#are you actually trying to make some kind of intelligent commentary on the themes and motifs

[rxttenfish]

see, people will often talk about more complex meanings in narratives and what was actually being intended by the author, but the thing is, sometimes you read the entire damn thing and you legitimately cant tell if theyre trying to make some kind of comment or narrative choice, or if the author themself just fucked up and didnt realize what theyre doing.

[sentienttoastah]

Someone mentioned in the reblogs of the last post about their preferred interpretation of Moby Dick and after seeing that I had a little personal thought discussion of my own in my brain and like ahahsjsjs it made me so happy

I just love looking at this book in a more serious way than I usually do so thank you to whoever that was :)

And speaking of, I think from now on I’ll give actual (only occasional!) literary commentary on Moby Dick for these Daily Dick posts because I cannot discuss this book with anyone else except the internet so yes. But for the sake of those who only want to see funky whale drawings I will keep them under the post’s cuts!!

Plus if I didn’t the post would be ungodly long.

Today, I tried to draw a bit of the crew but then I remembered I suck at drawing humans so even more extremely and unnecessarily green shaded Moby instead. Didn’t have much time so I just gave that fella the Outlast camcorder filter treatment. Dw, the cameraman is fine. Don’t like how this turned out though :(

I want to draw whale skeletons tomorrow :D

Anyways, delusional whale ranting time. Be warned this is way longer than my last one and will contain spoilers for those who haven’t finished the book!

So the reblog tag I saw went along the lines of interpreting Moby Dick as not a god but to have the reader doubt that fact throughout the book until the end because of the descriptions we get of him and honestly, yes. I absolutely agree on that for the original novel. It gives us dread while reading!!

Although I will say that if we were to add/accept some kind of mysticism to Moby Dick and see him as not only a whale and as something else, he still wouldn’t be a “god”. Yet at the same time he isn’t exactly a whale either. Or at least not a normal one (that much is clearly obvious I suppose). Like if that’s not a god then what is a god? And if that’s not a whale what is it? It’s all vague!!

One of the many messages or themes in Moby Dick is humanity’s constant struggle against the unknown and the uncertain. We all fear the unknown in one way or another whether we realise it or not. Why else do we dread our future? Or what will happen tomorrow? Or what will happen after death? Because we don’t know.

With Moby Dick we understand that he’s described as a massive white whale who is known to wreak havoc among sailors. But aside from that what else do we actually know about Moby? The only information we get about him all come from 3rd party sources (such as that other whaling crew they met at chapter 54) and then through Ishmael as our narrator. Like Ishmael himself has only encountered Moby Dick once. How do we know if the information he got from others is true?

And even if it was true it still doesn’t tell us a lot about Moby Dick. We don’t understand why he attacks ships, was he angry? Was he in pain? Was it his own form of revenge? Or was he genuinely just trying to mind his own business? We don’t understand how he became so intelligent, or whether it really was Moby Dick that they saw in the apparitions of chapter 51 or was it just a squid like we see in a later chapter? If it was Moby why was he following them?

The vagueness of Moby Dick’s position in being either whale or something else makes him haunting. So in my own interpretation I’d say to keep the final verdict completely undecided. He appears, then disappears. As only one of the many horrors of the deep. Moby Dick isn’t a horror book by any means but it is about the ocean, the ocean just so happens to be scary because we haven’t truly discovered everything it has to offer. Who knows what’s down there?

Also, not only the fear or mystery he gives to us as the readers but to the crew in the story as well. Moby Dick took victory from doing what other whales the crew have hunted never do. He was “unpredictable” as described. That wraps back to the beginning where I mentioned humanity’s struggles against the unknown and uncertain. But yet, even when we fear what we don’t know we are constantly challenging it still. We’re intrigued by it. Ishmael does so by wanting to learn more about whales and go off on more voyages despite his experience the first time around, and the pequod crew or most notably Ahab does so by challenging Moby Dick.

Speaking of Ahab, he himself can also be compared to Moby Dick’s unpredictability. He might not be vaguely god-like as Moby is, but there’s definitely something about him. Ishmael even quotes something about a mad man, a man who has let go of all rationality and morality, to be more dangerous than any beast. Why? Because he will become an unpredictable man. A man who will do anything to get what he desires even at the cost of others. Which is exactly what Ahab does. Humans are already dangerous enough when we understand them but when we don’t understand them? Even more dangerous no doubt.

That’s why his crew feared him after all. They didn’t know and nor did they want to know what would happen if they disobeyed him. Even Ahab doesn’t understand himself as he mentioned in the chapter with Starbuck. Why does he do the things he do? For revenge? For glory? For gold? He doesn’t understand except the fact he knows (or feels?) he has to. And it’s tragic.

In conclusion; aside from accepting differences, democracy, and the dangers of unhealthy obsession or copious amounts of whale anatomy, Moby Dick is also about the unknown and the uncertain. There’s a lot of other instances like Starbuck’s hesitation and Fedallah’s entire existence but I don’t want to drag out the rant for too long and obviously I’m not the first person to come up with this.

But what do you think? And thank you to anyone who actually read all my crap frfr 🙏🐟

[nightcoremoon]

somehow the boys managed to fuck up its narrative harder than both marvel AND dc did, by trying too hard to just be a modernized watchmen, but stumbling over its own dick at the last second by making literally all of its characters the dumbest morons who ever lived and following the exact footsteps of thirteen reasons why. trying to redeem the rapist by giving him a sad backstory? CHECK. forgetting that the catalyst of the main protagonist is the dead girlfriend whose ghost showing up was a central tenet of the core narrative before that entire plotline was scrapped because the new girl came along? CHECK. fourth season ruined by Super Smart Black Girl being a complete nuisance? CHECK. potentially grounded themes and hyperrealism and kinda intelligent social commentary absolutely fucking buried underneath a mountain of tasteless schlock thrown in to be marketably ~edgy~? CHECK. bad acting? …okay you got me there.

don’t get me wrong, the actors are fucking amazing. they performed their parts PERFECTLY. some of the best acting you will ever see in your life. 90% of the writing is excellent.

then the other 10% is the stupidest trash you’ve ever heard.

tell me why I feel more sad about a fucking octopus than I do about half the main cast getting thanos’d because they are obviously not gonna break the number one golden rule of screenwriting which is NO ON SCREEN BODY MEANS NO DEATH for anything but a literal actual baby because the number two golden rule of screenwriting is nobody wants to see a dead baby. rammstein almost got sued because their third album is a dead baby. and I can’t take the dead baby seriously because superman melted a woman’s face with his eyeball lasers, and there was no discretion shot. just straight up gore porn. it doesn’t even look good, the cgi is SO BAD.

MORTAL KOMBAT 9 HAS BETTER GORE EFFECTS AND IT’S 13 FUCKING YEARS OLD.

the show would be better if there was no sex or gore. you have to be a very special kind of shitty to accomplish that.

the social commentary started off great and then it had all the subtlety of a brick to the face, except the brick is on fire soaked with hydrochloric acid and filled with nitroglycerin and launched out of a cannon on the ISS at 200 miles per hour, and the face is an active fucking volcano. resident evil 5 was less on the nose. Chris Punched a Fucking Boulder. Homelander Is Literally Donald Trump. Republicans Are Bad. And Racist. And Misogynist. And Secretly Gay And Kinky. Rape Is Funny When It Happens To Men, Right? fuck off.

like yeah I agree with you (on some of it) but you don’t think that maybe you entered the realm of Tasteless about a season and a half before the Literal Actual Orgy Episode?

i almost don’t give a shit about season 5. what can they possibly do to untuck themselves from the corner they fucked themselves into by completely sabotaging the character of basically the entire fucking cast except for the main villain who turns out to be the Secret True Protagonist all along. they wanna try SO HARD to be watchmen but they can’t even do that right because they ruined the premise in season one. there are no real superheros; nobody was born charles xavier or erik lensherr, everybody was grown in a lab. every mutant is wolverine. oh no it’s just another aluminum foil hat series. womp womp. Government Bad. we get it. 🙄

[thefledglingdm]

Umm can I request directors commentary for literally any Leopika fic you’ve written??? Love your stuff!

❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

ahhahaha thank you so much! yes, absolutely! this is going to be long, because i have decided to do that scene in light of my life, pain of my ass. beware LONG BULLSHIT and spoilers below the cut!

ok to set the scene. i was TERRIFIED to write this part. because this is the climax, you know? we've had 150k words of build-up and emotional tension to this scene. while this has been a romantic story, this is the actual climax of the story. we've spent all this time in kurapika's head as he's dealt with his anxiety, his need for control, his fear of letting go. how he's changed as he's opened up his heart and his life to people outside. and finally he's actually working through all of his emotions and the progress he's made out loud, in front of everyone. and because he forgot about giving his speech until like five minutes before (sorry, kp), he is forced to speak from the heart.

For five agonizing seconds, Kurapika stood alone in the middle of a silent room. Above him, the string lights coalesced into a single shared point of soft white light that illuminated his space.

i so wish this could be adapted to, like, netflix or made into a movie. i put so much into this imagery. the play on light? the cinnamon topography? *chef's kiss* yes please netflix CALL ME.

Everyone in his life was staring at him expectantly, Pairo and Altair and Gon and Killua and Nanika and Alluka and Kalluto and his parents. And approximately a hundred other people on top of that, extended family on both sides, industry insiders, coworkers. All staring at him and waiting for him to say something amazing and powerful and deep about love and what did Kurapika know about love, anyway? He was a thirty-two year old trans man so terrified of his own emotions, so paralyzed by his fear of loss, that he did not figure out he was in love with his best friend until three weeks ago.

this is me screwing the knife in deeper for poor kurapika, sorry. this is so incredibly horrifying for a person with anxiety, as someone with anxiety. behold, the terrifying ordeal of being known.

Five seconds. Kurapika finally found Leorio standing near the back, leaning against the bar. He wondered if Leorio picked the same spot where they sat together the very first time they came here on purpose. Leorio sent him a wink and a thumbs-up.

the terrifying ordeal of being known and being so, so loved anyway. it was great to write in a way that showed leorio realized he was in love with kurapika first (indeed, realized that kurapika was in love with him before kurapika knew himself), because these little interactions shows so much how leorio is inviting and allowing kurapika to come to him on his own time. and supporting him the whole way, because they are friends!!!!

Breathe, Kurapika thought. Just breathe. It’s going to be okay.

this statement was not supposed to be a running theme/motif, but i'm super glad it did! i wrote it as a one-off line for melody, but then i was like, hang on, that's kinda good? every other time i write i'm like, hey, you could make a theme out of this!

“Um,” Kurapika started, his voice cracking. Christ, he sounded seventeen again. He cleared his throat.

my friends told me about how their voices changed and dropped on T. any trans person is stronger and more powerful than any us marine.

“For those of you who may not know, I’m Pairo’s brother. Kurapika. His older one, just to be clear.”

this is definitely something that has happened like a hundred times.

There was a smattering of chuckles around the room. He twisted to look at Pairo. “I’ve known Pairo since he was a toddler dragging a ragged, threadbare T-Rex plushie around behind him. I was there when he read his first chapter book on his own – Dino Hunter, of course – because he came bursting into my room at two o’clock in the morning to tell me about it.” Another round of laughter. “I was there when he got his first notebook, when he won his first writing contest, when he was published in his first magazine. I was the first person he told about liking boys instead of girls. I’ve watched him grow and learn and fall in love. And now Altair is part of our family, too.”

pairo and kurapika's lives as brothers were amazing. dino hunter is a reference to the book they both read in the manga that led to kurapika wanting to leave the kurta and explore the world.

i also thought that writing fit pairo well because it's a pretty accessible career for his eyes. he could type, he could enhance the screen and font when he needed, and he could do talk-to-type. one day i want to write a side-story of when pairo and altair met, because i have it perfectly formulated in my head and it's adorable.

Kurapika took a deep breath, tucking a lock of hair behind his ear. He confessed, “To be perfectly honest, I was scared when Pairo asked me to do this, because I’ve run out of things to teach him. He’s run on ahead of me in life. Settled down, moved in with his boyfriend – now husband, congratulations on that by the way – and gotten married, while I’m perpetually single and living alone in my loft apartment with an absolutely spoiled monster of a cat. Stop laughing, that wasn’t supposed to be a joke.”

emperor the cat was also not intended to be a character. i came up with him like, right before i started writing the chapter.

i think it was hard for kurapika to watch his brother fall in love and move on ahead in life. even if he was genuinely happy for them both. i had a conversation with a coworker a few months ago where we both talked about how we feel like we are "behind," even though we're both very accomplished. she felt like she was "behind" because i have a master's degree; i felt like i was "behind" because she was happily married and already had a child on the way (who is here and beautiful and perfect). and i imagine kurapika wondered if he was falling behind or missing something when he saw his brother succeed in love and business without really trying.

but there's no competition at all, of course. the world spins on, and we grow and change and find our place in our own time. there's no race.

The room quieted again. Kurapika went on, his eyes flicking over the crowd. He was starting to smile, too, now.

he's starting to realize this is okay, he's not going to mess up, he may actually have something worthwhile to say or share. he's getting more comfortable in all this.

“But I’m also a wedding planner – I know, ironic – and I’ve learned a lot about love from my clients. So if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share some of those lessons now.”

No one from the back shouted at him to shut the fuck up, that he didn’t have a single clue what he was talking about, so he thought he was safe to carry on.

how funny would that have been??? like, it would have been fucked-up and humiliating, but in any other situation?? hilarious. just killua looking like that dude in mean girls being like HE DOESN'T EVEN GO HERE except it's like HE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW WHAT LOVE IS.

He thought back to Light of My Life’s various couples, musing over their own rocky paths to the altar and the beautiful, fractured glimpses into their lives they gifted Kurapika and his team. What did they teach him? What did they teach his heart, that terrifying, terrified lump of meat frantically beating in his chest?

More than you think, his heart seemed to be telling him. Trust me; I will guide you through this. Trust me, trust me, trust me.

*"listen to your heart" plays in the background*

also like. trusting oneself and your perceptions and your feelings and your heart is so necessary. it's an important part of healing. and being honest with yourself and your feelings is part of a foundation for all healthy relationships, i think.

also i really like writing alliteratively. the play on words with "terrifying, terrified" was. inspired? terrifying, because kurapika for a long time feared his own heart and feelings, viewing them as a loss of control; and terrified, because his heart is afraid, too. and they are taking this leap together!

And Kurapika explained: “Love isn’t just found in eloquent professions or grand, romantic gestures. It’s supporting each other through your lowest, worst moments and coming out the other side stronger for it. It’s standing together, hand in hand, against the world. It’s in looking at someone simply existing in the world and seeing them as they are: good, beautiful, strong, intelligent, kind. It’s in your communication and your foundation and trusting that all good things will come together in time. It’s in the family that you build together. It’s in the work you each put in to get through the hard times. Together.”

me: yeah uh-huh jj you really did summarize the fic so far.

this is also where i started being sappy and thinking about love. friendly and romantic love. the love i've seen in my friends, the love i feel myself in my relationships.

