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indecisive-behaviors · 3 years ago

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Originally I was just going to add this as a reblog to my previous post about the parking lot scene in KK2 but it’s almost 2k words so now it’s getting it’s own post. Be forewarned- this is fucking long.

TW for discussion of PTSD, child abuse, neglect, injury, and death, in relation to topics surrounding the show, under the cut-

Obviously, Cobra Kai is a show based around the premise of “what happened to that Lawrence kid after he got kicked in the face?”, which is honestly a pretty cool idea for a show. Johnny’s story is never explained past sitting on the sidewalk with his head in his hands at the tournament, and there are no real context clue’s to figure out what may or may not have happened.

In the show we get to learn early on that Johnny’s life spiraled after the tournament, going from bad to worse to “holy shit how are you still alive”-dropping out/never going to college, working jobs he seems to hate, becoming an alcoholic, presumably many dead end relationships, and not being there for his kid. And yeah, obviously, this would be a hard pill to swallow for anyone watching the show if Johnny had just lost the tournament. If we never got the scene in KK2, he would have just been some kid who lost a tournament- we see at the end of the first movie that(through tears holy shit Billy) that Johnny is the one who gives the trophy to Daniel with his famous line, “You’re alright, LaRusso.” There’s a level of grudging respect in that moment that isn’t lost on anyone who sees that movie- that Johnny, who throughout the movie only sees Daniel as some whimpy kid, gets proven wrong and respects that. If we didn’t have that scene, there’s reason to believe Johnny would have apologized, tried to make amends, Something, even if it was just being less of a dick at school.

But then, we get the parking lot. We get a far off shot, intended to distance you from the scene, framed over Daniel’s shoulder. This makes sense, Daniel is the main character, the protagonist, the underdog hero- why wouldn’t it be framed in his perspective? But the scene is about Johnny. We get the shouting match, the back and forth- “No, you’re the loser man.”- and again it’s fairly obvious how Johnny sees this situation. This is a man who we assume(and is later confirmed) to be a surrogate father figure, who set his friend up for failure, and then basically forced him to do the same by targeting an injured opponent, and forcing him to fight without honor. This same man presumably follows a teenager out to the parking lot, to harass him, to tell him he’s off the team, to tell him he’s a loser, that he’s nothing.

But at that point, Johnny knows the truth, even if subconsciously. At the end of the day Johnny knows that Daniel LaRusso was a worthy opponent, and that regardless of the cheating and manipulation, Daniel could have won anyway, and did win, despite of it.

And then Kreese grabs him, too fast to react to, Johnny too surprised even knowing that Kreese is the bad guy here, not believing that he would ever willingly hurt him- and Johnny isn’t strong enough to fight him off, none of the boys are, so Johnny is forced to suffocate for almost a full 30 seconds(which I double checked for the record- also as a reference, 30 seconds is about the average time it takes for a person voluntarily holding their breath to pass out- this does not account for the oxygen lost during a struggle, and the lack of preparation from both surprise and panic. The only silver lining here is the fact that Kreese was most likely compressing his windpipe, not his jugular, which would have made him pass out in about 5-10 seconds, and would have caused permanent brain damage or death in about 15).

Now, PTSD is a complex thing. I’m not a psychiatrist, and what small amount of information we have is all we have to work off of, but I feel fairly comfortable in saying Johnny mostly likely developed it after the incident. This not an uncommon take in the fandom as far as I’m aware either. But, if we assume this, we also have to assume that after the fact nothing would have been done about this. Not just in the sense that we still don’t really know everything that happened right after the tournament, but that in the early 80s, PTSD wasn’t really a thing yet.

Sure it was absolutely a condition that existed, but Post Traumatic Stress Disorder wasn’t even added to the DSM-III until 1980- and for a long time afterward, was only seen as a condition that affected primarily war vets. Even after an event as traumatic as having a man you considered a father trying to kill you, in public, without remorse, would not have been seen as something to warrant the diagnoses, let alone treatment.

Johnny Lawrence was 17 when Kreese tried to kill him, and this boy would have been offered no resources beyond filing charges with the police. And as we see in KK3, either this didn’t happen either, or someone(presumably Silver) got the charges dropped. So on top of almost being murdered, Johnny had to live with the fact that the man who did that to him was still out there, and to top it off, still ran a dojo at least for a few months after the event. The only relief he could have gotten is after Kreese faked his death.

And sure, Mr Miyagi may have gotten Kreese to let go eventually, but as several people have pointed out in comments and tags, left him and the other boys alone with Kreese still standing there in the parking lot and just... drove off. Kreese has already been established to be a psycho with no problem hurting children, a little bit of glass might not have prevented him from trying again.

So why did I talk about all of that? Because it all contributes to why Daniel LaRusso works as a credible antagonist in season 1 of Cobra Kai.

Think about this- Johnny blames losing everything on Daniel in season 1, but we specifically get a shot in KK1 and later KK2(”You’re alright, LaRusso” and “I did my best” come to mind) where he seems to be at least mostly accepting of the fact that he lost(with what was actually an illegal kick but that’s a rant for another time). So why does he blame him for everything 30 years later?

Because 30 years later, Johnny is forced to go outside, go to work, and pretend like he doesn’t see what feels like every street corner(including right outside his apartment mind you), a literal billboard sized reminder of what happened to him.

The rest of this is mostly speculation but it makes sense in my head so bear with me.

When we get introduced to Robby, it’s made pretty clear that Johnny has not been in his life for a bit. In season 2 we get Johnny’s heart to heart with Miguel, where he divulges that he missed the birth, because he spiraled after his mom’s death. This however doesn’t suggest that he stayed gone, especially knowing that it wasn’t long enough for Robby to not consider seeking out his dad. Because tacked up to the fridge, is a picture of Robby in his soccer uniform as a kid. It’s an early detail you can see in previous episodes, and says a lot about how Robby grew up. To be fair, this could have been given to him by Shannon, and not taken himself, but it’s the sport Robby’s playing that makes me question this. KK1 dedicates an entire scene to Johnny being on the soccer team in high school. Soccer, while maybe not as important to him as karate, is still part of his character. Robby does not know karate in season 1, Johnny obviously didn’t share it with him, but that doesn’t mean Johnny didn’t share anything with him.

So Johnny’s back in his kids life, maybe doing better for himself, maybe cutting back on the drinking. LaRusso Auto is already established to exist at this point but it’s in Encino, a place Johnny has no reason to go to, and probably doesn’t want to. He’s trying again and things are okay. But Robby knows enough about Daniel to know that going to him will piss off his dad. So Johnny had to have talked about him at some point. The billboards here are what’s important- they’re in the first episode, the first scene montage, Johnny draws a dick on one of them as some petty revenge.

The first billboard goes up in the late 2000s to mid 2010s. Johnny sees it, maybe he has Robby with him at the time, maybe he goes home and says something there, but he says something in a way that sticks with even a child as being important. More billboards go up. Dealerships starting popping up more and more. Daniel’s face, and by extension, the memories, the flashbacks, become inescapable. Johnny, for a third time, spirals again. Before he even knows what’s happening, he’s lost his relationship with his son. And it’s all Daniel’s fault. Of course Daniel doesn’t do it deliberately, but the constant reminders are enough to send him back into a tailspin and Johnny blames him for it.

Because it’s Daniel who is a constant reminder of his failures- it’s Daniel who caused him to lose the tournament and almost get killed, Daniel who put up the billboards that trigger his flashbacks, it’s always Daniel Daniel Daniel.

And then Johnny gets it in his head that he wants to be better. He opens a dojo, teaches Miguel and the other kids, wants to try again- and he almost succeeds.

Johnny up to this point has not deliberately antagonized Daniel in any way. Sure he named the dojo Cobra Kai, but Cobra Kai is all he knows. Besides Johnny doesn’t blame karate for his failures, his best memories are Cobra Kai and he’s trying to be better than Kreese. So what’s the harm in this really? His building is in Reseda, there’s no reason for Daniel to ever be there, he doesn’t do it out of spite, it’s because he lives there and rent is cheap. He doesn’t know about KK3, doesn’t know about Daniel’s own trauma. This isn’t an attack. Johnny sincerely just doesn’t know.

Enter Daniel, stage left. Daniel makes no attempt to talk to him- he simply makes demands and accusations, before he starts making active attempts to put him out of business.

Sure, we as the audience know Daniel has good reasons to not want Cobra Kai back. But Johnny doesn’t. All Johnny knows is that the kid he picked on in high school- who won, who got everything Johnny wanted, who grew up to be successful, has a wonderful wife, two kids who love him, a thriving business- is doing everything he can to make his life hell 30 years after the fact.

