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the-ghost-king · 3 years

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About the cupid scene, Nico was forced to come out, but its also made very clear that Cupid is the bad guy. So is Aphrodite to an extent. They have a twisted and fundamental misunderstanding of love and how it works for mortals. I get that people could be mad about how Nico was forced to come out and putting him through more emotional trauma, but I also think its very realistic in showing how callous and cruel the gods understanding of love is.

I am reminded of the quote by Madeline Miller, "There is no law that gods must be fair..."

I also understand why the scene might be traumatic for other young LGBTQ+ readers, I've seen a lot of people talk about the fear of being outed in regards to them reading that scene as a kid. I completely respect their feelings on that, and I understand that as well. However, as someone who had been forcibly outed once before reading that scene, that scene really helped heal me. I don't think the Cupid scene is inherently homophobic, and I'm often bothered by the lack of nuance regarding around how it's handled.

I recognize it's a very emotional scene, and that people may have a hard time fully separating their emotions from that scene, but at the same time if there's a group of people saying "hey I understand why you disliked this scene but it was really helpful to me as a child because of the different experiences I had" maybe slow the breaks and hear what others also in the community have to say before determining if the scene is homophobic. You don't have to like the scene, and yeah maybe the scene did hurt you but that doesn't make it homophobic.

I want to specify on my word choice there a little closer, because of course outing someone is an act of homophobia, and the scene is homophobic in that sense. However often times the conversation about homophobia in this scene goes to "Rick was homophobic for writing this" where personally I would say this scene toes the line at being too far without ever crossing it. Some people may think this depiction crosses the line into "Rick was homophobic for writing this" which is fine, but just because something depicted homophobia and hurt you doesn't mean it was homophobic. Something doesn't have to out rightly be stated to be bad, in order to be read as bad*, and the Cupid scene does a wonderful job of depicting this.

I talk here about how Nico is shown what love is, and how love is treated by Nico, and how it affects his character. I think it's important to note that Nico's entire storyline can essentially be encompassed in an Orpheus-like or Odyssey-like tale. Nico's undergone this huge emotional and physical labor all in the name of having some form of unconditional love. I think that post is a really important read in the context of this one because I very carefully outline how love shapes Nico and how Nico shape and chooses his own definition of love, but I want to specifically dig into the Cupid scene on this post.

The big criticism often seen is "it's homophobic" which I covered above, and I want to clarify I'm not upset with or mad at or trying to tell anyone they can't dislike it or even say you can't say it's homophobic (my words on my one post are a bit off I'll admit) but the problem I have is when people believe they hold a moral high ground for thinking it's homophobic, or they remove all nuance from the discussion with "it's homophobic". Which is frustrating and annoying because it's a very complex scene, and it really changes Nico's arc and personality and it does help characterize him.

The big reason it shapes him so much is because of the other largest reason the scene is criticized, Cupid's behavior. What often fails to be recognized in those scenes is that Cupid is intentionally painted as the villain, this is very important to the scene.

In the context of this scene Nico makes an unspoken choice, a choice of "what is love to me?". I talk about how Nico claims his narrative in BoTL when he overcomes Minos, and he partially peaks that arc by convincing Gods to join the final battle of TLO. Following that arc however, Nico falls into his second arc, his crush on Percy was important in PJO, but not as important as it is in HoO.

By HoO Nico's entire character revolves around Percy, how to help Percy, how to aid Percy, etc. All of this has to do with Nico's crush on Percy, but also as an act of repayment because Nico hurt Percy- Nico lied to him about knowing him at New Rome in SoN, and he goes to Tartarus shortly after... This mirrors what Percy did after Hades tricked Nico... Percy choked Nico because he was upset with him, so Nico tried to win back Percy's affection by bathing him in the river.

The Cupid Scene is the resolution of Nico's arc, he is essentially given a choice- Cupid or Jason?

For this reason, we do see Nico recognize love for what it has been vs how it could be.

Cupid is there to represent what love is, to Nico love is brutal, and painful, and a lot of hard work... Nico has made himself utilitarian in love simply because it is the only way he can find any affection. Love to Nico is about flaying yourself for the benefit of others, to trample any and all parts of yourself simply to appease those you care for, because you want them to love you so much as you love them. The parallels I could draw between Nico and Orpheus, or Nico and Odysseus... I'd be here a long while...

In that scene Jason represents the alternative form of love which Nico chooses after his interaction with Cupid.

Jason says during the scene that he "preferred Piper's idea of love" which has to do with kindness and caring, etc, and then Jason becomes the embodiment of that idea during the scene- which showcases the alternative of what love can be, thus making Jason a personification of love in the context of that scene.

Jason looks to Nico, he doesn't ask for more, he simply looks to Nico with understanding and acknowledges him for who he is, and he does the exact opposite of what Nico expects:

Jason loves Nico where he is, without conditions, without forcing Nico to become something more. Jason didn’t force Nico to say more than what was necessary for him to understand, Jason looked at Nico and he called Nico brave.

Cupid is a more volatile form of love than Aphrodite, Cupid shoots arrows that makes people animals, that can make a god grow insane, but Aphrodite's form of love is about acceptance and humanity (think to how she picked Ares over Hephaestus even if it was perhaps "wrong")- both are about truth but one is about force and the other about acceptance.

When Nico walks out of there, he makes his choice- he is forced to come out yes, Cupid is wrong for doing this, but Jason again stays a figure of love in Nico's life. Jason basically says, "Good job, I know that was hard, thank you for sharing and let me know if you need anything, people will care about you and understand you," again and again and again to Nico, he doesn't tell Nico he has to come out, and he agrees to keep it between them for now. Jason is love as acceptance, Jason is the first person who unconditionally loves Nico, and that's the choice.

Will Nico accept unconditional love? If the answer is no, then Cupid wins and Nico is denying himself. If the answer is yes, then Jason and Nico win, and Nico no longer needs to make himself utilitarian in love in order to be loved.

The choice is made with Reyna and Hedge, most specifically Reyna.

When he accidentally comes out to them, and they accept him without making a big deal of it, without show, just that acknowledgement and "thank you for sharing" and Nico accepts their words and friendship still- Nico made his choice then to accept the love he was being freely given.

“He carried so much sadness and loneliness, so much heartache. Yet he put his mission first. He persevered. Reyna respected that. She understood that. She'd never been a touchy-feely person, but she had the strangest desire to drape her cloak over Nico's shoulders and tuck him in. She mentally chided herself. He was a comrade, not her little brother. He wouldn't appreciate the gesture.”

This is where we see the slow and steady, and healthy, end to Nico's arc in regards to love really grow into itself, and he begins to heal. He no longer sees such an intense need to make himself utilitarian for love, and he begins to heal from his internalized homophobia too.

(Internalized homophobia discussions with Nico also bother me too often times, people too often assume you can't date while struggling with internalized homophobia or at least very heavy handedly imply that which is just not true... You may have some issues in your relationship, but you can work through the internalized homophobia while building a new relationship and be just fine. Also to assume someone has an unhealthy relationship because of internalized homophobia is weird and lowkey reinforces the idea that "broken" people don't need love, but also does a huge disservice to so many LGBTQ+ people who are happily married/themselves but still struggle with these feelings, and to see a healthy relationship depiction despite someone in that relationship struggling with internalized homophobia is fine and good actually. As long as the individual can recognize what they're dealing with, and work through it in a healthy and constructive manner, then there's nothing wrong there...)

When I started this post to be honest I thought I would have a lot more to say, it's a scene that touched and changed me so deeply as a person, and beyond that in a more objective experience it completely changes Nico's character, by turning his arc around and beginning his healing process. To be honest, there probably is more to be said on it, I just haven't found the words yet... I know parts of this post are clunky and in a year I'm going to read this and see all the places it could be better but for now I'm content with it.

Whether or not someone considers the scene homophobic is a subjective experience, but I think this is a very well written scene purely for the characterization and symbolism, intentional or otherwise. I don't really care that much to debate if it's truly a homophobic scene or not, I can see both why people say it is and why people say it isn't and that can be culminated into "people have different needs" and "minorities aren't a monolith". Personally my much larger complaint is the complete lack of nuance and insight scenes like this are handled with, not the matter of personal opinion an individual reaches on the scene.

*the post uses the word "adult audience" and yes, fair point, children should not be able to decipher symbolism to the extent adults can. But older children and young teens, which the RRverse series are sold for, is when critical thinking skills and media analysis do begin to become parts of classroom curriculum. The scene does an excellent job of not outright stating Cupid is evil, but of depicting that in a very clear cut way.

#nevermind i lied here you go #nico di angelo #meta #long post #anon #ask #internalized homophobia #fandom homophobia

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northisnotup · 3 years

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Continuation of the amnesiac!Damen fic

"I don't know how to do this."

It’s been a long day. Nik went home hours ago, with the firm instruction to text if he needed anything, both Egeria and Hypermenestra have called to wish him a speedy recovery, the sun is setting...and Laurent shows no sign of moving anytime soon.

He came back at three and has stuck like a burr ever since. Through the blood work, the scans, the neurological tests. Everything. Laurent knows things about Damen’s medical history that Damen doesn’t even know - and not just the things he wouldn’t expect to know, missing almost four years of memories. But things that Damen himself forgot. Like the concussion when he was thirteen from when Kastor pushed him down a flight of stairs. Or the bumpy keloid scar behind his ear from a dirty hit during high school gym class. The way he found out he was allergic to a certain type of sedative by experimenting...also during highschool.