There. That’s what his clients taught him. Menchi and Buhara; Morena and Theta; Pokkle and Ponzu; Knov and Morel; Knuckle and Shoot; Canary and Amane. But so many more people showed him what love was. He pictured Pairo and Altair on his couch, laughing at him and judging him and helping him put his own puzzle-piece heart together into something cohesive and beautiful. He smiled at his brothers and saw the way they were clutching each others hands, mouths beaming and eyes dewy.

they LOVE their brother so MUCH. their view of the outside looking in for the past year, watching kurapika fall in love, go soft, be happier than they've ever seen him.

He told them, “It’s in the way you can communicate in gestures and looks, and sometimes, without looking at all. It’s in banter and private jokes and finishing each other’s sentences. It’s in casual touches and... pouring their coffee before your own.”

my coffee is never as good as when my partner makes it. my honey-lemon tea is never as good as it is when my partner makes it. my jokes are never as funny as they are when my partner and i finish each other's sentences, build off of each other's quips. we can communicate across rooms with nothing but a look. these little signs of love are everywhere and expressed in so many tiny ways. these examples here are between people in romantic relationships, but these apply to platonic friendships as well.

His eyes swept the room and found Killua and Gon. Gon had his camera hefted onto one shoulder, and Killua stood behind him, arms around his waist and chin on his shoulder. “It’s on the first day you wake up and realize the way you look at the world has changed. The way you open your hands and your heart and give what you have, simply for the joy of being received.”

to love? transcendent. to be loved? incandescent. to love and know that it is valued and cherished and requited?

and this was a callback to killua talking about, of course, how he fell in love with gon like melting ice. like sinking into a bath. and this was also a quieter callback to how gon fell in love. because it wasn't just that he had/has so much love to give, but because for the first time in his life, he got to see it truly received. accepted.

Kurapika saw Killua’s breath catch and Gon’s hand flex over the fingers interlaced over his middle. Heedless of their surroundings and of the running camera, Gon twisted to kiss Killua on the mouth.

SMOOCHES ahahaha!

He turned his head back to Leorio. The man had not moved; indeed, he looked like he was nailed to the floor. His eyes were so intense as they watched him that Kurapika was almost surprised he had not yet burst into flame. Kurapika said, “It’s in the moment you see someone you’ve never met before, but you look at them and just know, to your core, that this is really going to be something.”

leorio realizing something is happening here. something huge is about to happen, is about to change. and he's trying so hard not to dare to hope it might be good. it might be everything.

A chorus of oohs went around the room. Even from this distance Kurapika saw the way Leorio’s face went red, and he ducked his chin, looking bashful and embarrassed.

leorio: holy shit holy shit holy SHIT IT'S HAPPENINGGGG

How was I such a fool before, Kurapika wondered, How was I so blind, so willfully ignorant and oblivious. How did it take me so long to realize you were talking about me. I’m sorry it took me so long to get here. I’m sorry I made you wait for so long.

this is important because it's not just kurapika realizing and accepting his feelings for leorio. this is kurapika's version of realizing that leorio feels the same for him. leorio is in love with him, too. and he's wondering how it was possible he was so scared and blind for so long. he fears he may have hurt leorio by holding off on this for so long, so he wants to be brave, take the leap, and see what they could be.

Kurapika did not want this man to wait another second. He did not want Leorio to spend another moment trapped in this limbo. So he confessed in the middle of a silent room in front of over a hundred people, “It's the first time you hear them laugh, and your entire world’s axis shifts beneath your feet.”

i remember the first time i met my partner. i remember the first time i looked at them and felt my world shift a little to the right. i remember falling in love and thinking that this one was unlike all the others. it was warm, golden, comforting.

Kurapika watched the confused frown on Leorio’s face when he heard that, amused by the almost puppyish tilt to his head as he considered it. He knew the moment Leorio realized what he meant when his eyes blew wide, amazed and awed and achingly soft. His lips parted.

gOD he is so CUTE. he's like oh hmm huh what does that mean

and then he remembers

i promise, he's not a huge dickwad!

and leorio laughing at gon's accidental gaffe and his sweet earnestness. and kurapika walking in. leorio realizing kurapika wanted to know him before they ever even met.

Kurapika made himself turn away from the arresting sight. “One of my favorite venues lately was the Roseview Ballroom downtown. Among its many beautiful, gaudy attractions are its murals depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s plays all across the ceiling. One is a famous quote from Twelfth Night: ‘journeys end in lovers meeting, every wise man’s son doth know.’ But the more I think about it, the less I agree.”

i'm such a WHORE for shakespeare, as any readers of mine will know. check out my modern college adaptation of much ado about nothing.

He turned to meet Pairo’s eyes again, repeating, “‘Journeys end in lovers meeting.’ But nothing is ending here. It’s just changing.”

life does not end when we start relationships! or when they end! or when we move, change jobs, graduate, go to school, drop out of school. happy endings in stories still aren't endings. the greatest constant in life is change.

“Because what I’ve learned in this job, Pairo and Altair, what nugget of wisdom I have to give you, is this. Love is looking at a world that can be terrifying, cold, capricious, and indifferent, and finding the person whose hand you want to hold through it all anyway. Because you want every laugh, every tear, every wrinkle, every spark of joy. Love is life’s greatest leap of faith, because you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. But you know exactly who you want to spend all those tomorrows with.”

me finishing this: dammit i just wrote out my wedding vows.

Kurapika looked around the room again. At Gon and Killua; at Kalluto, Nanika, and Alluka; at his parents; at his brothers. At Leorio.

He concluded, “So you simply breathe. And you trust it will be okay.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the room when Kurapika dropped the microphone.

DAMN ME TOO THIS SHIT WAS GOOD TF?????? sorry my writing has peaked here.

[paenling]

no ones saying you cant enjoy daniil? people like him as a character but mostly Because he’s an asshole and he’s interesting. the racism and themes of colonization in patho are so blatant

nobody said “by order of Law you are forbidden from enjoying daniil dankovsky in any capacity”, but they did say “if you like daniil dankovsky you are abnormal, problematic, and you should be ashamed of yourself”, so i’d call that an implicit discouragement at the least. not very kind.

regardless, he is a very interesting asshole and we love to make fun of him! but i do not plan to stop seeing his character in an empathetic light when appropriate to do so. we’re all terribly human.

regarding “the racism and themes of colonization in patho”, we’ve gotta have a sit-down for this one because it’s long and difficult. tl;dr here.

i’ve written myself all back and forth and in every direction trying to properly pin down the way i feel about this in a way that is both logically coherent and emotionally honest, but it’s not really working. i debated even responding at all, but i do feel like there are some things worth saying so i’m just going to write a bunch of words, pick a god, and pray it makes some modicum of sense.

the short version: pathologic 2 is a flawed masterwork which i love deeply, but its attempts to be esoteric and challenging have in some ways backfired when it comes to topical discussions such as those surrounding race, which the first game didn’t give its due diligence, and the second game attempted with incomplete success despite its best efforts.

the issue is that when you have a game that is so niche and has these “elevated themes” and draws from all this kind of academic highbrow source material -- the fandom is small, but the fandom consists of people who want to analyze, pathologize, and dissect things as much as possible. so let’s do that.

first: what exactly is racist or colonialist in pathologic? i’m legitimately asking. people at home: by what mechanism does pathologic-the-game inflict racist harm on real people? the fact that the Kin are aesthetically and linguistically inspired by the real-world Buryat people (& adjacent groups) is a potential red flag, but as far as i can tell there’s never any value judgement made about either the fictionalized Kin or the real-world Buryat. the fictional culture is esoteric to the player -- intended to be that way, in fact -- but that’s not an inherently bad thing. it’s a closed practice and they’re minding their business.

does it run the risk of being insensitive with sufficiently aggressive readings? absolutely, but i don’t think that’s racist by itself. they’re just portrayed as a society of human beings (and some magical ones, if you like) that has flaws and incongruences just as the Town does. it’s not idealizing or infantilizing these people, but by no means does it go out of its way to villainize them either. there is no malice in this depiction of the Kin. 

is it the fact that characters within both pathologic 1 & 2 are racist? that the player can choose to say racist things when inhabiting those characters? no, because pathologic-the-game doesn’t endorse those things. they’re throwaway characterization lines for assholes. acknowledging that racism exists does not make a media racist. see more here.

however, i find it’s very important to take a moment and divorce the racial discussions in a game like pathologic 2 from the very specific experiences of irl western (particularly american) racism. it’s understandable for such a large chunk of the english-speaking audience to read it that way; it makes sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. although it acknowledges the relevant history to some extent, on account of being set in 1915, pathologic 2 is not intended to be a commentary about race, and especially not current events, and especially especially not current events in america. it’s therefore unfair, in my opinion, to attempt to diagnose it with any concrete ideology or apply its messages to an american racial paradigm.

it definitely still deals with race, but it always, to me, seemed to come back around the exploitation of race as an ultimately arbitrary division of human beings, and the story always strove to be about human beings far more than it was ever about race. does it approach this topic perfectly? no, but it’s clearly making an effort. should we be aware of where it fails to do right by the topic? yes, definitely, but we should also be charitable in our interpretations of what the writers were actually aiming for, rather than reactionarily deeming them unacceptable and leaving it at that. do we really think the writers for pathologic 2 sat down and said “we’re going to go out of our way to be horrible racists today”? i don’t.

IPL’s writing team is a talented lot, and dybowski as lead writer has the kinds of big ideas that elevate a game to a work of art, particularly because he’s not afraid to get personal. on that front, some discussion is inescapable as pathologic 2 deals in a lot of racial and cultural strife, because it’s clearly something near to the his heart, but as i understand it was never really meant to be a narrative “about” race, at least not exclusively so, and especially not in the same sense as the issue is understood by the average American gamer. society isn't a monolith and the contexts are gonna change massively between different cultures who have had, historically, much different relationships with these concepts.

these themes are “so blatant” in pathologic 2 because clearly, on some level, IPL wanted to start a discussion. I think it’s obvious that they wanted to make the audience uncomfortable with the choices they were faced with and the characters they had to inhabit -- invoke a little ostranenie, as it were, and force an emotional breaking point. in the end the game started a conversation and i think that’s something that was done in earnest, despite its moments of obvious clumsiness. 

regarding colonialism, this is another thing that the game is just Not About. we see the effects and consequences of colonialism demonstrated in the world of pathologic, and it’s something we’re certainly asked to think about from time to time, but the actual plot/narrative of the game is not about overcoming or confronting explicitly colonialist constructs, etc. i personally regard this as a bit of a missed opportunity, but it’s just not what IPL was going for.

instead they have a huge focus, as discussed somewhat in response to this ask, on the broader idea of powerful people trying to create a “utopia” at the mortal cost of those they disempower, which is almost always topical as far as i’m concerned, and also very Russian.

i think there was some interview where it was said that the second game was much more about “a mechanism that transforms human nature” than the costs of utopia, but it’s still a persistent enough theme to be worth talking about both as an abstraction of colonialism as well as in its more-likely intended context through the lens of wealth inequality, environmental destruction & government corruption as universal human issues faced by the marginalized classes. i think both are important and intelligent readings of the text, and both are worth discussion.

both endings of pathologic 2 involve sacrifice in the name of an “ideal world” where it’s impossible to ever be fully satisfied. in the Diurnal Ending, Artemy is tormented over the fate of the Kin and the euthanasia of his dying god and all her miracles, but he needs to have faith that the children he’s protected will grow up better than their parents and create a world where he and his culture will be immortalized in love. in the Nocturnal Ending, he’s horrified because in preserving the miracle-bound legacy of his people as a collective, he’s un-personed himself to the individuals he loves, but he needs to have faith that the uniqueness and magic of the resurrected Earth was precious enough to be worth that sacrifice. neither ending is fair. it’s not fair that he can’t have both, but that’s the idea. because that “utopia” everyone’s been chasing is an idol that distracts from the important work of being a human being and doing your best in a flawed world. 

because pathologic’s themes as a series are so very “Russian turn-of-the-century” and draw a ton of stylistic and topical inspiration from the theatre and literature of that era, i don’t doubt that it’s also inherited some of its inspirational literature’s missteps. however, because the game’s intertextuality is so incredibly dense it’s difficult to construct a super cohesive picture of its actual messaging. a lot of its references and themes will absolutely go over your head if you enter unprepared -- this was true for me, and it ended up taking several passes and a bunch of research to even begin appreciating the breadth of its influences.

(i’d argue this is ultimately a good thing; i would never have gone and picked up Camus or Strugatsky, or even known who Antonin Artaud was at all if i hadn’t gone in with pathologic! my understanding is still woefully incomplete and it’s probably going to take me a lot more effort to get properly fluent in the ideology of the story, but that’s the joy of it, i think. :) i’m very lucky to be able to pursue it in this way.)

anyway yes, pathologic 2 is definitely very flawed in a lot of places, particularly when it tries to tackle race, but i’m happy to see it for better and for worse. the game attempts to discuss several adjacent issues and stumbles as it does so, but insinuating it to be in some way “pro-racist” or “pro-colonialist” or whatever else feels kind of disingenuous to me. they’re clearly trying, however imperfectly, to do something intriguing and meaningful and empathetic with their story.

even all this will probably amount to a very disjointed and incomplete explanation of how pathologic & its messaging makes me feel, but what i want -- as a broader approach, not just for pathologic -- is for people to be willing to interpret things charitably. 

sometimes things are made just to be cruel, and those things should be condemned, but not everything is like that. it’s not only possible but necessary to be able to acknowledge flaws or mistakes and still be kind. persecuting something straight away removes any opportunity to examine it and learn from it, and pathologic happens to be ripe with learning experiences. 

it’s all about being okay with ugliness, working through difficult nuances with grace, and the strength of the human spirit, and it’s a story about love first and foremost, and i guess we sort of need that right now. it gave me some of its love, so i’m giving it some of my patience.

[defilerwyrm]

For the ask meme: burning bright, anything about the parts at the table with the Nein. You write their banter so well!

FIC SPOILERS BELOW!

Burning Bright on AO3

The entire dinner scene hit me like a bolt of lightning while I was working on this fic. It started with Beau’s outburst, and then Veth’s willful denial and subsequent fit, and I built the two scenes around that.

Diving into particulars….

“Uhm,” he said, intelligently, but quickly recovered and flashed his friends a smile. “It is most impressive. Certainly a step up from a tiny hut.”

A direct reference to the name of the spell. Originally it was Leomund’s tiny hut. I have no clue why in 5e Wizards decided to 86 the attribution names on so many spells like Otiluke’s resilient sphere and Tasha’s hideous laughter. Things like that always made me curious about the (what I assume were) PCs the spells were named after. I had thought maybe it was because the characters who diegetically invented them were specific to one setting, but in that case I don’t know why Bigby’s hand is still Bigby’s but Evard’s black tentacles are no longer Evard’s. I don’t like it. As an aside, Widowgast’s Nascent Nein-Sided Tower is, mechanically speaking, Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion. Anyway. Moving on!

