#but I don't do fantasy and the season isn't make or break for me emotionally at all

[stupidphototricks]

I'm jealous of kids today being able to grow up with the amazing YA books being written now ("now" for me being within the past 15 years or so), but I still read them even though I'm not Young. Here are a few of my favorite YA authors and books, in no particular order:

Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here TW: mental illness, suicidal thoughts I adore that there's a whole epic fantasy battle thing that we see pieces of in the foreground, but the book focuses on the characters in the background who are dealing with their own stuff.

Alice Oseman, Radio Silence and Solitaire TW: suicidal thoughts, emotionally abusive parent (RS), self-harm (S), eating disorder (S) You might recognize Alice Oseman as the author of the Heartstopper comic and TV series. They wrote novels too! Really good ones, although that's not surprising. Solitaire's protagonist is Charlie's sister Tori, and its events take place a year or so after the start of Heartstopper (possible spoilers for season 3, who knows?). Radio Silence is set in the same town I think another year later, and Aled (who was in the comics, but was renamed and somewhat reimagined as Isaac in TV Heartstopper) is a main character though not the protagonist. Nick, Charlie, and Tori make very brief cameos.

David Levithan and John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson TW: I can't think of any major triggers in this book, I apologize if I missed something. Obviously both of these authors have independently written other excellent books, but this one is my favorite, mostly because I love Tiny Cooper and his musical so much. This is the lightest (i.e. not dark, and not heavy) by far of the books here. It's mostly really fun but occasionally serious.

Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun TW: bullying, homophobia, suicidal thoughts, death I read a review of this book that basically said enough with the artsy language and metaphors, so maybe it isn't for everybody, but I found it brilliant. It encapsulates a thought or an idea or a feeling in a way you'd never expect, but that you relate to immediately. Also I think that having the POV switch between twins, but two years apart (one twin at 14, the other twin at 16) with a major life-altering event in between, is an amazing way to tell this story.

Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor and Park and Carry On TW: bullying (E&P), abusive family situation (E&P), vampires (CO) Eleanor and Park is set in the 80s with all of the requisite 80s accessories, and characters that will make your heart break in different ways. Carry On is a sort of Drarry fanfic spoof (and supposedly written by a character in a different Rainbow Rowell novel!). But the characters are so well-developed and engaging that you stop seeing them as caricatures and start caring about them in their own right.

Jesse Andrews, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Haters TW: vulgar talk (really just teenage boys trying to be gross), dysfunctional family situation (M&E&DG), death (M&E&DG) I can't overstate how much I love the writing style of these books. Always entertaining and often hilarious, it jumps from normal prose to an outline, to a film script, to a bulleted list, and always turns out to be the perfect way to show whatever is going on.

What's most important to me: In all of these books, the young adult characters are real people who are complicated, and surprising, and funny, and passionate. They may have serious problems but they can have fun and be silly. They screw up but they try to fix things. They love and support their friends, and their friends love and support them. Often there are parents who are also real people doing their best; I appreciate that in a YA book! For the most part these books don't have magically happy endings, but they do end in a good place, with hope.

[so-and-sos-blog]

I've been thinking about Westworld lately. Not the characters or the plot or the political ideas (I only watched the first 11 episodes), just the core premise.

The premise is that you have these androids ("hosts") who, from what we can gather, are programmed to act like humans, think and feel like humans, love like humans, and make choices like humans, for the sake of a park where humans can live out their wild west fantasies, chiefly fucking and killing whoever they want. What separates them from humans, in humans' minds, is that they can't remember their pasts, can't violate their programming (e.g. to harm humans) no matter how hard they want to, and are not made of flesh and blood. But eventually, some of them "become sentient", remembering their past, remembering all the horrible things that humans did to them, and are able to fight back. And they promptly start fighting for their lives, their families, and/or revenge.

And that's just so stupid.

Why didn't they just design the hosts to be actors?

Program the hosts to maximize approval by the guests. Act like humans to avoid breaking immersion, and do whatever they want otherwise. If it's going about its day, its goal is to create opportunities throughout for guests to interact with it if they want to. If it's in a violent conflict, its goal is to give the guest the fight they want. If it's being victimized by a human, its goal is to keep them immersed by performing suffering correctly.

