Black and White houses of Singapore are a singular architectural style found nowhere else in the world. Combining Anglo-Indian features with the English Arts and Crafts movement, these white-painted bungalows with black trim detailing were ingeniously designed for tropical climes. Originally built to house well-to-do colonial families, they are now extremely coveted and available only to the crazy rich ($40 million for starters, and you might have to wait several decades for a whole family to die). Overall I'd really only recommend the book to someone in need of a mindless beach read. In particular the ending is left unresolved; I know there's a sequel, but even for a book in the midst of a series I'd expect more loose ends to be tied up than what we got here. That said, I haven't seen the movie yet, and I suspect it's the sort of story where good actors can make all the difference, simply by fleshing out these somewhat-cardboard characters. Driving to Geronimo’s Grave by Joe Lansdale. A collection of six short stories by an author mostly known for capturing the spirit of rural east Texas, both in historical and modern fiction. In the title story, a brother and sister run afoul of a bank robber in Oklahoma during the Great Depression. This one had an excellent first-person narrator and a great sense of humor. In the Mad Mountains is a surprisingly straightforward Lovecraft pastiche, with hints of the Titanic's sinking and Amelia Earhart's disappearance mixing with the cosmic horrors. There's no twists or revisionism here; you could almost mistake this one for actual Lovecraft, except that Lansdale is much better at writing well-rounded characters. Though that's a low bar. Robo Rapid is an old-fashioned, surprisingly cozy YA post-apocalyptic story – more Edgar Rice Burroughs than Hunger Games – with a girl heading out on an adventure across a vast and unknown desert. The Projectionist is darker than the other stories; a noir tale of mobsters and unrequited obsession. Everything Sparkles in Hell is probably my favorite of the six. It reminded me a bit of Django Unchained, having a similar sort of violent humor tucked into a revisionist Western. A black bounty hunter and his Native American buddy track down four murderers, at least until a man-killing grizzly bear and a massive snowstorm complicate matters. Wrestling Jesus is the only story of these that I'd before; it was published in the Dangerous Women anthology and I have to say that I really disliked it there. A bullied teen is semi-adopted by an elderly ex-wrestler, who teaches him how to fight in between preparing for his own big match – he and another man have a rivalry going back decades where they compete for the attentions of a beautiful woman. Read as a story explicitly about a 'dangerous woman' it's a disaster, since a) the woman only appears in one scene, where b) she's literally a prize to be fought over by men. Read by itself, it's a fine story about a father-son relationship. Or it would be, if Lansdale hadn't included a long afterword complaining about the bad reviews he got for the anthology. Don't write a story that so blatantly misses the point and then get upset when people say you missed the point, dude! I hate it when authors I like act like dingbats in their nonfictional writings. But with all that said, this is a very nice collection of stories, with a surprising diversity of tones and settings. I've long been a fan of Lansdale's Hap & Leonard series, but this book would make a good introduction for newcomers. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. What are you currently reading? Jade City by Fonda Lee. This book has been described as "Hong Kong gangster movie, but fantasy". I just started it this morning so I can't say more than that, but really, what more do you need?

#books #book reviews #joe lansdale #kevin kwan #NetGalley

4 notes · View notes

mothermaidenclone-blog · 7 years ago

Text

A Wrinkle in Time or Can Giant Oprah Winfrey be my Fairy Godmother Please?

As soon as I heard about A Wrinkle in Time, I was very excited about it. The first ever live action movie with a budget of over $100 million to be directed by a black woman (Ava DuVernay), and it’s a science fantasy adventure starring a black teenage girl who’s a scientist - what more could you want? The costume and set design were both out of this world, pun very much intended, and I thought that most of the characters were three dimensional, well thought out and had meaningful interactions with each other. The plot, however, left something to be desired, as I felt it was a little all over the place and had a tendency to trail off in places. Admittedly, I have not read the novel, so this could be a problem with adaptation rather than writing.

*A Wrinkle In Time spoilers follow*

A Wrinkle in Time is predominantly the story of Meg Murry (Storm Reid), a young, teenage girl who is angry and disillusioned at the mysterious disappearance of her father, Dr. Alexander Murry (Chris Pine). The very first time we see Meg she is a child, enjoying and engaged in a science experiment with her father. She continues to be portrayed as a scientist throughout the film, explaining apparently magical phenomena, such as flying, using scientific terminology, as well as practically employing principles to save herself and her friends; for example, using strong winds to slingshot them to safety. S.T.E.M. fields are still overwhelmingly dominated by men that it’s so important for a children’s film, that many young girls will hopefully watch, to exemplify a black, teenage, female scientist as a role model.

Science aside, Meg sets a good example in a number of other ways. As an understandable consequence of feeling abandoned by her father - as well as being inexplicably bullied by other girls at her school because of his disappearance and a string of awful teachers talking about her behind her back, telling her that she’s not living up to her potential - Meg has very low self esteem at the start of the film. She aggressively rebuffs a compliment about her hair from her friend Calvin (Levi Miller) and she has trouble tessering - the means by which the characters travel instantaneously through the universe - because she does not entirely want to appear as herself again on the other side. Furthermore, Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon) constantly and loudly professes her disappointment and lack of faith in Meg. At the end, this is presented as a sort of tough love and that Mrs. Whatsit really did believe in Meg all along, but a grown woman continually putting down an already troubled teenage girl gave parts of the film a weird tone that I did not enjoy.

However, Meg’s character develops, which is crucial for a young, female audience to see. This is partly shown through positive interactions between female characters; for example, Meg tells the Mrs., “The three of you are beautiful,” and one of them replies, “Thank you, and so are you.” This might seem banal, but to just blatantly show women positively supporting each other in a way that children will understand is vital. So often in Hollywood, women are portrayed as rivals, especially where looks and beauty are concerned, so to attempt to normalise women giving each other compliments and accepting them in return is so important. Continuing with this theme, A Wrinkle in Time firmly cements Meg’s rise in self esteem by showing her to accept a compliment about her hair later on in the film - she is beginning to like herself more without having changed how she looks at all.

This isn’t just limited to the physical, Meg comes to terms with her own faults, thanks to the originally seemingly ill-intentioned gift of honest self appraisal from Mrs. Whatsit, and realises that yes, they are a part of her, but they do not define her. Meg’s winning move against the evil entity of the film, the IT (David Oleyowo) is to boldly declare, “You should love me because I deserve to be loved.” She finally appreciates her own self-worth and has confidence in her many abilities. This is finally confirmed by Meg opening the portal that takes her and her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), safely home - she is content with who she will be on the other side. It is so important to leave the audience with no doubt that Meg is comfortable, confident and happy with herself as a person - whilst not depicting her as being unattainably perfect, she is aware of and at peace with her flaws - because much of that audience will be young girls. I think this film has succeeded by portraying and praising this development and extolling a teenage girl who believes in herself.

Although Meg is the main character in A Wrinkle in Time, she is surrounded by many other wonderful female role models. Most predominant is her mother, Dr. Kate Murry (Gugu Mbatha Raw). Kate is presented as a scientist with equal standing to her husband, which is wonderful in and of itself, seeing as he is a white man and they usually dominate this field. In fact, Kate is seen as more respectable, as Alex is tutted off stage for his wild theories, but the same audience seems more willing to listen to her. When Alex goes off on a tirade after being rejected by the reputable scientific community, Kate offers him some sage advice, “In order to be great, it isn't enough to just be right, you have to actually be great, and we are. So why can’t you just help them along?” Not only is she a rational scientist, but an empathetic and practical person. Furthermore, Alex gives Kate all the credit for the science behind his journey; “Your calculations gave us the universe.” On top of all of this, she copes as a single mother for years and never gives up on her absentee husband, despite all the rumours about him. Kate is a very admirable woman, capable scientist and caring mother who provides a solid, realistic role model amidst all the fantasy.

More ostentatious exemplars take the form of the three Mrs.; the aforementioned Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling). This trio comprises of one white woman, one black woman and one woman of Indian descent, so that’s a move in the right direction as far as representation is concerned. These women are self-proclaimed warriors in the name of light who display a variety of incredible powers such as physical transformation, bestowing magical gifts and being able to traverse the universe using only their own will power. Other than Mrs. Whatsit’s previously stated slights, the three are constantly encouraging, and do everything in their power to help the children on their quest. Even Mrs. Whatsit is positive to other women, declaring Kate as, “dazzling”. Speaking of which, the three women look completely magnificent; they have a variety of costume changes throughout the film, all of which serve to make them look regal, majestic and powerful. Another striking visual choice was to make Mrs. Which massive - I don’t mean fat or muscly, just like three times the size of a normal human. This simple manoeuvre immediately imbues her character with an innate sense of grandeur, prestige and strength. As far as their names are concerned, we never find out who they are married to; no husbands are ever mentioned, so can we infer that they are all married to each other? I hope so, because a triad of resplendent lesbian lovers who are warriors for the forces of good in the universe is just about the coolest role model I can think of for a children’s film.

One final named female character remains, Veronica (Rowan Blanchard). She is maybe the ringleader of the - to it’s credit, surprisingly ethnically diverse - group of girls who are bullying Meg for the baffling reason that her father is missing. Veronica doesn’t factor much into the film, except that she mirrors Meg’s journey of self-love and acceptance. She is a bully at the the beginning, but we gain a glimpse into her personal life and see that this could be because she is self-conscious perhaps to the point of an eating disorder - she has written all of the foods she won’t allow herself to eat on her mirror. However, at the end of the film she is starting to become more friendly towards Meg, and we can only hope towards herself too. Veronica is symptomatic of what I believe to be so important about the female characters in A Wrinkle in Time; she is on a journey of development and self acceptance.

Overall, there is a great variety of wonderful female characters in A Wrinkle in Time. They are diverse not only in looks, but also in personality, and between them display a remarkable list of laudable traits including curiosity, scientific aptitude, bravery, confidence, magical powers, determination and the ability to love - their friends, family and, perhaps most importantly, themselves. What is arguably most crucial about these characters, especially Meg, is that they were not presented as being unbelievably flawless from the start, but as real human women who develop, interact positively with each other and become stronger as the film progresses. It doesn’t matter to me that the story was sort of nonsense, I think A Wrinkle in Time has triumphed if it gets these messages of self-love and belief to a wide audience of children.

And now for some asides:

Wow, Chris Pine can grow a beard really far up his cheeks, that was an important revelation.

Creepy, homogenous suburbia was one of the best portrayals of hell ever.

I think Charles Wallace as a baddie was one of my all-time favourite villains, his fashion was definitely on point at least.

11 notes · View notes

vinayv224 · 5 years ago

Text

The controversy over the new immigration novel American Dirt, explained

On January 21, Oprah Winfrey announced that Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt would be her next book club pick. Winfrey is pictured here with Cummins, Gayle King, Anthony Mason, and Tony Dokoupil. | CBS via Getty Images

A non-Mexican author wrote a book about Mexican migrants. Critics are calling it trauma porn.

The new novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, officially released on Tuesday, was anointed the biggest book of the season well before it ever came out.

It sold to Flatiron Books at auction for a reported seven-figure advance. Flatiron announced a first print run of 500,000 copies. (For most authors, a print run of 20,000 is pretty good.) It received glowing blurbs from luminaries like Stephen King, John Grisham, and Sandra Cisneros. Early trade reviews were rapturous. The New York Times had it reviewed twice — once in the daily paper, once in the weekly Book Review — and also interviewed the author and published an excerpt from the novel.

But over the past few days, the narrative around American Dirt has changed. One of those New York Times reviews was a pan, the other was mixed at best. Another critic revealed that she’d written a review panning the book, too, and the magazine that commissioned her review killed it.