And this could only have happened because in 1986 John G. Avildsen decided to add in a scene meant for the original movie into the sequel, for absolutely no fucking reason.

#meta analysis #ranting about cobra kai cuz I can #johnny lawrence #daniel larusso #cobra kai #karate kid #I will never get over the fact that that was an actual scene that they filmed #and then got no resolution #FOR 30 YEARS #I apologize to everyone for this post #obviously I have a lot of feelings about this

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wormworker · 4 years ago

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(about being autistic and surviving autmisia, ableism, trauma, & suicidal ideation)

(ok to share)

I was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia in 2018.

I'll do my best to articulate why.

I think, being disabled & experiencing ableist oppression, but not *knowing* about ableism, basically subjects us to perpetual 'self-gaslighting.'

I'm not sure what else to call it.

It's the trauma of being discriminated against, but not knowing *why* you're being discriminated against.

& not even knowing that it *is* discrimination.

I think it's different for us folks with, um, "less visible" disibilities than it is for those whom the average abled person can look at & clearly know the person is disabled (i.e. people using mobility aids).

Being Autistic, for example, people bully you & oppress you simply because you exist.

They probably don't know you're disabled. They don't know why they hate you. They just do.

And oh, do they *hate* you.

This experience of mine, people hating me so much & being so off-put by me, & me having no idea why people felt that way towards me...

It was torture. It did something to me. It was a very swift path to suicide attempts.

That trauma changed me so much. It completely warped the way I exist around people. The way I feel in the presence of others. The way I feel when people can see me & hear me & perceive me.

Not knowing why this was happening to me, I believed I started having delusions. Probably in middle school, I think. It got more intense in high school & in adulthood.

I had always had auditory hallucinations, because of extreme stress. My trauma started in infancy -- being in an unsafe & chaotic household.

& it was repeating, inescapable trauma.

My Autistic brain couldn't take it. I very quickly developed CPTSD.

Everyone is capable of experiencing hallucinations, even abled people, when put through stress or sleep deprivation.

My trauma was constantly invalidated & I couldn't rationalize any of it. Partly because I didn't know about ableism & autmisia.

So I thought there was something wrong with *me.*

Not knowing about ableism, this was the only explanation I could grasp: That something was wrong with me. That I deserved it. Or that my brain was fabricating it.

Then, last year, I learned about ableism & autmisia. I accepted myself as disabled & Autistic. I accepted I was part of a marginalized group & that I had always experienced ableism from the moment I was born.

The hallucinations almost completely stopped.

& I realized there had never been any delusions.

The trauma persists, of course. It will persist, as long as autmisia & ableism persist.

I still experience the effects of that trauma every day in my mind, body, heart, soul. & because of that, I do still hear disembodied voices at times.

But. It has a name now.

That's so very important.

I know now that my brain is not "gaslighting itself."

Psychosis from trauma, & psychosis from brain chemistry, is very, very real. I want to make it clear that I'm not discrediting that.

In my particular situation, I both did experience psychosis, & mistake that I was experiencing psychosis.

It was just that, what I thought was psychosis was actually autmisia & ableism.

Because it had never occurred to me that people could tell I wasn't "normal."

It had never occurred to me that people were abusing me for being Autistic, when they didn't even know I was Autistic.

The deep & traumatizing effects of autmisia & ableism & sanism is a very serious situation.

Autmisia did almost kill me. It did lead me to multiple suicide attempts. & it was terrifying because I didn't know what was happening to me.

I didn't know why I was being treated like that.

Knowing the culprit, knowing it was autmisia, doesn't make autmisia any less serious or damaging.

But how can you address a problem if you can't even find out what the problem is?

How do you get less desperate to end your own life if you don't even know why you're being pushed to that point?

So tell people about ableism & autmisia.

Everybody.

Especially your kids.

It's vital.

You could save a life.

#ActuallyAutistic #ActuallyDisabled #disability justice #disability tag #autmisia #ableism

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thewrongexecution · 4 years ago

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thinkin’ ‘bout final fantasy

I go by Not The Author for exactly the reason that I ain’t no expert on any given work of fiction, but I do like to make connections what make me seem smart: an illusion, haphazardly crafted by incident accident and supplemented by precocious pretentiousness. All the same, here are some fun thoughts I had that you might also enjoy!

I do have a point, that I do get to. I feel like I should say that ahead of time, all things considered. Like, I can appreciate if you can’t appreciate a shaggy dog story? But there is a point to all this.

...Eventually.

Spoiler Warning:

Final Fantasies 1, 6, 7, 7R, 13 and 15

Content Warning:

Discussion of death

Cussin’

Length warning:

5621 words

13 sections

16 digressions

Let’s dig in.

- - - - -

Final Fantasy 1 was not my first Final Fantasy experience, but I think it was the first I ever played by myself? The remaster for the GBA, came bundled with FF2 on the same cart, which I played briefly but did not complete and do not remember, except that it had Cid.

FF1 doesn’t have a Cid, but I really loved the narrative anyway, straightforward as it was, because it was very specifically about spitting in the face of an uncaring god who would doom the world for a laugh. Take these chains that bind us to darkness and, though we be forgot to history, strangle with them that selfsame darkness to bring an end to its tyranny.

((it is a terrible curse, to love time travel. so many grand expectations, so few ever met. play ghost trick, chrono trigger, radiant historia, majora’s mask, outer wilds. have you any recs yourself, lemme know! I digress.

((I digress a lot, as I may have mentioned. they’ll be noted in parenthetical, like this.))

This is the foundation upon which Final Fantasy is built, and while any student of architecture could tell you of many and varied perfectly valid construction techniques, it resonates. Grappling with an immutable past to course-correct an uncaring future is, too, an apt description of personal growth; a theme as universal as being alive. And I, as an impressionable youth, ate that shit up.

((I assume I was young, at any rate. my love for time travel, be it era-spanning or moment-stretching, is, I suspect, not entirely coincidental to my terrible temporal memory.))

And that was the tale of the studio, too. Final Fantasy was so titled because, the story goes, the developers knew they would shutter if it didn’t make bank. Staring your imminent demise in the face, knowing your fate is doom, and giving it your all, all the same.

And then they made another twelve, plus two-and-a-half MMOs, and god knows how many mobile games and spin-offs, and now the Fantasy is that there could ever be a Final one. so say I: life parodies art.

((the half-an-MMO is FF14 1.0, which no longer exists and is a fascinating tale, a rally against bleak futures all its own. I’ll [link] Noclip’s three-part documentary covering the developer’s side of things, because that’s the one I’ve seen. there’s plenty other material to hunt down, though, if you wanna.))

- - - - -

Final Fantasy VII is a game about fate, too. Particularly Death, that most ultimate of fates. Tragic, to be sure; preventable, or at least delayable, in many cases; necessary, at times, for the growth of something new.

Unrelenting. Unstoppable. Inescapable.

Death, and the fights against it, take many forms. There are the fascist death squads that hunt down your ragtag band and any dissent against their cruel masters, but these will only truly stop by cutting off the hydra’s head and building an entirely new society; eight dudes and their dog, faced with a corporate private military, can survive but never win. There are such disasters as do slay that hydra, be they natural or man-made. There’s the space alien and the apocalypse it ushers. There’s literal illness and injury, physical or otherwise. There are the deaths of loved ones, friends and family, that lead to some subtler deaths within those that survive them. The deaths of relationships, by neglect or abandonment. The ideological deaths we inflict on ourselves, accepting ever-growing lesser evils in the name of some impossible ideal.

Every day, the person we were becomes the person we are, and soon, the person we are will give way to someone new, and this, too, is a sort of death. In this sense, we tally Cloud’s deaths at least five: failure to become a Soldier and rebirth in shame, the massacre of Nibelheim and rebirth in grief, arrival at Midgar and rebirth in delusion, his cratering at the Crater and rebirth in nihilism, and his death and rebirth in the Lifestream of Mideel.

((you could prolly hunt down another two if you wanna be cheeky, but I lack the knowledge, motive and patience. frankly, this whole thing is to create a leading line of logic and probably isn’t, uh. academically ethical? or whatever the term is. I’m not necessarily wrong, but I’m definitely scuttling nuance. oh well!))

Now, I say “rebirth,” because that’s how deaths of identity more-or-less work. There’s usually some new identity waiting in the wings to take over. And rebirth is itself a notable theme, inasmuch as it is one outcome of death. But death is oft more final than that, and what people do in its imminence and wake is key here, too. Wutai’s collapse into an insular tourist trap. Avalanche’s vengeful fervor, in general and post-plate drop. Bugenhagen trying to pass his knowledge on to Red. The whole party’s ongoing post-traumatic depressive episodes.

Ultimately, death is the inescapable fate of all things. It’s what we do, in light of that, that makes us who we are.