"Do what?" Laurent says, paging through the book in his lap too fast to really be reading it. Damen almost frowns. It's a good book.

He makes himself consider. The spine is cracked, the pages dogeared, it's missing the jacket entirely and there is a stain on the cover which marks this specific book as the one Damen has had for years and years because that stain is mid range scotch from the time in his life that Damen was trying to drink scotch. He thought it would impress his father, but all it really did was give him wicked hangovers and mess up his insides.

According to Nik, corroborated by Jo, Damen’s known Laurent for three years. They met in college. They dated for one year, and have been engaged for another. The wedding is set for next year at Damen's mother's summer home.

So. It's entirely possible that Laurent has read this book before.

That's...weird.

He's had lovers before who knew his favourites. Jokaste would often order for him when they went out just to get him to try something new. But Laurent caresses the worn, scratched cover with gentle fingers. He pauses every few chapters to linger on a page or two before he continues to browse.

Laurent knows Damen's favourite novel well enough to have favourite scenes, and there is no reason why that should steal his breath.

"I didn't like you, this morning," Damen says. He feels like he should be apologizing for it, but it just makes Laurent bite back a smile, finally looking up from the liquid warped pages. He looks rumpled, in leggings and what is probably one of Damen's t-shirts, his hair mussed and finger combed into a bun. He looks exactly like someone Damen would have been happy to take home.

And Damen was going to marry him. Or he is, when he remembers him.

Things are coming back already, a slow trickle of knowledge that appears without strain. Kastor texted him and he remembered the heavy emotional weight of sitting next to him at their father's funeral. Their mother's side by side in front of them, clinging to one another and crying quietly. He can remember the way Kastor grabbed his hand during the eulogy and hadn't let it go until they were following the procession.

“You don’t like me now,” Laurent says lightly, unfolding one of his long legs and poking his bare toes into Damen’s side. He’d kicked off his shoes to contort himself into his current position in the visitor’s chair and looks effortlessly comfortable, though Damen’s not sure how that’s at all possible.

He swipes at Laurent’s leg, hand closing around his ankle and is hit with the sense memory of holding it before. Of pressing his lips to the delicate looking arch of that foot, wet and sudsy and of Laurent swearing at him for it.

“Damen?” all mirth has drained out of Laurent’s face, and the ankle in Damen’s weakening grip flexes and strains. “Damen, let go, I’ll get one of the nurses.”

“Did I call you Achilles? Was that,” Damen blinks, trying to focus his blurred vision. His head hurts, but he’s had a low level headache all day. “Was that seriously the pet name I chose?”

Laurent’s pale skin hides nothing when he blushes. Pink glows out from the high arches of his cheeks and across his nose. The tips of his ears look like miniature suns, rising. “Once,” he rasps, and clears his throat, tugging his ankle out of Damen’s slackened grip and curling himself back into a ball. “You compared me to him, once. Golden warriors both, I think were the words you used.”

“I love the Iliad,” Damen says, helplessly.

“And you don’t even like me,” Laurent returns.

Damen thinks he’s starting to understand Laurent’s sense of humor, as sharp as the rest of him and dry as a desert. But that wasn’t a joke, that wasn’t even an attempt at a joke. “You probably already know I was planning on asking Jo to marry me,” he says. It’s a poor olive branch, but it’s about all he has.

They both woke up this morning and had their hearts broken, so, they have something in common.

“I was your rebound fling,” Laurent surprises him. “You didn’t like me then, either.”

Damen opens his mouth to deny it, and then shuts it without speaking. Laurent would know better than he would, but… he doesn’t sleep with people he doesn’t at least like. Other people can. He tried, once - Kashel broke up with him for being clingy, which, in that case, meant wanting to get dinner before they fooled around.

“We don’t have to talk about this,” Laurent drops his eyes back down to the book.

“Maybe I want to talk about this,” Damen says it on impulse, just to be contrary but he’s surprised to find that he means it.

“You shouldn’t be taxing yourself.”

“Laurent -” Damen watches him startle, and to his shame he realizes why. They’ve hardly been apart all day, and it’s the first time Damen’s called his fiance by name. “I asked you to marry me.”

“You did,” Laurent agrees, voice tight.

“And you said yes,” Damen wonders for the first time if Laurent has spent all day wondering when that would be taken back. “help me figure out why.”

“You were kind to me, back then. Kinder than I deserved.”

Maybe he got better about being casual, about feelings - but looking at Laurent in this light, the ring on his finger, the one Damen put there...he doesn’t think so. “Kindness isn’t something you can deserve.”

Laurent stills. Damen hadn’t even registered the jiggling of his knee until it stopped. “I’m going to go get a coffee,” he says, standing suddenly.

“Hey, wait -”

“No,”

“I just -”

“I said no.”

“At least take my wallet,” Damen sighs, gesturing at the small pile of personal effects Laurent had grabbed this morning.

It was only this morning.

Laurent sneers, looking down his nose like he always does when he’s upset. “Why would I need your wallet?”

“Because…” Damen trails off, the trickle of memory becoming a flood, until between one heartbeat and the next, his life goes from greyscale to full colour. There are a million ways he could answer that. ‘Because you always put your debit card in your pants pocket and forget it there if you don’t have time to plan your outfit.’ ‘Because you never carry change and will talk yourself out of using your own money for a coffee, but using my money is fine.’ ‘Because you’re not really getting a coffee anyway, you just need an excuse to step out for a second.’

Looking at Laurent is like finally finding meaning in abstract.

Laurent hates that book. Specifically, he hates the wildly popular movie that was made out of the book which tramples all over the themes and reduces the narrative to a cheap trope that people fight about on the internet. But when Damen is sick, or he’s had a bad day, Laurent will leave the book on his nightstand, along with a cup of strong tea.

He can’t help the softness of his voice, “Because you don’t drink coffee after noon, sweetheart, and if you’re getting a tea, I want one too.”

“What did you call me?”

Damen smiles, lopsided, and pats the side of his cot, which has felt Laurent’s absence since his goodbye that morning. He did too, even if he didn’t know it. “Hi, sweetheart. I missed you.”

#my fic #Captive Prince #lamen

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shortnotsweet · 3 years

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Bakudeku: A Non-Comprehensive Dissection of the Exploitation of Working Bodies, the Murder of Annoying Children, and a Rivals-to-Lovers Complex

I. Bakudeku in Canon, And Why Anti’s Need to Calm the Fuck Down

II. Power is Power: the Brain-Melting Process of Normalization and Toxic Masculinity

III. How to Kill Middle Schoolers, and Why We Should

IV. Parallels in Abuse, EnemiesRivals-to-Lovers, and the Necessity of Redemption ft. ATLA’s Zuko

V. Give it to Me Straight. It’s Homophobic.

VI. Love in Perspective, from the East v. West

VII. Stuck in the Sludge, the Past, and Season One

Disclaimer

It needs to be said that there is definitely a place for disagreement, discourse, debate, and analysis: that is a sign of an active fandom that’s heavily invested, and not inherently a bad thing at all. Considering the amount of source material we do have (from the manga, to the anime, to the movies, to the light novels, to the official art), there are going to be warring interpretations, and that’s inevitable.

I started watching and reading MHA pretty recently, and just got into the fandom. I was weary for a reason, and honestly, based on what I’ve seen, I’m still weary now. I’ve seen a lot of anti posts, and these are basically my thoughts. This entire thing is in no way comprehensive, and it’s my own opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. If I wanted to be thorough about this, I would’ve included manga panels, excerpts from the light novel, shots from the anime, links to other posts/essays/metas that have inspired this, etc. but I’m tired and not about that life right now, so, this is what it is. This is poorly organized, but maybe I’ll return to fix it.

Let’s begin.

Bakudeku in Canon, And Why Anti’s Need to Calm the Fuck Down

There are a lot of different reasons, that can be trivial as you like, to ship or not to ship two (or more) characters. It could be based purely off of character design, proximity, aversion to another ship, or hypotheticals. And I do think that it’s totally valid if someone dislikes the ship or can’t get on board with his character because to them, it does come across as abuse, and the implications make them uncomfortable or, or it just feels unhealthy. If that is your takeaway, and you are going to stick to your guns, the more power to you.

But Bakudeku’s relationship has canonically progressed to the point where it’s not the emotionally (or physically) abusive clusterfuck some people portray it to be, and it’s cheap to assume that it would be, based off of their characterizations as middle schoolers. Izuku intentionally opens the story as a naive little kid who views the lens of the Hero society through rose colored glasses and arguably wants nothing more than assimilation into that society; Bakugou is a privileged little snot who embodies the worst and most hypocritical beliefs of this system. Both of them are intentionally proven wrong. Both are brainwashed, as many little children are, by the propaganda and societal norms that they are exposed to. Both of their arcs include unlearning crucial aspects of the Hero ideology in order to become true heroes.

I will personally never simp for Bakugou because for the longest time, I couldn't help but think of him as a little kid on the playground screaming at the top of his lungs because someone else is on the swingset. He’s red in the face, there are probably veins popping out of his neck, he’s losing it. It’s easy to see why people would prefer Tododeku to Bakudeku.

Even now, seeing him differently, I still personally wouldn’t date Bakugou, especially if I had other options. Why? I probably wouldn’t want to date any of the guys who bullied me, especially because I think that schoolyard bullying, even in middle school, affected me largely in a negative way and created a lot of complexes I’m still trying to work through. I haven’t built a better relationship with them, and I’m not obligated to. Still, I associate them with the kind of soft trauma that they inflicted upon me, and while to them it was probably impersonal, to me, it was an intimate sort of attack that still affects me. That being said, that is me. Those are my personal experiences, and while they could undoubtedly influence how I interpret relationships, I do not want to project and hinder my own interpretation of Deku.