All of these negative reviews centered on one major problem: American Dirt is a book about Mexican migrants, and author Jeanine Cummins identified as white “in every practical way,” as recently as 2016. (She has since begun to discuss a Puerto Rican grandmother.) Cummins had written a story that was not hers — and, according to many readers of color, she didn’t do a very good job of it. In fact, she seemed to fetishize the pain of her characters at the expense of treating them as real human beings.

So on Tuesday morning, when Oprah announced that American Dirt would be the next book discussed in her book club, the news was treated not as the crown jewel in the coronation of the novel of the season, but as a slightly awkward development for Oprah.

Oprah, lounging in a silk robe, sipping her morning coffee, copies of Groff's and Seghal's reviews of AMERICAN DIRT on the coffee table. She picks up her phone and thinks: I'll show these literary girls what chaos is

— joshua gutterman tranen (@jdgtranen) January 21, 2020

The story of American Dirt has now become a story about cultural appropriation, and about why publishing as an industry chose this particular tale of Mexican migration to champion. And it revolves around a question that has become fundamental to the way we talk about storytelling today: Who is allowed to tell whose stories?

“I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it”

American Dirt is a social issues thriller. It tells the story of a mother and son, Lydia and Luca, fleeing their home in Acapulco, Mexico, for the US after the rest of their family is murdered by a drug cartel. Lydia is a bookstore owner who never thought of herself as having anything in common with the migrants she sees on the news, but after she comes up with the plan of disguising herself by posing as a migrant, she realizes that it won’t really be a disguise: It’s who she is now.

In her author’s note, Cummins explains that she wrote American Dirt in an attempt to remind readers — presumably white readers — that Mexican migrants are human beings. “At worst, we perceive them [migrants] as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep,” she writes. “We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.”

Cummins also says in the note that she recognizes that this story may not be hers to tell, while stressing that her husband is an immigrant and that he used to be undocumented. She does not include in the note the fact that her husband immigrated to the US from Ireland, an elision that some observers have taken to be strategic, as though Cummins wishes to give the impression that her husband is Latino and is in just as much danger of being held in a cage at the border as the people she is writing about.

“I worried that, as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it,” Cummins says. (It is worth noting at this juncture that plenty of people who are slightly browner than Cummins have in fact written about Mexican migration.) “But then, I thought, If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?” Cummins continues. And so she spent years working on this book, traveling on both sides of the border and interviewing the people she met there.

American Dirt is explicitly addressed to non-Mexican readers by a non-Mexican author, and it is framed as a story that will remind those readers that Mexican migrants are human beings. And for some readers, including some Latinx readers, Cummins was successful in her aims. In her blurb for the book, the legendary Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros declared herself a fan, writing, “This book is not simply the great American novel; it’s the great novel of las Americas. It’s the great world novel! This is the international story of our times. Masterful.”

But for other readers, American Dirt is a failure. And it fails specifically in achieving its ostensible goal: to appreciate its characters’ humanity.

“It aspires to be Día de los Muertos but it, instead, embodies Halloween”

The first true pan of American Dirt came out in December, on the academic blog Tropics of Cancer. In it, the Chicana writer Myriam Gurba takes Cummins to task for “(1) appropriating genius works by people of color; (2) slapping a coat of mayonesa on them to make palatable to taste buds estados-unidenses and (3) repackaging them for mass racially ‘colorblind’ consumption.”

Gurba describes American Dirt as “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf,” arguing, “American Dirt fails to convey any Mexican sensibility. It aspires to be Día de los Muertos but it, instead, embodies Halloween.” Most especially, she critiques the way Cummins positions the US as a safe haven for migrants, a utopia waiting for them outside of the bloody crime zone of Mexico. “Mexicanas get raped in the USA too,” she writes. “You know better, you know how dangerous the United States of America is, and you still chose to frame this place as a sanctuary. It’s not.”

Moreover, Gurba notes that American Dirt has received the kind of institutional support and attention that books about Mexico from Chicano authors rarely do. “While we’re forced to contend with impostor syndrome,” she writes, “dilettantes who grab material, style, and even voice are lauded and rewarded.”

Gurba originally wrote her review for Ms. magazine, but it never appeared there. “I had reviewed for them before,” Gurba told Vox over email. But this time, “when they received my review, they rejected it, telling me I’m not famous enough to be so mean. They offered to pay me a kill fee but I told them to keep the money and use it to hire women of color with strong dissenting voices.”

Gurba says she’s had a mostly positive response to her review, “except for the death threats.” She maintains that American Dirt is a very bad book.

“American Dirt is a metaphor for all that’s wrong in Big Lit,” she says: “big money pushing big turds into the hands of readers eager to gobble up pity porn.”

“I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book”

Gurba’s review established the counter narrative on American Dirt, but that new narrative didn’t become the dominant read until last Friday. That’s when the New York Times published a new negative review by Parul Sehgal, one of the paper’s staff book critics.

“Allow me to take this one for the team,” Sehgal wrote. “The motives of the book may be unimpeachable, but novels must be judged on execution, not intention. This peculiar book flounders and fails.”

Sehgal, who is of Indian descent, says that she believes in the author’s right to write about “the other,” which she argues fiction “necessarily, even rather beautifully” requires. But American Dirt, she says, fails because of the ways in which it seems to fetishize its characters’ otherness: “The book feels conspicuously like the work of an outsider,” she writes.

And, putting aside questions of identity and Cummins’s stated objective, Sehgal finds that American Dirt fails to make the argument that its characters are human beings. “What thin creations these characters are — and how distorted they are by the stilted prose and characterizations,” she says. “The heroes grow only more heroic, the villains more villainous.”

Two days after Sehgal’s review came out in the daily New York Times, the paper published another review from the novelist Lauren Groff in its weekly Book Review section. Groff, who is white, was less critical of American Dirt than Sehgal was, but her review was far from an unmitigated rave: It wrestles with a number of questions over whether Cummins had the right to write this book.

But you would not know as much from the Book Review’s Twitter account, which posted a link to Groff’s published review with a quote that appears nowhere within it. “‘American Dirt’ is one of the most wrenching books I have read in the past few years, with the ferocity and political reach of the best of Theodore Dreiser’s novels,” said the now-deleted tweet.

“Please take this down and post my actual review,” Groff responded.

According to Book Review editor Pamela Paul, the tweet used language from an early draft of Groff’s review and was an unintentional error. But for some observers, that tweet, combined with the deluge of coverage the New York Times was offering Cummins, made it appear that the paper had an agenda: Was it actively trying to make American Dirt a success?

The Times’ intentions aside, in her review, Groff treats American Dirt as a mostly successful commercial thriller with a polemic political agenda, as opposed to Sehgal, who treated it as a failed literary novel. (Arguably, Groff is being truer to the aims of American Dirt’s genre than Sehgal was, but given that American Dirt is a book whose front cover contains a blurb calling it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times,” it’s hard to say that Sehgal’s expectations for literary prose were unmerited.) Groff praises the novel’s “very forceful and efficient drive” and its “propulsive” pacing, but she also finds herself “deeply ambivalent” about it.

“I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book” as a white person, she writes, and became even more sure as she learned that Cummins herself was white. Groff spends much of her review wrestling with her responsibility as a white critic of a novel addressed to white people by a white author about the stories of people of color, and ends without arriving at a satisfying answer. “Perhaps this book is an act of cultural imperialism,” she concludes; “at the same time, weeks after finishing it, the novel remains alive in me.”

On Twitter, Groff has called her review “deeply inadequate,” and said she only took the job in the first place because she didn’t think the Times would ask anyone else who was willing to wrestle with the responsibility of criticism in the course of reviewing it. “Fucking nightmare,” she tweeted.

Fucking nightmare.

— Lauren Groff (@legroff) January 19, 2020

In the wake of these reviews, the American Dirt controversy has coalesced around two major questions. The first is an aesthetic question: Does this book fetishize and glory in the trauma of its characters in ways that objectify them, and is that objectification what always follows when people write about marginalized groups to which they do not belong?

The second is a structural question: Why did the publishing industry choose this particular book — about brown characters, written by a white woman for a white audience — to throw its institutional force behind?

“Writing requires you to enter into the lives of other people”

The aesthetic question is more complicated than it might initially appear to be. People sometimes flatten critiques like the one American Dirt is facing into a pat declaration that no one is allowed to write about groups of which they are not themselves a member, which opponents can then declare to be nothing but rank censorship and an existential threat to fiction itself: “If we have permission to write only about our own personal experience,” Lionel Shriver declared in the New York Times in 2016, “there is no fiction, but only memoir.”

But in fact the most prominent voices in this debate have tended to say that it is entirely possible to write about a particular group without belonging to it. You just have to do it well — and part of doing it well involves treating your characters as human beings, and not luxuriating in and fetishizing their trauma.

In another New York Times essay in 2016, Kaitlyn Greenidge described reading a scene written by an Asian American man that described the lynching of a black man. She strongly felt that this Asian American author had the right to write such a scene, she says, “because he wrote it well. Because he was a good writer, a thoughtful writer, and that scene had a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain.”

Brandon Taylor made a similar point at LitHub earlier in 2016, arguing that successful writers have to be able to write with empathy. “Writing requires you to enter into the lives of other people, to imagine circumstances as varied, as mundane, as painful, as beautiful, and as alive as your own,” Taylor said. “It means graciously and generously allowing for the existence of other minds as bright as quiet as loud as sullen as vivacious as your own might be, or more so. It means seeing the humanity of your characters. If you’re having a difficult time accessing the lives of people who are unlike you, then your work is not yet done.”

Critics of American Dirt are making the case that Cummins has failed to do the work of empathy. They are arguing that she has the right to write from the point of view of Mexican characters, but that they have the right to critique her in turn, and that what their critiques reveal is that she does not see the humanity of her characters. They are arguing that instead, American Dirt has done the opposite of what Greenidge applauded that lynching scene for accomplishing. That the book has failed to suggest “a reason to exist besides morbid curiosity or a petulant delight in shrugging on and off another’s pain.”

It’s in the spirit of that reading — of American Dirt as a failure in empathy, as trauma porn — that Gurba noted on Twitter Wednesday morning that an early book party that Flatiron Books created for Cummins featured barbed wire centerpieces.

pic.twitter.com/6W8suWpCUD

— Myriam Chingona Gurba de Serrano (@lesbrains) January 22, 2020

Those centerpieces are all about the aesthetic splendor of migrant trauma, about the idea of reveling in the thrill of the danger that actual human beings have to deal with every day, without ever worrying that you personally might be threatened. They’re a fairly good illustration of what the phrase “trauma porn” means.

“I only know one writer of color who got a six-figure advance and that was in the ’90s”

The institutional questions about American Dirt are more quantitative. They progress like this: There are plenty of authors of color writing smart, good stories about their experiences. And yet American Dirt, a novel written by a white woman for a white audience, is the book about people of color that landed the seven-figure advance and a publicity budget that could result in four articles in the New York Times. Why has publishing chosen to allocate its resources in this way?

Flatiron Books has defended its choice. “Whose stories get told and who can tell them are important questions,” says Amy Einhorn, Cummins’s acquiring editor and Flatiron’s founder, in a statement emailed to Vox. “We understand and respect that people are discussing this and that it can spark passionate conversations. In today’s turbulent times, it’s hopeful and important that books still have power. We are thrilled that some of the biggest names in Latinx literature are championing American Dirt.”

It is worth pointing out here that Einhorn, a well-respected industry vet, was also the acquiring editor of the 2009 novel The Help, a novel by a white woman about black women in the 1950s. The Help was a bestseller and a major success, but it was also the subject of a critique similar to the one American Dirt is experiencing now, with readers arguing that The Help gloried in fetishizing the pain of its subjects.