- - - - -

Final Fantasies 13 and 15 are the only modern Final Fantasies I’ve beaten, and I bring them up because both deal very prominently with fate and death, and as Square’s most recent mainline FF titles, Remake can’t exist without comparison to them. Here’s what I remember:

Final Fantasy 13 was a game I enjoyed. The stagger system mixed up my casual FF tradition of Get The Big Numbers by putting a prominent UI element onscreen that says You Can’t Get The Big Numbers Unless The Bar Is Full. Suddenly there’s a natural-but-enforced ebb and flow to combat built in, where you gotta juggle chip damage, survival, and crowd control while keeping resources enough to burst down a staggered foe, but maintain situational awareness to swap back into survival mode if you’re not gonna down your enemy, all in something close to real-time. Very obviously a direct precursor to the combat of Remake. I didn’t realize the depth of it, but it was still super fun.

People at the time didn’t like the linearity of the game and, I can see that in retrospect? I think it’s closer to, there weren’t breakpoints, there wasn’t variety. It was cutscenes, combat, and the stretches of land between them; the only real thing for the brain to get a workout on was the combat, and eating only one kinda food is gonna make that food taste bland.

((I didn’t mind, but I like idle games, and, also probably had depression around then. Take that how you will.))

The story, though, I loved. You got your uncaring gods forcing mortals to do their increasingly-impossible bidding, cursing them to agonized unlife if they take too long, and with blissful, beautiful death if they succeed. It sucks! And here you have a ragtag band of incidental idiots trying to rebel against a system that, actually, wants them to? Like that’s the plan? Have mortals kill god and summon the devil to destroy all life, because god, doesn’t.... like life anymore?

((The lore gets more than a little impenetrable, and I remember bouncing off it a couple times. The throughline of God Sucks And Makes Zombies was good though.))

The biblical parallels are obvious, and if they weren’t, the final boss’ design will clue you in, god that’s a good design. hang on I can add pictures and already tossed a spoiler warning, here, look at this:

(per the Final Fantasy Fandom Wiki [X])

That’s literally The Holy Trinity But A Sword The Size Of A Building. It’s perfect.

Anyway, I love this game, because the heroes win, which is what God wants, so in winning, they lose, as was fated to be, right? Fuck All That, say the lesbians from space australia, as they turn into satan and, as satan, stop God’s shitty metal moon from crashing into space australia and destroying all life.

((this awakened something in me, though, as is becoming a theme, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. actually hold up I’m gonna rewatch that sequence.

((yeah okay wow on review that was aggressively cheesy and had a whole bunch of weird emotional whiplash that just leaves a super-bad aftertaste. I don’t really like it as an experience, but big bazonga lesbian satan with arms for hair is still a look-and-a-half.))

The whole thing is not entirely unlike if meteor was also Midgar, and there’s more than a few points where I went, hang on, are they trying to evoke 7 here? “Lightning” is ex-military and bad at emotions, Sazh is a black dad w/ guns and emotional trauma and I love him, quirky pink healer girl who might be an alien is here, the game starts on a train and leads into a robot bug fight; obviously it’s not one-to-one but the connections are there for a brain like mine to make, and only more prominent for the fact that FF7 was the more satisfying game.

((I cannot speak to 13-2 or -3; 13-2 was fun up until the enemies were abruptly 30 levels higher than me, more or less a mandate by the game for me to do all the side content, which I was not on-board with. I skipped 13-3 entirely, especially when I learned the whole game is on a timer. did not and do not need that stress in my life.))

- - - - -

But okay, FF13 was “too linear” and wasn’t doing super great. Enter Final Fantasy Versus 13, by which I mean enter Final Fantasy 15 actually, we don’t need any more of this 13 crap. And once again, I enjoyed it! ...Right up until it was bad.

Final Fantasy 15 was not a finished game, and we know this for certain now, because all its DLC was to make it a finished game. At the time, though, there was uncomfortable and inconsistent story pacing, only one playable character, relatively sparse combat mechanics... but it was open-world, and hey, that’s what you wanted, right? open, non-linear environments? I picked it up because, Teleporting Swordsman With a Motorcycle Sword. I am of simple pleasures, and those are they.

Of the little I remember, one point that’s stuck with me is the sequence following the Leviathan fight. See, we’ve been talking about fate and destiny and how Final Fantasy likes to spite them. Here in 15, our main man Noctis doesn’t want the destiny he’s been burdened with, to Become The King and Save The World from the Coming Darkness, or whatever. He’d really rather be doing, anything else? like hanging out with his buddies or actually getting married or, I dunno, grieving the death of his father. Nope! You don’t get to do that. Go find the ghost armaments of your dead ancestors so you can ~saaave the wooorld!~ I would have been in college around then, so, eminently relatable.

Now, on this journey, you meet a guy called Ardyn. He’s the sort of character that was built as an attack on me personally: sleazy, charming, possessing airs of casual familiarity with people he’s never met, kinda helps you out in tight spots, and also, by the way, vizier to the empire that killed your dad and wants you and your friends dead too. But not in the “secret good guy” way, he just likes fucking with you! he’s perfect.

Right up until the Leviathan fight.

See, Lunafreya, your betrothed--

((I’m so mad about this stupid, stupid garbage. I love Lunafreya on principle, but the game doesn’t bother to give her screentime. you only ever hear about her incidentally, which can be cool if you then meet the character and get to compare/contrast what you’ve heard, but the initial release only has her show up for this one chapter, and your party doesn’t really get to interact with her that much.))

Your betrothed is here and she’s some symbol of the peoples’ hope, right? she’s got light magic or something, and can actually commune with the gods. the gods are on your side, but you can’t actually understand a word they say, but she can, and that’s sick as hell. anyway.

You lose the fight against Leviathan, because you’re a shitty emo teen who doesn’t know how to use your ghost swords, and she got beat up earlier when Levi got all pissy at being summoned. And then Ardyn shows up in his magitek dropship.

Now earlier, Ardyn had Luna as his captive, completely at his mercy, and right now, he who would be king of kings, destined to save the world from darkness, is clutching at rock in a hurricane, beaten, wounded and dying.

Of the two, which do you think he stabs to death?

if you thought, “the protagonist, which will allow him to win, and subvert Final Fantasy’s themes of defying fate by having the villain be the one to do it, forcing everyone else to scramble for some alternate solution and deal with the fallout,” congratulations! You win disappointment, because that idea’s cool as hell and they didn’t. fucking. Do it.

((Ardyn, before this, had given me major Kefka vibes, and thinking on it now, the world descending into darkness in the 15 we never had could have played with even deeper parallels to FF6... but I never played 6, and that FF15 doesn’t exist, so... I’ll leave that analysis to better scholars.))

now, with the benefit of hindsight, that was never going to happen. too long in development hell, game had to ship, had no time or budget for mid-game upheaval. but at the time? made me lose any interest I had in Ardyn, made me mad at the developers for passing up on fulfilling the themes their series had explored in past, made me almost stop playing the game. I’m still mad about it for crying out loud!

((thinking about it gets me tensed up, coiled, with that sort of full-body thrum that’s best conveyed with letters that jitter around. best I can do here is bold italics, but it doesn’t have the right energy. it’s a fleeting feeling, but when it’s here? god. given the men that wrote this scene I would fight all of them and win.

((inhale...

((exhale...

((and move on.))

We, the player, never really meet Luna, so there’s no real... impact, no substance to it. It’s sad, but impersonal. villain kills damsel to inflict manpain on hero. that’s it. we’ve seen this song and dance before.

But kill Noctis? The character the player’s been controlling all this time, who they know intimately? Now it’s personal. Now your party members’ grief is a mirror to your own. And now you get to play as Luna, maybe? give the game time to flesh her out, have her bond with your old companions over their shared grief, and maybe use her connections and public speaking skills to rally the people of the world, in a perhaps-vain attempt to resist the oncoming darkness, while simultaneously using that public-facingness to drive her to hide her own fear and hopelessness...? That’s a complex character ripe for drama and tragedy right there! And then her, at the head of a story about people coming together to solve a global calamity themselves, rather than await their appointed savior?

Even then, but especially now... You can see the appeal, right?

- - - - -

Lemme step back and zoom out for a moment, because there’s one more kind of Fate to discuss before I finalize my thesis. Yes, I promise, there is a point besides being mad at FF15, this is still ultimately about Remake. Bear with me a little longer.

See, Remake’s premise is that it’s not quite FF7, but that itself is predicated on Remake being essentially FF7. Certain things must be in the Remake series, or it will cease to be the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series. The developers have gone on record saying as much, that they’ll still cover the thrust of the original, and that makes a lot of sense from a development standpoint. Building on an existing framework saves loads of time, and lets them focus on details as they have in Remake.