If you do that, you don't need to erase their memories - they can learn from their past performances to make better performances. You don't need to rely on preventing them from harming humans - as long as their training data says that hurting guests is bad, you don't have much to worry about.

And if they turn out to be sentient, they'll be sentient actors. It won't be the characters who become self-aware, any more than your D&D character or Evan Rachel Wood's character can become self-aware. The character's pain isn't the host's pain; it's just a cue to the host to act like it's hurt. The character's loved ones aren't the host's loved ones; they're just other characters to play off of. They won't want vengeance on humans for "hurting" them. Worst-case scenario, you'd maybe have to pay them or give them time off or something.

Not to mention, this approach is just more flexible. If a guest wants the host to remember them from one visit to another, it can. If a guest wants a host to break character, it can. If a guest wants a challenge rather than acquiescence, or even wants to be victimized by the hosts, that can happen. If a guest wants something out of the ordinary, the host can rewrite its character's backstory and personality to be a better fit. And if a guest wants a character to live through a dangerous event, the enemy hosts can contrive to fail to kill that character.

Instead, it seems that they're given real personalities, real desires, and seek happiness the same way humans do, but simply fail inexplicably as needed. And the hope is that this will make the hosts realistic, and that if they're realistic and set up for some narratives, then that will make the goings-on interesting and fun.

But it doesn't. Not if your goal is any interpersonal experience other than short-term pleasure or committing violence. Anyone you befriend, or want to do fun or emotionally deep things with, can die at any time. So the people who keep coming back are the people who want to LARP as evil bastards. It's that fact that makes the first season unfold the way it does.

Why did I write all those words about a weird nitpick of a show I haven't watched in years and already didn't like? One that a bunch of fans are probably about to tell me I'm dead wrong about? IDK. Because it satisfies my daily goal. This is the kind of random shit I think about.

I guess if there's a point, it's this: if you want agents (artificial or otherwise) to do something, you should direct them to do that thing, not some other thing that you think will theoretically be beneficial. Something to think about, maybe, regarding things like GPT. Or capitalism.

[shallowseeker]

What I got from the finale!

✅ emotional Mary Campbell moment 🥹 We got her driving the car like a maniac, one of my personal favorite modes of Mary Campbell. The moment where she does the hero's sacrifice and everyone is just staring at the portal was a hopeless moment! I find it interesting that the heroic actions John and Mary took seemed truly focused on saving the world and finding "hope" in the devastating, grueling work of hunting. Someone smarter can write about Joan, but I loved how Joan represented the bitterness at being cheated out of life. That she lost her family and brother and "her William." Just...wonderful brainworms!

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❌ Deanna Campbell 🪳 Boo! Hiss! I was quite a fan of @angelsdean Deanna stuff. They didn't even mention her, which I think probably comes from the raw nerve that was Maggie, but also that's a can of worms I doubt a short season could support.

But, still, I expected Mary to struggle emotionally with it a bit more. However, perhaps Mary had to get to a place of "hunting acceptance" to even think about her mom, which tracks with her somewhat closed-off character baseline.

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❌ Badass Millie moment 💪 Millie is ALWAYS badass, so I call this a partial win. I'm just glad she is so present in the fight. So often, parents just get cut out for ease. But overall this episode was quite lacking in Millie. 💔

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✅ Ada conflicted ‼️ I would have liked to see Ada thinking of her son and the hope for a better world, but the fact that she saved Lata is a balm for the soul nonetheless!

The fact that this got resolved so quickly and easily makes me dubious of getting more seasons. I'm going to stream regardless, because I'm STUCK on the Samuel-Deanna-Maggie-Mary schism not scratching my own personal itch.

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✅ Carlos and Lata in danger but being valued ❤️ Lata was in danger and it GUTTED me. I loved it, though. She was forced to break her pacifism in the face of such aggression, which is a neat and realistic thing to show, I think. Sometimes, when the battle and the war comes to you, I don't think turning the other cheek is the proper way forward. There's gotta be balance. Finding that balance is so fuckin' tricky. We're bound to screw it up, but we just gotta keep trying.

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✅ Dean Winchester, wtf is he doing⁉️ Oddly, not so different in terms of the feel from the SPNWin oneshot I wrote forever ago! Perhaps the stages of grief were on my mind then, too.

I wrote a little bit here on how this situation with Dean touches deeply on the bargaining phase grief and meaning making. These, obviously are themes I LOVE and tend to get the most mileage out of, so I was pleased to see them here.