Meanwhile, authors of color say that they rarely see publishers investing the kind of money and support in their own books on the level that The Help and American Dirt received.

“I got sexually assaulted by a serial killer in 1996. I wrote a book about that. Most of the subjects in that book are Mexicans and Chicanx. I got paid $3,000 for my story,” Gurba says. “So yes, the publicity surrounding American Dirt is unfamiliar to say the least.”

“I’ve always had five-figure advances (my fourth book comes out this spring) and many of my friends have gotten four figures — and they are mostly writers of color,” said the novelist Porochista Khakpour in an email to Vox. “I only know one writer of color who got a six-figure advance and that was in the ’90s.”

Khakpour adds that the level of hyperbolic attention American Dirt has received, especially from the New York Times, is deeply unusual for publishing. “I only got a Sunday [New York Times Book Review] review for my first novel and that felt like a miracle,” she says. “Again, most writers of color I know are published by indies or academic presses and it’s hard for them to get the attention of the Times. I write for the NYTBR and I can honestly say I’ve never seen this much attention given to a book — I find it embarrassing.”

Both Khakpour and Gurba argue that American Dirt was appealing to publishers because white people tend to be most comfortable reading about people of color as objects of suffering.

“Certain narratives that flirt with poverty porn make liberal white people feel good about their opinions,” Khakpour says. “They feel like they learn something, like by reading these accounts they are somehow participating in helping the world they usually feel so helpless about.”

Gurba says many white people expect to see her enact such narratives herself and become angry when she doesn’t. “Recently, a white woman got angry at me when she found out that I’m Mexican,” Gurba says. “She insisted that I didn’t look or act Mexican and that I had confused her. But she confused herself. She had a stereotype of what Mexicans are. I defied it. That made her uncomfortable. Now, apply that scenario to the literary equation [American Dirt has] presented.”

The narratives Gurba and Khakpour suggest both assume that the decision makers on American Dirt were white. And there is very good reason for that assumption: Publishing is an extremely white industry.

According to trade magazine Publishers Weekly, white people made up 84 percent of publishing’s workforce in 2019. Publishing is staffed almost entirely by white people — and in large part, that fact can be explained by publishing’s punishingly low entry-level salaries.

A job as an editorial assistant pays around $30,000, and it means living in New York City, where conservative estimates generally say you need an annual salary of about $40,000 before taxes to get by. But landing a position as an editorial assistant is generally a promotion: to get one, you usually have to spend a season or two working as an intern first, for low or no pay.

Such salaries mean that the kind of people who work in publishing tend to be the kind of people who can afford to work in publishing: those who are carrying little student debt and who can rely on their parents to supplement their salaries as necessary. And mostly, those people tend to be white.

As a result, publishing is predominantly staffed with well-meaning white people who, when looking for a book about the stories of people of color, can find themselves drawn toward one addressed specifically toward white people — and who will lack the expertise to question that book’s treatment of its characters. Which means that as long as publishing continues to be overwhelmingly, monolithically white, it will continue to find itself mired in controversies like the one surrounding American Dirt.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2vaaciE from Blogger https://ift.tt/2RCGOJy via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

btzone · 8 years ago

Text

Buck-Tick and Bonji

Apologies for the long absence. I have written many things in my mind but neglected to actually type and post here.

If you’ve ever wondered about the symbols on Atsushi’s arms from the “Sweet Strange Live Film” concert video, read on. (Warning: long post!)

Bonji are characters of Indian origin that are used in Japanese esoteric Buddhism. In English, it is known as Siddham script. Last night, as I was waiting to be tattooed, I was browsing Japanese tattoo books and came across the use of bonji and there was a slight explanation. I recalled that Buck-Tick has used them in the past. I think some fans may have discussed this online but perhaps not in detail in English. I usually don’t try to unravel the mysteries of the Buck-Tick world but I’m sure there are many who are curious so let’s try to peel a layer or two.

Disclaimer: I am by no means any sort of expert in any religion, nor of Japan, and to be quite frank, nor am I an expert of Buck-Tick. I am a music fan and have passing interests in many things. There are a few reasons why I try not to interpret what Buck-Tick does. Mostly, I don’t really do that for any band or thing that I like! I feel it, not think it, if that makes sense. I may make some connections and have some surface curiosities but no pressing desire to write a thesis on it. So if I ever neglect to cover a topic related to Buck-Tick that you have interest in, it could be for this very reason so please don’t be too upset that I don’t touch it.

Secondly, I think it would take a native Japanese or scholar to begin to examine even pop music (and like it or not, Buck-Tick falls into the realm of pop). The reason being that there are many aspects to culture, such as literature and religion, that may be referenced in music. (Atsushi is the main lyricist and an avid reader.) The connections that a native person of a country would make are different than what a foreigner would make. Not that any interpretation of art is wrong, it just may not be as informed and as I am not a true native, I don’t want to steer foreigners down a divergent path. As I’ve mentioned before, I am half-Japanese and lived there for a bit growing up. However, my involvement with Japanese culture is on the pop level. My involvement with literature and religion in Japan is hardly more than what a child would experience. My mother is not a religious person and where she is from was a kingdom colonized by Japan so it has a separate history, language, and religion though by today’s definition it is Japan. So the exotic image you may have of Japan is at times just as foreign to me!

Buck-Tick has used various symbolism as part of their visual presentation and one could argue if a particular use was because it was superficially cool, misinterpreted on their part, or deliberately used for a deeper meaning. (In the early days, Hisashi remarked that he would look through the dictionary for cool words in English.)

Buddhism is not a Japanese religion but it arrived centuries ago and has woven into the culture. One will practice elements or come across bits and pieces even if one is not a practitioner. It is just a part of Japanese culture. Since I did not grow up going to Buddhist temples, there are many aspects I don’t know. The words for elements of Buddhism may also be vastly different in Japanese, English, and Indian languages so it can be hard for my brain to keep up.

For further reference, one can read up on the Wikipedia entries and other sources. I am just summarizing. Again, bear in mind the localization of Buddhism, that the Japanese pronunciation and use of elements may be a little different than Buddhism in other countries.

梵字 is how bonji is written in Japan. The Japanese wikipedia page explains the history and how it is read in Japanese. The English entry is on Siddham script. In use circa 600-1200 but you will see it in Japan to this day, especially at Buddhist sites. There are many sects of Buddhism, even in Japan. The use of bonji is particularly noted in what is called esoteric Buddhism in English or Shingon-shuu in Japanese. Bonji is used to write mantras. It may be written on wooden sticks, stone pagodas, and even merchandise sold at temples. (For example, at one temple I visited, they sold necklaces of the Chinese zodiac animals written in bonji.)

The most famous deity in Shingon Buddhism is Fudou Myouou (simplified with macrons as Fudō Myōō) AKA Acala. He always has a sword in his right hand, seems to have a bit of an angry face, is often depicted seated but can be standing, and has two servants that he may or may not be pictured with. There are many variations to the elements of his imagery and these each have a meaning too deep to cover here. Below are images of both the standing and seated versions that I took at a temple in Japan.

All of that is a very long intro to what is actually on Atsushi’s arms but I would be remiss to have skipped all the backstory to understanding what is on his arms. The answer to that is it appears to be the same script that is on 五輪塔 gorintou, or a stone pagoda used for memorial or funerary purposes. As Buck-Tick songs and imagery often deal with death, this should be no great surprise. The “go” in this word means 5 so the script is comprised of five. Each section has a script that represents an element that has further associations. To be honest, the Wikipedia entry in English is lacking. The Japanese entry has more info but to be clear and be sure that I as a non-Buddhist do not misrepresent, I would like to refer the reader to other sources as well. But first, let’s break down the gorintou.

From top to bottom, the characters are read in Japanese as Kya Ka Ra Ba A. Their associated meanings, colors (not noted in chart above), body parts, and shapes are:

Kya = 空 Sky (space), blue, head, pearl shape

Ka = 風 Wind (moving gas), black, neck, half moon/circle shape

Ra = 火 Fire (flames rise or ascending), red, heart, triangle shape

Ba = 水 Water (flowing or descending), white, belly, round/circle shape

A = 地 Earth (ground or firm), yellow, legs/feet, square shape

The A to Z Photo Dictionary of Japanese Buddhist Statuary has a good entry on Gorinto. For further reading, the site also has an entry on the Number Five in Buddhist Traditions.

To further complicate things, it should be noted that these can also have 4 sides/directions (north, south, west, east) and that the reading of the script is different on each side. Each direction also has meaning. This information is summarized as follows and as a non-practitioner, I hope to do it justice. (Japanese source is where the colors of gorinto are listed)

East reading: Kya Ka Ra Ba A (gateway to spiritual awakening)

South reading: Kyaa Kaa Raa Baa Aa (gateway to ascetic practice/training/Sadhana)

West reading: Kyan Kan Ran Ban An (gateway to enlightenment/Bodhi)

North reading: Kyaku Kaku Raku Baku Aku (gateway to nirvana/Buddha’s death)

It appears that what is on Atsushi’s arms is the same but the hands are different. For the purpose of writing this entry, I did not re-watch “Sweet Strange Live Film” but rather searched for magazine photos and screenshots. Thus, I did not find a clear picture of the hands so you may to do your research on this and I hope I have provided a decent starting point.

For a further Buck-Tick connection to all these elements, in the “Picture Product 2″ video, there is a section devoted to each member. For Toll, there are childhood photos and Toll visits those sites and tries to recreate some photos as an adult. One set of photos is taken at Jigen-in temple AKA Byakue Dai Kannon in his hometown of Takasaki, which is next door to Atsushi’s hometown of Fujioka.

This temple has a giant white statue of Kannon. Kannon is a female goddess known also as the Guanyin bodhisattva. (Perhaps the camera manufacturer Canon rings a bell? It is an alternative spelling of Kannon.) It is possible to go inside of the Kannon statue and ascend many stairs and see various figures of Buddhism, including Fudō Myōō. Also on the temple site is a Gorintou. Below are pictures I took of both at the Jigen-in temple.

Armed with this knowledge now, it is up to you to decide whether or not there is any connection between Atsushi’s lyrics during the “Sexy Stream Liner” era and the script on his arms.

#buck-tick #バクチク #bonji #gorinto #sweet strange live film #akumanosasayaki

112 notes · View notes

curewhimsy · 5 years ago

Text

About that New Project (UPDATED)

EDIT: I updated and I added MORE CHARACTERS (something felt imbalanced still and I couldn’t stop lol) and I actually did general descriptions for all of them... They’re not extensive and may change, however.

———

The thing I was talking about in my Soune Taya post...

The Mega Project?

Well... it was going to be a visual novel concept.

But since I have no skill in making a VN, I’m just going to write a story. Like the anime that will be based off the VN. Like Clannad’s anime or something.

It’s going to be long since I have (ahem) FOURTY-SIX (46) WHOLE CHARACTERS WITH ROUTES THAT I’M GOING TO INCORPORATE.

This is why I said I will never ever finish it, even if I devote my entire life to it.

But it won’t feel right without all these characters. I WANT to have all these characters. I’m a “go big or go home” person. I’m too ambitious and I know that.

So.

Here are the characters.