It was delectable that Caleb wanted to impress him.

This boy hungry and not just for soup

Flustered, Essek tried to fend them off, but it was Caleb that did him in. It was always Caleb. The human took a large roll from his own plate, broke it in half, and offered one of these parts to Essek, who tried his best not to choke.

“You need to keep your strength up, ja?” Caleb implored him quietly.

The steady hand that accepted was a point of pride because it very much wanted to quake. The Kryn weren’t bread people, but...did he have any idea what this gesture would mean in Rosohna? Any inkling at all?

This is another one of those places where I delight in playing to cultural differences. What I’d had in mind for what that gesture—breaking food into two pieces and offering half to someone—WOULD mean in Rosohna was a bit nebulous, as I like to keep the reader guessing a bit and let their imagination fill in the blanks; but my rough idea was that it’s a courting gesture that signifies “I can and will provide for you, even if it means less for me.” An expression of selfless caregiving and an offer of partnership. Not wholly unlike a bird bringing food to a prospective mate.

And actually it’s a little bit funny coming from Caleb, who has fuck-all to his name but his name, when Essek is a rich bitch who answers directly to the Bright Queen.

Not that he was about to say it out loud, but he was a quick convert to this whole bread thing. To say that it won him over would be an understatement. That seemed to be a recurring theme here.

I imagine if I’d grown up never really eating bread and was introduced to it in adulthood I’d be like “Where have you BEEN all my life?!” But also: the bread is friendship, the bread is the Mighty Nein, the bread is communion in the spirit of sharing rather than politics and appearances and power plays—things he thought he was fine without until they were foisted upon him.

Somewhere in the course of the multiple conversations going on at one time, Jester got an Idea, as she was prone to doing. He became increasingly aware of her talking about kissing, of all things, and this culminated in her shouting above the din, cheeks flushed purple though he hadn’t seen her touch any wine: “I have an idea you guys! Why don’t we all go around and say how many people we’ve kissed?”

Jester is the most wonderfully convenient deus ex machina if you ever need to insert an awkward or embarrassing conversation among the Mighty Nein, because this is exactly the sort of shit she would do.

Jester leaped up and slammed her hands onto the table. “Caduceus you’ve never been kissed?! That’s so sad!”

The firbolg was unfazed. He merely shrugged and said, “It hasn’t come up and I haven’t gone looking. Not something I’ve ever thought about, really.”

Jester’s tail lashed back and forth behind her like an overstimulated cat. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

Fjord went a bit wild-eyed at this. Caduceus smiled gently and said, “No thank you.”

Three things about this part:

1) Jester’s tail doesn’t get NEARLY enough mention in fic! If I’m playing (or writing) a character with a tail you can be damn sure you’re gonna know what it’s doing! Makes me wanna play a tabaxi tbqh.

2) Cad’s “No thank you” is the sum total of his sexuality, lol. Jester was raised in a pretty highly sexualized setting, didn’t really get out much before she fled Nicodranas, and can be pretty naïve, so she doesn’t really get the whole aroace thing; but it never crosses Cad’s mind that this would be “abnormal“ or ”sad” in any way—it causes him no distress, as it shouldn’t. This is yet another “Same planet, different worlds” moment.

3) Fjord is physically restraining himself from yelling “JESTER WHAT THE FUCK” lmao

Veth kept picking at it. “So you’re um. You know. Into the fellas?”

Beau snorted. “I could’a told you that months ago.”

“Yeah you could’a!” Veth pouted with a self-conscious curl to her shoulders.

I saw a comment on Tiktok that said Veth was being borderline homophobic, but that wasn’t my intent! It’s just that she inherited a certain blind spot for male queerness from her player, and as hard as she’d been trying to encourage Caleb to hook back up with his female ex, it never occurred to her that he had a male ex, too—and given that they’ve been so close for so long, she’s feeling pretty self-conscious about the fact that she never figured out that Caleb is bisexual in all that time, as well as kind of upset that no one—Caleb especially—told her. She’s having a moment of “Why didn’t I know this? Did you think it was going to change things between us? Did I make you feel unsafe?” And also a little bit of “Okay well, now I have to get him to hook up with TWO people AT ONCE because my boy deserves threesomes 😤”

Jester went goggle-eyed at him. “You’ve only been with one person?” she exclaimed. “But you’re like a hundred years old! And very handsome. I would have thought you’d get like, all the ladies.”

Ladies. Right.

Veth might not be the only one with a certain blind spot.

Beau gave her a funny look, snorting. “I dunno, he seems like the kinda guy who turns down those offers left and right.”

..…But Beau’s got his number, for more than one reason. She’s got super gaydar, for one, and has him pegged as the type who’s very choosy about his partners (also mind you, this was before demi!Essek was canonized by WoG, so I was still rolling with my hc that Essek got around when he felt like it).

The uproar was instantaneous. Everyone—almost everyone—started talking or shouting at once. Beau’s voice rang out among the din with, “HOLY SHIT ESSEK FUCKS.” Strangely pleased with himself, he downed the rest of his wine in one gulp and spent the next few minutes fending off increasingly prying, personal questions until the Nein grew bored with his lack of answers and someone changed the subject.

There it is, the line that spawned two entire scenes!

He was not a war mage, but he was experienced and wily, and he was damned good at what he did, and as long as there was breath left in his body, the Mighty Nein would not fall here.

Joke’s on me, motherfucker literally has the War Caster feat -_-

But like in my defense, that’s just what it’s called in the book. The feat just means that you have either the training or experience to cast well during a fight, which I see as not necessarily the same thing as a war mage, which was my way of saying an arcane caster who is a soldier.

Veth stared at her blankly as if willing herself not to understand. “Caleb? With who?”

She breathed steadily. “...Essek. Caleb and Essek.”

Beside her, Jester squealed and brought her fists to her face.

Veth was less enthused. “WHAT.”

Beau’s mental commentary here is dead on. Veth still doesn’t really trust Essek at this point and has been pretty vocal about that…despite being the one to declare him part of the Mighty Nein? Eh, she’s allowed to have complicated feelings on the guy, all things considered. But I find it kind of comical and very Veth (and very Sam) for her to be all full of zest for trying to get Caleb back together with the frigging Volstrucker who is actively working for his abuser and worst enemy but balk at him hooking up with Essek.

Jester “explained” in a delighted yell: “Caleb and Essek are gonna fuuuuuuck!”

I don’t know, is this too unsubtle to call foreshadowing? The line flowed naturally in the dialogue, but it’s also letting the reader know exactly what they’re in for next, lol.

“...He’s going to break that little elf twink, you know,” Veth said, sounding distant. Seemed she was having some difficulty processing. Not too surprising, considering how adamant she was about wanting their wizard to hook back up with his old flame, the fucking Volstrucker. “We’ve all seen his dick.”

This was 100% taken from Sam’s little throwaway line “It’s above-average” but it turned out to serve two purposes other than reminding the reader that all of these people have seen Caleb naked:

1) It’s yet another thing Veth thinks she understands about him but doesn’t. Caleb’s a top like Dalmatians are purple and if you disagree then I respect your right to be incorrect ;)

2) That said, it is, in fact, foreshadowing for the sequel, in which Essek experiences a great deal of frustration. (I haven’t touched the damn thing in weeks, feels like; I’ve been too busy with work, being exhausted from work, and being in a tizzy about my upcoming surgery.)

Fjord blurted out, “I’ll join you.”

Poor Fjord has had such an uncomfortable night!

Hoo boy that was a lot. Thanks for the ask, this was really fun!! And sorry it took so long; I work Saturday nights and things got really busy for a bit there.

[gffa]

I’ve been thinking about Qui-Gon a lot lately (through various things like creator commentary, some fic that managed to make me really adore him, fandom reactions, my eternally conflicted M&A feelings, etc.) and honestly I keep coming back to how we have so little of the character that almost anything anyone says on him is pretty much pure projection.  You can say some nice things about him in TPM, but you can also say some less than flattering things about him in TPM. Like, the idea that Qui-Gon shows more compassion than Obi-Wan for calling Jar Jar a “pathetic creature”?  This is the same guy who said, “The ability to speak does not make one intelligent.” and was condescending right to Jar Jar’s face.  No, Qui-Gon was not kinder to him than Obi-Wan was.  (And the “pathetic lifeform” thing is clearly not serious, imo.  Especially considering, in The Clone Wars, it’s Obi-Wan who is shown to be the one who does things like making a special effort to avoid the attacking creatures on Ryloth.)

You know who else wasn’t kind to Jar Jar?  Padme makes her disdain for him BLATANTLY clear, right to his face, on Rodia.  But that never seems to comeup, either because it’s TCW or because she’s not a Jedi.  It’s a thing that a lot of characters do, including on TCW. You know who is pretty damn nice to Jar Jar, though?  Mace Windu.  He’s obviously annoyed at some points, but he treats Jar Jar with respect and kindness, far more than Qui-Gon ever did. And Qui-Gon as the most compassionate Jedi?  Again, no, because what he did to Obi-Wan in the Council Chamber wasn’t cruel, but it was really uncaring of how that would affect Obi-Wan.  It was focused entirely on Anakin, like Anakin was the only person who mattered.  His kindness to Anakin was very sweet!  But he was kind of a dick to Obi-Wan, even if I think that Obi-Wan understood why and wasn’t that hurt by it and Qui-Gon trusted that. Then you have M&A where Qui-Gon never really talks to Obi-Wan.  He thinks all these things about Obi-Wan, but never actually says them.  And when Obi-Wan questions him, Qui-Gon gets real defensive and snippy.  And that’s setting aside that he had a chance to actually help shape the Jedi in the ways he thought would be better and then he said no after the Jedi Council specifically asked him to be part of it because he had different opinions.  That’s part of the book, that’s canon. He’s not a bad person!  He cares very much.  I think Obi-Wan understood why Qui-Gon did what he did.  But we really don’t see much of who he is beyond the movie and M&A and neither of them ever show us Qui-Gon being particularly compassionate or caring above and beyond what you can find Obi-Wan or Yoda or Mace or any of the other Jedi doing. And, as much as this was inspired by Dave’s comments, I’m actually really :/ about his whole thing about how Anakin not having a dad was a “failing” as if nuclear families are the only kind of love that are important, as if a supportive, caring community means nothing.  As if we don’t see Jedi taking care with their younglings.  As if children without father figures are incomplete somehow? Like, I usually love Dave, but everything he said about TPM only works on the surface and pretty much everything he says is contradicted by the movie itself or George’s commentary–like George has specifically said if Anakin had been found by the Jedi earlier, he would have been fine, that’s not “only Qui-Gon could have kept him from falling”. I get wanting to defend the prequels and their place in the story and their connection to the themes, but I really disagree with his entire take on that movie, based on the content of the movie (Qui-Gon being a dick to Jar Jar, to Obi-Wan, etc.) and George’s commentary on the movies. Again, Qui-Gon is not a bad character, but he’s a very blank character, you can project pretty much whatever you want onto him, that’s what’s so frustrating, because there’s just not enough either way, and what little we have in canon really contradicts that whole theory. ETA: Okay, I’m going to add some George Lucas quotes to this to better show what I mean, because this was originally meant to be just an informal thing but I think it would help to be a little more serious about it: Qui-Gon Jinn commentary from The Phantom Menace: “So here we’re having Qui-Gon wanting to skip the early training and jump right to taking him on as his Padawan learner, which is controversial, and ultimately, the source of much of the problems that develop later on.”  –George Lucas, The Phantom Menace commentary That… is really not what Dave said about Qui-Gon. “The fact that everything must change and that things come and go through [Anakin’s] life and that he can’t hold onto things, which is a basic Jedi philosophy that he isn’t willing to accept emotionally and the reason that is because he was raised by his mother rather than the Jedi. If he’d have been taken in his first year and started to study to be a Jedi, he wouldn’t have this particular connection as strong as it is and he’d have been trained to love people but not to become attached to them.”  –George Lucas, Attack of the Clones commentary Basically, if Anakin had been found earlier, he would have been fine, he would have been trained to love people, as per George Lucas’ words.  Ie, YES THE JEDI DO LOVE PEOPLE. The only time I’ve seen George talk about Anakin’s fate is when it’s specifically about Anakin’s choice in it, not outside influences making choices for him: “It’s fear of losing somebody he loves, which is the flipside of greed.  Greed, in terms of the Emperor, it’s the greed for power, absolute power, over everything. With Anakin, really it’s the power to save the one he loves, but it’s basically going against the Fates and what is natural.“ –George Lucas, Revenge of the Sith commentary Because Star Wars is about choice just as much as it’s about family.  And that family shouldn’t have to be a nuclear family to have a loving, supportive community.  As if Plo Koon didn’t love and support Ahsoka.  As if we don’t see Obi-Wan reaching out to Anakin over and over again in care, concern, and support, in the movies, in The Clone Wars, in the comics, in the novels, etc.  As if we didn’t see a whole gaggle of Jedi ready to jump up and teach Ahsoka because they cared about her.  As if we didn’t see Jedi after Jedi after Jedi sacrificing themselves in Order 66 to save their Padawans. Dave Filoni, you read Kanan: The Last Padawan where Depa sacrifices her life for Caleb or watch the Order 66 scene in Jedi: Fallen Order where Jaro Tapal sacrifices himself for Cal AND YOU TRY TO TELL ME JEDI DIDN’T LOVE.

[june-the-botanist]

The Botanist Reborn

NAME: Juniper Rose Blower

(FC image below = manip by me for accurate reference)

FACE CLAIM:  Elizabeth Olsen NICKNAME:  June, Rose AGE:  24 HEIGHT:  5′6″ SPECIES:  Human GENDER:  Female BIRTHDAY:  March 17 SUN SIGN:  Pisces RESIDENCE:  unknown SKILLS:  botanist, shapeshifter, medic DRINK:  Gilnean Ambrosia FOOD:  Meat Pie (usually beef or venison) DAY OR NIGHT:  Day SNACKS:  Honeycrisp Apples SONGS: Assassin’s Theme composed by Lorne Balfe [click links to listen]; Invincible composed by Russell Brower PET:  none COLOR:  earthy tones (brown / green); Gilnean colors (faded blue & gold) FLOWER: Gilnean roses EYE COLOR:  hazel-green (left), ocean blue (right) HAIR COLOR:  Sun-rich Blonde BODY TYPE:  slender, swimmer’s build, modest curves

MORAL ALIGNMENT: Neutral Good

A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. She is devoted to helping others. She works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because sometimes it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

PREDOMINANT ARCHETYPES:

PERSONALITY:   ISFP-T -- The Adventurer

Adventurer personalities are true artists, but not necessarily in the typical sense where they’re out painting happy little trees. Often enough though, they are perfectly capable of this. Rather, it’s that they use aesthetics, design and even their choices and actions to push the limits of social convention. Adventurers enjoy upsetting traditional expectations with experiments in beauty and behavior – chances are, they’ve expressed more than once the phrase “Don’t box me in!”