The reality is that Deku himself has an innate understanding of Bakugou that no one else does; I mention later that he seems to understand his language, implicitly, and I do stand by that. He understands what it is he’s actually trying to say, often why he’s saying it, and while others may see him as wimpy or unable to stand up for himself, that’s simply not true. Part of Deku’s characterization is that he is uncommonly observant and empathetic; I’m not denying that Bakugou caused harm or inflicted damage, but infantilizing Deku and preaching about trauma that’s not backed by canon and then assuming random people online excuse abuse is just...the leap of leaps, and an actual toxic thing to do. I’ve read fan works where Bakugou is a bully, and that’s all, and has caused an intimate degree of emotional, mental, and physical insecurity from their middle school years that prevents their relationship from changing, and that’s for the better. I’m not going to argue and say that it’s not an interesting take, or not valid, or has no basis, because it does. Its basis is the character that Bakugou was in middle school, and the person he was when he entered UA.

Not only is Bakugou — the current Bakugou, the one who has accumulated memories and experiences and development — not the same person he was at the beginning of the story, but Deku is not the same person, either. Maybe who they are fundamentally, at their core, stays the same, but at the beginning and end of any story, or even their arcs within the story, the point is that characters will undergo change, and that the reader will gain perspective.

“You wanna be a hero so bad? I’ve got a time-saving idea for you. If you think you’ll have a quirk in your next life...go take a swan dive off the roof!”

Yes. That is a horrible thing to tell someone, even if you are a child, even if you don’t understand the implications, even if you don’t mean what it is you are saying. Had someone told me that in middle school, especially given our history and the context of our interactions, I don’t know if I would ever have forgiven them.

Here’s the thing: I’m not Deku. Neither is anyone reading this. Deku is a fictional character, and everyone we know about him is extrapolated from source material, and his response to this event follows:

“Idiot! If I really jumped, you’d be charged with bullying me into suicide! Think before you speak!”

I think it’s unfair to apply our own projections as a universal rather than an interpersonal interpretation; that’s not to say that the interpretation of Bakudeku being abusive or having unbalanced power dynamics isn’t valid, or unfounded, but rather it’s not a universal interpretation, and it’s not canon. Deku is much more of a verbal thinker; in comparison, Bakugou is a visual one, at least in the format of the manga, and as such, we get various panels demonstrating his guilt, and how deep it runs. His dialogue and rapport with Deku has undeniably shifted, and it’s very clear that the way they treat each other has changed from when they were younger. Part of Bakugou’s growth is him gaining self awareness, and eventually, the strength to wield that. He knows what a fucked up little kid he was, and he carries the weight of that.

“At that moment, there were no thoughts in my head. My body just moved on its own.”

There’s a part of me that really, really disliked Bakugou going into it, partially because of what I’d seen and what I’d heard from a limited, outside perspective. I felt like Bakugou embodied the toxic masculinity (and to an extent, I still believe that) and if he won in some way, that felt like the patriarchy winning, so I couldn't help but want to muzzle and leash him before releasing him into the wild.

The reality, however, of his character in canon is that it isn’t very accurate to assume that he would be an abusive partner in the future, or that Midoryia has not forgiven him to some extent already, that the two do not care about each other or are singularly important, that they respect each other, or that the narrative has forgotten any of this.

Don’t mistake me for a Bakugou simp or apologist. I’m not, but while I definitely could also see Tododeku (and I have a soft spot for them, too, their dynamic is totally different and unique, and Todoroki is arguably treated as the tritagonist) and I’m ambivalent about Izuocha (which is written as cannoncially romantic) I do believe that canonically, Bakugou and Deku are framed as soulmates/character foils, Sasuke + Naruto, Kageyama + Hinata style. Their relationship is arguably the focus of the series. That’s not to undermine the importance or impact of Deku’s relationships with other characters, and theirs with him, but in terms of which one takes priority, and which one this all hinges on?

The manga is about a lot of things, yes, but if it were to be distilled into one relationship, buckle up, because it’s the Bakudeku show.

Power is Power: the Brain-Melting Process of Normalization and Toxic Masculinity

One of the ways in which the biopolitical prioritization of Quirks is exemplified within Hero society is through Quirk marriages. Endeavor partially rationalizes the abuse of his family through the creation of a child with the perfect quirk, a child who can be molded into the perfect Hero. People with powerful, or useful abilities, are ranked high on the hierarchy of power and privilege, and with a powerful ability, the more opportunities and avenues for success are available to them.

For the most part, Bakugou is a super spoiled, privileged little rich kid who is born talented but is enabled for his aggressive behavior and, as a child, cannot move past his many internalized complexes, treats his peers like shit, and gets away with it because the hero society he lives in either has this “boys will be boys” mentality, or it’s an example of the way that power, or Power, is systematically prioritized in this society. The hero system enables and fosters abusers, people who want power and publicity, and people who are genetically predisposed to have advantages over others. There are plenty of good people who believe in and participate in this system, who want to be good, and who do good, but that doesn’t change the way that the hero society is structured, the ethical ambiguity of the Hero Commission, and the way that Heroes are but pawns, idols with machine guns, used to sell merch to the public, to install faith in the government, or the current status quo, and reinforce capitalist propaganda. Even All Might, the epitome of everything a Hero should be, is drained over the years, and exists as a concept or idea, when in reality he is a hollow shell with an entire person inside, struggling to survive. Hero society is functionally dependent on illusion.

In Marxist terms: There is no truth, there is only power.

Although Bakugou does change, and I think that while he regrets his actions, what is long overdue is him verbally expressing his remorse, both to himself and Deku. One might argue that he’s tried to do it in ways that are compatible with his limited emotional range of expression, and Deku seems to understand this language implicitly.

I am of the opinion that the narrative is building up to a verbal acknowledgement, confrontation, and subsequent apology that only speaks what has gone unspoken.

That being said, Bakugou is a great example of the way that figures of authority (parents, teachers, adults) and institutions both in the real world and this fictional universe reward violent behavior while also leaving mental and emotional health — both his own and of the people Bakugou hurts — unchecked, and part of the way he lashes out at others is because he was never taught otherwise.

And by that, I’m referring to the ways that are to me, genuinely disturbing. For example, yelling at his friends is chill. But telling someone to kill themselves, even casually and without intent and then misinterpreting everything they do as a ploy to make you feel weak because you're projecting? And having no teachers stop and intervene, either because they are afraid of you or because they value the weight that your Quirk can benefit society over the safety of children? That, to me, is both real and disturbing.

Not only that, but his parents (at least, Mitsuki), respond to his outbursts with more outbursts, and while this is likely the culture of their home and I hesitate to call it abusive, I do think that it contributed to the way that he approaches things. Bakugou as a character is very complex, but I think that he is primarily an example of the way that the Hero System fails people.

I don’t think we can write off the things he’s done, especially using the line of reasoning that “He didn’t mean it that way”, because in real life, children who hurt others rarely mean it like that either, but that doesn’t change the effect it has on the people who are victimized, but to be absolutely fair, I don’t think that the majority of Bakudeku shippers, at least now, do use that line of reasoning. Most of them seem to have a handle on exactly how fucked up the Hero society is, and exactly why it fucks up the people embedded within that society.

The characters are positioned in this way for a reason, and the discoveries made and the development that these characters undergo are meant to reveal more about the fictional world — and, perhaps, our world — as the narrative progresses.

The world of the Hero society is dependent, to some degree, on biopolitics. I don’t think we have enough evidence to suggest that people with Quirks or Quirkless people place enough identity or placement within society to become equivalent to marginalized groups, exactly, but we can draw parallels to the way that Deku and by extent Quirkless people are viewed as weak, a deviation, or disabled in some way. Deviants, or non-productive bodies, are shunned for their inability to perform ideal labor. While it is suggested to Deku that he could become a police officer or pursue some other occupation to help people, he believes that he can do the most positive good as a Hero. In order to be a Hero, however, in the sense of a career, one needs to have Power.

Deviation from the norm will be punished or policed unless it is exploitable; in order to become integrated into society, a deviant must undergo a process of normalization and become a working, exploitable body. It is only through gaining power from All Might that Deku is allowed to assimilate from the margins and into the upper ranks of society; the manga and the anime give the reader enough perspective, context, and examples to allow us to critique and deconstruct the society that is solely reliant on power.

Through his societal privileges, interpersonal biases, internalized complexes, and his subsequent unlearning of these ideologies, Bakugou provides examples of the way that the system simultaneously fails and indoctrinates those who are targeted, neglected, enabled by, believe in, and participate within the system.

Bakudeku are two sides of the same coin. We are shown visually that the crucial turning point and fracture in their relationship is when Bakugou refuses to take Deku’s outstretched hand; the idea of Deku offering him help messes with his adolescent perspective in that Power creates a hierarchy that must be obeyed, and to be helped is to be weak is to be made a loser.

Largely, their character flaws in terms of understanding the hero society are defined and entangled within the concept of power. Bakugou has power, or privilege, but does not have the moral character to use it as a hero, and believes that Power, or winning, is the only way in which to view life. Izuku has a much better grasp on the way in which heroes wield power (their ideologies can, at first, be differentiated as winning vs. saving), and is a worthy successor because of this understanding, and of circumstance. However, in order to become a Hero, our hero must first gain the Power that he lacks, and learn to wield it.