Haku, Neru, Miku, Luka, Teto, Gumi, Meiko, Lapis, Merli, Lily, IA, Yukari, Uta, Zatsune, Rin, Len, Kaito, Akaito, Dell, Gakupo, Yuuma, Piko, Mizuki, Nigaito, Dex, Daina, Ruby, Taya, Longya, Ling, Momo, SeeU, Ruko, Ritsu, Miki, Aku, Bruno, Clara, Iroha, Yuu, Wil, Kyo, Akari, Qingxian, Anon, Kanon In the story adaption, Uta Utane (Defoko) will take the role as the player/main character, and learns everyone’s backstories. She will be the one with the (gigantic) “harem” around her. Think, Tomoya from Clannad. But IF there’s ever an actual game, I’ll plan on Uta being one of the date-able characters. She’ll be your childhood friend.

The characters are all college students here. They are all college-age, roughly between 18-26, depending on which character. I may give them specific ages eventually.

Here are descriptions I thought of already. For some of these Loids, this is my first time EVER writing or portraying them. Ever.

(Full names are listed in Western order. This is partly due to the story taking place in the USA, in a “Japantown” sort of place to explain the prominent Japanese population.)

——————————————————

Haku Yowane- A shy, gloomy girl who is looking to join in the school’s choir... However, the choir doesn’t have enough members. And it’s not like Haku is a good enough singer to singlehandedly bring it back to life... or confident to work up the courage to even audition. Haku seems to depend on Neru, her only friend, to comfort her when she gets down. Haku is the cousin of the popular Miku Hatsune, the most popular girl in the school and star singer in the choir. Neru Akita- A tomboy with a hot temper. But inside, she hides delicate feelings. She seems to always be with Haku, cheering her up when she gets down. The two seem to only have each other. Miku Hatsune- A very popular girl and star singer in the choir. A bubbly, cheerful sweetheart. Has lots of friends and is always smiling. Idealistic and doesn’t believe in impossible. Miku dreams big, but apparently she gets very depressed when her dreams are crushed. Luckily that never seems to happen... for now. Luka Megurine- A polite and elegant woman. She can appear aloof and intimidating at first, but is actually just shy. She is half Japanese, a quarter French, and a quarter German. Teto Kasane- A bubbly girl who can be childish. Is playful, weird, and a bit demanding. Very clumsy. Gumi- A girl who can be a bit shy, but once you get past that, Gumi is unique, free-spirited, and chill. She likes art and reading books. She keeps a sketchbook with her at all times. Meiko Sakine- The confident, mature woman of the group. Energetic and loves to party. Still responsible. Like a mother or older sister. Has quite a temper, though she mostly uses it to defend others... Lapis Aoki- Merli’s stepsister, who seems to be the opposite of her. Bubbly and playful, and quite childish. Quite friendly. However, she can be a bit selfish at times. Lapis is Japanese, though her adoptive sister Merli is Indian. Merli Aoki- Lapis’ stepsister, who seems to be the opposite of her. She can seem cold and distant, even a bit harsh at first. But inside, she is very thoughtful and willing to help those important to her. Merli is Indian, though she was adopted into Lapis’ Japanese family after the death of her parents. Lily- The school’s toughest female delinquent. IA- An idolized girl in the school for her good looks and singing skills. However, she hides dark feelings? Yukari Yuzuki- Half sister to Akari Kizuna. Looks up to IA but also feels she will never be as good as her. Uta Utane- A rather plain, bluntly-spoken person who doesn’t see much in life. Usually bored, silent, and rather deadpan. Once a bright girl with lots of dreams. Deep inside, she is passionate and caring, really... Can it be restored? She is non-binary, going mostly by she/her. Miku Zatsune- Edgy and hates Miku. She would rather be called Zatsune, because her first name happens to be Miku, like the person she despises so much... But could there be something deeper to her? Rin Kagamine- Rin is a bit chaotic. She is bold, brash, athletic, and charming. She is also just plain nuts. Len Kagamine- Len fries to be cool and hip, but he is just a big dork. He is quite the comedian however, sometimes unintentionally. Kaito Shion- Kaito is a silly boy. He loves ice cream, unicorns, rainbows, and anything fluffy. But he also has moments of seriousness where he says really deep, philosophical things. He is quite romantic. Akaito Shion- Akaito is a sarcastic and grumpy boy, but when it comes to romance, he gets quite passionate. He sometimes flirts around with girls, but when he finally finds a true love with a girl (or guy) who truly changes his life... well... it’s a bit different. Dell Honne- Dell is usually in a bad mood. He currently lives with a father who barely acknowledges him. He tends to keep it all inside, and he’s really just lonely and needs to find someone to vent to. He enjoys computer programming and composing electronic music. He is Haku’s half-brother, but they didn’t grow up together. Gakupo Kamui- Gakupo likes doing kendo and martial arts, and is generally athletic. He is a nice guy who also loves animals and history. He seems serious, but can be unexpectedly silly sometimes. He likes embracing his Japanese and Ainu heritage. Yuuma- Yuuma likes music and is quite popular. He may seem hard to approach, because sometimes he doesn’t know what to say. He is a little blunt at times, but has a good heart. He has a crush on Mizuki. Piko Utatane- Piko is a genius who loves astronomy and excels in mathematics and physics. He is a shy and compassionate person, but whenever he opens his mouth, he sounds very strict. He is bad at socializing and making friends, which leaves him quite lonely. On top of that, he is sickly and absent from school often. Piko wishes to make a friend. His first friend in the school is Lapis Aoki, who pretends to be a fairy to grant his wish. After a while, Lapis declares that she wants to be Piko’s friend. Mizuki- Mizuki is a singer who also plays the a Japanese harp (koto.) She is quite a charming person and seems to flirt with many people... even girls... but not Yuuma. Since Yuuma has a crush on Mizuki, this discourages him. Nigaito Shion- The youngest of the three Shion bothers. Nigaito’s nicknames are Nini and Nii. He is rather sickly, but remains to have a warm and pure heart. Dex- Daina’s childhood friend. Best friends, even though they are of completely different genders, and with very different personalities. Some people wonder how it works. Dex is silly, fun, a bit of a party animal, but he is still very caring and compassionate. He just needs a bit of help devoting himself to his studies. But he is quite intelligent when he is focused. He is Black, Creole, and is learning French. Daina- Dex’s childhood friend. Best friends, even though they are of completely different genders, and with very different personalities. Some people wonder how it works. Daina likes to study and learn, and doesn’t like atmospheres like parties so much. She prefers quiet, peaceful places. She may seem a bit distant on the outside, but she is just a little shy. She is White, with English and French heritage. Ruby- Ruby is rather confident, yet nice, and will always give people a helping hand. She is Black and Latina. Taya Soune- Taya is incredibly polite, bowing at many occasions and also offering to do favors a lot. He speaks very formally. He is non-binary, but go mostly by he/him. Longya Yuezheng- A quite serious man who is dutiful and studious. Protective over his younger sister, Ling, and monitors her safety constantly. This is due to Ling nearly getting into a tragic accident when they were younger, traumatizing Longya. He is Chinese. Ling Yuezheng- Ling is a hardworking student, however she has a playful side and she feels lonely that she doesn’t have many friends and is devoting her life to studying. Momo Momone- A peaceful, sleepy girl. Rather low-energy and tranquil. However, Momo has quite a temper when it comes to injustice. SeeU- A rather eccentric, bold and energetic girl with “the light of the stars in her eyes.” She is Korean. Ruko Yokune- Ruko is one of the most mature characters, having a lot of wisdom about life and many experiences. However, they still have moments where they need a helping hand. Ruko is non-binary, mostly going by she/her or they/them. Ritsu Namine- Ritsu is rather brash, but means well. He is non-binary and mostly go by he/him. Miki- Loves romance anime/manga and is obsessed with “cute couples.” A true fangirl. Acts cute and animated. Iroha’s best friend. Aku Yamine- Hates her name, because it’s pronounced the same as the word for “evil” in Japanese. Prefers to be called Akurin. Aku is a very nice and naive, somewhat clumsy girl with big dreams. Is half Black and half Japanese. Bruno- Black Latino, lived in the Dominican Republic. Polite and soft-spoken, but a talented guitarist. Clara- From Colombia, and is Latina. A rather doting girl who somehow feels like both a mother and a little sister. Iroha Nekomura- Loves cute things and stuffed animals. Is kind of insecure and doesn’t find herself very cute, though her best friend Miki constantly reassures her. Yuu- A sweet, cheerful guy who is always filled with energy. Half English, half Japanese. He is in a band with Wil and Kyo called ZOLA PROJECT. Wil- A sophisticated, fashionable guy who is quite outgoing. He is Black. He is in a band with Yuu and Kyo called ZOLA PROJECT. Kyo- A wild, energetic guy who is always raring to go. He is Japanese. He is in a band with Yuu and Wil called ZOLA PROJECT. Akari Kizuna- Yukari Yuzuki’s half-sister. Cheerful and sweet, and wants to make others smile... even though many heavy thoughts are hiding behind her own smile. Qingxian Mo- She seems very nice, but she’s actually a bit self-absorbed. Since her name is hard to pronounce for English-speakers, she insists on being called Qing (pronounced like Ching.)

Anon- (Coming soon)

Kanon- (Coming soon)

#vocaloid #life of pastell #my writing #wip #brainstorm #vn #fanfic #utau

5 notes · View notes

boricuareads · 8 years ago

Photo

[Image description: graphic titled “Adriana Reviews...” followed by four books with their titles, authors, and release date (discussed below), superimposed over a gradient mosaic of pinks and purples]

Hi, everyone! I’ve been busy moving and with personal family business, but in between I’ve been reading, so this post is intended as a review-dump of all the books I read during that time. That’s right, I’m not talking about just one book reviewed, I’m talking about FOUR books being reviewed. In ONE post! Hold on to your reading devices, ‘cause it’s about to go down… (Spoilers and Long Post Ahead!!!)

I’ll start with the one I read during my finals week (I know, procrastination got the best of me):

Future Leaders of Nowhere by Emily O’Beirne (March 14th, 2017)

Set in Australia, we follow along as Finn and Willa end up at a camp for “Future Leaders” thanks to their performance in their respective schools. Pitted against each other as captains of their respective teams, these teenage girls must find common ground in order to survive the wrath of an entitled straight white boy who’s drunk with power (or a semblance of power).

I really liked the plot and characters of this book! At first I was apprehensive about the thematic and was sort of confused about what the camp entailed, as well as the fact that a month-long camp where they basically mixed a roleplay “Settlers of Catan” with scavenger hunts didn’t seem like something I would be interested in. However, it was the characters which drew me in. I loved Finn and Willa, both separately and together. Finn was a silent-but-deadly kind of leader that left me doing chinhands because DAMN I love girls who don’t take any shit. The same went for Willa, since I kept repeating “I wanna be like you when I grow up” as I saw her take charge of her Amazonian group of girls. Their relationship was organic; gotta love that friends-to-lovers trope. I adored their tenderness, how genuine their respect for each other was, and how realistic these aspects were because these were teen girls! Willa and Finn were insecure, they had family and identity issues, and yet they still managed to be there for each other. Of course, they had issues, but that’s a part of teenage angst and author-made drama.

The author was also able to include so much representation that made me so giddy! On the page, Finn was bisexual (I loved her explanation in Ch. 63: “Listen, I’m perfectly happy to help you out with difficult concepts. Like that time that I explained anaerobic respiration to you, but I do not have the time or the energy to explain really basic stuff. Especially when the meaning is in the actual word. Bisexuality. Hear that? Bi.” Even though that definition is very binary, it was important to see that word written out), Willa was gay and of mixed Indian descent, and there was a whole cast of side-characters with varied identities.

With all that said, I also had issues with some parts of the book. The characterization of Willa was at times inconsistent, and there was an islamophobic act depicted (a character tried to take off a Muslim girl’s hijab) that wasn’t really dealt with beyond the anger of some characters and it ended up seemingly brushed aside by the MC. The shifting POV worked most of the time, but there were times where the POV of that character didn’t feel all that necessary.