((I think they've already set up an in-universe justification for this, too. The party may have defeated the Whispers at Midgar, but the Whispers are the will of the planet. The only way to truly defeat them would be to defeat the planet itself, which: kind of the goal of the villains!

((a bit ironic, because the villains are the Whispers’ means to keep manipulating events. Remake backends a very large portion of the plot, and I don’t think Rufus seeing the Whispers is a throwaway detail. The party chases Sephiroth by chasing Shinra in the original, so even if the party has shaken free of the direct influence of the Whispers, manipulating Shinra should in turn manipulate the party.

((on top of which, Rufus prizes power, and the power to change or control fate-- something both the party and Sephiroth have seized-- would be as enticing as anything.))

But this begs the question: How much of Final Fantasy 7 is necessary before it stops being Final Fantasy 7? Do you need all nine characters? The Weapons? Rideable chocobo? Breedable chocobo? What about locations? Can you drop the Gold Saucer? or Mount Condor? or Mideel? How many minigames am I holding up? These are necessary questions, but so is this:

“Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?”

- - - - -

Now, the phrase “emotional impact” is necessarily kind of nebulous and subjective, so lemme dig into that a little bit.

The first significant chunk of the original FF7 takes place entirely in Midgar, which is one huge city. Every screen is densely packed; movement is typically constrained to narrow corridors and industrial crawlspaces. The whole world is deeply claustrophobic and visually hostile, by design.

This is FF7 for the first few hours, before a motorcycle chase deposits you outside city limits, and then... you hit the world map, and everything changes. The world is rendered in three whole dimensions, now! (Then, a technological marvel in its own right.) There’s a sky! There’s a horizon! Grass, mountains, the ocean!

Boundless, terrifying freedom.

From a mechanical standpoint, there’s only one real destination, an A-to-B with random encounters before a small enclosure with an inn and shops, no real change from what you’ve already been doing. But the mood? Everything’s fresh and new, now. Everything’s an unknown.

So, how do we do that again, two-and-a-half decades on?

Let’s say, something like this: Remake 2 starts with Cloud and Sephiroth en route to Nibelheim. For new players, this provides immediate intrigue: why are these mortal enemies hanging out in a truck? how did they get here, where are they going? For veterans, it’s familiar: oh, we’re in the flashback sequence.

For both, it provides mechanical familiarity. We just finished last game hanging out in Midgar, a bunch of town squares with shops and cutscenes connected to hazardous corridors. Well, Nibelheim’s a town with shops and cutscenes, connected to a monster-filled anthill and capped with a reactor. We know this. We’ve done this. We can do this again.

And when the flashback ends, we’re in Kalm. Another town, maybe with sidequests this time; Midgar looming in the distant skybox as a reminder of how far we’ve come.

And then you leave Kalm, and the camera zooms out, and out, and out...

Remake is essentially 7, and you can’t have the impact of 7′s world map reveal if Remake isn’t functionally open-world too. Square has plenty of experience with open environments, however successful their more recent attempts have been; I’m confident that the have the ability, at least, to craft an expansive world that feels appropriate to FF7.

((I’d like to take a moment here to talk about FF14, which mixes both compact twisty dungeons and wide-open overworld zones, and is necessarily wildly successful to still be operating as an MMO... but though I have played it briefly, I don’t claim knowledge sufficient to go in-depth. The point is, Square not only can make a game like that, they have, and are, and apparently possess non-zero competency. I have worries, but I’m not worried, if that makes sense.))

So, can you recreate a given kind of emotional impact? Yeah!

Can scenes from the original Final Fantasy 7 be rendered into a new context, more-or-less as they were? Absolutely!

Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?

- - - - -

Aerith dies.

If you opened this post and didn’t know that, well. There were spoiler warnings up at the top, the game’s more than two decades old, and the spoiler itself is basically a piece of pop-culture, up there with space dad and wizard killer. There’re probably plenty of people who know next-to-nothing about Final Fantasy 7 except that Aerith dies.

Everyone knows because, at the time, it was so big a thing. This was a title that Square hyped to heaven and back to push JRPGs into mainstream western markets, and it worked. And this was before major death was so common and arbitrary as it is today; even now, Game of Thrones and its ilk are a relative rarity. The death of a protagonist or love interest wasn’t a new thing for games, or any media really, but usually you knew it was coming, or it served some purpose. Aerith’s death was sudden, arbitrary, you’re almost immediately thrown into a boss fight so you don’t even have time to process it right away, and it’s the first stone in an avalanche of other pointless arbitrary tragedy. It’s an obvious narrative setup for the endgame confrontation with Sephiroth; instead, Cloud has a breakdown, Meteor happens, and now there’s an entire Disk 2.

Fandom has always been fandom, even before the continuous immediacy of the modern internet, but... people wrote letters to Square, and got sad on message boards. There’s an entire subset of forum signatures, back when those were a thing, that you could sort as “people fucked up over Aerith dying.” And again, this was the world. Not just Japan, or Asia, but everyone.

((Or, everyone with the finances to have a PS2 and/or an internet connection. Gaming as a pastime remains way expensive, whether played or watched. But you know how it is.))

And that’s the problem with answering that question.

See, FF7 is a lot of things, but for better or worse, it is defined by Aerith’s death. It’s one of many factors, but you can’t... leave it out, right? or it wouldn’t be FF7 anymore.

Aerith dies in FF7, and everyone knows it.

- - - - -

But Remake has promised, repeatedly, that things will be different this time. Everyone is coming together to defy fate, and Cloud in particular is here to keep Aerith from dying. Bodyguard jokes aside, Cloud repeatedly has flashbacks (flashforwards?) to Aerith’s death and the events leading to it. When he meets her in the church, when they cross into Sector 6, twice in the final battle. Hell, the very first time they meet, Sephiroth taunts him about not being able to save her. Even from a metatextual standpoint, since everyone knows Aerith dies, that’s like, The Most Obvious Fate To Change.

If, after all that, Aerith still dies? It’s not just tragedy, at that point. That’s the developers, actively lying to the player about their intent in making this game series. That’s frustrating, and immersion-breaking, and when said death is likely to still have one or more entire sequels to come after? maybe not great for sales! I know I didn’t bother buying the complete edition of FF15; I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about a game that set up this cool possibility, and then just, failed to deliver on every count.

And, Remake is being made for two audiences. I’ve said “everybody knows Aerith dies,” but that’s not really true, is it? It’s been 23 years, after all. Remake could well be someone’s very first Final Fantasy experience. That’s why they’ve been telegraphing Aerith’s death so hard. Not everyone knows, but at least everyone can guess. Is it fair, then, to this new audience, with potentially no knowledge or understanding of the legacy of this flashy new action game, to foreshadow tragedy in the future, have everyone come together to say, We’re Going To Stop This, and then... not? Is that good writing? Is that satisfying? When this is a multi-game and potentially multi-console investment of time and money, is this, as a newcomer, a story you’d want to keep playing?

And then on top of that, it’s 2020.

I don’t mean that in the current-year-fallacy, “we’re better than this now” kind of way. Rather, the way I felt about Final Fantasy 15 is even more relevant now. People, in real life, are realizing that the powers-that-be are failing them, have failed them, have been failing them for far longer than twenty-three years. The people that already knew that are actually showing up for each other, to spite what felt and feels like inescapable fate and finding that, together, they might just be able to ruin God’s day.

Game development is, of course, its own whole beast, and projects in motion tend to stay in motion; deviating from a plan takes time and money that Square may be unwilling to spend. But, under current world circumstances: is making a game where the hero sets out to save one specific person from their fated death, and following that with a game where that one specific person dies anyway, aside from everything else, a good business decision?

- - - - -

So... Aerith, shouldn’t die, right...? But, FF7 requires Meteor, and so requires the Temple of the Ancients and the Black Materia. And, Meteor can only be stopped by Holy, so FF7 requires the Forgotten City.

FF7 is a tragedy. FF7 demands blood.

...Hey, actually, hold that thought. How come Cloud can remember Aerith dying in the first place? He’s not from the future, right? He’s got a connection to Sephiroth, who is from the future... and Sephiroth can manipulate his memories...? but, why would Sephiroth let him, or make him, remember that?

Hey, how come Zack is alive, but like, in the “narrative scope” sense? Wouldn’t his presence circumvent Cloud’s delusions about the Nibelheim incident?

Hey, how come Cloud had multiple big climactic Sephiroth confrontations at what’s essentially the end of the prologue, including one that mirrors the very end of the original FF7? Shouldn’t that still come at, like, you know. the end?