Adventurers live in a colorful, sensual world, inspired by connections with people and ideas. These personalities take joy in reinterpreting these connections, reinventing and experimenting with both themselves and new perspectives. No other type explores and experiments in this way more. This creates a sense of spontaneity, making Adventurers seem unpredictable, even to their close friends and loved ones.

Despite all this, Adventurers are definitely Introverts, surprising their friends further when they step out of the spotlight to be by themselves to recharge. Just because they are alone though, doesn’t mean people with the Adventurer personality type sit idle – they take this time for introspection, assessing their principles. Rather than dwelling on the past or the future, Adventurers think about who they are. They return from their cloister, transformed.

Adventurers live to find ways to push their passions. Riskier behaviors like gambling and extreme sports are more common with this personality type than with others. Fortunately their attunement to the moment and their environment allows them to do better than most. Adventurers also enjoy connecting with others, and have a certain irresistible charm.

However, if a criticism does get through, it can end poorly. Some Adventurers can handle kindly phrased commentary, valuing it as another perspective to help push their passions in new directions. But if the comments are more biting and less mature, Adventurer personalities can lose their tempers in spectacular fashion.

Adventurers are sensitive to others’ feelings and value harmony. When faced with criticism, it can be a challenge for people with this type to step away from the moment long enough to not get caught up in the heat of the moment. But living in the moment goes both ways, and once the heightened emotions of an argument cool, Adventurers can usually call the past the past and move on as though it never occurred.

[ SOCIETY ]

$ Financial : wealthy / moderate / poor / in poverty. ✚ Medical : fit / moderate / sickly / disabled / disadvantaged. ✪ Class or Caste : upper / middle / working / slave / unsure. ✔ Education : qualified / unqualified / studying✖ Criminal Record : yes, for major crimes / yes, for minor crimes / no / has committed crimes, but not caught yet.

[ FAMILY ]

◐ Marital status : married - happily / unhappily / engaged or betrothed / partnered / single / divorced / separated / widowed ◒ Children : has a child of sorts or children / has no children / wants children. ◑ Relationship with Family : close with sibling(s) / not close with sibling(s) / has no siblings / sibling(s) is deceased / Has cousins and is close to them ◔ Filtration : orphaned / adopted / disowned / raised by birth parents mother

[ TRAITS + TENDENCIES ]

♦ extroverted / introverted / in between. ♦ disorganized / organized / in between. ♦ close minded / open-minded / in between. ♦ calm / anxious / in between. ♦ disagreeable / agreeable / in between. ♦ cautious / reckless / in between. ♦ patient / impatient / in between. ♦ outspoken / reserved / in between. ♦ leader / follower / in between. ♦ empathetic / unemphatic / in between. ♦ optimistic / pessimistic / in between realistic. ♦ traditional / modern / in between. ♦ hard-working / lazy / in between. ♦ cultured / uncultured / in between / unknown. ♦ loyal / disloyal / unknown. ♦ faithful / unfaithful / unknown.

[ BELIEFS ]

★ Faith : monotheist / polytheist / atheist / agnostic. ☆ Belief in Ghosts or Spirits : yes / no / don’t know / don’t care. ✮ Belief in an Afterlife : yes / no / don’t know / don’t care. ✯ Belief in Reincarnation : yes / no / don’t know / don’t care. ❃ Belief in Aliens : yes / no / don’t know / don’t care. ✧ Religious : orthodox / liberal / in between / not religious. ❀ Philosophical : yes / no. / in between

[ SEXUALITY & ROMANTIC INCLINATION ]

❤ Sexuality : heterosexual / homosexual / bisexual / asexual / pansexual. ❥ Sex : sex repulsed / sex neutral / sex favorable. ♥ Romance : romance repulsed / romance neutral / romance favorable. ❣ Sexually : adventurous / experienced / naïve / inexperienced / curious. ⚧ Potential Sexual Partners : male / female / agender / other / none / all. ⚧ Potential Romantic Partners : male / female / agender / other / none / all.

[ ABILITIES ]

☠ Combat Skills : excellent / good / moderate / poor / none. ≡ Literacy Skills : excellent / good / moderate / poor / none. ✍ Artistic Skills : excellent / good / moderate / poor / none. ✂ Technical Skills : excellent / good / moderate / poor / none.

[ HABITS ]

☕ Drinking Alcohol : never / sometimes / frequently / to excess. ☁ Smoking : trying to quit / never / sometimes / frequently / to excess. ✿ Other Narcotics : never / sometimes / frequently / to excess. ✌ Medicinal Drugs : never / sometimes / frequently / to excess. ☻ Indulgent Food : never / sometimes / frequently / to excess. $ Splurge Spending : never / sometimes / frequently / to excess. ♣ Gambling : never / sometimes / frequently / to excess

[ MOST NOTABLE PERSONALITY TRAITS ]

TENDERNESS

You are not afraid of the sufferings and sorrows of other people, even when they are acted out in unappealing ways. Beneath even defensiveness and self-righteous behavior, you know that deep down people need nurturing and consolation. One danger is being naïve about people’s dark sides. But at your best you know you can be mean yourself, which helps you to sympathize. You bring strength and forgiveness where other people might panic.

RATIONALITY

You like clarity and intelligent simplicity and you get frustrated at messy thinking. This can make you seem unreasonably pushy to some, but it is actually a virtue: you are motivated by a horror at pointless effort and a longing for precision and insight into how things and people work. Your ability to synthesize and bring order is essential in producing thinking which is truly helpful.

INDEPENDENCE

You don’t set out to be different for its own sake; you are more easily guided by what interests and moves you. You are more concerned about what is right for you than about the pressure to fit in. In sex you are more aware than others of impulses which are not entirely conventional. You know the value of selective irresponsibility, of forgetting occasionally about being ‘good’.

Your archetype is the doppelganger.

Traits: manipulative, self deprecating, intelligent, knowledgeable, ambiguous, caring

The doppelganger is most commonly used to symbolize the divide between two egos, or the grey line between good and bad. Doppelgangers are extremely intelligent, and are able to manipulate a persons thoughts and feelings for their own benefit. While they are seen as a darker character, they are closer to being morally ambiguous, if not someone who has been forced into a position they never agreed upon. Doppelgangers wish they could do better, and often find themselves regretting not doing something. While they are capable of manipulating others, they are vulnerable, making themselves susceptible to being manipulated as well. Although many of their traits are negative, they crave attention, validation, and wish they could be a better version of themselves. If you can get under their hard exterior, you’ll find a true friend, and a loyalist.

FLOWER PERSONALITY Juniper is:

Fennel

You Are: You’re quiet, sometimes shy, with a tendency to be reserved. You have a humble, kind nature and often find yourself taking care of others. You can be known to hold things in, and you don’t always speak up for yourself. This tendency to hold things in can lead to disturbances.

Fennel is soothing and supportive, helping to ease digestive upset. For feelings of fullness and bloating, fennel is the friend to call on to help.

Sweet and mildly bitter, with a distinct licorice-like taste, fennel was revered by the ancients for its charming properties. Attributed with the power to bestow long life, courage, strength and even to ward off evil spirits, we modern plant people highly regard fennel for its capacity to ease uncomfortable feelings of fullness, bloating or gassiness, or as an all-around promoter of healthy digestion.

Nettle

You Are: Truly a nurturing and supportive friend, you’re the kind of person that just isn’t for everyone. But those who take the time are rewarded with your gentle disposition, and the kind of friendship that does a person good no matter the difficulty they’re facing. When out of balance, you can become more prickly than supportive or nurturing, though—a sign that you need to shower yourself with the same kind of nurturing you so freely give to others.

Nettle is a deeply supportive herb that has been used for centuries as a tonic to support your body’s well-being. A traditional springtime tonic whose alluring “green” taste is a reflection of the rising green of spring, nettle gently nourishes the whole body.

Nettle’s genus name, Urtica, comes from the Latin urere, meaning “to burn”, an obvious reference to nettle’s nasty sting. Nettle is widespread around the world, and evidence of this very old plant was even found in Neolithic stilt dwellings in Switzerland dating back to the third millennium B.C. It has long been enjoyed for its gentle support for the whole body, as well as for its refreshing, green taste.

Peppermint

You Are: Unflappable. You are cool in the crisis, calm in the storm, collected amidst the chaos. You’re a breath of fresh air, a waft of inspiration to the down-and-out, a refreshing, inspiring, uplifting person to be around. Of course, even a cool cucumber like yourself can run into trouble. You may try to take on too much, which can leave you feeling weighed down and not quite yourself.

With its comforting breath of fresh air and the peppery, sweet familiar scent that tingles your nose, peppermint is a classic candy flavor. But there’s herbal wisdom hiding in those after dinner mints—peppermint oil also has the power to relieve occasional indigestion and soothe your stomach when your digestion needs a little help.

Long before mint became the go-to flavor of everything from gum to candy to toothpaste, the Greeks, Romans and ancient Egyptians were using mint leaves as a digestive aid. Peppermint’s characteristic minty-ness comes from menthol, an important part of its essential oil that, when present in high enough quantities, will be felt in a tingle in your nose and a strong minty scent that carries across a room.

[eyreguide]

Jane Eyre & Rebecca

I’ve always thought that Daphne du Maurier has acknowledged that her 1938 novel Rebecca was a re-working of Jane Eyre, but I haven’t been able to confirm that (if anyone does know of a direct quote from du Maurier, please let me know!)  But nevertheless there are still many similarities between the two in terms of plot and themes, and having recently re-read Rebecca, I wanted to dive into how these two wonderful books mirror each other.

Both Jane Eyre and Rebecca are deemed Gothic novels - stories in which romance, suspense, and horror intertwine. And both novels heavily feature elements often associated with Gothic stories - death, fire, madness, young and innocent women, and older, imposing men.  

The relationship dynamic between the two couples feature some similarities, (older man, younger woman, class difference, mystery/secrets between the two) but there are also important differences - Jane and Rochester get to know each other more, and their courtship is not quite as whirlwind as the second Mrs. de Winter and Maxim. In Rebecca, the tension does not lie in whether or not Rochester and Jane will declare their feelings for each other, but in whether Maxim loves his second wife, even though he married her. Jane Eyre appeals to me for the tension in a romance undeclared as I found in my re-reading of Rebecca that I felt very frustrated by how Maxim treated his wife. I did understand why he felt estranged and unsure - it was endearing to find out that he wasn’t sure if she could love an older man like him as much - but he did kind of ignore her for most of the time she was at Manderley. Granted the girl also spent most of her time trying to pacify Maxim whenever he showed a temper, so the dynamic between the two felt much less romantic than in Jane Eyre.

In bringing the two main characters together within the first few chapters, Daphne du Maurier is given time to develop the suspense and psychological dread that defines Rebecca. Film adaptations can add as many shadowy hallways and dramatic musical beats to Jane Eyre as they want, but the story is much more focused on character development and romantic tension. Once the reader becomes absorbed by the narrator in Rebecca, her every thought seems to tend towards “I’m not good enough.” or “He doesn’t love me.” Her neuroticism can be exasperating but I of course also empathized with her insecurities. And I enjoyed the way the author plotted how every scene seemed to exacerbate that. Rebecca is such a great example of how one’s inner monologue affects you.

With the actual character of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier creates an interesting version of Bertha Mason. Rebecca and Bertha share many traits - beauty and accomplishments, an alluring personality, and ultimately selfishness, greed, and a malicious streak. While some of Bertha’s vices may be explained by mental illness, Rebecca stands on her own as fully embracing her vices. She shows no remorse, yet is still captivating as the villain of the story. Just as Bertha proves an obstacle to Rochester’s happiness, Rebecca ingeniously places an obstacle to Maxim’s happiness even in death. It’s fascinating how du Maurier crafted a story where the dead haunt the living - but in a way that feels realistic and doesn’t rely on paranormal intervention. The story is also beautiful in its simplicity - the other characters build up Rebecca in the mind of the second Mrs. de Winter and the reader so that it makes sense to name the book after her. For despite the de Winters’ attempts at happiness there is seemingly no escape from Rebecca and her machinations.

It is also interesting to consider Rochester and Maxim. One is adamant that he can not kill - even indirectly - his first wife, and another does so in a moment of passion. I wonder if that could be a commentary on the superior nature of one over the other - but if Rochester was in a situation closer to Maxim - where he had to acknowledge Bertha as his wife, with the possibility of raising her child which he knows is not his - would that drive him to commit such a crime? Impossible to say, but a very thought-provoking conundrum. You could even consider that if Jane was in a similar situation to the second wife - would Jane work to cover up her husband’s crime? I kind of believe in that case that she would not.

Even if du Maurier does not acknowledge Jane Eyre as a direct inspiration for Rebecca, I love thinking about Rebecca as a sort of inversion of Charlotte Brontë’s novel. Where the focus is not on the two characters in love, but on the shadow between them and how that shadow grows until it must be acknowledged. Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre is more of a plot device in how she affects the relationship between Jane and Rochester - with Jane only going on to develop further and achieve independence. Rebecca does cause the second Mrs. de Winter to develop further, but she is limited in her transformation. I love the two works for different reasons and find them both engrossing and intelligent reworkings of a romantic Gothic tale.

[cobra-diamond]

Hicks and Yang on Azula Fans

Cult.

Upset.

Scary.

Aggressive.

During the 2019 San Diego Comic Con, an Avatar Q&A was held including Michael Dante DiMartino, Gene Yang and Faith Erin Hicks.

One fan asked about the franchise’s plans for Azula. Here is a summarized transcript of the exchange, with my own commentary:

Fan: “Hi, so the comics have shed light on characters who have a lot more of their story to be told after the Finale. I has wondering if you might be able to, if you have any plans for, expanding on a character you’d mentioned before: Azula.”

I can hear the trepidation in this fan’s voice; they can’t just come right out and say it. I know the feeling: should I feel interested in Azula? Will others understand why? Will they accuse me of minimizing her evil and villainy? Am I minimizing her awfulness in the show? Am I even right to want more Azula?

Yang’s answer:

Yang: “I have to say, in my experience with Azula Fans, it has been almost like a cult [crowd erupts in laughter]. Not saying you are!”

Well, actually, Yang, you kind of are.

And you didn’t answer the question.

You know what’s also a cult following? The Princess Bride movie. But was Yang referring to that kind of cult? No, because nobody would think twice about insulting Princess Bride fans by referring to that movie as having a “cult-like” following.

No, Yang was referring to that kind of cult, the one where if you accuse someone of being a member, you are insulting their intelligence and accusing them of borderline nefarious obsession. Yang was referring to the spooky, deranged kind that believes aliens seeded the Earth with Human life and built the pyramids. Only in the case of Azula fans, the original show seeded Azula with humanity and left the door open for a deep, compelling change-and-growth story in the Post-Finale setting.