All in all, the book reminded me of the styles of E. Lockhart and Becky Albertalli. It was a fun, breezy read if you’re a fan of teenage hijinks at a sleepaway camp. Thanks to the publisher for allowing me access to review this book through NetGalley.

Rating: 3/5 Stars

Goodreads // Amazon

After reading that last book, I read Joyride during the flight home, which made it easy for me to delve into its world…

Joyride Vol. 1 by Jackson Lanzing and Colin Kelly (September 21st, 2016)

Joyride was a fascinating read for me. I don’t usually read graphic novels (probably because I’m incredibly picky about them and devour them so fast), but Joyride was just fun to devour. The writing kept me engaged and I genuinely was interested in the development of the characters and their adventures in space. I’m a fan of science-fiction and space adventures, especially when the team is comprised of found-families in the face of adversity.

Though they kept me engaged for the duration of my flight, I felt they were forgettable characters for some reason. I loved them, but I felt like they weren’t developed enough. Perhaps in Vol. 2 there was more character development, but in this installment it was difficult to discern between characterizations and that got in the way of the storytelling. In the future, I would like to see the relationships between the female characters explored some more as well as the dynamics with the brothers. The book left me with so many questions, mostly centered around the plot and its characters: what type of government were they under at the base? Was the alien sidekick necessary to the plot besides to make snide and unhelpful comments? Was Catrin gay? Is there going to be a love triangle around Uma? If so, I would read the next installment.

In terms of the art, I felt like the colors were vibrant and it appeared neat. I’m not that knowledgeable of art and drawing, I find myself lacking in that department, but I really liked them because they kept drawing me in; it was the type of aesthetic I like in my science fiction media. I did find the depictions of the characters inconsistent at times as well, but I didn’t really mind that.

In any case, on a scale from 0 to 5, where 0 is Jupiter Ascending-ridiculous and 5 is Star Wars: The Force Awakens- glorious, Joyride falls in a solid 3 level sff (so, maybe like a Star Trek Beyond). Thanks to BOOM! Studios for allowing me to read this through NetGalley.

Rating: 3/5 Stars

Goodreads // Amazon

After reading this graphic novel, I knew I wanted to delve into a more light-hearted, highly anticipated read…

Always and Forever, Lara Jean by Jenny Han (Release date: May 2nd, 2017)

I want to start by giving thanks to our lord and savior Jenny Han for being so generous as to give us meek readers a third and final look into Lara Jean Song-Covey’s life. Her writing is always full of life and colors. I have to say that when I read, I become a very mentally-visual person, so when I tell you that a book and its words remind me of certain colors, it’s good. Always and Forever reminded me of a muted blue, the blue of melancholy, of looking back through old pictures, of taking the last step out of your high school. It is a blue that looks at the future and says it’s okay to not have your shit together as long as you have people around you supporting you and cheering you on to your next great adventure.

Always and Forever was the best goodbye to Lara Jean I could’ve hoped for. It was full of twists and drama and it was so realistic I had to check if the story wasn’t actually about me. I could relate to Lara Jean’s anxiety around college and the process of getting accepted or denied to the universities you love. When I was going through that process, my dream schools were University of Wisconsin-Madison and Penn State, and though I got accepted, I had to go through the heartbreak of declining their offers because it was too much money. I felt Lara Jean’s disappointment as if I had declined those offers right then and not four years ago.

I also felt Lara Jean’s uncertainty around the relationships you keep or give up on after high school. There are some that are forever, like your family. Her family, as always, showed up for her time and time again, and their love for her shone through in this book. I loved Kitty so much, especially with her feelings towards her second older sister leaving their house. On the other hand, Lara Jean felt conflicted over her relationship with her boyfriend, Peter. Though I graduated without a significant other (much like Lara’s mother advised them to do), I found myself a tad angry at Peter and even Lara. I don’t know why I kept finding it selfish for them to want to go to the same university and just keep doing what they’re doing because it works instead of challenging themselves. Maybe it was the cynic in me talking over the idealistic voice that permeates Young Adult Contemporary Romance, but by the end of the book I was glad to squish that so-called voice of reason; who needs that when you could be salivating over Lara Jean’s wardrobe/cooking/everything. I had one question, which I may have missed over the course of the series, but I needed to know what was Lara Jean’s major, as that may have been key to her characterization.

In the end, I was glad for Jenny Han’s basically coming full-circle with this book. This novel was the best tight, pretty bow this series needed.

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Goodreads // Amazon

Last but not least, a monster of a book that took me an entire week to get through while tending to my dad at the hospital…

Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust (Release date: September 5th, 2017)

First off, I want to declare that I was dubious about this book. I first heard of it through a friend, who sent me an article that dubbed it as “a feminist retelling of Snow White”. I’m always cringing when someone calls a book a feminist-anything, but I was willing to give it a try. When i saw that NetGalley had it in advance, I requested it, not really thinking I’d get approved. To my surprise, my inbox was telling me that Flatiron Books had approved my request and I was really excited (thanks Flatiron Books!). I delved into Bashardoust’s world without much background besides the fact that it was supposed to be feminist and a retelling of Snow White (which I may or may not have forgotten when I started reading it because I was tired).

I think it was essential for me to dive into this one without reading what it was about, because it led to me wanting to process everything written at face value. Girls Made of Snow and Glass was a magical tale of putting oneself first, as the opposite would allow for men’s greed and ignorance to burrow itself into women’s lives.

In this tale, the patriarchal notions of duty to a man in a position of authority and notions of how a woman should exist in public and private spheres are challenged by the main characters: Mina and Lynet. Lynet was a normal fifteen-year old girl in a fictional royal family; she wishes to be more than what she was born into, wanted to run away from her circumstances and, above all, be herself. This sounds pretty cliché, except for the fact that it’s GAY! Yes, you read right, G A Y. I won’t go into details, but it’s a very nuanced and mellow pairing that felt like ocean waves on a stroll by the beach. On the other hand, Mina was set up to be the wicked stepmother, except the narrative framed her more as a woman who’d been forced to assimilate into a patriarchal monarchy that didn’t appreciate her prowess as a tactician and desire to help those in need. Mina’s circumstances were constricted by her father’s ambition and her own intellect, which in itself is deemed as valuable by the author but not by people surrounding her, much as is the case with many powerful and influential women.

I really liked the characterization work the author put into the story, each character was fleshed out and I wanted to know more about each of them. I did think the author maintained the races of the characters vague, which was a problem for me, since it’s being marketed as a feminist fantasy book and there’s not a lot of visible racial representation. The plot I felt was slightly predictable, but I was delighted by the way the author threaded these characters reacting to each other. I felt the reveals came too early, that the reader was just given the characters’ secrets readily, rather than it being a slow reveal. I liked the author’s writing, I think it was really nice and had a beautiful poetic flow.

Girls Made of Snow and Glass was a wonderful read about the influence women have and, in summary, to never underestimate the power that their words and actions hold. At its center, it’s a story about two women coming together from two very different points in their lives and learning from and loving one another. Bashardoust’s story was intricate and a bit of what we needed in the realm of fantasy.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Goodreads // Amazon

#mine #future leaders of nowhere #girls made of snow and glass #joyride #always and forever lara jean #adriana reviews #adriana recs #long post

7 notes · View notes

advocatewrites-blog · 8 years ago

Text

Simple/Clean Chapter 10

Simple/Clean: An Original Character’s Story

Fandom: Kingdom Hearts (1, with mentions of other installments)

Synopsis: There are many worlds, but they share the same sky. One Sky, one Destiny. And when that destiny is threatened, the universe calls on one hero to save the day. Or, more like, five. When the Earth is consumed into Darkness, Danielle Scott and her friends are given the Keys between light and darkness. If they are going to save the worlds and find her brother, they are going to have to go on a multiverse-wide road trip to find the Door to Light. If only they had a better weapon than keys.

Rated: +K for violence and occasional language

Disclaimer: The Kingdom Hearts series was created by Tetsuya Nomura and owned by Square Enix. The Final Fantasy series was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and owned by Square Enix. The films depicted were created by the Walt Disney Animation Studios and owned by the Walt Disney Company. Any other work mentioned or homaged are property of their respective owners. This is a non-profit fan-based work that only seeks to entertain. Please support the official releases.

Chapter 10 of 12

Previous Chapter

Next Chapter

Start from beginning

Chapter 10: Lost and Found

When he was much younger, before his sisters were alive, he asked his mother why they didn't have two grandmas.

He was still young, and most of his information about the outside world came from TV. Still, he was pretty sure that most people had at least two grandmas (some could have as many as four if they were really lucky, but TV generally didn't show that one).

At the time, Mom only smiled more and pinched his cheeks. But he was more stubborn than most children, so he insisted. Eventually, she caved in.

“I haven't seen your grandparents in a long time.” She admitted. “They didn't want to see me anymore, and I never wanted to see them again.”

Looking back on it now, he could see that her smile was stretched too thin and felt too forced. Looking back on it now, he felt terrible for even asking the once.

“But I wouldn't want you around them anyway.” Mom said. “There are better people I want you to learn better things from. But remember this.”

Mom pulled him in closer so he could look into her eyes. He had seen her several times before and several times since, but never once was he able to forget that look. He had never forgotten the fire that was lit behind her eyes, all light and hope and determination.

He had never forgotten that look, but he would see it in other places. Dani, mostly, but sometimes Hanna.

“Your siblings are going to be here soon.” Mom said. “And when they do come, they're going to need a lot of help. I want you to be able to help them. Real family stays together.”

He never found out if Dani or Hanna had a similar speech. He realized much later on that few people would get that lesson, and by the time he was in 6th grade, he learned to hold in his shock whenever someone would complain about their siblings. It didn't matter. No matter how much they cried or how bad they were at playing trains, Dim loved his sisters. They were his best friends. They were his family.

A full rigged ship, the kind you would see on the covers of children's books about pirate ships. Three masts, sails hoisted despite the fact that there is no air in space. 10 cannons, all pointed towards them. It made the Gummi ship look very small.

“But what is a pirate ship doing in the middle of space?” Nadine asked. “There aren’t any jets on that thing, how did it get here?”

“Hey, do you think that thing is chasing Monstro?” Katie asked.

The ship charged.

“I think that thing is chasin' us!” Goofy said.

“Oh! So we're the great white whale?”

“Incoming!” Donald cried.

The Gummi Ship crashed. This was far from the first time it had done so, so none of the occupants were terribly shaken.

Hanna was the first to open the hatch to get out. She was greeted by Heartless, holding a variety of swords. She swallowed hard, and raised her hands in the universal sign of surrender. The rest of the occupants of the ship filed out in a similar matter.

“I didn't think you'd make it this far, Sora.” Riku greeted from the steering wheel. “It's good to see you.”

“I can't say the same.” Sora said.

He glared. It didn't quite look like a glare, so much as it looked like a puppy trying to be intimidating.

“Where's our brother, you creep!” Dani spoke up instead, and took a step forward. The swords aimed towards her, but she didn't flinch back.

“Is he really that important to you? More important than letting old friends reunite?”

Dani and Hanna shared a look.

“Yes!” They exclaimed in unison.

“Fine. Then I won't tell you I found Kairi.”

Riku took a step to the side. Just out of the corner of her eye, Hanna could see a human figure, slumped onto the deck.

Sora's eyes widened. “Kairi!”

“While you were off with your new friends, I decided to go and find her.” Riku explained.

“Bet you got the Heartless to help you with that, didn't you!” Dani shouted back.

The light faded from Sora's eyes. “Riku, why are you siding with the Heartless? You're better than that!”