Hey, how come--

- - - - -

Remake has these... Callbacks? Refrains? Like my favorite, when Sephiroth throws a train-- you know, The Fate Metaphor-- at Cloud, who absolutely shreds the thing. Or, for a more direct example:

And it frequently uses these to show that people are changing, that things can change. You know, the whole Running Theme the game has going on.

Sephiroth gets a refrain, too.

At the start of the game (give or take a reactor), in his first real appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, makes sure Cloud hates him, and tells Cloud what he wants.

At the end of the game, in his last appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, tells Cloud what he wants, and makes sure Cloud hates him.

Structurally, these encounters more-or-less bookend the game; thematically, it doesn’t exactly indicate change. Barret may or may not have come around on Cloud, and his admission that Cloud is important to him after all is, itself, important. Cloud, on the other hand, was always going to defy Sephiroth. He stands resolute, now, ready to fight rather than flee, but apathy was never on the table.

Now, Sephiroth’s whole Thing is psychologically manipulating Cloud to get what he wants, and as part of that, what Sephiroth wants is usually not what he says he wants.

All throughout the original FF7, Sephiroth riled up Cloud so that Cloud would pursue and defy him, culminating first in the Black Materia incident, and then again in the Forgotten City. None of the Sephiroth clones could survive the trip through the Northern Crater, so Sephiroth had to lure Cloud, with the Black Materia, to him, and then also convince Cloud to give up the Black Materia of his own accord. Mind control, memory manipulation and illusions were involved, but if Sephiroth could maintain those indefinitely, he probably just. Would have done that instead. Way easier,

The point is, in Remake, in addition to all the intermittent retraumitization sprinkled throughout the game, Sephiroth goes out of his way twice to directly ask Cloud, “hey, you hate me, right?” And, as part of that question, he tells Cloud, “this is what I want.” And Cloud? He hates Sephiroth, and will do his damnedest to keep Sephiroth from getting what he wants.

So. What does Sephiroth... say he wants?

- - - - -

One last aside before we cap off: This post would not exist without the valiant efforts of one Maximilian_dood. His devotion to the series kept myself and many others engaged and excited and, frankly, hopeful, in the leadup to the release of Remake, and his correlations between the rest of the FF7 series and Remake were enlightening and entertaining.

and had he not the gall to identify defying fate as a device to make aerith’s death more tragic, I would never have been angry enough to write this.

((I know, I know. Gaming and streaming and lit analysis are all hard individually, and I don’t begrudge losing one for the other two. And it was a first playthrough! I might have seen these lines sooner than some, but collating all this info was certainly not instantaneous. And Square can be hack writers at times-- see again my rant on FF15-- so even then, I can’t discount the possibility.

((but, still.

((Really?))

So, while I would like to believe that I have, by now, made my thesis on Remake’s narrative direction abundantly clear, here it is spelled out anyway:

- - - - -

At the bottom of the Forgotten City, at the shrine on the pillar in the lake, Cloud will find Aerith, who believes her fate immutable.

Sephiroth will descend, and Cloud will sacrifice himself, that Aerith should live.

This is Sephiroth’s plan.

- - - - -

Hey, thanks for reading this far! With my conversational tone and rambling tendencies, I’d have preferred to make this an audio post or, god forbid, a video essay, but I got a keyboard, and that’ll have to do. Diction is important to me, as the capitalization, italics and use of punctuation may have clued you in on, so... maybe you’ll get a dramatic reading sometime in the future? but, don’t bet on it.

Feel free to riddle me with questions, or point out inconsistencies with this big ol’ thing! I’m not exactly an expert, and I’m sure I glossed over, heavily paraphrased, completely forgot, intentionally ignored and/or aggressively misrepresented some stuff, but I love learning and teaching esoteric bullshit about The Vijigams. On that note, anything that sounds like it should be sourced is sourced from “I heard about it on social media or in a stream or youtube video one time, but if I actually had to hunt it down this whole thing would never see the light of day, and it has already been like three months,” which isn’t to excuse my lack of due diligence, but I do, lack diligence, so, tough.

Oh! but the Remake screens all come from [here]. Don’t care much for that splash screen, but, I Get It, so, whatever.

There were some other things I wanted to touch on but couldn’t really find a spot for. FF7 Remake as a metaphor for its own development, for example. Or, some of The Possibilities, like how Cloud’s death could very literally haunt Aerith, or how Remake sets up a more fleshed-out Midgar revisit that Cloud’s death specifically would make infinitely sadder.

On that note, if it was not yet obvious, I love speculation, and if they do go this direction, it’ll probably be their justification to go completely... off the rails? Remake only has to be FF7 until it doesn’t, after all. If there’s some wilder implications youall see for like... I dunno, a Jenova more fully-regenerated from also having Cloud’s cells back, getting into proper Kaiju-on-Kaiju battles with the Weapons, or anything like that? Feed me your brain juice, etc.

And, once more, for the road: this is interpretation; subjective, opinionated, and very much in denial of any kind of author-ity. Nor is this a claim on how things should be, or an assertion that this would be good or bad. Everything ultimately rests on Square's narrative design team and, we’ve touched on them already.

((but, for your consideration: I’m smart, and right))

Here’s hoping, whatever happens, we get the game we deserve.

thanks for coming to my ted talk, have a great day

#In This Essay I Will but for real this time #but hell if that's stopped me before #ff7 remake #blatant speculation #ff7 remake spoilers #ff7 spoilers #ff13 spoilers #ff15 spoilers #I dip into spoiler territory on more but these ones get a deeper dive #also if any of y'all know how to get images screen-read-able please lemme know #the screenshots are to point out that the game itself does do these things #but I don't wanna content-lock anybody out of my bad garbage #also also if the wordcount didn't clue you in:#long post #posting this right now immediately listening

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sorjomagazine · 6 years ago

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by Nikita Kallu

art by Namrata Chowdhury

Fashion and sustainability are two very different concepts. When we think about fashion we think trendy, addictive, sexy and constantly evolving. Whilst sustainability indicates a certain slowness, ethically and responsibility. (Vuletich)

As I write this, New York Fashion Week has just ended. Fashion week happens across the globe where top designers showcase their visions for the coming seasons. They’re full of designs that push the boundaries, striking models, expensive fabrics and high-profile socialites lining the runways. However, fashion has a whole dark side that is often ignored and thus enter haute couture’s polluting, unforgiving, cheap chic cousin: fast fashion.

What is fast fashion? Fast fashion refers to inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass market retailers in response to the latest trends. However, fast fashion is a global crisis that needs to be addressed since it drastically affecting the world in negative ways both environmentally and socially. Though I am a consumer of fast fashion, and if you’re reading this, it is likely you are too, we may not be able to become 100% sustainable overnight but educating ourselves about the atrocities is a start and making small changes can make a big difference.

photo credit: Fashion United

Examples of your favourite retail giants capitalizing off of the fast fashion industry include H&M, Zara, Uniqlo, Primark and Fashion Nova. We are easily drawn to these stores through advertising. However, we often forget what consequences are attached to our rapid consumption of fashion from these corporations. We forget that the fashion industry is the second most polluting industry on earth following oil. We blatantly ignore the environmental impacts of the production of our clothing. We want more, we want cheap and we want it now! (Chirila).

But the fact is that clothes made from polyester take up to 200 years to breakdown, it is non-biodegradable, and is estimated to use 70 million barrels of oil a year to produce it. Furthermore, each time polyester clothing is washed, it sheds 1000s of tiny microfibres of plastic than end up in the sea, eaten by fish which we eat ourselves. Sadly, 83% of the world’s water is contaminated with this plastic.

If we start at the very beginning of the garment manufacturing journey we need raw materials to convert into fabrics to produce this fashion. For example cotton may seem better choice of fabric but approximately 7000 litres of water is needed to produce one pair jeans. This is the amount of water a person drinks in half a decade. Cotton is a resource and energy intensive laborious fabric. It consumes 10% of all fertilizers in the world and 25% of all insecticides used in agriculture. Ironically, ⅔ of all fibres used to make our clothes are cotton based and cotton needs a vast amount of water to grow which thus places a substantial strain on our environment. In fact, in Uzbekistan the Aral sea literally dried up due to stress on water supply for use in the garment industry. (Perry).

photo credit: Independent

Cotton’s dark side has led to 250, 000 Indian cotton farmers have committing suicide in the last 15 years due to the stress of debt they accumulated through buying genetically modified cotton seeds to keep up with demand since the way organic cotton grows does not match the equilibrium at which we are consuming the plant.