As the characters change, they bridge the gaps of their character deficiencies, and are brought closer together through character parallelism.

Two sides of the same coin, an outstretched hand.

They are better together.

How to Kill Middle Schoolers, and Why We Should

I think it’s fitting that in the manga, a critical part of Bakugou’s arc explicitly alludes to killing the middle school version of himself in order to progress into a young adult. In the alternative covers Horikoshi released, one of them was a close up of Bakugou in his middle school uniform, being stabbed/impaled, with blood rolling out of his mouth. Clearly this references the scene in which he sacrifices himself to save Deku, on a near-instinctual level.

To me, this only cements Horikoshi’s intent that middle school Bakugou must be debunked, killed, discarded, or destroyed in order for Bakugou the hero to emerge, which is why people who do actually excuse his actions or believe that those actions define him into young adulthood don’t really understand the necessity for change, because they seem to imply that he doesn’t need/cannot reach further growth, and there doesn’t need to be a separation between the Bakugou who is, at heart, volatile and repressed the angry, and the Bakugou who sacrifices himself, a hero who saves people.

Plot twist: there does need to be a difference. Further plot twist: there is a difference.

In sacrificing himself for Deku, Bakugou himself doesn't die, but the injury is fatal in the sense that it could've killed him physically and yet symbolizes the selfish, childish part of him that refused to accept Deku, himself, and the inevitability of change. In killing those selfish remnants, he could actually become the kind of hero that we the reader understand to be the true kind.

That’s why I think that a lot of the people who stress his actions as a child without acknowledging the ways he has changed, grown, and tried to fix what he has broken don’t really get it, because it was always part of his character arc to change and purposely become something different and better. If the effects of his worst and his most childish self stick with you more, and linger despite that, that’s okay. But distilling his character down to the wrong elements doesn’t get you the bare essentials; what it gets you is a skewed and shallow version of a person. If you’re okay with that version, that is also fine.

But you can’t condemn others who aren’t fine with that incomplete version, and to become enraged that others do not see him as you do is childish.

Bakugou’s change and the emphasis on that change is canon.

Parallels in Abuse, EnemiesRivals-to-Lovers, and the Necessity of Redemption ft. ATLA’s Zuko

In real life, the idea that “oh, he must bully you because he likes you” is often used as a way to brush aside or to excuse the action of bullying itself, as if a ‘secret crush’ somehow negates the effects of bullying on the victim or the inability of the bully to properly process and manifest their emotions in certain ways. It doesn’t. It often enables young boys to hurt others, and provides figures of authority to overlook the real source of schoolyard bullying or peer review. The “secret crush”, in real life, is used to undermine abuse, justify toxic masculinity, and is essentially used as a non-solution solution.

A common accusation is that Bakudeku shippers jump on the pairing because they romanticize pairing a bully and a victim together, or believe that the only way for Bakugou to atone for his past would be to date Midoryia in the future. This may be true for some people, in which case, that’s their own preference, but based on my experience and what I’ve witnessed, that’s not the case for most.

The difference being is that as these are characters, we as readers or viewers are meant to analyze them. Not to justify them, or to excuse their actions, but we are given the advantage of the outsider perspective to piece their characters together in context, understand why they are how they are, and witness them change; maybe I just haven’t been exposed to enough of the fandom, but no one (I’ve witnessed) treats the idea that “maybe Bakugou has feelings he can’t process or understand and so they manifest in aggressive and unchecked ways'' as a solution to his inability to communicate or process in a healthy way, rather it is just part of the explanation of his character, something is needs to — and is — working through. The solution to his middle school self is not the revelation of a “teehee, secret crush”, but self-reflection, remorse, and actively working to better oneself, which I do believe is canonically reflected, especially as of recently.

In canon, they are written to be partners, better together than apart, and I genuinely believe that one can like the Bakudeku dynamic not by route of romanticization but by observation.

I do think we are meant to see parallels between him and Endeavor; Endeavor is a high profile abuser who embodies the flaws and hypocrisy of the hero system. Bakugou is a schoolyard bully who emulates and internalizes the flaws of this system as a child, likely due to the structure of the society and the way that children will absorb the propaganda they are exposed to; the idea that Quirks, or power, define the inherent value of the individual, their ability to contribute to society, and subsequently their fundamental human worth. The difference between them is the fact that Endeavor is the literal adult who is fully and knowingly active within a toxic, corrupt system who forces his family to undergo a terrifying amount of trauma and abuse while facing little to no consequences because he knows that his status and the values of their society will protect him from those consequences. In other words, Endeavor is the threat of what Bakugou could have, and would have, become without intervention or genuine change.

Comparisons between characters, as parallels or foils, are tricky in that they imply but cannot confirm sameness. Having parallels with someone does not make them the same, by the way, but can serve to illustrate contrasts, or warnings. Harry Potter, for example, is meant to have obvious parallels with Tom Riddle, with similar abilities, and tragic upbringings. That doesn’t mean Harry grows up to become Lord Voldemort, but rather he helps lead a cross-generational movement to overthrow the facist regime. Harry is offered love, compassion, and friends, and does not embrace the darkness within or around him. As far as moldy old snake men are concerned, they do not deserve a redemption arc because they do not wish for one, and the truest of change only occurs when you actively try to change.

To be frank, either way, Bakugou was probably going to become a good Hero, in the sense that Endeavor is a ‘good’ Hero. Hero capitalized, as in a pro Hero, in the sense that it is a career, an occupation, and a status. Because of his strong Quirk, determination, skill, and work ethic, Bakugou would have made a good Hero. Due to his lack of character, however, he was not on the path to become a hero; defender of the weak, someone who saves people to save people, who is willing to make sacrifices detrimental to themselves, who saves people out of love.

It is necessary for him to undergo both a redemption arc and a symbolic death and rebirth in order for him to follow the path of a hero, having been inspired and prompted by Deku.

I personally don’t really like Endeavor’s little redemption arc, not because I don’t believe that people can change or that they shouldn't at least try to atone for the atrocities they have committed, but because within any narrative, a good redemption arc is important if it matters; what also matters is the context of that arc, and whether or not it was needed. For example, in ATLA, Zuko’s redemption arc is widely regarded as one of the best arcs in television history, something incredible. And it is. That shit fucks. In a good way.

It was confirmed that Azula was also going to get a redemption arc, had Volume 4 gone on as planned, and it was tentatively approached in the comics, which are considered canon. She is an undeniably bad person (who is willing to kill, threaten, exploit, and colonize), but she is also a child, and as viewers, we witness and recognize the factors that contributed to her (debatable) sociopathy, and the way that the system she was raised in failed her. Her family failed her; even Uncle Iroh, the wise mentor who helps guide Zuko to see the light, is willing to give up on her immediately, saying that she’s “crazy” and needs to be “put down”. Yes, it’s comedic, and yes, it’s pragmatic, but Azula is fourteen years old. Her mother is banished, her father is a psychopath, and her older brother, from her perspective, betrayed and abandoned her. She doesn’t have the emotional support that Zuko does; she exploits and controls her friends because it’s all she’s been taught to do; she says herself, her “own mother thought [she] was a monster; she was right, of course, but it still [hurts]”. A parent who does not believe in you, or a parent that uses you and will hurt you, is a genuine indicator of trauma.

The writers understood that both Zuko and Azula deserved redemption arcs. One was arguably further gone than the other, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are both children, products of their environment, who have the time, motive, and reason to change.

In contrast, you know who wouldn’t have deserved a redemption arc? Ozai. That simply would not have been interesting, wouldn’t have served the narrative well, and honestly, is not needed, thematically or otherwise. Am I comparing Ozai to Endeavor? Basically, yes. Fuck those guys. I don’t see a point in Endeavor’s little “I want to be a good dad now” arc, and I think that we don’t need to sympathize with characters in order to understand them or be interested in them. I want Touya/Dabi to expose his abuse, for his career to crumble, and then for him to die.

If they are not challenging the system that we the viewer are meant to question, and there is no thematic relevance to their redemption, is it even needed?

On that note, am I saying that Bakugou is the equivalent to Zuko? No, lmao. Definitely not. They are different characters with different progressions and different pressures. What I am saying is that good redemption arcs shouldn’t be handed out like candy to babies; it is the quality, rather than the quantity, that makes a redemption arc good. In terms of the commentary of the narrative, who needs a redemption arc, who is deserving, and who does it make sense to give one to?

In this case, Bakugou checks those boxes. It was always in the cards for him to change, and he has. In fact, he’s still changing.

Give it to Me Straight. It’s Homophobic.

There does seem to be an urge to obsessively gender either Bakugou or Deku, in making Deku the ultra-feminine, stereotypically hyper-sexualized “woman” of the relationship, with Bakugou becoming similarly sexualized but depicted as the hyper-masculine bodice ripper. On some level, that feels vaguely homophobic if not straight up misogynistic, in that in a gay relationship there’s an urge to compel them to conform under heteronormative stereotypes in order to be interpreted as real or functional. On one hand, I will say that in a lot of cases it feels like more of an expression of a kink, or fetishization and subsequent expression of internalized misogyny, at least, rather than a genuine exploration of the complexity and power imbalances of gender dynamics, expression, and boundaries.

That being said, I don’t think that that problematic aspect of shipping is unique to Bakudeku, or even to the fandom in general. We’ve all read fan work or see fanart of most gay ships in a similiar manner, and I think it’s a broader issue to be addressed than blaming it on a singular ship and calling it a day.