Hicks’s answer:

Hicks: “I have to say, for the most part, Avatar fans have been just absolutely lovely to me, but I got this scary e-mail from someone who was an Azula fan and was very upset and aggressively demanding that I write her a certain way. I actually had to shut down my e-mail because it unnerved me so much. And it was a little weird because Azula is one of my favorite characters as well, but it made be scared off, perhaps, from writing her in the future.”

God dammit. Hyper-sensitive and impassioned fans are everywhere. This most certainly occurred. Even Bryke have spoken about getting hate mail from jilted fans. At any rate, to anyone reading this, don’t do this. Clearly Hicks doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to put up with it, neither will it change hers or anyone else’s minds.

Azula’s place in the franchise isn’t where it is because fans haven’t been loud enough; she’s a secondary character and a villain. If they were ever going to expand her non-villain role in the franchise it would have happened a long time ago. As the articles “She’s Completely Crazy!” and Mirror & Misdirection explain, the piss poor handling of her character comes from a much deeper, unchangeable source in the Creators’ minds.

But the first thing that jumps to Hicks’ mind is one instance of hate mail? Telling this fan she is grouped in with someone who is scary, upset and aggressive? And that is enough to scare her off?? Holy shit. Hooooly shit. She better not be tasked with salvaging, or even writing, anything regarding Azula. Someone tasked with writing Azula, I mean really writing Azula, especially after the mess of Smoke & Shadow, needs far more guts than this. She is far too spooked by fans, and the current canon and lack-of-vision of Bryke is only going to infuriate more.

Hicks’s answer continued:

Hicks: “So please be kind to creators. We’re working very hard on licensed properties. I know none of you guys [the crowd] would do this [send hate mail; crowd erupts in laughter]. Um, I love Azula. I think she’s great. I would like to write her. I would like to write more stories. Gene actually left her place in the world very open-ended. I actually loved the way Gene wrote her. I liked Smoke and Shadow a lot. I think that story and where Azula’s journey went was really fascinating to me. So yeah, I would like to write Azula stories. As of right now, I’m writing new Avatar stories, not necessarily about Azula, but maybe someday in the future. Azula fans, please be nice to me. I’m trying my best.”

First of all, nobody cares about Smoke and Shadow. Yes, nobody. Its popularity on Goodreads nose-dived compared to The Promise and The Search. There are parts of it that are okay and likable, but not the work itself. I will give Hicks the benefit of the doubt that she is just going, “Yes, my Emperor! Your clothes are beautiful!” to her naked overlords. Smoke and Shadow was a mess for more than just Azula and an utter train-wreck for Azula. Don’t read much into that comment by her.

She is scared off from writing Azula, but still wants to writer her. Wants to. Whether we get more Azula shouldn’t come from her wanting to, she should have to if that is the plan for the franchise. More evidence that the franchise has no overarching plan for telling compelling stories about these characters. It doesn’t matter if fans know that Azula is destined to become Zuko’s closest advisor. It doesn’t matter if fans know Zuko and Azula reconcile, as implied by generous interpretations of Smoke and Shadow.

Well, duh!!

Of course that’s going to happen. It’s the only logical outcome that is consistent with the themes of the show. Fans don’t want to be told what happens; they already know what has to happen. What fans want is to see HOW it happens. They want to see the journey, and right now the journey is crap, and the franchise doesn’t even appear to know what they even want the destination to be.

This Post-Finale setting, while containing some nuggets of gold when taken out of context, are an unplanned, butchered mess that does far more telling than showing, and the telling it does is half-baked and confusing.

“Licensed properties” is an important key word, however. It reveals the reality that Faith Erin Hicks has guard rails put on her, whereas for us fans, our imaginations are the limit and is not constrained by canon, deadlines or the commercial realities of Avatar.

“Licensed properties” also implies the Creators. While we can think of all the great ways a novelist or a competent manga author could create a sweeping epic about both Azula, the Fire Nation and her ultimate place in the Avatar world, the commercial realities of Avatar might just not allow it: Zuko and Aang are the faces of the franchise, followed by Katara. Everyone else are just secondary characters. As a result, Azula becomes a razor thin eggshell painted to look like a person but is not actually a person because the Creators have neither the time nor inclination to turn her into one.

And lastly, “I’m trying my best” is not a very assuring statement. Once again, more evidence that there is no plan or even “faith” in what they are doing. If these authors have to “try” then they don’t know either their market or their product. They’re hoping fans will like what they come up with versus buckling down and actually figuring out how to tell Avatar stories worthy of Avatar’s reputation.

So remember Azula Fans, or Avatar Fans, if Azula Fans are even counted as Avatar fans, your desire to see a competent, well-written, compelling and emotionally-gripping Azula story makes you part of a:

Upset,

Scary,

Aggressive,

CULT.

Well, they certainly got the first one right.

P.S. Don’t harass Faith Erin Hicks. The situation with the comics and Azula are way above her pay grade. At best, we can learn why.

[op-peccatori]

YES! I LOVE reading match-ups. 🥰🥰🥰 If you would be so inclined, sweetest friend, I'd like to request one from any of the fandoms mentioned or as you see fit. 💕 I've exposed myself in front of you plenty LOLOLOL so I don't think I need to get TOO descriptive but I'll drop these extras: Procastinator (OOOF). I LOVE running (casual or sports). I am SHORT. 🤧 I don't dislike my physique but am not particularly fond of my curves (AAAH). (Is this alright? 🤣)

FAA!!! Thank you for requesting 💕 I hope you like your boos 🥰 (Yes, it was perfectly alright)

The characters I picked for you are: Lucien (MLQC), Comte se Saint-Germain (IkeVamp), Kiro (MLQC), Saeyoung (Mystic Messenger)

These characters were picked mainly because I could see you being able to have a very comfortable and open relationship with them. And also for their intelligence 👀 They respect you, your mind, your decisions—everything; Lucien and Comte are the calmer personalities here, while Kiro and Saeyoung are a touch more excitable. The main themes here are of partnership, trust, freedom and intimacy.

Lucien and Comte are my primary picks for you! They’re people who are capable of being deeply empathetic, perceptive and have A+ communication skills. You can always talk to them about anything, without worrying about consequences or judgment. They can judge your moods and needs rather quickly as well, always willing to adapt to them and provide support accordingly. Honestly, with one text from you or a quick phone call, they’ll know if you’ve had an exhausting day and immediately start doing what they can to make it better. Food, comfort, space—they’d do anything. They’re people you can explore every aspect of life with, because they’re capable of being very objective.

They know when to let you be, and when to step in if the procrastination is eating at you. They never push, though. They’d put actual effort into figuring out what works for and motivates you!

Please take Lucien with you when you go running. He could really use the fresh air 🤣 Comte is more of a ‘waiting at the door/finish line with a towel and a cool drink’ kind of partner. He might join you occasionally, if only to admire you as you run 🥰🤣

They will worship you. They love every single inch of you, showering you in such reverential and adoring praises it might make you cry. Or embarrass you, if it’s in public. Words aren’t even required, it’s all in their heart eyes 🥺 And in conflicts, they would defend you without losing their calm, ever willing to be at your side in every situation.

They’re not as open to speaking about their own problems as they are to solving yours, mostly because they would rather focus on you. But they get that it’s unfair, and would try to be better. This is where your own understanding nature comes in, and allows them to open up to you with ease. Trust is a two-way street 😌

(They can also match your thirst every step of the way 🤣 They play it cool, but the beast is often lurking behind their placid masks lmao)

Kiro and Saeyoung are the type of guys who’d be your best friend and boyfriend in one package. They’re adventurous, exciting, and mischievous. They can be a little clingy, but if you’re okay with that, it’s all good! It’s how they show their affection. They’re the kind of partners you could go backpacking, clubbing, scuba-diving (honestly ANYTHING) with. They’re always up for anything as long as you enjoy it! They’d watch all kinds of shows with you, sneaking in with snacks as soon as you sit down to watch something. They’re your personal sunshine providers, especially Kiro. You need a little cheering up? They’ve got their pom poms ready. However, they’re quite prone to hiding their own low moods, which might be frustrating at times. Kiro would be better about it, because he would come to you for comfort. Saeyoung needs to be chased after 🥰

They’re both quite active, especially Kiro, and would love to accompany you on runs. And of course, they’re ready with banners and t-shirts with your face on them if it’s not a casual run. They’re both serial procrastinators (SAEYOUNG!!!) so in this case, you have company 🥰 They might tease you for your petite stature, ruffling your hair and leaning on your head. Punch them 💀 They just think it’s adorable.

They’re so, so affectionate and are extremely offended if you say you’re not fond of any part of you, and commit themselves to the mission of changing your mind, or at least showing you how much they adore it.

Date nights at home with Lucien and Comte would often have a more intimate atmosphere—talking comfortably, discussing your days/weeks, any plans you might have together. They prefer to eat face to face than watch something as you eat, choosing to put on a movie or tv show after dinner if you guys wanna watch something together. With Saeyoung and Kiro, it’s livelier. They too love talking to you as you guys eat, but they don’t mind watching something either! They’d still provide some sort of commentary 🤣

[cowboyshit]

hangman’s monologue

I don’t know how to preface this but, for those of you who watched today’s bte (5/18/2020) and saw hangman’s monologue, I had to go in depth and break it down for everything I interpreted it alluding to. Overall it’s an insanely intelligent and amazing promo where on the surface level it can read as a reflection of what’s going on in the world, but when you pick it apart for the metaphors interwoven within you can see how much of a testament to his character and current story line it is and what he understands moving forward and what he’s come to the conclusion of doing. Basically this is just me going feral for thousands upon thousands of words because I clearly love a cowboy WAY too much.

You can read it under the cut, if you’d like!

Okay so I’m a little brain tired after a full day’s work but I’m still pretty feral about Hangman’s monologue and the metaphors it was filled to the brim with so *rubs hands together* I’m going to see what I can pick apart!

For the most part we understand the bald eagle he talks about seeing is something that makes him want to go home. Home is not his physical house, but All Elite Wrestling. That’s the home he’s been avoiding. I was almost thinking the bald eagle represented Matt Hardy in some way, which makes the line: “…when I hear what sounded like a miniature tornado spin right past my ear” seem to me like it relates to Vanguard 1 being a drone that’d sound like that – because, as far as I’m concerned, every time I’ve been at a demonstration with a bald eagle flying they’ve not sounded like a miniature tornado, but maybe he was being a little hyperbolic or maybe it was coming in fast haha. Plus, if we tie the bald eagle to Matt Hardy that could be the change Hangman has seen that’s making him think maybe it’s time to come home. He’s watching Kenny with Matt and maybe feeling guilty for not being there with his tag partner. Hearing the constant commentary of “one half of the tag team champions” is perhaps getting to his guilt? Because even if Hangman doesn’t want to be tag team champions with Kenny and even if he doesn’t actually care about having that tag team gold (which – small interjection, for all he says he doesn’t care about it, he did make a point to pack it with his ‘essentials’ when he left to go live in the woods) he does shoulder guilt of not being good enough, in not doing what he’s supposed to do. His partner is there, so Hangman feels guilty that he’s not. A tag team is supposed to stick together. So maybe, just maybe, the bald eagle has something to do with Matt Hardy, as that’s been the only change to AEW recently (with him tagging with Kenny) that’d be enough to put some sort of guilt on Hangman’s shoulders that I can think of.

Oh also – real quick – I do think it’s interesting he’s talking about this happening as he comes up on his last bottle of whiskey, but he talks more about that later so I’ll get into that a little more later on. I think this has to do with his acceptance that he’s using the alcohol as a crutch, but I digress. Moving on!

“Maybe I should go home? I don’t know. The thought itself bloomed inside my brain like a malignant tumor; uninvited, unwelcome, but growing just the same. I mean, it would be ridiculous to go home right now. Because out here I can’t get infected. I can’t infect anyone else.”

These lines are more evidence that Hangman is fighting within himself, with his own mind about returning “home” to AEW. It’s an unwanted thought, but it’s an important and heavy and prevalent one. In the woods and away from AEW he can’t feel day-to-day like a dog chasing it’s tail, reminded that he’s not quite achieved what he wanted (remember that he promised at the press conference that he would be AEW world champion before 2019 was over, which he failed to do and he has never had another chance at that title yet). Or, even worse, when he’s there he’s constantly shown his loneliness to his face where it’s inescapable, even if some of it is his own doing (not seeking new friendships after breaking off with the Elite and even going so far as to horribly damage his new friendship with Private Party over a measly $12. It’s not about the money at this point, I think Hangman is afraid to let anyone get close to him again because he thinks if he has no one close to him he won’t have to fight those thoughts of being shoved back into the shadows).

Which brings me to this little part: “Because out here I can’t get infected. I can’t infect anyone else.” When he’s away from AEW he can’t be infected by his worries of splitting with the Elite and he can’t allow those feelings and what he does because of them – drinking, acting out – to hurt anyone else. Because Hangman loves the Elite as much as he probably wishes he didn’t. He has too good of a heart not to love them, even if he is angry at them and even if he doesn’t want to be a part of them anymore. We saw this when he went from angrily yelling at Matt and Cody to asking with concern after Nick’s well-being once he found out he’d been “hurt” by Hangman during their last match.

The next few lines that follow I do believe may be more about his commentary regarding the coronavirus and what it means to be traveling to the show, etc. but once we get through those lines we hit this part: “I mean even now I would never know if I overreacted coming out here to live, but I would forever live with the pain of knowing I didn’t do enough. And to be honest, I’ve been kind of enjoying living out here. I’ve got good company, and I know you can’t see them right now, but they’re everywhere. It’s not just people either. Two days ago I swear a raven winked at me.”

There’s a lot in those lines that follow the same theme of what’s been discussed. If he never returns home to AEW, he won’t know if he’s been overreacting about everything. Things are getting muddled in his head where it’s reality vs anxiety. Maybe running away and hiding from everyone was an overreaction. Maybe avoidance, instead of ripping off the band-aid and letting the wound air and heal wasn’t the right move. If he never goes back, he’ll never know. He’s beginning to understand that the only way forward is to return, but there’s that fear and anxiety inside him that keeps screaming to slam the breaks and reverse, to go deeper into the woods as it were instead of coming out from the shadows.

And of course he’s enjoyed living away from “home” despite this moment of reflection he’s having. Out here in the woods he doesn’t have to fear disappointing anyone. He doesn’t have to run across the Elite’s path and worry there’ll be another fight because they just won’t listen to him. He doesn’t want to fight with his friends. He just wants to shake hands and go his own way, but they’ve got their claws in him and it’s made him desperate and feral to get away from them and as such he acts out and in turn hurts (infects) other people AND himself.

But, like I said, Hangman says: “But I would forever live with the pain of knowing I didn’t do enough.”