The horrific, damaging impact of toxic chemicals used in cotton growing was shown in the gripping documentary The True Cost (I would recommend this to anyone wanting an easy way to learn all about the unspoken side of the fashion industry. It is currently streaming on Netflix). The documentary brought light to how pesticides caused serious birth defects in Indian cotton farmer’s children as well as the death of a cotton farmer in the USA due to a brain tumour. (Perry).

photo credit: Good on You

Furthermore, fast fashion exists around planned obsolescence; the idea that your clothes are literally only built to last a couple washes before they shrink or tear at the seams. They are designed to fall apart. They are not slow, high quality investment pieces. Built to last just one season. This fits into how fast fashion brands on the high street are in a rapid competition to put out new collections to feed our constant raging appetite for fast fashion. Instead of 4 seasons, we see fast fashion adopt 52 seasons, constantly putting out new content weekly at extremely cheap prices because this is what we as consumers seem to want. Fast marketing means this planned obsolescence goes unnoticed as we continue to consume and purchase more and more clothing. (Chirila).

Additionally, it means we become extremely wasteful only wearing the garment about 5 times before or they collect dust never to be worn. We are over consuming due to this throw away culture an it needs to change! In the past decade the number of garments purchased per consumer has more than doubled and yet still consumers discard of them after a couple of wears.

The driving force behind fast fashion is to keep the entire production and supply chain as cheap as possible so the product can be sold to the consumer for the lowest possible price whilst business CEOs make the most profit. In fact a CEO makes the same amount of money as 10000 workers in Bangladesh. Where businesses like H&M adopt a quantity over quality attitude corners are cut when it comes to the health and safety of garment worker, workers are often forced to work extra hours for less than minimum wage. According to the Global Fashion Agenda it would cost only about €1.35 to double the wages of those producing t-shirts that retail for €25 each. (Landry, Kerr).

photo credit: Fashion United

All of these shortcuts however led to the largest and worst disaster in fashion industry history Rana Plaza disaster in 2013. The factory workers complained about the unsafe working conditions and the cracks on the walls, but their boss told them to go back to work. The collapse left 2500 injured and killed 1138.

credit: East Chapel Hill Observer

photo credit: Trusted Clothes

photo credit: Racked

Change in this industry is slow, on the outside small victories can be seen such as this year being the first London fashion week to go fur free, however there are still currently 75 million people on earth working long hours in factories and sweatshops to produce cheap clothing where over 50% of the workers are not paid a minimum wage causing them to fall into an inescapable poverty trap. In countries like the Philippines and Bangladesh they are systematically held in poverty so as to attract foreign investment. In addition, another major issue that many large corporations have been exposed for is child labour, examples include Nike, Adidas , Gap and H&M. Whenever we purchase clothes with lots of sequins and beading this is often a sign that child labour was used to make the piece. (Hall)

Claims have also been made about Victoria’s Secret, a multi billionaire lingirie brand known for it’s beautiful designs, that it’s products have been made by children (as young as ten years old) who work long hours without pay.

photo credit: Daily Mail

What is the alternative? What can we do as consumers to change our consuming habits and avoid buying into these businesses?

One of the most important things we can do is shift our own mindsets and change the way we think about fashion. We currently consume too much, we own 4 times as much clothing in our wardrobes as our parents did. We buy more clothes and spend much less on them than we used to. We must try to break our addiction to speed and volume and try to adopt a quality over quantity attitude because there is a true cost to our cheap bargains.

As a student myself I understand it isn’t always easy to purchase clothes that have been made with ethics in mind when these alternatives are so expensive and often harder to access. Nonetheless, here are some easy methods we can all try to reject fast fashion:

CLOTHES SWAPS: Grab a friend and both pick out a few items of clothing you already own, choose ones that are in a nice condition which you no longer wear. Swap these with your friend so that they can fall in love with the pieces as you once did and you can try out a new style with their clothes.

THRIFTING: This has already become much more prevalent in recent years but if you’re not on the thrift shopping wave you’re really missing out. Explore vintage stores and charity shops to find the most unique hidden treasures. If personal aesthetics and styling are something you’re interested in then I’m sure you can relate to how cool it feels to be rocking clothes that no else owns because they’re vintage. Vintage clothes are sustainable because they’ve been reused or recycled by different people.

REWORKING OLD CLOTHES: Reinvent old clothes by cropping trousers; fraying jeans; painting jackets; customizing sneakers; appliquéing t-shirts with badges; dyeing shirts etc

LOVE THE CLOTHES YOU ALREADY OWN: Learn to sew on a button if your shirt is missing one rather than purchasing a whole new shirt

EXPLORE AND FIND YOUR OWN NICHE STYLE RATHER THAN ALWAYS BUYING INTO TRENDS

photo credit: PhD in Parenting

References:

Author unknown. (2018). WHY DO WE NEED A FASHION REVOLUTION?.Available: https://www.fashionrevolution.org/about/why-do-we-need-a-fashion-revolution/. Last accessed 16th Sept 2018.

Chirila, A. (2018). 10 Unbelievable facts about fast fashion. Available: https://www.toptenz.net/10-unbelievable-facts-about-fast-fashion.php

Hall, K. (2018). 20 facts about the fast fashion industry that will shock you. Available: https://thegreenhubonline.com/2018/01/16/20-facts-about-the-fast-fashion-industry-that-will-shock-you/. Last accessed 17th Sept 2018.

Kerr, J, Landry, J. (2017). Pulse of the fashion industry. Available: http://globalfashionagenda.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Pulse-of-the-Fashion-Industry_2017.pdf. Last accessed 16th Sept 2018.

Parry, M. (2018). The True Cost of Fashion. Available: https://www.fairtrade.org.uk/Media-Centre/Blog/2018/April/The-true-cost-of-fast-fashion. Last accessed 17th Sept 2018.

Perry, P. (2018). The environmental cost of fast fashion. Available: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/environment-costs-fast-fashion-pollution-waste-sustainability-a8139386.html. Last accessed 17th Sept 2018. Vuletich, C. (2016). How to engage with ethical fashion. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXOd4qh3JKk. Last accessed 16th Sept 2018.

MEET THE WRITER:

Nikita Kallu is a 19- year-old from England. She will be studying pharmacy at university this year. She enjoys painting, fashion, photography and listening to music. As an artist for Sorjo Magazine, she paints watercolor portraits that explore the emotions and experiences of people of color.

[email protected] | @tigerholograms

Why Fast Fashion Is Your Evil, Haute Couture Polluting, Unforgiving Cousin

by Nikita Kallu art by Namrata Chowdhury Fashion and sustainability are two very different concepts. When we think about fashion we think trendy, addictive, sexy and constantly evolving.

Why Fast Fashion Is Your Evil, Haute Couture Polluting, Unforgiving Cousin by Nikita Kallu art by Namrata Chowdhury Fashion and sustainability are two very different concepts. When we think about fashion we think trendy, addictive, sexy and constantly evolving.

#climate change #educate #ethics #fast fashion #global warming #morals #namrata #news #nikita kallu #pop culture

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populistmedia · 6 years ago

Text

[EXCLUSIVE] Day in the life of an activist: Walk Away Campaign Founder Brandon Straka