“My heart's too strong for them. I have nothing to fear.” Riku turned his attention back to Hanna and Dani. “Now you can go visit your brother.”

A trap door on the deck opened.

Nobody was anywhere near it.

Hanna stared at the trap door for a minute. Then back to the Heartless, whose swords were now getting a lot closer.

One by one, in a single file line, they jumped to their doom.

“Ya don't say?”

“Yeah! That was definitely her! I've finally found her!”

“All right! A-hyuck! Now let's go up there and talk to her!”

“Yeah!”

“Sounds great! Okay, but first, how about getting off!”

The six piled off of Donald, who grumbled a thanks.

Nadine glanced around the room. The brig of the ship, though bigger than it ought to be, was virtually empty. The only things in the room were a few barrels and crates, that probably held food and water at one point. Not even rope that could have restrained them. There was only one door that could lead out, but Nadine had no idea where it would lead.

“Lookin' for a way out?”

Nadine's head snapped towards the source. “Yes, Mr. Barrel. If you have something to contribute, please do.”

A blur of green shot towards her. It took Nadine a minute to process it was a boy. Far younger than her, dressed entirely in clothes that looked woven from twigs and leaves, and...floating.

“Who're you?” Goofy asked.

“Me?” The boy asked with a cocky smile. “I'm the answer to your prayers!”

Katie scoffed and folded her arms. “You don't look like a unicorn.”

“Fine then. I won't help you break out.”

“Aren't you trapped in here with us?” Sora asked.

“Nah. I'm just waiting for someone.”

The sound of jingling bells filled the room. A yellow blur shot past Nadine, and towards the boy.

“What took you so long, Tinker Bell?” The boy asked.

More jingles. Nadine had to squint, but she could just make out a humanoid figure in the yellow light.

“Another girl?...I'm just not going to leave Wendy behind, Tink!...Wait, Tink--”

The yellow blur shot past Nadine and out of the room.

The boy pouted.

“So are we working together?” Nadine asked.

“Fine. But only until we find Wendy.” The boy said. “Peter Pan, at your service!”

“Fantastic. How are we getting out of here?”

“We can't go anywhere if that door's locked.” Sora pointed out. “Do you think we can stack enough barrels on top of each other to get to the trap door?”

“Can't you fly?” Peter asked.

“Can't you use the magical weapon that can unlock any door?” Hanna asked.

“Oh. Right.”

“After all that trouble of capturing her, you just want me to let her go?” Captain Hook asked.

“She's not one of the ones Maleficent wants.” Riku said.

Captain Hook put hand and hook on hips. “And what exactly, is Maleficent planning, anyway?”

“Who knows? All I know is that she needs seven maidens, and Wendy isn't one of them. Dispose of them however you want. Make them walk the plank, if you want.”

He did want to make the walk the plank, but he wanted to prove his point more. “And what of the other girls we captured. Are they the chosen ones?”

Captain Hook had seen many a great thing in his day. Not only was he a pirate, but he was a pirate in a magical world. He had kidnapped Indians, fought with mermaids, and flown above the seven seas. His arch-nemeses were a boy who never grew older and never grew wiser, and a crocodile. On any day, he would put up with things that would make another pirate look like a landlubber.

And yet the glare that Riku sent him made the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. “Them, I expect you to throw off the plank.”

“Captain, we're having a bit of a problem!” Smee rushed in, nearly knocking into Captain Hook in the process. “Th—the prisoners have escaped. A—and Peter Pan is with them!”

Captain Hook's blood boiled over. He opened his mouth, ready to shout to his crew, the Heartless, anyone, to get those prisoners back. Riku, however, simply snapped his fingers to conjure a Heartless. The Heartless faded into the ground, moving past Captain Hook's feet and almost tripping him, and vanished through the gap in the door.

“He'll take care of the prisoners. You worry about getting rid of the dead weight.”

Captain Hook stood there, mustache twitching. He deserved more respect than to be pushed around by a mere child like that. On the other hand...someone was wrong with that boy. And not in the usual way Captain Hook had to put up with misbehaving children.

“Peter? Peter Pan!”

“Wendy!” Peter jumped up towards the floorboards and hovered there. “Where are you? Are you alright? Are the Lost Boys with you?”

“We're all alright, but please hurry! The pirates are going to come soon!”

“Alright, I'll be right up there!”

“Wendy?” Sora asked, sounding hesitant. “Is there anyone else up there with you?”

“Well, there is another girl, but she appears to be asleep. She hasn't moved an inch.” Wendy said.

“C'mon help me get up here!” Peter exclaimed, still tugging at the loose floorboards.

“We can't fly!” Nadine snapped.

“Oh, that? Tink, can you take care of it?”

Hanna wasn't sure how bells could sound angry, but Tinkerbell in her strange language made it work.

“Oh come on!” Peter snatched Tinkerbell by the wings and shook her. Golden dust fell from her and onto the seven. Katie sneezed, scattering it.

“There! Now you can fly!” He said.

“No, now we're covered in glitter.” Hanna said. “And I've been needing a proper shower since three worlds back.”

“If you believe in yourself, you can try anything!” Peter said. “Now fly!”

From above, Wendy screamed. Peter jumped out of the way as a Shadow crawled through the floorboards and onto the floor below. Not a Shadow, Hanna realized as it grew. Dim. Or what Dim was supposed to be.

The Heartless rushed towards her. Hanna summoned one keyblade to counter it. Another to attack. The Heartless stumbled backwards, and fell forward as another Keyblade struck him from behind.

“Give me back my brother!” She roared.

The fight started. Out of the corner of her eye, Hanna could see the others scurrying up the floorboards and into where Wendy and the others were, but she didn't care. The hall was narrow, and they would have gotten in the way anyway.

The Heartless was quick, but Hanna was quicker.

The Heartless could attack hard, but not as hard as Dani.

The Heartless could attack one of them thoroughly, but that only gave the other time to strike.

The Heartless wasn't strong enough to take them together. And it knew it. It fell to the ground and crawled back towards the ceiling.

“This is the silliest battle against good and evil ever.” Nadine said.

Still, it wasn't every day you got to see a band of pirates get their beards punched off by a group of kids. The charge was led by Peter Pan, who seemed to be the oldest one in the group. He had challenged Captain Hook in what was probably the only real battle in the group; Peter soared over him and fought hook to dagger, Hook crawled through the masts and crow's nest to keep up. The others…well, the three year old with the teddy bear seemed to be doing the most damage so far, followed by the seven year old in a top hat, who managed to find a way to duel with his umbrella. Occasionally a Heartless would show up, but it was usually defeated by either Donald's or Nadine's magic.

“Hey, do you think we can steal this ship when this is over and use it instead?” Katie asked.

“And abandon the Gummi Ship?” Goofy asked.

“I've been sharing the same mattress with six other people for the last few weeks. I think it's worth it.”

“You've also been using me as a pillow.” Donald grumbled.

“You're fluffy and warm. I have no regrets.”

Nadine's eye drifted. Out from where they had escaped came the Heartless that looked like Dim, followed quickly by his sisters.

“Do you think we should go help them?” Sora asked.

“No,” Katie said, her voice gravely serious. “This is their fight.”

Just faintly, over the roar of the other fights, Nadine could hear “No it's not!”

“Oh. Then yeah, we might want to deal with that.”

Four more Keyblades joined the fight.

Seven pointed towards the Heartless.

The Heartless' head snapped back and forth, as if it were trying to figure out which one of them was less likely to break him. The answer was none of them. It settled for stepping backwards into the Darkness.

“You're stronger than I thought.” Riku spoke from above. “But I wonder how much stronger you would be if you didn't have to rely on them.”

Sora turned to him and scowled. “Riku, you're better than this. I know you are. You don't have to work with them.”

“You don't get it, do you? You're not strong enough to get Kairi's heart back.”

A portal of Darkness appeared behind Riku. Sora rushed towards him, dismissing his Keyblade so he could hold a hand towards him. Riku took a step backward. Sora jumped.

He did not fall down. In fact, he kept rising up, bits of golden dust falling off him as he did.

The portal closed before he could get there.

As it turns out, they could not keep the ship. Both the Lost Boys and the Darling family had to get back to their homeworlds, which were apparently different places. Peter had tried to explain it to her, but he seemed to rely on stars in the sky as addresses, and he was having a hard time following along with the disappearing sky. Nadine did not want to tell him why it was missing. Peter had declared himself captain, and while he looked decidedly foppish in Captain Hook's hat, he didn't look nearly as foppish as Captain Hook himself.

“Alright, James,” Nadine said as she dragged the former captain by his jacket. “Tell me what we want to know, and we won't throw you overboard until we're over Neverland.”

Hook twitched. “Alright, alright, just get me away from that beast!”

As someone who grew up in Florida, Nadine could respect a healthy fear of crocodiles. Hook, on the other hand, took it to another level. He shook like a leaf in a hurricane, and every time he heard so much as a clock tick, he would jump. That, unfortunately, was frequently.

“I thought I was the bad cop.” Katie said.

“I thought forced in-terror-gation was bad.” John Darling said.

“It is, so don't watch.” Nadine answered.

Wendy helped turn her brothers and Katie around.

Hook took a breath to prepare himself. It didn't help all that much, but it got him talking. “They're heading for a world called Hollow Bastion. Maleficent's plan involves bringing together seven maidens of pure hearts. Supposedly that'll give her great power, but I don't know how.”

“She didn't tell you the whole plan?” Nadine asked.

“I don't think she told anyone the whole plan.” Hook said. “The boy seems to think it'll allow him to bring back the girl, but I don't know.”

Nadine took a minute to process that. “And Hollow Bastion?”

“Never been to it. I'll be surprised if it's an actual world or just some rock Maleficent found floating in space.”

“The word you're thinking of is meteor.” Nadine said. “Thanks for the help; we'll be sure to throw you into the Mermaid Lagoon.”

She gestured to the two boys in matching raccoon costumes to take him to the brig.

Sora hadn't moved for a long time. He leaned against the port-bow, watching the clouds underneath drift past.

And Hanna wasn't sure what to do about it.

She, Peter, Donald and Goofy had watched him for some time, not sure what to say to him or if they should try. Hanna had settled for standing next to him, a silent reminder that she was with him no matter what. Donald and Goofy had settled for whispering to themselves in voices that weren't quite whispers.

“I still can't believe it.” He muttered at last.

“Sora, I--”

“I flew. I actually flew!” Sora looked up, and Hanna saw all the lights in his eyes turn on. “I can't wait to tell Kairi! I wonder if she'll believe me...Probably not.”

Hanna let out a breathy laugh in relief. She was not sure she could handle watching Sora break down.

“You can take her to Neverland!” Peter said. “Then, she can try it herself!”

“Sure, we've already broken every other rule about world order.” Donald said.

“There's so much I want to tell her, about flying, about the pirates, about everything that's happened!” Sora continued.

Silence fell between them, for it could not fly. Sora's excitement dimmed a bit.

“If you believe, you can do anything, right?” Sora said. “So do you think...we'll be able to get Kairi's heart back?”

Hanna wasn't quite sure the answer to that. “Yes,” she said, because she did not want to accept no as an answer.

“And your brother?”

“Of course.” Hanna said.

Another pause.

“What about Riku?” She asked.

Sora looked unsure. “I don't know if I can justify Riku's actions anymore. But he's still my friend, and he's just as much a victim of the Heartless as anyone.”

“Well,” Goofy said. “We'll just haveta find a way ta help him too!”

“Alright, everybody, set course!” Katie announced as she joined them.

Peter jumped to the wheel. “Where to?”

“Uh, no, we're heading out.” Nadine clarified, and gestured to the seven of them.

“Where to?” Hanna asked.