Even if it isn’t his fault that Matt, Nick, and Kenny (I’m leaving Cody out only because he really hasn’t had a solid presence in the Elite story lines since this has begun) won’t let go, he’s recognizing that if this is something HE wants – if he really wants to be separated and that’s what’s going to make him happy - it’s going to have to be something he does. And if he doesn’t go back to AEW, if he just continues to hide and get drunk in the woods, that failure will sit on HIS shoulders and no one else’s. There will be no one to blame but himself.

Also! I do believe the line about the raven is a reference to Marty which is why I included it, but that’s really all I gotta say about it haha I was just excited to think he was referencing his old villain buddy.

Okay so the next bit is a little long, but I need to include his whole dialogue to break it down: “Why did I think that in the first place? Honestly? I mean, it feels selfish, but there is a large part of me that wants to march right back up the front steps and slip off my boots and let them dry, stumble right through the front door with a sheepish grin, hoping nobody noticed I had left in the first place. And as nice as it is out here, truthfully the past few months has left me feeling pretty damn worthless. Like, I used to know more, but living in a house is kind of all I understand now. And maybe most selfishly, I feel like I want to go back home because I was on the run of my life in that house. I was learning to eat as much toast as I wanted fresh from our Russel Hobbs toaster. I nearly won the prestigious “Man of the House” award in May. I teamed up with our broom to clean the house better than ever swept it before. And I feel like I might have been starting to patch up the holes of the house.; the walls that made the house what it was in the first place. Everyone was loving it - what I was doing in the house - and it made me feel more validated than I ever felt in my life. And I felt like maybe I was on my way back to winning the “Man of the House” award. The thing I had promised to win on day one. But I - I’ll never get that momentum back… I mean, does momentum even exist in a house that’s empty?”

This part is FULL of so much and I’m going to try my best to talk as cohesively about it as possible without just. Screaming.

So again, he’s talking about how he thought about returning to the “house” and what all of that entails. Of course Hangman wants to return without notice – he doesn’t want to have to answer on where he’s been or what he’s been doing. He doesn’t want prying eyes to poke and prod inside when even he’s still tangled about what his journey is and what would actually make him happy. It’s only going to set off his anxiety if everyone starts pointing out how long he was gone because a part of it, despite himself, is tied to that guilt for how long he’s been gone in the first place. He does feel guilty for being away. The last thing you want when you’re guilty for something is for it to seem like everyone’s going to put it under a microscope. And maybe he knows he isn’t strong enough yet to not fall back on harmful behaviors in order to cope with that sort of scrutiny.

Also, him feeling worthless being away from AEW. Hangman, at his core, is a representation of struggling with self-identity. Who is he? At the end of the day who is Hangman Adam Page? I don’t think that’s a question he has enough self-confidence to look in a mirror and answer. He’s caught searching right now, lashing out, numbing himself, stumbling, trying, doing, failing, succeeding… and he’s still just a little bit lost. He hasn’t quite caught his stride. His eyes are so focused on the AEW World Championship (which I believe is the Man of the House award he’s talking about) because he thinks that’s what’s finally going to prove to everyone – but more importantly himself – that he’s good enough.

The funny thing though, I think this reflects the children’s story he wrote about his character too – is that I feel like there’s a chance even holding that title isn’t going to prove anything to himself. Like when it talks about the “golden horseshoe” in his children’s book and the fact that “Adam” didn’t need it to do an amazing job. But… I digress.

And I think that’s where the last line ties in, where he talks about not being able to find that momentum. He doesn’t think he can get back what he had when he was going after the championship in the beginning. Everyone’s moved on, he thinks. The eyes of the belt now fall to others - Mox, Brodie Lee - where’s room for him in that? With how tangled up he is right now it’s no wonder he can’t see himself pushing for the momentum again of having everyone rally behind the idea that he’d hold the championship or be capable of taking it away from the names who have it now. He feels like that part of the house has emptied out and with all his other battles he can’t see how he’d get through those to get any piece of importance back on that spot. 

I want to reiterate and focus on another section in that long quote because I think it’s incredibly important: “And maybe most selfishly, I feel like I want to go back home because I was on the run of my life in that house. I was learning to eat as much toast as I wanted fresh from our Russel Hobbs toaster. […] I teamed up with our broom to clean the house better than it’d ever been swept before. And I feel like I might have been starting to… patch up the holes of the house… the walls that made the house what it was in the first place. Everyone was loving it, what I was doing in the house and it made me feel more validated than I ever felt in my life.”

If you’ve been watching AEW from the start and hadn’t seen much of Hangman before, you’ll have caught on to the trajectory of his popularity and how he is at the highest point in his career that he’s ever been in. The cheers these days are for HIM. I remember my excited surprise when, during a promo with the Bucks and Kenny, Hangman interrupted them and the entire arena cheered for HIM. For his interruption. Think about that in terms of how his career used to be – how no one really cared that much if Hangman was coming out to the BC theme because they’d rather see the more popular Bullet Club members, The Young Bucks or Kenny Omega. But now he has a catchphrase people are chanting. People pop FOR him. He’s learning how to eat that “toast” the crowd is giving him. He’s learning how to accept this outpouring of love and support us fans are showing up in troves with for him. 

The line about the broom is clearly a nod at Kenny. They cleaned the house better than before – that match at Revolution was… astonishing. I feel like he and Kenny were finally hitting their stride and coming to a better understanding in working in tandem in the ring and that’s what this is a nod to.

And now those last two lines. Patching up the holes of the house – that’s his relationship with the Elite. Before all this went down, we saw a BTE episode where Matt and Hangman sat down at a bar and started to get serious before the camera cut and didn’t let us see what the conversation was, but we understand it was about the contention between the two of them (as Matt’s the one lashing out the loudest and angriest out of the bunch and making Hangman explode the worst). So, right before all this happened Hangman was maybe finally feeling like he was getting somewhere with the holes torn in his relationship with his friends. His brothers. His family. (Which – real quick – we know found family is a huge thing for Hangman, given the earlier episode of BTE where Jimmy Valiant talked to him and Hangman lamented over the loss of how Jimmy helped him and all the trainees feel like they were a family).

And that last line about feeling validated. He finally is getting the recognition he’s (quite frankly) deserved all along. He’s come into himself and now the crowd is rallying behind him. At each show he was just getting more and more over. Everyone has been loving what he’s been doing at AEW. They care more about him than KENNY OMEGA (which we also see Kenny rant about in this same episode earlier on when he’s on the zoom call with Colt). Imagine how insane that must feel to him after he’s always put these guys on such a high pedestal for their achievements!!!! Look at his career record when paired to Kenny’s or the Bucks. But finally, FINALLY after all this time he was emerging as the favorite and of course that’s where he’s finding validation. That’s helping take down those worries and those anxieties when it comes to feeling like he’s not enough or that no one cares about him. How can he feel that way when he goes to the ring and thousands of people are screaming HIS catchphrase or popping for HIM? And maybe there’s a part of him that’s stayed away because not having that audience cheering for him robs him of the validation he was just beginning to accept and brings his fears back that are always waiting in the wings.

Okay, moving on.

“I mean it seems unfair that I get to live out this Snow White woodland fantasy while Cynthia from Food Lion has to go back to her apartment every morning. I mean am I the bad guy here? I mean, either way I look at it, I’m the bad guy in my own drunken monologue here in the woods. I mean, maybe that just the way the world has conditioned me to think when the choice was never mine to begin with.” 

I think the “Cynthia from Food Lion” bit is talking about us. The audience. Hangman feels guilty for running away and leaving us behind while we still have to face our day-to-days and we don’t get the luxury of running off and getting drunk in the woods when things go bad. We have to keep facing our day no matter what we’re going through. We have to keep “going home” in a way, regardless of what our struggles are. It’s valid to feel guilt for it, but he’s also right about the way the world has conditioned him to think when the choice was never his to begin with. It’s, to me, that reflection of what us millennials face. We are constantly told we are in the wrong, that we’re killing business after business despite the issues being out of our control to fix or have a hand in. We’ve been conditioned to constantly feel this guilt that we’re not doing enough – for the most part our parents and grandparents had degrees or jobs or houses by the time they were in their twenties whereas most of us can’t afford that. We’re constantly told that we’re not doing enough. That it’s our fault even when we don’t have a choice. 

“I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t shake the feeling that the world is about to fuck me dry one more time. And for the first time ever, I have the chance to put on lipstick first. I mean… I need… I know I need to go back home. Home is still there.” 

This is a little vulgar of an expression, but I think that’s the point. It’s shock value to really pull your attention toward it. It needs that hard light shone directly on it. In the beginning I talked about how sometimes we know we have to walk into something that’s going to be awful just to get through to the other side and I think that’s what this refers to. Hangman knows he can’t keep running from his problems and, given his history, he can’t help but feel like it’s going to explode in his face even if he comes with good intentions. If we look at the trajectory of every time he tried to tell the Elite he wanted to separate from them we see how it got uglier and uglier each and every time. So even though he doesn’t think it’s going to go perfectly fine or the way he wants it to go (where he’s allowed to walk away, figure out who he is on his own, and then maybe go for the AEW World Championship if that’s even still something he can achieve) he knows he has to go back. He’s had a chance to “put lipstick on first” which means he’s had the chance to get ready for it. To steel himself. For the first time in his career he’s had a chance to step away from the storm, stare it right in the eyes and see exactly what he has to do in order to get through it, even if he comes out battered on the other side. He has to go home. He has to go back to AEW. He has to face everything he’s been running from lately.

So now the final bit which is my favorite metaphor simply because it has to do with horses so, you know the horse girl in me SCREECHED.

“But honestly, what I want to do is climb back on my horse and ride off into the sunset and just say the hell with it. Maybe this little rant is all I have left. I’m just throwing my leg over a saddle with a broken tree. Kicking a horse i know has long been dead, and the horse just collapses, and I’m sitting back here in the same spot wondering “Why did I want to go home in the first place?” Maybe it was the eagle coming back home to her nest that made me think it or maybe it’s because I’m out of whiskey.”

For those of you that don’t know, the tree in a saddle is the saddle’s frame on a western saddle. It’s basically the structure the saddle is based on and how you tell how to properly fit your saddle to the horse so you don’t cause further problems for your horse while riding. When the saddle tree breaks, the saddle can shift where it’s positioned on the horse’s spine and cause a LOT of problems for your horse. It’ll add pressure where pressure shouldn’t be added and distribute the weight off, effectively fucking up the horse’s spine. It’s easy to ride a saddle with a broken tree because for the most part unless you are paying close attention you won’t feel that the tree is broken, but your horse absolutely will. So what he’s saying is that while he wants to get in the saddle and ride off into the sunset to effectively never be bothered again, he won’t be able to do that.

The next few lines are simply more reflections of Hangman trying to work through his personal anxieties. Maybe he’s telling himself this last little bit as a way to try and “get out” of going. Maybe he’s trying to tell himself he’s crazy for thinking it’s time to go back. It’s also a reflection of what he’s worried about – that all of this is going to be for naught. That it’s hopeless. That he’s had time away to reflect and think, but maybe that’s just it. Maybe when he goes back he’ll just be “beating a dead horse” and be caught up in the same shitstorm he was before. That he’ll go through all this trouble to go back only to find himself planted right back on his ass in the spot he’s at now. Aimless and tangled up inside his head.

Those last couple lines, again – he’s wondering what’s made him think this way. Is it because he’s out of alcohol and he finally has to face sobriety and think? Or is it because the “bald eagle” came back to her nest and made him feel like he needed to go back too?

Like I said before, overall this is an amazingly thoughtful piece. The way it was delivered like a rambled monologue but actually had so many in-depth layers was phenomenal. It comes across like someone working through their anxiety, talking out their problems, being pulled back into those thoughts of doubt and trying to convince himself out of them. Just... fucking phenomenal, really.

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

Star Trek: The Story

Every television show is built upon one simple thing: it’s foundational setup.  At its core, a setup is the baseline for each new episode.  It’s what the audience returns to on a weekly basis.  The core elements of the show enable each episode to build a new story upon it, and, in most cases, , a show is often only as good as its setup, so you’d better hope the setup is a good one.

When it comes down to it, whether or not the audience likes a premise is what can make or break a show.

Thankfully, Star Trek had a good one.

A five-year mission to explore the galaxy meant you could get a fair number of adventures out of it.  Exploration and missions meant a new planet every week, new characters and a different adventure to embark upon (although odds are, the new episode would still feature Kirk’s Rock).  Even better, the main cast of characters (7, with 3 forming the core main characters) is consistent, familiar, and solid.  The audience grows to know them, and knows how to expect them to act.

This premise is kind of perfect.

The stability of a main crew gives the audience well-known and well-liked characters to return to for every episode, allowing for a familiar ‘home base’ at the start of every episode.  The format of the five-year mission, clearly stated in the opening, also gives the audience a sense of familiarity with the overall plot: the reason that the Enterprise and her crew are out here in the first place.  Kirk and his crew aren’t just wandering around space for kicks, they have a purpose: exploration for Starfleet and the United Federation of Planets.

This base works very well too in also establishing the characters’ abilities.  Being well-trained in Starfleet, the crew of the Enterprise is competent, intelligent, and pragmatic enough to find their way out of some difficult situations.  This allowed the writers to find ways to let Kirk and his crew think their way out of any situation, without stretching the suspension of belief for the audience.  With the variety of difficult situations that the Enterprise crew came across, it was vital that the audience believed that they could handle it.

So yeah, Star Trek had a great premise.  How were the stories themselves?

That’s where things get a little tricky.

As it turns out, there is a massive difference between writing a plot for a movie, and writing multiple smaller plots for a television show.  In film, there is one major conflict, one major story arc that, once it is finished, doesn’t go anywhere (unless very well-done sequels are made).  In television however, it’s a whole different ball game.

There is no ‘one and done’ storyline.  You have to write multiple, smaller stories, over and over again, trying to keep it varied and interesting while remaining true to the show’s format and setup.  In the case of Star Trek, this meant that sometimes, the differences between some episodes are rather superficial, with many episodes and stories sharing common elements.  In your typical episode of Star Trek, you could expect at least one of three things:

Clever interpersonal character drama, pointed social and political commentary, or extreme camp.  In many cases, you would get some combination of the three.  Even here, there was often some variety.

Most episodes of Star Trek followed one or two basic formulas.  

In many episodes, some external force threatens the ship and crew, whether directly, mentally, or by up-ending the laws of physics by warping reality.  In many others, Kirk leads a landing party to the surface of a planet, where they are trapped and stripped of communicators.  A Redshirt or two dies, Kirk and the remaining party evade their captors and probably engage in a fight, and in the end, they escape.  In other cases, it turns out that the inhabitants of the planet are all worshipping something as a deity that is, quite simply, Not.  The Enterprise crew often ends up enlightening the people on the planet, setting them free.

In a lot of cases, the episode ends with a motivational Kirk speech.