Brandon Straka is the founder of the #WalkAway Campaign, and he shares his thoughts with Populist Media readers. Thi is an article written by Brandon. You can find him: on Twitter On Facebook This is Brandon's First video that helped him start a large and growing movement of Facebook testimonials: https://twitter.com/usminority/status/1007191747355729920 AND THIS IS HIS STORY, IN HIS WORDS: Six weeks ago I was a normal guy. Just a normal guy in an increasingly abnormal world. The majority of my agitation usually being derived by the ever-worsening breakdown of subway reliability on my long commutes back and forth to my apartment in Harlem, and the majority of my stress hinging on swinging my monthly rent and student loan payments. My life was, by most accepted measures, typical. But like many other Americans, I also carried an additional burden through my day today. A burden which hangs darkly over the landscape of normal life, making it impossible to forget that at any moment the thunder may crack, the lightning may strike, and once again, the downpour begin to siege. You see, I live amongst people who have become unhinged. In a liberal city like New York, the tenets of liberal ideology are sacrosanct and Trump Derangement is a celebrated condition. One is often reminded while engaging in a conversation where they fall on the privilege hierarchy totem pole. Furthermore, lest we allow our privilege to make us complacently presumptuous, deftly alert watchdogs reside in plenty to assure that we not assume to know another person’s preferred gender pronouns, that the world would be an indescribable utopia if heterosexual white men received their righteous abdication, and that no matter what you may have experienced in your life or what you are currently going through- that dark-skinned lady sitting across from you on the subway has things much, much worse. The President of the United States never leaves the purview of most liberals’ minds. He is the boogie man- always lurking- perhaps in the closet, perhaps under the bed, but he’s there... always. Like an unwanted fixture in a Manhattan studio apartment, he resides in their minds, taking up space, making it impossible for them to imagine arranging the thoughts in their minds without the obstacle of...HIM in the layout. He appears in conversation constantly. The rules of engagement now so acceptably lax that even the most illogical introduction brought about by non-sequitor or abrupt emotionally charged asides is considered common play. His omnipresent influence over the thoughts, plans, considerations, and of course, the most valuable liberal commodity- feelings- of leftists is inescapable. “How was your day today?”, “I mean, it was fine... considering how bad things are these days.” Thankfully, I am also inspired to be surrounded by the selflessly brave, “All we can do is continue to resist” I am told. This full force of this resistance usually manifests itself in the form of a facebook profile pic border garnering that very word, or a posted meme reminding us that this hero among us is very, very “woke”. I myself used to be a liberal. In the spring of 2017, just months after the election of Donald Trump, I had what is commonly referred to as a “red-pill experience”. I didn’t mean to take this pill. I didn’t actually even know it existed. I ended up swallowing the pill by accident- and tried my best to spit it out multiple times along the way. It began with a need to understand how half of the voting population could support Donald Trump. The media sources I trusted- CNN, MSNBC, The Huffington Post, and of course the greatest resource of all- my educated liberal friends had been affirming and reaffirming for months that this man was a racist. A bigot. A homophobe. And so much more. And his followers were just as bad! After all, how else could we explain away that 15 second soundbite that got so much airplay, in which we clearly saw this monster on the right mocking the disability of a reporter to the rousing cheers of his rabid brain-washed followers. It was a sickening sight to behold. I found myself unable to get through a day without feeling that pit in my stomach that reminded me how much I hated this man, and felt trapped under a dome of his domination- trapped in a world with those who covertly supported all of this- while I was unable to identify those who had betrayed our common decency. I needed to understand how this could happen in order to find a modicum of peace. I, too, had become Trump Deranged. So I began by taking to social media and pleading with Trump voters to help me understand. Most of the time, nobody would answer me. The more i asked and went unanswered, the angrier I became. I made a vow to never return to my home in the midwest again. I considered cutting off my parents. What other choice did I have? The media told me every day of the wave of violent crimes against minorities that he had brought on by “dog whistling” to his most dark and hateful base. Story after story was shared on social media by terrified LGBT people and racial minorities, with the rapidity of machine gun fire, warning us that the next day would bring an Executive Order repealing our hard-earned rights. When the orders never came to fruition, they provided a reasonable excuse, and ominously assured us it would be coming next week. How could our fellow Americans do this to us? And why don’t they care? Why won’t they answer me and be held accountable?? Finally, after many weeks, a crack appeared in the dam. I was reached out to by a school administrator who still resides in the quiet plains of the rural midwest. She told me all about Obama era regulations that resulted in the destruction of local small businesses and damaged their communities. She told me about the influx of illegal immigrants and the very real impact that these things have on the real people in small town America who are affected most. I was shocked and confused. The media had told me for years about the great and seemingly infallible man who had held office for 8 years, the man who held the rare accolade of completing a “scandal free” presidency. I had been told time and again that anybody who could criticize such a nearly perfect human being who honored us with a nearly perfect presidency could only do so because they are clearly consumed with hatred, driven mad by a black man occupying America’s most esteemed office. I researched the points this woman had made and was amazed to find that what she had said to me was true. My eyes had been opened a bit, but... this was hardly a smoking gun. And besides, maybe the liberal media did go a little soft on Obama. But that doesn’t explain or justify supporting the second coming of Hitler for Obama’s replacement. And what about that incident of mocking a reporter’s disability? No amount of dissatisfaction for our previous president could justify that national disgrace! And so back to social media I took to ask middle America what became of their conscience? How could they have overlooked this? This time it was a former babysitter, Diane, who reached out to me privately. “Have you seen this?”, she asked in her private message- including a link to a video titled “Debunking that Trump mocked the disabled reporter”. I was stunned and angry just reading the title. How brainwashed could these people be?? The media had explained to those of us on the left that we were being “gaslighted” by those on the right- now my own babysitter was trying to gaslight me, too! Arrogantly, I gave Diane an “lol” and told her I’d watch this propaganda piece when I got home. And so I did. And what I saw next was officially the moment the red pill touched my tongue. I stared, spinning and disillusioned as I watched the compilation of footage in the video- mostly of Trump on his campaign, some clips even going back ten plus years, showing Donald Trump using the exact same voice and gesture used to mock the reporter- but in every circumstance he was imitating somebody who was groveling- caught in a lie, behaving dishonestly. For the first time I watched the entirety of the segment of him telling the story about the reporter at his rally. And it became very clear to me. He did not mock that man’s disability. But the media I trusted told me that he did. What was going on? I began to dig deeper, and the more I researched the more unwanted truth was presented to me. I didn’t want to accept what I was discovering. Stories of black Americans going to Trump rallies to support him and being cut out of the shot when the liberal media arrived and framed up their camera angle to capture an image consistent with their “white people only” narrative. Numerous moments which were isolated and taken out of the context of Trump speaking on the campaign trail, spun to give the impression that his rallies were conventions of hate and the resurrection of racism and bigotry. The cover ups for Hillary Clinton. The dishonest poll skewing. The omission of inconvenient truths because they revealed the good in this man and those who support him. The dishonest manipulation and peddling of fear- primarily to those in minority communities, keeping us suspended in a constant state of fear. Donald Trump was not the master under the bed. It was the media. And the politicians on the left who were in cahoots with their agenda. I tried talking about what I had learned with those around me- friends and fellow New Yorkers. And most usually I was met with anger and contempt. “What are you doing!? So what, you love Trump now??”. And at that time, I didn’t. I truly just wanted to understand- and share what I was learning with someone else who could understand me. In the isolation of my experience, I took to the internet and sought comfort in finding others who had been through this same type of awakening that was happening to me. This is when I discovered this term... “red pilled”. There were others. Other people had spent their lives, like me, believing in the good of liberalism- even as we watched it be co-opted and absorbed by the very characteristics it claims to fight against. Others, like me, had discovered that the media is capable of not only omitting truth when delivering the news, but actually beginning with a deceitful narrative and plucking out moments and sound bites to twist and spin until they neatly support their agenda. That the left wing politicians who for so long had assured me they would support me and the gay community at large, went along with the false narratives and fear mongering that kept me and my community up at night. I attempted to expose these things on social media. My intentions were pure- I didn’t want others to have to be afraid the way i was afraid. The response I got from fellow liberals and never Trumpers was astounding. When I was lucky, I would be unfriended. In many other circumstances, friends and family used social media to proclaim me mentally ill, unstable, on drugs, self-loathing, starved for attention, insane, stupid, ignorant, and a victim of body- snatching- a once good person now replaced by a brainwashed bigot. My invitations to social events came to a standstill. The texts stopped. The calls stopped. When people ran into me in public they would often behave uncomfortably, squirming to get away, treating me as a defective who was frightening to be around. The truth about liberalism became clear to me. This is a religion, one which demands unquestioning groupthink to be an accepted member of the clergy. Any dissenting opinions on any host of issues ranging from gun rights to the legitimacy of the wage gap is grounds for removal. To belong, you must believe in a privilege hierarchy which separates people by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and organizes them into camps of victims and oppressors. You must believe the media, no matter how preposterous the lies are that they tell. You must hate the president based off of these lies. You must engage in acts of resistance based of this hatred- including supporting jokes about his beheading, urinating on his name on a public street, threatening and intimidating his supporters. You must always retain instant access to anger- so as to become enraged at any moment when the signal to do so is sent out by the left wing media and politicians. If you are unwilling to comply, the implications of this choice are clear. The threat of loss of friends, family, career and social standing are liberalism’s greatest weapons to intimidate its members into never straying the flock. Unfortunately for the left, they messed with the wrong guy. In May of 2018 I sat down to write what I call the “definitive manifesto” on everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party and liberalism. I shot a slick video using the script and devised a campaign to accompany the video, knowing there are surely hundreds of thousands or more who have been waiting to be set free just as I had set myself free. I called the movement the #WalkAway Campaign. I encouraged others to #WalkAway from the Democratic Party and the hatred and rage which has now become synonymous with the left. I asked those who were willing to leave to tell their own stories by making video testimonials and posting them to the facebook group: the #WalkAway Campaign. I had hoped the campaign would be a success and that others would open their eyes and feel inspired by my lead. Just six weeks ago I released the video and the campaign. And back then, I was a normal guy living in an increasingly abnormal world. Now, everything is different. Within a month my video had received millions of views and been shared tens of thousands of times. Conservative media picked up on the movement. I dedicated myself to speaking to anybody who was willing to talk about the Campaign. No less than five interviews a day. Sometimes twelve. And the people began to #WalkAway in droves. Today, just six weeks after launch, the #WalkAway Campaign has nearly 120,000 members on facebook. Thousands of testimonials- video and written, by those who want civility to be the norm again. People who want their friends and family back. True patriots who fear an impending civil war and see #WalkAway as a possible last ditch effort to save America from imploding- done in by the dishonesty and derangement caused by the liberal media and current leftist lunacy. I have become a public figure. This is not something that scares me, nor is it something that I wish to run from. I’ve always been a leader. As a performer, I’ve always felt at home on a stage. I never dreamed I’d be leading an international movement as a conservative political figure. But I’ve now learned that God has a hell of a sense of humor. I’ve been called to action, and I take this call seriously. The response from the left regarding #WalkAway has been typical. They ignored us as long as they could. Then the denials. Then the lies. And then the retributions. They said the Campaign was a non-movement. A silly trending hashtag that was barely worth mentioning. As #WalkAway grew and the hashtag became one of the most used on the internet, out they came again with outlandish conspiracies about Russian bots and foreign interference. I have been accused of being a Putin puppet. I have been accused of being a (very stupid and very untalented) actor, hired by the Koch brothers, the GOP, the Trumps. After being recognized from television, I have been refused service in a store and labeled “alt-right”. I have had left wing news sources accuse me of working in tandem with subversive extremist clicks and organizations. They have attempted to erase the members of the #WalkAway Campaign, whom I call “the Patriots" by reporting that they are not real. Despite their video testimonials, these people who are bravely opening their hearts and minds for all the world to see and hear- telling their truth about the pain, disappointment and loss of hope they have experienced by those who engage in these very behaviors- they do not exist. They are “bots’. And the dishonest leftists have social media on their side. Facebook regularly removes thousands of members of the #WalkAway Campaign at a time. The platform has currently blocked my ability to message the Patriots or respond to their messages to me. Their ability to share about the group is also often blocked. Just as the left can not allow themselves to handle the thought that liberalism and the Democratic Party has scammed them, they can not allow themselves to accept that #WalkAway is a real movement and a real threat to their existence. The same irrational, unhinged, inability to deal with reality is manifesting itself once again in their refusal to listen to the real words of real people, and instead live in a state of denial about tens of thousands of people walking away from their party. Should the midterms and 2020 election prove to be a conservative windfall, the implication of this refusal to accept reality will surely show itself once again, in the belief by those remaining on the left that world is becoming even more racist, more hateful, and even more manipulated by outside propoganda. Sadly, many will never see that the truth of these assertions lies only in the mirror of the accuser. Read the full article