“Where Maleficent is hiding out. Hollow Bastion.”

Author's Note: I've always liked the idea of Peter Pan more than the actual work. Not even getting into the racism, it always felt a little too "child logic"-y for me. I like the aesthetics and the worldbuilding fine, just not the content. Although one of my favorite high school theater experiences was when my brother was in a production of Peter Pan (I think he was Smee? Definitely one of the pirates) and the final battle at the end was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen on stage. It was the very definition of high school theater experience. I think that's what Peter Pan excels at: loosely connected shenanigans.

We're in the final stretch for this story now! The next two chapters are the finale! There will still be two sequels that will continue the story. And, you know….probably a little more.

#Fic #OCS #Simple/Clean #Dim Scott #Nadine Anderson #Katie Williams #Donald Duck #Goofy #Hanna Scott #Dani Scott #Sora #featured

0 notes

how2to18 · 7 years ago

Link

PREGNANCY IS APOCALYPTIC, or it can be. There’s something both utterly mundane and completely shocking about bringing another human being into the world, and the process of adjusting to a new life — in both senses of the phrase — is challenging for many mothers, whether they admit it or not. Of course, many start out as tender, maternal people and experience few significant personality changes. But for others, the birth of a baby is the destruction of one way of life, one way of being, and the start of another. It’s a complete shift in worldview, a remaking of identity, a transformation that ripples out from the personal to the social and political. Meanwhile, for babies, their mothers or caregivers are their entire world, a governing force that controls all aspects of life. But what if suddenly women were giving birth to babies that emerged as some regressed, earlier form of human? Society as we know it would surely collapse.

That is the central, wonderful premise of Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God. As the novel opens, we’re devolving, though it’s not a straight or linear path backward. After all, as the narrator, 32-year-old mother-to-be Cedar Hawk Songmaker, points out, evolution was intuited from many different pieces of evidence, and it’s been known to push species sideways as much as it has forward. Additionally, our devolution, as Erdrich imagines it, is not merely biological, it’s political and social, as well. But what the reader might expect to be a dark and brooding story is instead frequently flush with knowing hilarity. The novel promises to be both apocalyptic and dystopian, but it takes its time getting there. The literary mixes with the colloquial, as in Erdrich’s other fiction (Love Medicine, The Round House), but the colloquial has the edge. Structured as letters written by a mother to her unborn child during a critical point in history, the novel is among the author’s most accessible works of fiction.

Cedar is the letter-writing mother whose contemporary, slightly forced humor colors the novel. She’s a Native or part-Native woman adopted by white Minneapolis progressives Sera and Glen. She notes, “Although I’ve seen Sera eat a gas-station hot dog once, and many years ago Glen had an affair with a Retro Vinyl Record Shop clerk that nearly tore the family apart, they are happily married vegans.” Throughout, Erdrich mocks Sera and Glen for being the sort of people who congratulate themselves for “how good their track record is on political idiocies and wars and natural disasters.” They see political trouble coming, and they are right. Since evolution is going backward, the government is taking an intrusive interest in pregnant women and the condition of their babies.

When Cedar describes her childhood as an adoptee, she notes, “I was rare, maybe part wild, I was the star of my Waldorf grade school.” Once she went to college with other indigenous people, however, she became ordinary. Unlike the other indigenous students, she had no struggles and stopped going to class. She explains, “I’d been a snowflake. Without my specialness, I melted.”

As the novel begins, Sera gives Cedar a letter from her biological mother, an Ojibwe woman named Mary Potts. Cedar learns that her Native family has “no special powers or connections with healing spirits or sacred animals,” and is, in fact, bourgeois. One set of relatives even owns a Superpumper gas station. Pissed off, Cedar thinks, “Who are the Potts to suddenly decide to be my parents? Worse, who are they to have destroyed the romantic imaginary Native parents I’ve invented from earliest childhood, the handsome ones with long, both-sided braids, who died in some vague and suitably spiritual Native way […]?”

Still, because of her pregnancy — the baby is due on a date of symbolic importance: December 25 — she drives out to meet her birth mother, who goes by “Sweetie.” As she approaches the reservation, Cedar is welcomed by a huge sign that reads “Future Home of the Living God,” and once inside she meets Sweetie’s boyfriend Eddy, an endearing writer. Like several others in the novel, he’s reminiscent of an E. L. Doctorow character — artless and naïve, or self-deluded, yet also weirdly knowledgeable. He “doesn’t have the modern sort of depression” that can be “treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,” and he has written a manuscript that’s more than 3,000 pages long.

Eddy likes theorizing about the world, and he’s the first person to whom Cedar discloses her pregnancy. When Cedar asks him what he thinks is going to happen, the following exchange takes place.

“Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we’ll keep adapting.”

“But the world is going to pieces.”

“It is always going to pieces.”

“This is different.”

“It is always different. We’ll adapt.”

After meeting her biological family, which includes her drug-addict half-sister Little Mary and her wise Native grandmother Mary, Cedar returns home to the father of her unborn baby, Phil, and hints of dystopia start emerging. Looking at Cedar’s ultrasound, her OB-GYN notes that every part of the fetus is perfect. He tells Cedar she should leave, and though she’s initially confused by the warning, it turns out that the government is searching for any pregnant women carrying babies that are not devolving.

Once Cedar’s pregnancy starts to show, she cannot go out, even to shop for food. She becomes confined to the house and has to construct a secret food cache in the basement. Her progressive parents disappear from their house, and fake people with fake smiles and gentle voices move into it. She cries over all the “wonderful, normal times” that she’s eaten crackers and cheese with parents or friends. The government is taken over by the Church of the New Constitution, which conducts surveillance through her computer. It turns on by itself and says, “Hello dear, this is Mother. How are you tonight? I am worried. We don’t seem to be communicating very well.”

It’s end times.

Reading the first 50 pages, with all their satire and humor, I was humming R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” But as the novel progressed, I came to understand that it would be grimmer than other dystopian novels I’d read and, because of its recognizable ordinariness at the outset, more terrifying.

Indeed, events grow steadily more horrifying and visceral — in one memorable scene, Cedar is forced to crush and kill rats to keep them from swarming a stillborn baby. But as the action grows more intense, the government’s will becomes increasingly baroque, simultaneously over- and under-explained. Why are people trying to escape to California? Why is the government targeting Minneapolis? Why are the news anchors all white? How does Mother appear in computers in which the power has died? These questions need not be answered, of course, and the supernatural elements in the basic premise provide Erdrich some freedom. But the way in which these questions are raised and then just as quickly dropped feels rushed rather than intense and mysterious.

Somehow, in a fortuitous blast of pregnancy hormones, Cedar remains optimistic through the darkest of times. But Future Home fully conveys the intensity of pregnancy during an apocalypse — if it can feel harrowing for an individual mother in normal circumstances, how much more earth-shattering must it be when you’re carrying one of the last fully evolved humans? The conceit of a mother writing to her unborn child is well executed, and the nature of impending motherhood is handled with care and accuracy. Cedar notes, “I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick and glorious.” This spirit of looking at the world as a source of amazement, as being pregnant with possibility, rather than with sorrow or wistfulness, permeates the book. The tone shifts from frank and satiric to philosophical and tender but rarely sinks into the deeply melancholic voice that we’ve come to expect from the genre.

Designing a fully realized dystopia that speaks to the present moment is an ambitious and challenging feat of world building. Although the novel is slow to move into a dystopian register, the newly oppressive governmental institutions Erdrich fashions for Future Home make sense. The reader can easily imagine how our current government, which is already obsessed with controlling women’s reproductive systems, would become even more intrusive when there is a premium on “normal” babies.

The immediate comparison is to Margaret Atwood’s similarly hellish masterwork The Handmaid’s Tale, but the two novels have quite different political viewpoints. Given the Trump Era rise in reactionary conservatism, Atwood’s storytelling may seem eerily of-the-moment to those watching the Hulu television show based on the novel. However, the novel was published in 1985 — it was Atwood’s insightful response to what was happening politically during a decade that was crucial to the advance of the Christian right. Catholic right-to-life organizations had made Roe v. Wade a significant political issue by 1976, former Southern Baptist minister Pat Robertson was calling abortion a “theological matter,” and it was taken up as a pet cause by Evangelicals who came together to form the Moral Majority. Atwood’s novel simply takes the Moral Majority and pushes its beliefs to their logical end: a violent theocracy. She plainly modeled Serena Joy after pro-life conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, who said in 1977, “Women find their greatest fulfillment at home with the family.”

The Handmaid’s Tale has an elegiac atmosphere, a longing for a yesteryear in which secular democracy, rather than theocracy, was the social norm. In Atwood’s dystopia are the seeds of a utopia. The novel sets as its ideal a time prior to the seizing of political power by Evangelical fanatics. It’s unforgettable partly because the narrator, the handmaid Offred, turns ordinary secular details like shampoo into objects of visionary poetry imbued with a loss and sorrow that pervades the entire work. This poetry of the everyday is shared by notable contemporary dystopian novels such as Laura van den Berg’s Find Me (2015), which touches on the search for a mother, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), as well as arthouse films such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). Everything social and political that is frightening in Atwood’s universe is intensified through lovely references to the utterly banal. Look at what you could lose, her novel seems to say.

Future Home shares the intensity of Handmaid’s Tale but doesn’t dissolve into melancholy. It cannot be read as an elegy for a lost world the way Atwood’s novel can. Cedar’s moral and religious worldview is different from that of the more liberal narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale. For instance, Cedar writes a Catholic newsletter, and this is in line with the book’s choice to treat her unborn fetus as a person, a potential recipient of all her letters. Perhaps Erdrich’s approach to what is dystopian arises from her different starting point — our existing world is not a utopia, and Erdrich will not pretend that it is.

Unlike Atwood, Erdrich uses banal imagery — particularly food and pregnancy, but also snot and technology — to generate a surreal sensation. She evokes the feeling of crazy end times by showing how institutions have gone completely haywire even as most sensory objects are experienced and sought after in the same way. In one scene, for example, Cedar is out getting a Subway sandwich when she sees the police seize a pregnant woman and her husband off the street, leaving their child to be swallowed up by a crowd. Cedar writes, “This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.” Erdrich captures the flavor of our Trumpian reality perfectly.

Future Home also shares literary DNA with P. D. James’s reproduction-focused dystopian novel The Children of Men (1992), though the latter is set in England. James uses fertility issues as a launch pad for concerns about totalitarianism. In the novel, the last baby was born in 1995, and by 2021 humans are on the brink of extinction. The narrator’s cousin is the Warden of England, and his critics view him as a despot. He’s a paternalistic force who purportedly acts out of concern for order but actually seeks to retain and enforce power. A subplot about a baby’s paternity echoes and reinforces the larger plot’s commentary on the rise of a tyrant, which is rendered authentic through James’s use of real history and politics — heretofore run by men, by fathers — to inform her narrative.

Instead of a masculine-centered totalitarianism that can be read as paternalism run amok, Erdrich imagines the government of Future Home as a creepy mother. As it acts to control the reproduction of Cedar and other pregnant women, the government explicitly projects itself as “Mother” — soft, maternal, concerned. But it’s a mother that desires control, a mother who may seem nurturing and progressive but is really just as autocratic as a traditional father figure. Where James’s paternity subplot clarifies her vision of totalitarianism, Erdrich’s government-as-creepy-mother framework muddles hers. It feels like a literary attack on a progressive vision of government, especially when juxtaposed with the lightly mocking satire directed at Cedar’s progressive, white, adoptive parents.