There were often subgenres of these episodes.  Episodes like A Piece of the Action, The Omega Glory, Bread and Circuses and Patterns of Force dealt with societies crafted after pieces of Earth history, where commentary could be most easily or most pointedly made.  Transporter incidents could often kick off a plot, whether by splitting a person into two personalities (The Enemy Within) or transporting them to another universe (Mirror, Mirror). Other episode types would often pop up, such as time travel, (Tomorrow is Yesterday, Assignment: Earth), the court-room/clear my name episodes (Court Martial, The Menagerie, Wolf in the Fold), aliens with god-like powers are jerking the crew around (The Squire of Gothos, Catspaw, Plato’s Stepchildren, Who Mourns for Adonis? Spectre of the Gun, Day of the Dove, The Empath, The Savage Curtain).

Even more standard stories included crew members (typically Kirk, but occasionally others) falling in love and having to break it off by the end of the episode (Most tragically in The City on the Edge of Forever, but also occurring in Requiem for Methuselah, Wink of an Eye, The Enterprise Incident, The Gamesters of Triskelion, By Any Other Name, The Paradise Syndrome, and For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky)  It happened a lot.

Other common plotlines often included madness plagues, regular sickness plagues, Klingons (Or occasionally Romulans), or the Technology Gone Mad episodes.

So yeah, there were patterns.  Lots of them, in fact.  However.

For all the episodes that were a ‘different version’ of an already produced story, there were also many episodes that were different in their own right.  Episodes like Amok Time, Devil in the Dark, Shore Leave, Space Seed, Balance of Terror, The Corbomite Maneuver, The Galileo Seven, Metamorphosis, The Trouble with Tribbles, Obsession, or Journey to Babel.  These episodes, while sometimes containing elements of other plotlines, were distinct, ‘fascinating’ episodes that challenged the traditional ‘Star Trek’ structure.

While it’s always good to have new types of episodes (for the most part), it’s important to remember that even the formulaic episodes were fairly varied, with plenty of new forms of commentary or camp to offer.  Episodes like A Private Little War provided discussion on the Vietnam conflict, and Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is a pointed, on-the-nose, well-deserved criticism of racism.  These stories, while sometimes containing plenty of elements of previously used episodes, were typically still good.  The characters were usually still interesting and memorable, the bad guys equally so, and most of the time, the stories were interesting enough that audiences didn’t mind if they’d already seen an alien culture worshipping a computer or not.

Were there clunkers?  Certainly.  Episodes like Turnabout Intruder, The Way To Eden, Spock’s Brain, and And the Children Shall Lead certainly exist, and while some fans have soft spots for some of them, these stories are widely regarded as the worst of the worst.  But no show is immune to bad episodes, and Star Trek’s reputation, overall, has far more good than bad.  Like I’ve mentioned before, having a formula (or multiple formulas!) is not necessarily a bad thing.  Star Trek’s multiple formulas and occasional ‘new’ story made for interesting and dynamic television stories that stuck with audiences.

While only lasting three seasons, Star Trek managed to generate multiple fascinating examples of television storytelling that have resonated with audiences decades after their initial broadcast.  Even after the show went off the air in 1969, the show’s following only grew, with more fans after it had finished than while it was actually airing.  After three seasons, with the last on shaky legs, plenty of fans still come back to these stories, continuing to find value in them.

Why?

As it turns out, it’s because they’re just…good.

The episodes of Star Trek all relied on new concepts and adventures, driven chiefly by characters that the audience knows and likes.  These episodes rode on a sense of drama, a genuine concern for these people, this crew, the core setup.  On top of that, the drama, while sometimes a bit campy to modern eyes, was often interesting and gripping, and no matter how similar the concept of each episode, the execution and interpersonal conflict was always different, allowing the audience to experience familiar ideas in unfamiliar ways.  The stories weren’t happening to these people, they were about them, and as a result, only the episodes where the characters aren’t in character tend to be the ones that are looked at unfavorably.

As I’ve mentioned before, the real secret to television is consistency mixed with creativity.  And Star Trek had that nailed.  

For all of its formulaic styles, Star Trek was new and interesting, bringing creative stories and characters to previously-used templates to make genuinely engaging and innovative entertainment, while being somewhat familiar.  The points are not softened by the fact that we’ve seen ‘parallel Earth cultures’ before, the characterization is not nullified because we’ve already seen Kirk fall in love with a doomed woman.  Each episode brought something new to the table (admittedly, not always a good something new) and as a result, despite similar themes and concepts, each episode is its own memorable entity, containing equally memorable and iconic characters in heartfelt, earnest stories that does its best to make its audience think.

In the end, that’s a huge contributing factor to why Star Trek still has the following it does.  No matter how much time passes, these stories, written over fifty years ago, still pack a good amount of the emotional and philosophical punch that they did when they were first penned.  

Are the episodes a little campy at times?  

Sure.  Absolutely.

But that doesn’t make them any less effective, or beloved, over fifty years later.  Even now, these stories pack a punch, to which a very loyal fanbase is still a testament.  These stories still have something to say over half a century later, interesting, compelling stories to tell with characters who are just as gripping as they were in 1966.  

Not bad for an old science fiction show from the ‘60s.

Thank you guys so much for reading!  Stay tuned for the next article, where we’ll be discussing the genre and themes of Star Trek.  Don’t forget that the ask box is always open, whether for discussion, questions, suggestions, or conversations.  I hope to see you in the next article.

[the-desolated-quill]

If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own - Watchmen (TV Series) blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. if you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

If You Don’t Like My Story, Write Your Own feels like a tale of two episodes. One has well written characters, emotive storytelling and exciting possibilities, whereas the other contains ham-fisted, painfully obvious subtext and annoyingly long infodumps told to the audience with all the grace and subtlety of a brick to the face. 

Let’s start with the positives. At the beginning of the episode, we’re introduced to the character of Lady Trieu, played by Hong Chau, who buys a farmhouse from an Oklahoma couple by offering them a genetically engineered baby. I love this scene so much. It’s by far the most tightly written and engaging scene so far this series, and serves as a perfect introduction to a genuinely interesting character.

Lady Trieu is a Vietnamese born trillionaire industrialist who absorbed Adrian Veidt’s company after his disappearance and seems to take heavy inspiration from him, even going so far as to have a gold statue of him in her complex. It’s unclear whether she knows about his involvement with the squid (how could she possibly know?), but she clearly shares his vision of making the world better. 

Or... does she?

That’s precisely what I love about this character. Trieu is clearly the secret mastermind behind whatever is going on here (more on that later) and it would have been easy to just simply have her be a carbon copy of Veidt, but she isn’t. There’s a subtle, but clear distinction between the two. In my review of Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, I talked about the paradox of a liberal capitalist and how it’s often not enough for Ozymandias to simply save the world. He needs to be seen to be saving the world. He wants something with spectacle in order to appeal to his own vanity. This is true of Trieu as well, except, despite all his flaws, Ozymandias clearly at least wanted to help people, albeit in an incredibly flashy way for his own aggrandisement. Trieu doesn’t even want that. She just wants the attention and the good will. 

The opening scene is a perfect illustration of this. Giving that married couple their own DIY baby was one thing, but all the crap with the hourglass and the silly monologue and everything, there was no need for any of that. And lets not forget, she didn’t give this couple a baby out of the goodness of her heart. She did it solely because she wanted their land so she could claim a fallen object from space. The same is true of this Millennium Clock she’s building. I’m pretty sure its purpose isn’t just to tell the time, but that’s not the point. It’s described by her daughter as not the Eighth Wonder of the World, but rather as the First Wonder of the New World. Plus, of course, she is a trillionaire. If she just handed out even a small portion of her vast wealth, it would make a huge difference, but then there would be nothing in it for her. Nothing to gain. Unlike Veidt, Trieu is a character driven by pure cynicism. She has no interest in saving the world, but rather the attention and adoration of the world around her. She wants the world and the people around her to rely on her to save them. Basically if Ozymandias is an altruist tempered with narcissism, then Lady Trieu is a narcissist tempered with altruism. It’s a beautifully realised character and one I’m most excited to see more of in the episodes to come.

I also like the connection she has with Angela. Both were born and raised in Vietnam, except Trieu’s mother was a native to Vietnam before the US invaded and absorbed the country, turning it into the fifty first state. This puts Angela in an interesting position. Being an African American, her family obviously has history of being the victims of colonial oppression, but in this alternate history where Vietnam is part of America, Angela is also now in the role as one of the colonial oppressors. A settler in a country stolen and plundered from the natives. It’s an interesting position for her character to be in and I’m very curious to see where the show takes this.

After taking a backseat in the previous episode, Angela mercifully gets to take the lead again this time around and she’s great. With the FBI breathing down her neck, Angela continues to get to the bottom of the mystery involving her grandfather, the murder of Judd Crawford, and the Seventh Kavalry, and I really like where this is taking her character. She privately confides in Wade about what she has learned, even asking him to hide Judd’s Klan robe. This is the kind of character stuff I wanted to see in the previous episode during the funeral. How do you react to the knowledge that one of your closest friends was a hateful bigot? And from the looks of things, it seems as though Angela is doing her level best to protect Judd’s memory, at least until she gets to the bottom of what the fuck is going on here. I love this because it feels totally believable.There’s still a part of her that doesn’t want to accept Judd’s racist ties to white supremacy and clinging onto the idea that he might be misunderstood or that there’s something else going on underneath. This is an excellent internal conflict that has so far been handled exceptionally well. You don’t think less of Angela for not wanting to accept the truth because it’s totally understandable and believable.

Also I just want to briefly talk about what we learn about Wade, aka Looking Glass, in this episode. The man’s a doomsday prepper, living in a bunker in his back garden, preparing for another squid attack. I LOVE this so much. It makes total sense in the context of Watchmen and, like with Lady Trieu, it serves as a really nice inversion of an existing character. Like Rorschach, Looking Glass is a paranoid conspiracy nut, but unlike Rorschach, there’s actually some truth and logic behind his paranoia. Again, it’s a subtle distinction, but it’s enough to allow the character to go off in his own direction.

Here’s the thing. The bits I like about this episode, I really like. Unfortunately the bits I don’t like, I really don’t like.

Let’s begin with Laurie. What is she even doing here? Not only is she so utterly divorced from the character in the graphic novel, she doesn’t even contribute anything meaningful to the plot, other than to bicker constantly with Angela (which, considering this is the first time in Watchmen that we’ve had two female characters together interacting with each other, it feels immensely disappointing that this is the best the writers can come up with) or to spout gratuitous fanwank and pop psychology. The pop psychology in particular irritates me because it simply doesn’t gel with the tone and themes of Watchmen. I’m really hoping all that stuff about trauma and wearing a mask to hide the pain doesn’t in fact apply to Sister Night, otherwise I’m going to be extremely annoyed. Not only is that cliched beyond belief, it also stands directly against the whole point of Watchmen as a concept. Alan Moore’s intent was to scrutinise the reasons behind why someone would put a costume on and fight crime. Some just want the attention, others want to compensate for their own inadequacies, and some just want to live out their own violent, hedonistic fantasies. Only Rorschach fits the trauma model proposed by Laurie, and even then it’s not really accurate. Rorschach uses his trauma more as an excuse than a motivation. Watchmen serves as a deconstruction and criticism of superhero archetypes, so to potentially give Sister Night an obligatory tragic backstory would feel like a grave disservice to the source material.

The pop psychology also represents another problem this episode has. It seems to spend an awful lot of time telling its audience about its themes and commentaries rather than just showing them. One of the things I loved so much about the second episode was that it respected the audience’s intelligence. The connections it was making between the police and mob psychology, the superhero genre and its roots in US propaganda, and the KKK and the moral absolutism of most comic book heroes were apparent in the episode’s visual language and symbolism. It didn’t try to highlight them in fifty foot high neon lettering, instead trusting the audience to make the connections themselves. Here, however, completely the opposite. At numerous points, it feels as though the episode is sitting me down like a naughty school child and straight up telling me the plot, rather than trust that I’m a grown man who is perfectly capable of following this by himself, I pinky promise.

Take the whole subplot with Adrian Veidt for example. By watching the previous episodes, you can deduce that he’s trapped in a prison of his own making and is trying to escape (although admittedly it turns out that the clones aren’t in fact his creations, which is a pity because I think that’s less interesting, but still). Awesome idea. Love it. But showrunner Damon Lindelof is clearly worried that the idiots sitting at the back of the class didn’t get this, so Adrian spends his limited screen time here just explaining his subplot to the audience. It’s really annoying.

Or what about the Millennium Clock? The Seventh Cavalry are clearly in league with Trieu for some unknown reason, and in their video message to the police in the first episode, they say ‘tick, tock’ a lot, which is clearly a reference to the Clock. All a bit goofy, granted, but do you know what’s even goofier? Will getting up out of his wheelchair, staring dramatically into camera and saying ‘tick, tock’ for no fucking reason whatsoever other than to spell out the connection for the slow people in the audience who didn’t make the link. Dude, I promise you, we are following this. It was just pointless. But not nearly as pointless as...

Good God, do I hate Lube Man!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against there being humour in Watchmen. The original graphic novel had moments of dark humour, but there’s a time and a place. It just feels weird and kooky just for the sake of being weird and kooky. And again, it serves as a less than subtle reminder to the audience of the themes of the show. The police are abusing their powers and letting smaller crimes fall by the wayside, but rather than let that come up naturally in the story, we get a random excerpt from the Silver Slider here. All I can say is Lube Man had better play a vital role in the episodes to come, otherwise I’ll be pissed.

See, when Good Lindelof is writing the scripts, I’m enjoying this show immensely. When Bad Lindelof takes a turn at the keyboard, however, that’s when I start to get worried. 

[zhouxuns]

thoughts on the finale

overall, s3 was quite good. but the finale makes it all feel pointless. and not just s3, but s2 and s1 as well. and i know the line about “the universe acknowledges you” was because of what was to come and was supposed to be some sort of comfort to the audience, but it wasn’t. at least not for me. legion never stuck the landing for their finales so this doesn’t surprise me. but i’m gonna rant anyways.

several things i didn’t like.

1) no acknowledgement whatsoever of the hallers who gave david a loving life. they retconned the hallers’ existence this whole season to push the idea that david never received love in his childhood and didn’t grow up looked after. despite the fact that we’ve seen throughout s1 how dearly important david’s childhood was and how important mama and papa haller were to him and how much he loved them and vice versa. i mean really, no acknowledgement of amy haller at all? the woman he cared about most besides syd? his sister? who was so important to him, we got a multiverse episode about how key amy was to david’s lives? not even an acknowledgement towards lenny when she killed herself inside amy’s body? and even worse, we’ll never know precisely why the xaviers gave david to the hallers in the first place. i found this retcon extremely insulting to david’s character, but to adopted families/foster families.