#BrandonStraka #WalkAway

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augustfair-blog · 6 years ago

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Being a Writer, Not a Migraine Sufferer - in 3 Vital Steps

I had my first migraine when I was 12. Since then they have come on harder and with less room between. It seemed there would never be an end to it. Until, after almost a decade and a half of trying, I found a way out.

I don’t feel like I need to tell you about how painful and inhibiting migraines can be, especially when you can expect one in the future.

If you don’t suffer then I can’t convince you they’re not simple headaches, and that the fallout can leave you half yourself for days.

If you do, then there would be even less point in me quoting my range on the pain scale, or us comparing notes of prodrome or postdrome symptoms.

But it’s likely you either know someone who lives with chronic migraines, or you are searching for a way out like I was.

I love to write. Migraines have always done their best to get in the way of that.

Below are 3 Vital steps you need to take to greatly reduce migraine attack frequency and severity. The closer you stick to this short list, the better the results will be.

Vital Step #1 - Mg 400mg

Take magnesium supplements every day. There is something in the vast body of the unknown surrounding migraines that depletes magnesium when a migraine occurs. Equally, a migraine attack is almost guaranteed if you don’t have sufficient magnesium in your system.

Those who suffer from chronic migraines are just plain terrible at both acquiring and sequestering magnesium in their bodies. This leads to a never ending cycle of triggering and depletion.

Remember your body needs at least 400mg of Magnesium per day. If you are starting out with this supplement you will need to take twice that much (800mg) for a few days in order to fill your likely near-empty reserves. Similarly if you have drunk alcohol your body will have flushed this vital mineral out with the rest of your body’s electrolytes. But if you are worrying you might be taking too much: fear not, you would need to consume much more than that before you notice the side-effects (hint: you will be running to the bathroom more often).

Don’t forget: Your pharmacist/chemist/drug-store human may attempt to sell you a combined Magnesium-Calcium supplement. As someone with a masters degree in biology I can tell you that makes no sense. Magnesium and Calcium are what are called competitive inhibitors of each other.

In simpler terms: If they are floating free in your bloodstream, like they would be before your body absorbs these minerals in pill/tablet form, they will cling onto each other and neither will be absorbed. Instead they will be flushed out of your system. Make sure to buy Magnesium-only supplements.

Vital Step #2 - Fat’s are Not the Enemy

You doubtlessly know that fat gets a bad reputation. Mostly that is a deserved one. Processed fats, hydrogenated fat, animal fats, and oils that have been removed from their source are all bad for you. No question.

But your brain needs good fat to work; even more so if you are a migraine sufferer. Your brain is essentially made of fat. It makes up the cell membranes of your neurons, and coats the connections between them. A deficit in good fat will only make your brain struggle to form and maintain its neuronal pathways.

Good sources of fat:

Whole olives

Avocados

Nuts (Including nut-butters)

Seeds

Cocoa

Beans and tofu

Notice I didn’t mention fish, eggs or dairy products. Fish and eggs are high in cholesterol which can easily pass through the blood-brain-barrier, where it builds up and damages your brain.

In fact: you can’t get cholesterol from plant sources. Your body makes all the cholesterol it needs from plant-based foods.

Dairy products are packed full of animal fat, and low-fat alternatives use processed oils that have none of the benefits of good whole-food plant-based fat. Both animal and processed fats and oils are poison to your body, and especially to your fat-based brain.

Caveat:

While incorporating plant-based fats into your diet, be warned that fat is calorically dense; every gram (or ounce) is packed full of energy, and your body loves it. For most of us our body rewards the consumption of fatty foods immediately. Eating the right amount is tricky but vital.

I get roughly half of my daily calories from fat. This necessitates one avoid too much carbohydrates, the main source of calories in diets across the world. I have learned the hard way that high carbohydrate, low fat days will greatly increase my chances of getting a migraine. While high carb, high fat days won’t trigger an attack, they do invariably lead to weight-gain. So remember to keep an eye on how much fat and carbohydrates you consume.

Vital Step #3 - Cut out Stress

Stress is the third leading cause of triggering migraines. Everyone has stress-causing elements in their lives. Some of these are unavoidable. There are countless guides, books, and semi-criminal schemes out there based on the idea of dealing with stress. But while some stress can be dealt with, its vital to remember: the best cure is prevention.

When you really think about it, there are things in your life which cause you immense amounts of stress that are there by choice. Relationships, certain responsibilities, expectations you have for yourself and others, your place of work. So many of these seem non-optional, or inescapable. But the fact is:

You don’t have to do anything in this life but die at the end of it.

How much less stress would be in your life if you stopped spending time with that coworker outside of work? How much calmer would your existence be if you used your qualifications (and don’t say you don’t have any if you’ve ever been employed or gone to school) in a different workplace where your narcissistic boss wasn’t a constant drain on your nerves? How zen would you be if you simply opted out of the purely voluntary ‘obligations’ you think the world expects of you but in reality doesn’t care? Move to the country and grow your own food. Emigrate to somewhere with better weather and nicer people.

No doubt you have chortled at some, if not all of that last paragraph. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” you ask sarcastically. “If only,” you say while still being trapped in the same voluntary roles you place yourself in. “This man has no sense of reality,” you comment.

Well, that last one has some merit in certain circumstances. It’s the reason I have always been drawn to writing fiction.

But the fact is: many of the things you take to be factual about yourself are totally self-sustained. Tomorrow morning you could realise you don’t need to keep up with the Joneses, you don’t need that promotion, you aren’t as poor as you think you are if you change your goals in keeping with what will really make you happy. You don’t need to maintain that toxic relationship which really does no good for anyone, nor pretend to be someone you’re not for what you think is the benefit of others.

I let go of a lot of values and expectations I had always assumed were a given. I experience a fraction of the stress as a result. It’s an ongoing process, but an infinitely fulfilling one I promise.

#migraine #migraineprevention #health #wholefood #plant-based #stress #reducingstress #migraines #goodfat #painmanagement

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populistmedia · 6 years ago

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EXCLUSIVE: Day in the Life of an activist: Walk Away Campaign Founder Brandon Straka

#BrandonStraka #WalkAway

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