One interpretation of Bakugou’s character is his repression and the way his character functions under toxic masculinity, in a society’s egregious disregard for mental and emotional health (much like in the real world), the horrifying ways in which rage is rationalized or excused due to the concept of masculinity, and the way that characteristics that are associated with femininity — intellect, empathy, anxiety, kindness, hesitation, softness — are seen as stereotypically “weak”, and in men, traditionally emasculating. In terms of the way that the fictional universe is largely about societal priority and power dynamics between individuals and the way that extends to institutions, it’s not a total stretch to guess that gender as a construct is a relevant topic to expand on or at least keep in mind for comparison.

I think that the way in which characters are gendered and the extent to which that is a result of invasive heteronormativity and fetishization is a really important conversation to have, but using it as a case-by-case evolution of a ship used to condemn people isn’t conductive, and at that point, it’s treated as less of a real concern but an issue narrowly weaponised.

Love in Perspective, from the East v. West

Another thing I think could be elaborated on and written about in great detail is the way that the Eastern part of the fandom and the Western part of the fandom have such different perspectives on Bakudeku in particular. I am not going to go in depth with this, and there are many other people who could go into specifics, but just as an overview:

The manga and the anime are created for and targeted at a certain audience; our take on it will differ based on cultural norms, decisions in translation, understanding of the genre, and our own region-specific socialization. This includes the way in which we interpret certain relationships, the way they resonate with us, and what we do and do not find to be acceptable. Of course, this is not a case-by-case basis, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who hold differing beliefs within one area, but speaking generally, there is a reason that Bakudeku is not regarded as nearly as problematic in the East.

Had this been written by a Western creator, marketed primarily to and within the West (for reference, while I am Chinese, but I have lived in the USA for most of my life, so my own perspective is undoubtedly westernized), I would’ve immediately jumped to make comparisons between the Hero System and the American police system, in that a corrupt, or bastardized system is made no less corrupt for the people who do legitimately want to do good and help people, when that system disproportionately values and targets others while relying on propaganda that society must be reliant on that system in order to create safe communities when in reality it perpetuates just as many issues as it appears to solve, not to mention the way it attracts and rewards violent and power-hungry people who are enabled to abuse their power. I think comparisons can still be made, but in terms of analysis, it should be kept in mind that the police system in other parts of the world do not have the same history, place, and context as it does in America, and the police system in Japan, for example, probably wasn’t the basis for the Hero System.

As much as I do believe in the Death of the Author in most cases, the intent of the author does matter when it comes to content like this, if merely on the basis that it provides context that we may be missing as foreign viewers.

As far as the intent of the author goes, Bakugou is on a route of redemption.

He deserves it. It is unavoidable. That, of course, may depend on where you’re reading this.

Stuck in the Sludge, the Past, and Season One

If there’s one thing, to me, that epitomizes middle school Bakugou, it’s him being trapped in a sludge monster, rescued by his Quirkless childhood friend, and unable to believe his eyes. He clings to the ideology he always has, that Quirkless means weak, that there’s no way that Deku could have grown to be strong, or had the capacity to be strong all along. Bakugou is wrong about this, and continuously proven wrong. It is only when he accepts that he is wrong, and that Deku is someone to follow, that he starts his real path to heroics.

If Bakudeku’s relationship does not appeal to someone for whatever reason, there’s nothing wrong with that. They can write all they want about why they don’t ship it, or why it bothers them, or why they think it’s problematic. If it is legitimately triggering to you, then by all means, avoid it, point it out, etc. but do not undermine the reality of abuse simply to point fingers, just because you don’t like a ship. People who intentionally use the anti tag knowing it’ll show up in the main tag, go after people who are literally minding their own business, and accuse people of supporting abuse are the ones looking for a fight, and they’re annoying as hell because they don’t bring anything to the table. No evidence, no analysis, just repeated projection.

To clarify, I’m referring to a specific kind of shipper, not someone who just doesn’t like a ship, but who is so aggressive about it for absolutely no reason. There are plenty of very lovely people in this fandom, who mind their own business, multipship, or just don’t care.

Calling shippers dumb or braindead or toxic (to clarify, this isn’t targeting any one person I’ve seen, but a collective) based on projections and generalizations that come entirely from your own impression of the ship rather than observation is...really biased to me, and comes across as uneducated and trigger happy, rather than constructive or helpful in any way.

I’m not saying someone has to ship anything, or like it, in order to be a ‘good’ participant. But inserting derogatory material into a main tag, and dropping buzzwords with the same tired backing behind it without seeming to understand the implications of those words or acknowledging the development, pacing, and intentional change to the characters within the plot is just...I don’t know, it comes across as redundant, to me at least, and very childish. Aggressive. Toxic. Problematic. Maybe the real toxic shippers were the ones who bitched and moaned along the way. They’re like little kids, stuck in the past, unable to visualize or recognize change, and I think that’s a real shame because it’s preventing them from appreciating the story or its characters as it is, in canon.

But that’s okay, really. To each their own. Interpretations will vary, preferences differ, perspectives are not uniform. There is no one truth. There are five seasons of the show, a feature film, and like, thirty volumes as of this year.

All I’m saying is that if you want to stay stuck in the first season of each character, then that’s what you’re going to get. That’s up to you.

This may be edited or revised.

#bakudeku #meta #my hero academia #boko no hero academia #bnha #mha #bakugou katsuki #izuku midoriya #ok these are just my general thoughts in response to the people who have hang ups about this ship #like y’all need to pls chill tf out ok #this is also not comprehensive and could definitely be elaborated on #but it’s just general thoughts #it’s just addressing general opposition I’ve seen #I never thought I’d ever write this much about this ship wtf

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c0rpseductor · 3 years

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while i was lying in bed waiting for my migraine to go away i started thinking about jk r*wling (ugh i know) and her stupid essay where she discussed her Fear Of Being Transed were she to know what trans people were when she was young

and it really just kind of struck me how mistaken her ilk seem to be when it comes to, like, obviously everything in general, but particularly the actual experiences and thought processes of trans men. because this narrative is so contrary to absolutely every life experience i’ve had & share with other trans guys it’s frankly laughable

the pushback i got for even CONSIDERING being trans as a teenager was enough to put me back in the closet, both in terms of others’ overt denial that i could be anything but cis and their just constantly treating me as a girl because i was in the closet. nobody on god’s green EARTH wanted me to be male, and every effort i made to connect with my actual gender or even be a little more masculine was a legitimate nightmare. the idea that trans men are somehow encouraged to transition Because Misogyny is so completely absurd that in any other universe i would think it was satire.

not only that, but like, on top of that the idea that it’s all some ploy to Escape the social difficulties of womanhood...like, first of all, in my current experience being a trans man is 9000% more difficult than being a cis woman. i don’t pass in my day to day life, so i still get treated with weird misogyny AND get the added enjoyment of having to weigh whether it’s safe or even worth the effort to correct anyone, AND the few people i’m out to still insist on misgendering me at every available opportunity anyway, which is miserable. it would be much easier for me to be cis, i haven’t unlocked some secret level of Male Privilege, and even after medical transition i probably won’t fare much better given i’m 5 foot nothing. all that is fine, obviously; even if it’s kind of a bummer i’ve made my peace with it, it’s just like....if i actually perceived myself as female, why would i voluntarily choose this as if it’s a get out of jail free card, unless i was an idiot? being trans is awesome and i’m proud of it, but it’s also fucking hard.

if anything, the common perception that trans men decide to be trans to avoid misogyny (as if that’s like....a thing) was part of the reason i so vehemently denied being trans for so long, and then vehemently denied being male when i couldn’t deny my not being cis any longer. i was TERRIFIED of the idea of being some kind of political and social traitor to women, enough that i actively denied my own identity and made myself miserable for years in order to, like, be more feminister. it was stupid, obviously; i’m a dude and always have been, even before i was consciously aware of it, and you can’t be a traitor to a group you were never part of. trans men have a particularly unique relationship to misogyny compared to cis men anyway, and conflating those relationships is a pretty shallow conception of manhood and transness. it’s not like my intimate knowledge of exactly how people treat and see women suddenly vanished the moment i was able to admit to myself i was a man. that would be fucking stupid.

and like, OBVIOUSLY the entire movement of shallow transphobic neoliberal “feminists” who think gender essentialism is radical is predicated on an absolute divorce from material reality and basic logic; you would have to be a complete idiot to think most of the black-and-white grade school shit they do about men and women. it just astounds me every goddamn time i think about it how utterly ridiculous and willfully ignorant this mindset is, ESPECIALLY the idea that anyone would decide to be a trans man because it’s “easier” or because of, like, the most shallow and baffling understanding of internalized misogyny ive ever heard

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jewish-privilege · 4 years

Link

...We reached out to black Jews (...) to understand their feelings at this wrenching moment and what their message is for the broader Jewish community. Here’s what they told us.

...April Baskin is a diversity consultant and racial justice director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable.

Personally in terms of my energy right now, I’m just exhausted. Just seeing all the suffering particularly in light of the people going out into the streets without a plan or adequate protections in place (friends, march marshalls, legal aid contact info, etc.), the poignancy of people whose politics otherwise have them mostly sheltering in place during the worst pandemic we’ve seen in over a hundred years, that they are compelled to take action — at their and our own peril. But it seems their thought is, “How can we not stand up?” As a Jewish social justice leader, I have a visceral, fundamental concern for people’s well-being in this moment — that people are very triggered and that this is all in the context of pre-existing heightened anxiety and stress because of the pandemic. And for black folks, whether it’s conscious or not, the sense of terror we feel for when is the shoe going to drop for someone we know, someone in our town, for us?