2) farouk’s redemption. how utterly insulting to the audience’s intelligence to redeem farouk with no recognition for his insidious actions and unrelenting vile choices. he possessed a baby, terrorized it for fun, abused a child, he sexually molested david every time david was frozen with fear to further suppress him, he raped lenny, a lesbian, whenever he felt like it, he stole people’s bodies because he felt like it, he killed endless amounts of people. and then they have this same farouk ask his younger self if he was really that hateful and petty as if the audience is supposed to forget that just a year prior to that conversation, that this same farouk brutally murdered an innocent amy haller to get at david and, as lenny said, raped her whenever he wanted. the same person who continued to plant the ideas in david’s head that he’s god and doesn’t have to regard the lives of other people. the same person that kidnapped syd and manipulated her into turning against david before he even betrayed her. like, for real? just retcon all of that to pretend like farouk had a change of heart and always loved david and wants world peace? all it takes is to share beer with your old enemy despite the fresh blood on your hands? wow. how embarrassingly bad is that on the writers’ behalf.

3) syd. not only did syd have a mere handful of lines in this episode, but yet again, it’s as if the writers changed their minds about syd’s feelings/characterization. she’s got to be one of the most jerked around characters on this show. she used to be consistent up until the latter half of s2 when the writers decided to make syd ooc for the sake of plot (you know, the david is evil crap). syd just episodes prior expressed that she felt it was worth it to have been with david and that she wouldn’t change it. she didn’t regret their love, she regretted their downfall. in her final moments, she’s back to bitter snark, borderline defeating the whole empathy episode. i loved the bit about saving baby david, but loathed the “i am” in response to david saying she’ll be extraordinary without him around. it retcons the entire value of syd’s history, her life choices, her self perception. syd, who ALWAYS believed she was extraordinary, given by her famous quote “who teaches us to be normal when we’re one of a kind”, suddenly will be a “better” person w/o having known david? when it was through him she found summerland, found mutant allies, found freedom, found a second childhood. and then what is the purpose of saying her new life will be distinctly amazing if we don’t even get to see it? not even an epilogue paragraph of what syd became in her new life? it felt like such an impersonal send off for her. she’s the female lead but yet again she ends up on the reduced end of things.

4) no consequences. the entire theme of s3 was, time traveling can change the past, but it can’t change who we are. there were no consequences in sight for any of these people. all those awful things david did, murdering and orphaning people, causing his best friend/sister’s suicide, drugging those hundreds of women, none of it mattered when legion pretended like it was supposed to. we didn’t really see david grow. we didn’t truly see him redeem his self. we didn’t see him express any true regret or remorse for all he did on the way there. right up until he end he remained in his entitled tantrum state. all it did was justify everything he did. because the past got rewritten. david got his second life and the people he sacrificed to do it don’t matter. and really? “sorry” was all he could say to the woman he raped and hurt the most? big yikes. legion’s faux commentary on make entitlement and sexism went absolutely nowhere. it’s absolutely bull crap. further proof that rape should’ve never been part of this show, let alone trying to do commentary on rape culture.

5) disjointed elements. switch turning out to be a time god felt so last minute and so lazy. she suffers and endured all this abuse from david because she was meant to “grow up” into her celestial clock form. sure it’s better than just her dying, but it feels as if her screentine was dedicated for a disappointing surprise. given how much screentime switch took up, i expected better. this is my main problem with shows adding more characters to the main plot. it causes the original characters to be neglected which results in less screentime for the originals (syd and the loudermilk twins) or being killed/written off (lenny, ptonomy, the birds) and usually the pay off isn’t good.

6) the severe lack of follow up. we will never know what oliver’s 1 + 1 plan was. we will never know what ultimately became of the birds. what became of ptonomy, who they turned into a flash drive and gave all of 3 lines to for the whole season, we’ll never know what the 3 years from now event change ptonomy calculated turned out to be, or what became of summerland or division 3. we’ll never know why they showed 616!legion in the desert. we will never get a true apology from syd to david and vice versa. we will never get an actual explanation for why farouk was allowed to roam around freely and unchecked despite him being the root cause for david’s demise.

7) the impersonal approach to mental illness. what’s the deal? legion had such a sensitive despite clinical approach to mental illness in s1. they handed the diagnoses with such care and the themes involved with it. in s2 it’s all but abandoned, and in s3 the theme returns, but with no personal touch whatsoever. ah gabrielle has the sickness, it runs in the women in the family, okay mental illness is hereditary for david, understandable. how come this is something david never reconciles his self with? how come they never give david’s true diagnosis? we know he has dissociative identity disorder, but david doesn’t. david is expressly in denial about being mentally ill, even saying he’s not “crazy” to his mother. yet he has a system of alters he works with. they all say “i am legion” which we know is what his collective of alters are called, but that’s it. one of the things david wanted to change was his mental illness. is he ever going to learn he can’t change that because he was sick all along because of his mother? his mental illness is such a huge aspect to her character yet in s3 it just feels like a post it note stuck to his chest. no one regards it with sensitivity. no one accepts responsibility in exacerbating his condition. nothing. legion used to be about mental illness. then they shed it for social commentary which held no weight, and destroyed the characterizations for an outcome that was ultimately inconsequential.

overall, this just proves to me that legion needed more than 3 seasons. easily 4-5 seasons would’ve worked better for this. legion doesn’t even leave things up for interpretation, it just leaves most of what they set up unanswered. i felt since s2 that it had been too soon to develop the story they were developing and i was right. choosing a 3 seasons arc where 2.8 out of the 3 seasons the male lead is a sympathetic and genuinely good character to make him evil and narcissistic and apathetic? makes no sense. or when the female lead used to be this complex morally grey character and at her last hour becomes isolated once more and is quoting things straight out of 2014 tumblr? i mean really? wtf.

the other characters didn’t get to do enough across these seasons. they were cannon fodder for david’s story/development (or lack thereof) more than anything else. once they were less proximal to david, they were less relevant to the writers too.

syd and david’s relationship didn’t last nearly long enough before they were thrust into ghastly new territories. and the same goes for everyone else’s dynamic on the show. far too much offscreen development occurred. farouk having a change of heart? you truly couldn’t pinpoint any point where farouk ever felt sorry for david or cared about anyone else but his self. he’s been nothing but condescending, sadistic, manipulative, and countless other atrocities. d3 and the summerlanders being comfortable with farouk with no mind control at play at all? get real. kerry and syd’s friendship was nice tidbit but we didn’t see it develop at all. it would’ve been important to see these female mutants develop a relationship. it’s the most frustrating thing aboutall of this. clearly more time was needed.

we needed more time for these things to feel truly earned. but noah was way in over his head because of how busy he became by the time s2 swung around and decided to cut the show short. i don’t buy for one minute that 3 seasons was the plan all along. everything about legion’s story progression beyond s1 screams improvisation and a messy one at that. there wasn’t enough time for these characters to breathe, too much characterization and story had been retconned to get the ending over with, and legion choosing to end where it began, except all the characters we loved are gone, all the things that made the show most important to us are gone, feels more depressing than i thought it would.

it’s going to be difficult rewatching the show especially from its flawless premier season, knowing none of it happens at all. it’s literally unfathomable to think that 3 years later this is where we’d be. i’m so disappointed.

[yogpetshame]

In the latest Triforce podcast, they complain about politically correctness, about the left-wing, and Lewis defends *notorious transphobe who spends all his time harassing trans people* Graham Linehan. It's fucking awful.

You know, I got kind of a different impression and I figured I might as well labor through explaining why, since we’re dealing with a really long piece of media that’s hard to “digest” the way you would normally be inclined to. 

The part where it starts, where they’re talking about Curb Your Enthusiasm, is so-so. It feels like listening to a guy talk just a little too passionately about how they relate to Rick Sanchez, or Bojack Horseman, or Walter White. The core of Curb is not, as Sips says, to “comment on cancel culture.”

Anyway, the salient bit comes way later in the podcast. I flick through the YouTube auto-generated transcript in moments like this and think, goddammit, this technology needs to hurry up. So before you go “Holy shit, YPS transcribed all that?!” …No I didn’t, which is why it’s going to read like fucking shit. I’m just going to correct it when the words are wrong but I’m not doing any not-strictly-necessary punctuation. Nooo thank you.

Lewis: Something like I think that okay a good example is like JK Rowling and you know actually for example someone tweeted me this week saying you should unfollow Graham Linehan who wrote like father Ted I think when I signed up to Twitter about 10 years ago I automatically followed a lot of people who I was a fan of 

Sips: or thought you were because you don’t know these people 

Lewis: Bill Bailey-

Sips: writes a funny show that you like 

Lewis: cuz I want to see funny tweets on Twitter from them you know I like father Ted I want to see his funny tweets you know and someone tweeted me and said you should unfollow him because he’s done a load of anti-trans stuff and commentary and I I was like you know what I don’t think I’ve- I will. I think I’m just gonna unfollow him. I don’t think it’s worth trouble wise I don’t I don’t think that this guy particularly is obviously like I but it’s a little bit in my head though I’m a little bit like Oh father Ted’s now a bit tainted like Harry Potter’s a little bit tainted by 

Sips: the thing is okay fine you’ve unfollowed him you’ve unfollowed him after suggestion of somebody but you haven’t you haven’t unfollowed him for like the pure reason right you’ve just done followed him because it’s like off 

Lewis: in my head 

Sips: he’s pressuring me and I don’t want to be seen as somebody who agrees with what this guy might have said 

Pyrion: so that’s what cancel cultures is about

Sips: exactly 

Pyrion: I still think the main thing the  main thing to do is if I mean first of all I don’t want to know Graham linehan I don’t care what his opinions are, I want to see Father Ted

Sips: no i want to see the funny stuff  is it something on Twitter that’s even remotely funny and related to father Ted great that’s why I followed him in the first place because the father Ted you know what I mean like 

Lewis: yeah 

Pyrion: well so Twitter is real easy to be as puritanical as you like about whatever it is you believe in but I guarantee you even people you know really well there’ll be something of opinion that they hold that you think what that’s fucking bizarre like I can’t get my head around this weird that you you what are you gonna stop seeing that person because there’s something you disagree with them about I don’t know I mean I know lots of people whose politics are wildly different from mine or their opinions about all kinds of stuff are wildly different from mine it doesn’t change the fact that they’re they’re essentially a decent enough person that I could be friends with them 

Lewis: no absolutely

Pyrion: I just think it’s it’s not worth analyzing with a micro microscope every single aspect of a person’s personality because no one is clean no one is gonna come out of it and you’re gonna be okay with everything they said 

Lewis: I don’t think they’re evil if they have flaws like that or beliefs necessarily either I think it’s that they’re a product of their their cultural like like teachings been informed of over the years via media and Hollywood and books and people and friends of family and surroundings and locales…

So at worst, to me, this reads like Lewis is willing to concede that some people do not deserve your attention because of their words and deeds. Mostly, it’s like not wanting to be bothered about it and cause an argument outweighs his attachment to old media by a good deal. And he even will admit that separating the art from the artist is futile. I don’t really have an issue with it.

Pyrion comes in with the dog-tired “I don’t care who made it, I live in a Solipsistic world where the only things that matter are the things I observe.” Stupid, but inoffensive.

But you can see Sips starting some shit which he follows through on almost as soon as he gets a chance to.

Lewis: so what I’m saying is don’t be too hard on yourselves if you find that your your beliefs are challenged you know 

Sips: I don’t hold a strong belief on that though like you know like like I if if if that offends somebody to laugh at that and they’re around me or whatever I  would apologize I would say oh sorry 

Pyrion: you know like it’s not worth clinging to that kind of 

Sips: I’m a reasonable person I’m not I’m not gonna fight for my right to laugh at prison rape jokes I just don’t care enough but I could but equally 

I’m not I’m not going to to to falsely support like like trans rights and stuff as well by unfollowing somebody on Twitter because as much as I support somebody’s right to be who they are or who they want to be and and freedom and stuff like that these are things that don’t really affect me 

I’m not gonna be as passionate about them as somebody who is who is affected by it you know or or living that life or whatever you know what I mean I think there’s I think there’s a lot of like almost like false support for movements nowadays just to appear sort of like politically correct or popular or something like that and I don’t agree with that either I you know I think people that are coming out and and being like overly  sort of supportive about something that they have nothing to do with or whatever is is is it’s not it’s not a genuine thing it’s it’s it’s a lie

Pyrion: you see that in Hollywood a lot 

Sips: of course you do 

Pyrion: cos they cast something and it’s like the cast is like you can tell they’ve they’ve fucking they brainstormed the shit out of how to get the perfect cast for essentially for to avoid bad reviews on on Twitter and in the media 

Sips: sure 

Pyrion: it feels disingenuous 

Sips: yeah no 

Pyrion: it’s not from the heart no they haven’t changed they just going with the trends 

Sips: it is it’s it’s it’s some sort of formula for like popularity or for money or sales or something like that and it doesn’t feel nice it doesn’t feel good like like 

Lewis: yeah we should be on top of that stuff 

Sips: I think you need somebody to support me with with with just about anything really but like you know what I mean like it’s I don’t know like III think I think just I think it’s important to just be yourself and not get caught up in that in the hype of everything you know what I mean like just yeah like and don’t be an asshole yeah

It’s like Sips thinks that by burying it 55 minutes into an hour long podcast he’s going to get away with saying he doesn’t have sympathy for anyone who isn’t straight and white. Like I understand the way he’s trying to couch it, by saying that it’s slacktivism or it’s not a genuine demonstration of support, or that he’s not required to demonstrate his support in any way. But when you find yourself following someone who actually represents something you really believe is hateful, how can you not care, just because well, he’s funny, and he doesn’t happen to hate you? I don’t think it’s fair to make a snap judgement about a person based on who they choose to follow on Twitter… rather, I think it’s very fair to make a judgement about how they rationalize continuing to follow that person. “He doesn’t hate me so it’s not my problem” is bullshit.

Sips pauses for a minute and comes back in a few minutes later, as though he realizes what he just blurted out:

Sips: I feel like this podcast would be way better if I could actually articulate my thoughts like in an intelligent manner or not just like being a dope

Lewis: this is what this is though I said at the very start the podcast it’s that words are not enough like we we I think we need speeches

Pyrion: ‘More than words,’ that’s this week’s theme is the song ‘More than Words’ by Extreme.

Lewis: prepared speeches that are finely honed and crafted to not-not-not cuz but a lot of time people to get the wrong end of the stick from this podcast they’re gonna think Lewis said this sentence and people are gonna take out of context and it’ll and it’ll mean so which is the opposite of what I meant

Interlude… that’s why I bothered to pull the transcripts out in the first place. Hard to argue I was fucking around with context when I’m cutting out fat chunks like this.

Sips: I meant yeah yeah I know 

Lewis: it’s a very complex topic

Sips: alright I do my best I think I’m a reasonable person I don’t think I’m overly offensive to any one person or a group of people III don’t have hate in my heart for anything other than people who are sweaty at overwatch oh you know what I mean like I know I’m not going out of my way to like spread hate or to spread misery or whatever I think I’m like a pretty easygoing you know happy-go-lucky sort of sort of person.

Unfortunately nobody is handing out medals for bullshit, so your rambling appeal for sympathy was for naught, Sips.