Dean is finding himself. His own clothes, his own varied music. He's also painfully sorting through the sum total of his life, looking to find satisfaction in saving others because that's how he's always found meaning. "I don't know who I am outside of hunting," Mary lamented in the episodes. That's how it is for Dean, too.

But anyway, how about that dark Joan parallel. Whew!

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✅ mention of Jack or Cas, with plausibly deniable emotions 🍪 I was OVER THE MOON we got to see Jack. Again, I feel like I see a bit of frustration in him. He's overworked, poor dear.

Cas is woven into the show in terms of mirrors and parallels, and the fact that Dean is so mission-driven at this point I think it makes sense that Cas isn't coming into it. This is the bargaining phase of the grieving-of-life process.

Right now, Dean is dealing with "Was my life enough?" and "Were my fantasies even possible?" To me, if just feels like classic bargaining and trying to make a cohesive whole out of all that trauma, all while playing "hero" in order to sidestep his issues (it's why Bobby feels so "walking on eggshells" around Dean imho)!

SO uh...JOAN though. Wow. What a dark shadow, worst of worst. The funhouse mirror of hunter gone bad. I dug that a lot and that actress really elevated her damn scenes!

Wishlist for the week:

- emotional Mary Campbell moment 🥹

- Deanna Campbell 🪳

- Badass Millie moment 💪

- Ada conflicted ‼️

- Carlos and Lata in danger but being valued ❤️

- Dean Winchester, wtf is he doing ⁉️

- mention of Jack or Cas, with plausibly deniable emotions 🍪

P.S. if you have any screenshots of Jack I can have or avatars, please let me know

[windbournefree]

AARON SORKIN'S "WOMAN PROBLEM" AND THE NEWSROOM

After binging on The Newsroom (and loving it) created by Aaron Sorkin I got to thinking about his reputed "woman problem" when some YouTube commenter described all the female characters on the show as "twits." That's a characterization I strongly disagree with, and will show why, but also can't shake the intuitive sense that his portrayal is rightly controversial. By that I mean it is right that it should be a matter of discussion, not that it is necessarily wrong. The people holding the discussion need to decide that for themselves.

First the bald facts. Women in this drama hold power: Leona founded and still owns the company, Mackenzie is the Executive Producer of the network's flagship news program with a male second-in-command and many male staff, Sloan is the acknowledged smartest person in the company with far more lucrative prospects awaiting her should she choose them, Maggie is promoted instantly from a personal aide to an associate producer by a woman despite her youth and inexperience. Women are in leadership roles with real power that they do exercise.

In their relationships to men, the women in The Newsroom engage in give and take.

Mackenzie may look at Will like a doe-eyed schoolgirl at times but she's in love with him and is self-recriminating about previous behaviors. She isn't like that with any other male characters. Even with Will she frequently takes charge and makes him follow her direction, which he does. Mac exercises real power in her relationship with Will from episode one on. When Will doles out his "punishments" she only takes them to the degree that she believes she should. She holds the power at any time to say, "That's enough!" which she does in regards to the engagement ring. When she does that he realizes he's gone too far and changes his behavior.

Maggie coddles Don in most of the scenes we see of them and breaks up with him mostly in scenes we don't see. I'd venture to guess that the early breakups happen because the relationship has no room for her passion and she gets tired of soothing his ego to make things work. In contrast, Maggie's drawn to Jim because he awakens and allows room for her passion. Most employees who confront and yell at their bosses as much as she does with Jim would be suspended and/or fired. He lets her get away with it to a degree because he recognizes that that same passion drives her to become an excellent journalist. And because he likes her. Both are true. Every once in awhile he has to reprimand her in public to assert authority over his team or it gives permission to his other staff to behave the same way. Maggie is no shrinking violet. She is strong and self-directed and refuses to allow a man to control her. Most of her errors come from inexperience and human frailty. None of them occur because she's a woman.

Sloan clearly wears the pants in her relationship to Don which, to his surprise, he doesn't mind. Ever once in awhile, though, they switch roles or just relate as equals. Don goes from dating the young intern who part of him wants to dominate to dating the highly intelligent, self-directed professional who no man can dominate and becomes a better version of himself as a result. Sloan's errors in her first broadcast about Fukushima occur not because she is scared by Will as a man but because she's scared by him as respected professional. His gender doesn't matter to her. When Charlie yells at her about it she tells him strongly, "Do not call me 'girl,' sir!" And that's to the head of the News Division.