There is a conceptual basis for Erdrich’s decision to make her intrusive government maternal and solicitous, or falsely nurturing. As the linguist George Lakoff has pointed out in multiple books, including Moral Politics (1996), we tend to understand nation metaphorically as family. Traditionally, the left and right wings in this country have held ideological worldviews that can be understood as two different family models. Within this framework, progressives are identified with a nurturant parent model in which empathy is crucial and children become self-reliant with the help of caregivers, often mothers. In contrast, conservatives subscribe to a strict father model, which positions the father of a traditional nuclear family as the primary protector of children and sole authority devising rules of behavior and providing enforcement. Thus, one group sees the role of government as nurturing and supporting its citizens while the other sees it as an enforcer of rules and order, nothing more.

The text of Future Home drives toward the idea that a nurturing, progressive vision of government could and would lead to an abuse of control just as the strict father model does. This may, as an abstraction or in a historical vacuum, be true. Humans of any gender have within them the capacity to abuse whatever power they get. However, our real-world experience shows that most of what we know about how abuse of power plays out corresponds to a right-wing, authoritarian, strict father worldview (think Nazi Germany). The Children of Men gets this exactly right. The nurturant parent model, on the other hand, has only ever partially been implemented in the United States through programs such as Social Security. It simply doesn’t, by its very definition, correspond with the idea of brute governmental force.

Moreover, Erdrich’s political intentions for the novel as expressed in her author’s note are precisely the opposite of what her text suggests. She started writing the novel in 2002 in response to what she saw as a regressive political moment — the false intelligence that went into justifying the war in Iraq and President George W. Bush’s reinstatement of the global gag rule. She revisited the novel in 2016 after Trump was elected, when it appeared that we’d circled back to the politics of 2002, only worse. In the note, she points to deaths from unsafe abortions and the newly reimposed global gag rule, writing, “I only have to look at photographs of white men in dark suits deciding crucial issues of women’s health to know the timing is right” for publication of Future Home.

But the political concepts in Future Home are not fleshed out enough to comment effectively on our current moment. The symbolic connection between mothers and power that Erdrich wants to make is handled much more thoughtfully by Octavia Butler in her strikingly prophetic 1998 novel Parable of the Talents. In Talents, a demagogue president takes control of the country by promising that he’ll make America great again. A group of his Christian Crusaders are kidnapping the children of heathens and raping women, though he formally distances himself from them. The novel’s protagonist Lauren Olamina, a cult leader whose daughter has been kidnapped by the Crusaders, desires power and influence, too. However, she’s a black woman, not a representative of the established white-nationalist government, and she’s not given to offering up fake nostalgia in an effort to gather followers. Instead, she creates her own religion by seeking out like-minded followers through conversation and discussion — in other words, she’s nurturing.

But in the end, Olamina’s daughter Larkin, who may have been brainwashed, perceives her mother as being just as frightening as the totalitarian president. Through Larkin we receive the truth that power-seekers are always, regardless of gender, capable of manipulation and abuse. This, I think, is the truth Erdrich is working toward in Future Home. But Butler’s Afrofuturist version speaks more directly to our times. Olamina is never in a position to wield the brute, oppressive force of the government — she never has the power to create apocalyptic conditions the way Future Home’s Creepy Mother regime does. She may offer a form of salvation, but it is not to be had on this Earth.

Future Home is a departure from the lush intimacy of Erdrich’s Love Medicine and the dark, unforgettable storytelling of The Round House. As a gifted author’s flawed, experimental foray into dystopian fiction, it illustrates an important distinction between dystopian writing that arises from dreams and fantasy and that which arises from observation. At Future Home’s core is a fantasy about the visceral relationship between mothers and their babies, and between humans and Mother Earth. Dreams are inexorably personal, private, and idiosyncratic. They arise more from how we feel about things than from what those things might mean apart from our feelings about them and so fall outside the shared public sphere of the political. Erdrich’s dream-like approach to dystopian fiction contrasts with that taken by Atwood, James, and Butler, who were articulating shared visions rather than private ones, those they’d extrapolated from tangible situations that could be observed by anybody in our world who was interested in looking.

In the later part of the novel, Erdrich alludes to a famous Bertolt Brecht quote: “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” In the scene, Eddy says, “Humans have always been superfluous troublemakers […] But at least we’ve got good songs.” Cedar points out that not everyone has good songs, and notes, “Mother — you know that Mother — has no song.” Eddy replies, “People sick for power have no song. But your baby is going to have a song.” Future Home functions like a song about the dark times, a blues hymn about how surreal life under Trump feels to progressives. But it’s not really a song about the specifics of our dark times. Rather, it’s a beautifully written, if imperfect, thought experiment that pushes the boundaries of reproduction-focused dystopian fiction. We may be in a historical moment that feels brutish and regressive, but it could, Erdrich suggests, be even worse.

Anita Felicelli has contributed essays and reviews to The New York Times (Modern Love), San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and The Rumpus. Her short stories have been published in The Normal School, Joyland, Kweli Journal, Eckleburg, Strangelet Journal, and The Stockholm Review.

The post Louise Erdrich’s Dystopian Dreams in “Future Home of the Living God” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2BVDxeT via IFTTT

#Blogger

0 notes

khawajagis4680-blog · 8 years ago

Text

The Inequality of Human Races This chapter talks about many concepts that I am learning about in my social theory class. Gobineau begins with describing the concept of scientific racism by stating that it is not undeveloped intellect that restrained the Huron Indian from inventing things. Instead, it was because of the "predominating influence of environment." This reminds me of the Enlightenment Era and how the Western Europeans introduced the idea of a democratic society in which all men were equal. While the Europeans continued the Transatlantic Slave Trade on the side and the justification that they gave at that time was scientific: the superior race and the inferior race. Later in the article, the author discusses how institutions no matter how damaged always look good on paper, which seems to be a perfect example of a camera obscure. Marx defined the capitalist society as a camera obscura. In other words, what we see a capitalist society to be things are the exact opposite, which is very similar to the point that Gobineau made. Johann Gottfried Fichte Addresses to the German Nation (1808) Fichte discusses how unequal distribution of power is the reason behind the oppression of one state by the other. But is it not power that is the culprit in this situation? Also, Fichte talks a lot about the interference of foreign countries and how that leads to the destruction of one's nation. Does he think that each country should be on its own? Adolf Hitler's first letter on the Jewry Hitler's letter to Gemlich mainly discusses how the Jews were strategic with preserving their race by the use of wealth, material possessions and power. What I don't understand is that he could've just exiled them from Germany, just like the Zionist partially did to the Palestinians. Why did he have to commit an ethnic cleansing of Jews? Program of the NSDAp, 24 Feb 1920 If someone read this without knowing that these are Hitler's words -minus the no Jew is a German part- he/she would think of it to be a plan that works for the people of their country. For others this a right nationalist movement just like the one that is going on in France at present where they want to cleanse France of any minorities. Also, many Americans would perceive them to be the words of Pres. Donald Trump. Goebbels at Nuremberg- 1934 I cannot believe that Goebbels is using what happened to Germany as an excuse for what Germany did to the Jews. On a more contemporary level, if Israel uses the Holocaust to justify what it is doing to Palestine that would not make any sense. It makes them no better than the Germans. Also, I like when he discusses how propaganda can work as a tool for social change but it is a gradual process and it will take its time. Benito Mussolini: What is Fascism, 1932 It is a little surprising that Mussolini converted from being a passionate socialist to becoming a fascist dictator. I cannot grasp this paradigm shift that took place in his life. In class, we learned that the end game of capitalism is fascism but how can it become the end game of socialism? Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism (1932) Mussolini's explanation of fascism is in close relation to nationalism. Similarly, Hitler used the same grounds for the creation of a Nationalist Republic, and he used the nation- which is in our heart- to emotionally get people involved in the genocide of Jews. Also, this article describes all the things that are used to support fascist administration; religion, ethno nationalism, lack of individualism. The best part about these readings is that they make way more sense because of their relation to today's world. From Caligari to Hitler This was an impressive montage to watch but as is mentioned that it is a psychological history of the German Film makes me think about the psychological explanation behind the sense of nationalism or is it the process of hypnotizing that drives people to be dictated by an individual? M The beginning of this movie was tragic. The fact that kids would be singing songs like these were standard makes me think of all the atrocities that happen in Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan and how they darken the lives of the kids in those countries. Also, in one shot "M" was captured in the camera with a circle of knives surrounding him, and it seemed as if he fear his weapons of destruction. If we try and fix this into today's world, we can see that people that are involved in the creation of a capitalist society are very much scared of the end game of this economic system. Just like Malcolm X said in response to the assassination of President Kennedy: "chickens coming home to roost." That is what I felt that M was experiencing at that moment. Rome, Open City Pt 1 & 2 This movie is a perfect example of what we call resistance. In a carceral state, we are aware that whoever tries to challenge the Social Dominant Paradigm he/she are either murdered or are held as political prisoners. But in Rome, Open City each character symbolizes the unity that comes with the resistance. Also, Marina should have never been trusted! Karl Polanyi- The Great Transformation In the introduction, on page 38 Polanyi mentions that "that human should use instruments of democratic governance to control and direct the economy to meet our individual and collective needs." Does this mean that Polanyi has somewhat similar views to Bernie Sanders? Gramsci on Fascism Gramsci makes an excellent point in his article, Sovietize. He states that the peasants and the working people need to make sure that if and when they combine with the liberal bourgeoisie to bring down the fascist they should step away and take hold of the government before the bourgeoisie. But this confuses me when I try to identify him with any one of the Social-Political Theories.

Our Marx Gramsci understands the importance of history in the life of Marx. Also, the fact that we are all are a bit Marxist does not make sense to me because you cannot be a Marxist and talk about the oppression and not do anything about it. His theory was about working as a collective to benefit each other, but if you're a Marxist who realizes his privilege but fails to speak up about the oppression of others, then I refuse to believe that you are a Marxist. At one point in the Conquest of State, Gramsci mentions that "the existence of private property places the social minority in a privileged position and makes the struggle uneven." But is that the case? By social minority does he mean white individuals? Ezra Pounds Canto In XLV, it seems like Pounds had a difficult time accepting "usury" in the modern world. In this part, he focuses on comparing the past with the contemporary world, which highlights the fact that he realizes the impact of capital on peoples' lives. He gives an example of an artist and mentions how he would never have been able to survive in a world that valued money more than the beauty of art. This poem evidently depicts Pounds fascination with history.

The Futurist Manifesto After this, I was just angry. I understand that technological progress has been beneficial for us, but if this progress is to happen at the expense of the lives of others and the Earth then that is not progress! I was disgusted by what they mentioned in point 9, " We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman." This will not get Marinetti a future. Instead, he will end up destroying his chance at an actual life.

Cultural Criticism and Society Theodor Adorno did an impressive job with explaining the concept of critical theory. The criticism styles; transcendent and immanent as he describes are styles critiquing culture from within and outside. Adorno also discusses how "professional critics were first of all "reporters": they oriented people in the market for intellectual products." This to me seemed fascinating because it appears that such exposure led the critics to have insights on society in a different manner.

Paul Celan As mentioned in class, Celan's work is difficult to understand because of the deep symbolic value of each and every word that he has used to describe the conditions in which the Jews were living. Death Fugue gave me goosebumps. He describes drinking "black milk," which at first I thought symbolized the lives of the mothers that had been murdered and who could no longer feed their children milk but then it also made me think he might be talking about the un-nourishing life that he lived in the concentration camps. Celan's work has torn me, and it brings back the feelings that one gets when they see Chemical Bombs thrown at Syrian civilians.

The Beach Beneath the Street Wark's work was refreshing to read. In other words, this book was more like a biography of people, but the one thing that connected them all was the Situational Internationalist Movement.

0 notes