I am experiencing more white Jews sending me private messages. A lot of them are saying “What can we do?” and in time I hope we can advance our collective knowledge and education enough so it can become more of “I’ve been proactively learning from people of color and here is what I am doing,” or “These are the things I’m considering. I’m mostly leaning towards this one, does that sound like it’s in alignment with your vision?”

That said, it’s a step forward and it’s good, but it’s asking more of us as Jews of color to not only figure out how to maintain our jobs and do additional leadership and activism in this moment, but then also being asked to support and manage white Jews’ work during a time in which many of us are traumatized and heartbroken. But this is progress, and I would rather people reach out, however they best know how, than apathy and not doing anything or paralysis from fear.

...Yitz Jordan is the founder of

TribeHerald

, a publication for Jews of color, and a hip hop artist also known as Y-Love.

What am I feeling? Anxiety. That’s what I’m feeling. I had an anxiety attack on Friday. I live in the ‘hood, I live in Bushwick, so I’m not really geographically in the Jewish community, but I know that somebody on Friday for instance was shot not too far from me and I was terrified as to what the response to that was going to be, were cops going to respond and was rioting going to happen in my neighborhood?

And in the Jewish community, this is the kind of fight that I’m having: “This didn’t happen after the Holocaust, why are black people acting like this?” It’s that role of explaining over and over again to people who quite often don’t want to listen.

I feel like there’s the same split that’s going through America in ideological lines, is going through the Jewish community … whatever percent of Orthodox Jews that support Trump, you see it more from these people. When we say the Jewish community in general that also consists of people like JFREJ [Jews for Racial and Economic Justice] and Jewish Voice for Peace and these other organizations, but in the Orthodox world, the pro-Trump wing is where I’m hearing these types of conversations. And I’m seeing this, ranging from lack of knowledge to callousness regarding people of color. There are some people who genuinely don’t know, and to whom a lot of these issues are very new. Especially Hasidish people, for instance, this just isn’t part of the Shabbos-table conversation — police brutality, inequality, systemic racism. But you have some people who just show callousness.

Gulienne Rishon is a diversity expert and chief revenue officer for TribeHerald Media.

I am thankful for true allies, who understand that this is not the time to center their own experiences. I am thankful for true allies, who understand that the experiences they and their ancestors have had are to be used in this moment as empathy, and that no one is denying them their experiences in asking them to listen and learn.

But mostly, if one more white-presenting Jew tries to tell me today that they don’t have white privilege (not that they aren’t White, but that they don’t have white privilege) because they’re Jewish/the Holocaust/Jews got kicked out of schools, I might lose my mind. I should not have to deal with people telling me that my story (the Black part) doesn’t exist because my story (the Ashkenazi experience) exists. But I do. And I am confident that part of why G-d put me in the skin of a biracial Jewish woman descended from a kindertransport survivor, a WWII veteran who was kicked out of his Hamburg Gymnasium for being Jewish, and two Southern Black Virginians, is to help us as a people face our sinat chinam and take responsibility for being the light unto the nations by helping, not closing our ranks and denying the pain others feel because of the freshness of ours.

Facilitating difficult conversations about race is literally my profession. Yet, some days, I’m just a person behind a keyboard on Facebook who came out of our day of rest hearing that the world erupted in flames, and I look at the beautiful brown skin of my daughter and her parents, and I’m angry and afraid. I’ve worked so hard to have these conversations with grace when you’re caught up in your feelings about the complexity. On a day when it’s not about the complexity, but processing and mourning actual death, can you please give the same grace to mine?

...Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell is

a musician

who blends traditional Yiddish and African-American music.

Let’s get real here, American Jews: You are living in an Old Country, whether you choose to recognize it or not. The state-sanctioned violence visited upon Black communities happens in ghettos you can easily pronounce, in towns you visit without the aid of a tour guide and cities you reside in without a granted law of return.

So, who are you in this narrative, this country from which there is no real option of flight, this century which is your own, your heartless ruler, hands slick with the blood of children and refugees, the cavalries, maintaining “order” on your behalf over a people whose mere existence for centuries has been deemed disorderly?

Solidarity with Black people doesn’t require a radical act of historical imagination. You are here. We are here. You know what to do. Do it. Now.

Tema Smith is a writer and the director of professional development at 18Doors, an organization for interfaith families.

I’m deeply upset about George Floyd and also that he is not the first and not the last, and that it’s taken a murder so egregious to really get people out into the streets in this way, and get a lot of people to wake up to what happens unfortunately too frequently.

I also have deep gratitude for the moment that we’re in, for so many people who hadn’t previously spoken out are speaking out.

As far as the Jewish community, the number of people who either have spoken out publicly or who have reached out privately as people who just care and want to make sure that me and other Jews of color are feeling OK right now — and I think most of my friends who are Jews of color are experiencing similar things from their friends — is huge. Frankly, I’ve gotten messages from people who I’ve never corresponded with beyond public tweets, just reaching out saying ‘Are you OK?’ and a recognition that is in many ways at a new level.

This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. This is the first time I’ve received messages from so many people and that makes me hopeful for that grassroots community level being there to support each other, and that is huge. And the fact that there is a growing chorus of voices in the Jewish community speaking up, that’s huge, and that people are showing up at protests, I can’t say enough of how meaningful it is to see that...

#black lives matter #Black Jews #African American Jews #anti black racism

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moonwaif · 3 years

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I might delete this later but maybe it'll do some good. So my grandma was a verbally and physically abusive person, particularly to my mom when she was growing up. At the same time, she was really close to my mom. The good was great, the bad was terrible. Eventually she and my grandpa divorced. My grandpa, unable to be alone, brought home a woman who he had only known for two weeks and married her. She was even more abusive than my grandma was.

My mom left home at seventeen and would spend the next few decades living with friends and partners, in and out of therapy as she learned to love herself and end the cycle of abuse.

If I had been my mom, I probably would have cut these people out of my life for good without looking back. But you know what? My mom didn't want that. She still loved them. She still wanted to try. And it doesn't mean she suddenly condoned child abuse, or thought that what happened to her was justified. It was just what she wanted, period. Later on as an adult, she was able to exercise the agency she did not have as a child, and she used that agency to see what kind of relationship could be built, on her own terms.

These would actually be the last few years of my grandma's life, and they were the best years that she and my mom shared. My grandma had endured every type of abuse imaginable at the hands of her own family as well as the foster care system. She dropped out of school at 14 to begin working in a factory, then got married. What she gave her own kids was fucked up, but it was the best her broken heart and mind could offer, and at the very least it was better than her own life had been. In those last few years, she expressed regret. My mom said she really changed. She would die a month before I was born, after being denied healthcare because she was uninsured.

My mom would also help care for her dad and step-mom in their final years, because that's what she wanted to do. I can't say I would have done the same. Nevertheless I supported her and respected her decision.

My point is, I don't think there is one single right way to process your abuse. I don't think you have to forgive your abusers or reconcile with them. Sometimes it's not even safe to do so, or it may be complicated by other issues (for instance, if you know that individual is still actively abusing others). But it's up to you. Survivors of abuse shouldn't be shamed for exercising their agency to reconcile, just like they shouldn't be shamed for cutting abusers out of their life or pressing charges if possible. Their experiences are varied and do not necessarily fit a single narrative.

My mom would go on to work with children as a school counselor, inspired by her own experiences to support children and try to make the world a safer place for them.

EDIT: No fandom-related tags or mentions on this post, please.

#chatter #abuse mention #child abuse mention #dont @ me #keep fandom off this post

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ineffable-endearments · 3 years

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Okay. Now I'm going to submit some theories about how I think Crowley and Aziraphale specifically are going to go in the future of Good Omens.

Again, this post is not really...specific theorizing about plot events. It's big-picture stuff.

With that said, this post will get a bit heavy at times, in the sense that it will contain opinions that not everyone will like. It drifted into rambling about queerbaiting and all that stuff. I'm not going to spam anyone's dashboard with drama over it, but it's very possible someone else might try. It's also not really a negative post, depending on what you want to hear, I suppose. But if you're only in the mood to read fluff today, you'll probably want to pass it up.

Oh! Also it's very long, and sexuality is discussed in a vague way that doesn't involve any story elements or body parts.

For starters, I don't think Good Omens 2 - or even 3, if that comes about - is going to have anything explicitly sexual or romantic between the two of them, where "explicit" is things like the characters giving outright definitions of their relationship or outright discussing exactly what goes on between them, either on or off-screen. I also don't think there's going to be kissing or "hooking up" (come on...that person on Twitter shouldn't have even asked). Those actions are too blatant for what Neil has already said about the series. While they technically leave some room for interpretation, they probably don't leave enough.

I DO think it's quite possible other characters will continue to define the relationship FOR them and Crowley and Aziraphale will continue to not deny it.

As far as the queerbaiting debate, "is Good Omens queerbaiting"...it's gonna depend how you define it. I always learned that queerbaiting was basically where the creators intentionally make it look like a character is gay or otherwise queer but then swap that character development out for a cis identity and hetero relationship at the end. The point is that the "bait" leads to queer audiences being actively hurt. That's the behavior that seems awful to me, and I don't see Neil and company doing that.