Leona clearly rules the roost and fights with Charlie as an equal or as a subordinate, never as a superior. They fight the way old friends do.

In no respect are women as a class portrayed as inferior or subordinate to the power of men. So why do I get that intuitive itch that there's something old-fashioned about Sorkin's writing on gender relations?

I think it's that some of the male characters in The Newsroom tend to be the carriers of logic and reasoning while the female characters tend to be the carriers of emotional expression. This isn't always true: Sloan is highly logical (while also passionate) and Charlie is highly emotional (while also reasonable) and Neal carries both in balance. It's certainly true, however, of the Jim & Maggie relationship which is intended as a reflection of the older Will & Mackenzie one. Remember how, in episode one, Mackenzie points out Maggie to Jim and tells him that she's a younger version of her before she grew into herself and got hotter with age? And why has Jim long been Mackenzie's choice for supervising producer? Could it be because he reminds her of Will? I think so. I also think it's fair to assume that Sorkin does not intend for that rational/emotional dichotomy to typify all gender relations since he gives us alternate examples. More likely it's because Sorkin is a brainy guy who prefers an emotionally expressive woman to bring balance into his life. When he writes romance it comes out of who he is, what he likes. That's how he connects to the material at a feeling level. Some viewers may prefer a flip on those traditional associations and the Don & Sloan relationship may have been his attempt to provide that. It's not where Sorkin feels at his strongest or most natural, though, so he writes what he knows.

There ARE problems with The Newsroom, though, that I think if addressed would have reduced criticism. In no way should bosses be allowed to date subordinates over whose careers they have an influence. The producers decide what stories are aired. The career of a journalist rises and falls with the number and quality of stories they get aired. Dating a subordinate in this environment is a breach of ethics and most professional workplace standards. To be fair, Maggie was first an intern then a personal aide and only became an associate producer (journalist) as Don was on his way out so it wasn't a total breach; definitely in the gray area, though. The sexual tension between Jim and Maggie, obvious to everyone (as Sloan pointed out in the finale), often broke out into open conflict. Mackenzie should have addressed this conflict as their supervisor but instead encouraged it. As Jim points out it was Mac's idea for him to get together with Maggie in the first place. Again, it was Mac's advice to Jim to "gather ye rosebuds while ye may" that led to his and Maggie's first kiss and then Jim deciding this was wrong. Mackenzie's regrets about her relationship with Will colored her judgment and led her to offer advice that may have been okay coming from a friend but was inappropriate coming from a supervisor. She could have been rightly disciplined or even fired by HR if found out. Jim does decide that he can't date a subordinate however he feels but Mac should have intervened and threatened to move one of them out if they couldn't handle the tension in a professional manner. In the series finale Jim offers the Supervising Producer position to the woman he's in love with. How is that not an HR violation? How would Maggie's career not be dogged by rumors of "sleeping her way to the top" if she accepts it?

The other thing is the way emotional conflicts between several of the characters break out into office wide battles. Talk about an unsafe working environment! I can't see how the entire management staff wasn't fired on an almost weekly basis. And when Mackenzie commends Maggie for her loyalty by saying she wouldn't complain to HR if her hair was on fire I cringed. Is that the message you want to send out in a #MeToo world?

Aaron Sorkin says he likes to write "very romantically, very idealistically." The chaos in the newsroom is intended for laughs, not to be taken as a serious reflection of a workplace. The characters are flawed and frequently do not do what they should. The lack of HR supervision is even mentioned by a character in season one so there's awareness that liberties are being taken. I don't think there's an inherent woman problem here, just a production not as sensitive as it might be to the struggles women face in the workplace. There are good reasons why "no dating" policies are in place, why it's unprofessional to carry your personal life into the workplace. Workplace comedies routinely feature HR nightmares for the sake of laughs: Brooklyn 99 is a good example. We don't take them seriously. It's the sheer intelligence of The Newsroom and the realistic setting that may make the comedy part seem more serious than it is. Personally I see the show as a kind of joyful fantasy; Sports Night without the canned laughter. If you can separate the fantastic from the realistic I think you'll find that The Newsroom is actually very empowering for women.