However, I think it's far and away the most likely option that it will be left up to interpretation whether Crowley and Aziraphale are, you know, a buddy duo or a romantic couple or some sort of ineffable queerness all their own off-screen. So if your definition of queerbaiting is "the characters seem gay to us, but homophobes can tell themselves they're not," then yes, I think that debate will follow us to our graves if we let it.

I am a cisgender, possibly straight (?? demi/bi? I might never find out) woman. There is absolutely no way I could ever tell anybody, ESPECIALLY not gay guys and nonbinary people - the people Crowley and Aziraphale tend to resemble the most - how to feel about their treatment in the story. All I can offer is that I'm one flawed individual and there are things I have the emotional capacity to handle and things I don't. Crowley and Aziraphale as both a canon construct and a fandom pairing mean an absurd amount to me, and I can't hang around in spaces where people are constantly talking about how my own interpretations of them are not enough, or how the story is written with ill intentions. I don't want to stop anybody from venting about it, but I am going to be removing myself from those situations.

I like to imagine 1990 NeilandTerry, or TerryandNeil, as a sort of two-headed God who came up with Crowley and Aziraphale, set them loose on Creation, and now are watching them get up to way more ridiculous stuff in the brains of their fans than they'd ever imagined in the first place. I like to imagine them watching, amused and bemused, as their creations fall in love in thousands of universes, and saying, "Well, we didn't specifically Plan for this, but we did promise free will."

This is psychoanalytical toward a public figure and is therefore a bit dangerous, so please take it with an entire mountain of salt, but I sometimes think perhaps Neil sees some of his and Terry's friendship in Crowley and Aziraphale, and suspect that he wants to reserve the possibility that they could be platonic because he and Terry were platonic, while at the same time leaving room for the fans to have their own interpretations, too. Because if there's one thing that comes up really frequently with Neil, it's his belief in imagination and how much stories matter to people. He can have his little corner of the universe where A and C reflect himself and Terry, and we can have...literally anything we want, as long as we're willing to extrapolate just a little bit from canon. It's not even that much extrapolation! It's just "Yes, they love each other, so what exactly does love mean to you?" and if love means kissing, well then, if we can think it, we can have it.

Given that Neil has written LGBT+ characters before, I think he has non-bigoted reasons for wanting Aziraphale and Crowley to remain undefined, and given even the small chance that those reasons may involve the grieving process for a dead friend, I believe it is unkind to argue with him about it or hold his reputation hostage over it.

With that said, do I want canon kissing/hooking up/all that stuff we put in fics? Listen, I can't deny that I do! Personally, I'd be over the moon. I'd probably be so happy I'd have to go to the hospital to get sorted out. Even the thought of it makes me giddy and light-headed, because that physicality is a part of my own experience of love.

However, there are a lot of people who would feel left behind if that happened. Ace and aro people in the fandom whose love for their friends and partners is just as strong as mine, but who are sex-repulsed or just don't want to see kissing on-screen. The loss of Crowley and Aziraphale as a pairing who are extremely easy to interpret as queerplatonic would be hurtful to them, and I do not want to see them hurt like that. I don't think Neil does, either.

So, once again, the "best for everyone" option becomes a really strong canon relationship based in both narrative function and profound affection, which has genuinely thoughtful queer undertones and leaves open the logical possibility for romantic or sexual encounters but does not insist that they must happen. People, especially fans who are super invested, tend to have an easier time imagining scenarios that take place off-screen (e.g. kissing, sex) than they have erasing scenarios that they've already seen in canon (e.g., if someone wished they could continue viewing it as an ace relationship but they were shown "hooking up"). Also, while relationships are super emotional and extremely subjective, I'd argue that in a long-term adult partnership, the non-sexual connection is more important than the sexual one. As a fan, I'd prefer to extrapolate "they love each other so maybe they'd have sex" rather than "they're sexually attracted to each other so maybe they'll intertwine their whole existences together."

It probably isn't necessary to add, but I will anyway: I'm aware that Good Omens is sort of sacrificing social leverage - the ability to whack homophobes over the head with canon if they try to deny the show's queerness - and is thus not really contributing to making specifically gay relationships more widely seen and accepted. However, I don't think all stories have to invest heavily in every social issue they touch on for them to still be meaningful. I also do think Good Omens is an excellent example of a relationship that is extremely profound without being heteronormative.

I don't think the next season is going to be a rom-com. It will likely not even be a "love story," where the definition of "love story" is "a story that follows the development of a relationship and employs certain plot beats to make its point." Remember that conflicts and breakups are key to love stories, so if it IS a love story, then we're going to have to watch the relationship get challenged in ways some of us might have thought were already resolved in season 1! And while that could be thrilling and ultimately very good, it would also be likely to undercut some of the careful headcanoning and analysis we've already done. Any sequel is going to do that to some degree, but a second love story would probably do it a lot, with interpretations that people are even more protective of.

I'm sort of thinking the next season is likely to be a fantasy-heavy mystery, only because those are the two concepts Neil's introduction led with - an angel with amnesia who presents Crowley and Aziraphale with a mystery. Crowley and Aziraphale's connection to each other can still absolutely be a major theme! It can still be the thread stitching the plot together! It just probably, in my opinion, won't escalate and escalate and escalate like it did in season 1. And it will probably be woven in there among a lot of other plot threads that are, in many moments, louder. Still, I'd love to be left with the impression of these two existences, the light and the dark, subtly becoming more intimate, subtly growing more comfortable in this shared place they've chosen in the universe, gradually starting to behave like they know they aren't alone in the world anymore, all while other things happen to and around them.

Nonsexual physical intimacy - a really great hug, or leaning together on the sofa, or a forehead touch, or something like those, something that could happen in a lot of different kinds of relationships but is undoubtedly based in deep trust and affection and a desire to be close...that's the dream, for me. Oh, how lovely it would be.

Of course, I could be just absolutely, embarrassingly wrong about all this. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

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thefolliesofmen · 3 years

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History in the Making - Panel Discussion

Hi folks! Today I was honored to be a part of Concordia’s History in the Making Conference and speak on the making of meaning through Death Tourism. As not everyone was able to attend, or just prefer learning in a different format that isn’t Zoom, I figured I could at least share my slides and speakers notes here for posterity.

As these are speaking notes, please excuse if I do not catch every grammar or spelling mistake, but I hope you enjoy them nonetheless.

Today I am going to be going through how meaning is made at Death Tourism sites, and how that meaning changes over time. To do this, I am first going to explore some brief definitions of death tourism, the history of it, and how it is viewed by the general public. So please buckle up and join me as we go on a speed run through three prominent dark tourism sites – particularly what they are, how they qualify, and how meaning is made around them through the perspective of thanatourism. The site we will be using are Pompeii, Salem, and Chernobyl.

In my introduction alone, I used a mired of terms interchangeably. Death Tourism, Dark Tourism, Thanatourism, and just for funsies I am going to throw another one in there, Disaster Tourism. Some scholars will separate all these terms to represent specific aspects of the field, the site in particular, and the intentions behind the visitors themselves. Foley and Lennon are often credited with coining the term “Dark Tourism” and have defined it as a “product of the circumstances of the late modern world.” Intent is something that will come up often during my talk, as it is hard to concretely define a field like tourism that has so much to do with the intentions of the people taking part in it as well as the people presenting the history. Today, I will be using these terms fairly interchangeably. A definition to start us off: Dark Tourism taps into the macabre, secret, and shunned interests of humans; the world we create; and the one we leave behind.

The Macabre The Secret The Shunned Creation and Destruction Are real and valid reasons for someone to visit a site I said before that the intention of the visitor is a hot topic when trying to figure out how to define this field. Most of us have probably been to Death Tourism sites and have never really thought about, because it fit into a different category in our mind. The image here is a graveyard, which makes sense on the surface to count as death tourism especially if you are visiting it for a reason outside of knowing someone who is buried there – this cemetery in particular is Old Burial Hill Cemetery in Salem Massachusetts and would be a hotspot for that, as it was a filming location for Hocus Pocus, Old Burial Hill Cemetery in Salem Massachusetts. Dark Tourism deals largely with the commercialization of sites associated with large amounts of human suffering and death. Commercialization can happen in a variety of ways, whether it be through charging admission to a specific site, merchandise and materials relating to the event, or economic benefits that are by-products of the sites being visited, such as surrounding towns gaining revenue from hotel rentals, meals, etc.

Since the enlightenment, European and North American cultures have taken a strict stance on separating the dead from the living. Death occurs in buildings, cities, countries removed from us and we only see the sanitized version – the more removed we are from something with our engagement with death the better it is. That isn’t a hard and fast rule however, because the distance from the death and disaster in question can be spatial or temporal in nature, as long as there is some kind of way in which you can convince yourself that all this death and destruction happened to an Other. Caitlyn Doughty, a mortician who found notoriety through her YouTube Channel Ask a Mortician has done some research on what she refers to as the “witch to kitsch factor”, that being how much time has to pass before it is socially acceptable to take tragedy and make it into a thing of entertainment? My argument here however is that, the meaning that a dark tourism site creates and is created unto it has both to do with the temporal separation between the entertainment and the tragedy, but also the spatial and cognitive space between the two. I know I am probably preaching to the choir when I say that history permeates pop culture, and the line between tragedy and entertainment can be seen here. Pompeii occurred close to 2,000 years ago and is now a 13 years old Doctor Who Episode wherein even an Alien that alters many historic events, even this could not be stopped. Salem Witch Trials took place over 300 years ago, and the Halloween edge of kitschy witches have taken over the narrative of Salem, as the town has gained even more infamy in recent years due to the popularity that Disney has continued to experienced in the 26 years since its release. Chernobyl occurred 35 years ago. It is most recently a 2019 somber but still drama packed mini-series on HBO exploring the disaster and aftermath. These are not the first nor are they the last instances of Pompeii, Salem, and Chernobyl influencing popular culture.

The temporal and spatial separation that I just spoke of is what Foucault would use in the argument that dark tourism sites are examples of Heterotopias. That, and the Othering.

These dark tourism sites are marginal spaces, that are infused with the juxtaposition of sameness and contradictions. Foucault breaks down what a Heterotopia is through examining its:

Precise and determined function within a society, but can still have multiple functions

The power to Juxtapose the incompatible

A break with traditional time

Presupposition of opening and closing the isolation and penetration

Illusions of real spaces that create and Other

Each of these criteria hit on the combined need for things relating to death and destruction to be both intimate to our experience of the world, but also separate from us in a way in which we can walk away from them afterwards and cease to think about it. Dark Tourism is assumed to be an escapist pastime in which we as humans can displace our fears of death, decay, destruction, and general apocalyptic fears onto this physical place – particularly because of its seemingly socially acceptable mode in which we can grapple with these kinds of topics. I said before that it was after the Enlightenment that death became removed from our day to day life. But before that? It was common and fashionable to interact with death on ones down time – morgue tours in Paris were all the rage, with some people even asking to be locked in the display room with the unknown corpses to scare their friends and other visitors.

Death has been removed from us, and so these romanticized ideas of escapism and morbid contemplations are the simplistic and incomplete theories as to why people are drawn to Thanatourism.

Now don’t get me wrong, while I say that these theories are simplistic and incomplete – I am not denying that they have some merit and nuggets of truth and wisdom to them. We come back to intent. Why people engage in Disaster Tourism does not interest me so much as what their interaction with the field tells us about our own society. We make meaning out of everything, that is who we are as academics but also who we are as a general species. But how do we make meaning out of sites and events through the lens of dark tourism? I believe that the reasons we are so fascinated with these sites, outside of just general morbid curiosity (pun intended) – for starters, our fascination with these places, I posture, has to do with our false yet engrained belief that we are no longer experiencing such death and suffering anymore. This all happened in another time, in another place, to another group of people. Our fascination shows our ignorance. We think, Pompeii happened so long ago, it is more of a story than anything. We think, Salem will never happen again, we are past the time of believing that witches walk among us. We think, Chernobyl was the fault of the Soviets, we are a democracy. We don’t think – that this could happen again and is still happening.

I have mentioned Pompeii, Salem, and Chernobyl quite a bit now – lets get into how they are case studies for us making meaning out of dark tourism sites. First up: Pompeii The eruption of Mount Vesuvius and subsequent destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum was first recorded in the letters of Pliny the Younger to Tacitus. On October 24th 79 AD,pumice stones and ash started pouring down onto the city, killing part of the population before those who were unable to escape were buried by the hot volcanic ash and burned alive by pyroclastic flow. By the end of the day, the city was buried in six to seven meters of debris, and it remained as such until its re-discovery in the seventeenth century. During his tenure as the lead archaeologists working to recover Pompeii from 1863-1875, Giuseppe Fiorelli is credited with not only the Fiorelli process of pouring plaster of Paris into cavities in the ash to discover what created those cavities – but he was also a driving force behind excavations being done on the city from the top down, rather than the streets first to further pillage the homes that were uncovered.

Pompeii is a special case when it comes to tourism of Roman ruins. To Victorian and Edwardian tourists – Pompeii was a disappointment to finally see. Mary Beard discusses how to these visitors, the depictions of Pompeii in art and literature, outshone the real ruins. From the beginning of tourists coming to the site though, it was always known that what they were coming to see and what would shock them the most, were the casts of the bodies that had been excavated were front and center as soon as you entered the site along the aptly named Street of Tombs. For most of its history, Pompeii has existed on this marginal plane, being both a city of the living and of the dead. Rome as a whole has always been plagued by the stereotypes and ideals placed upon it by people outside of Italy’s borders – namely it being an eternal city that should be temporally static, anchored in its own heritage – and Pompeii has been subject to the same expectations in many respects. has been constructed many times since its unearthing. First, through its own use as a city, and then during the Romantic period as a theme park for tourists, and even in the modern era as a place of education and where “the processes of historical discovery are laid bare”. The overall shift in identity for Pompeii was its change from a city of the living, where people went about their daily lives, to a city of the dead populated by corpses and ruins, now being re-populated annually by millions of tourists. Because Pompeii is a ruin, empty of life, and so far removed from the present reality in terms of time, it is very easy to project meaning onto – both meaning for itself and meaning for the visitors.

One of the darkest moments in American history was the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The “largest and most lethal witch hunt in American history” began in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts) when several young girls, including Elizabeth Parris, who was the daughter of the town minister Samuel Parris, began to experience “fits” that had no discernable cause other than what the town doctor declared to be bewitchment. While the accusers themselves and many of the “witches” they targeted lived in Salem Village, the Town of Salem was where the hangings took place, with the first ones occurring in the fall of 1692 when Sarah Good, Elizabeth Hose, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Wildes were executed. From the Fall of 1692 to the summer of 1693, there were 20 executions, 19 of which were hangings and one pressing.

Salem is a place of societal ruin. The entire community turned on itself, before coming to the confusing conclusion in 1702 of the magistrates declaring the trials that were held unlawful, and decreeing that the good names of the victims be restored. I mentioned that Salem Village is now know as Danvers Massachusetts and while Salem and Salem Village, share the terrible history, Salem Village works hard to separate itself from the narrative, as seen by it renaming itself to Danvers in 1752. It desperately wants to be removed from the story of the witch trials, when arguably it has more geographic claim to the narrative than Salem itself. Danvers has gone about making visiting any sites within its border nearly impossible. Homes and buildings related to the trials that remain in situ have continued housing families and businesses, memorials have little to no parking available, and heavy traffic on the roads makes it difficult to visit them as a pedestrian, meaning only a specialized tourist who was bound and determined to see the locations would make the Herculean effort to find them. For Salem, the buildings that it claims connections to the trials have either been moved or demolished in the time since the witch trials, and key places like the exact location of the gallows have ended up being lost to memory. The markers that denote the locations also denote their own inaccuracy and obscure the events that took place during the trials – thus disappointing tourists when they learn of the deception. Salem capitalizes on a false authenticity of place It is not through education that Salem profits off of its dark history, but through the kitsch-based fascination of pirates and witches existing in one of the oldest colonial ports. The Salem Police Department logo even contains a witch motif. With souvenirs, dungeon experiences, and large events such as a Witch’s Walk, Salem revises the tragedy in its history in a way that romanticizes and idealizes it, similar to the way that Disney movies present history. There was a monument erected to the victims of the witch trials in 2017. It stands apart from the rest of the city in aesthetic and in placement, silent and innocuous that it can be missed: it does not loudly advertise its existence like the rest of Salem. It works in the way that dark tourism sites overall do, in the fashion of “visitors deciding the meaning”. By being ambiguous in its specific design, it allows for the tourist to see what they think is fitting for a monument, whether that be the gallows, a jail, or a ruined building.

Chernobyl to this day still has the reputation for being the world’s worst nuclear accident. Through a surge of energy to Reactor #4, the unit caught fire on April 26th, 1986, leading to its rupture and explosion later that same day. As people fled and were evacuated from their homes, with instructions to leave everything behind as they were promised they would be able to return in a few days, Pripyat, the closet town to the reactor, was re-born as a ghost town. Across the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, an estimated 200,000 people have died due to radiation exposure, and an even greater number of people suffer from ongoing health conditions. As expected, the argument for the inclusion of Chernobyl in these case studies is that it represents a man-made ruin through the folly of trust in technology.

With Chernobyl, it is important to remember that it took place against the backdrop of the Cold War. The USSR and America both had agendas that they were trying to further in their coverage or lack there of, of the reactor blowing. Seeking any advantages they could claim in exposing or concealing the situation, inflating or deflating the numbers of people harmed. It wasn’t until 2011 when Ukraine finally allowed tours to take place through Pripyat, before this it was only illegal tours led by members of the surrounding communities or family members of those impacted by the exodus. The tourists have a wide range of reactions to the site – expressing indifference to the history, excitement about the danger that they perceive, and some individuals even schadenfreude, pleasure of witnessing the misfortunes of others. For dark tourism concerns, it’s authentic for being in situ, adding the aura of the place to the experiences and representing death in a more immediate way. Chernobyl is prime for the romanticization treatment of media due to being within the living memory and located in Eastern Europe, a place that is already seen and depicted as a foreign Other to many, adding to the forbidden allure of visiting. With the rise of social media, the number of tours to Chernobyl see spikes in the fall and winter, when the nature around the abandoned ruins is dying and decaying as well, lending itself to the desired aesthetic for people to show off that they visited. “Chernobyl is both real and imagined,” where one can go explore and tell others about later – but it is also staged. Knowing that people are drawn in by the heterotopic binaries of the real and the contrived, items within Chernobyl and Pripyat are posed to illicit the maximum emotional impact when photographed, the creations of juxtapositions within a juxtaposition itself.

Death Tourism deals with sites of ruin, that are explicit reminders of the circle of life and death being indiscriminate. Tragedy has happened here, and it will happen again. Someone was here before, and someone will be here after, until one day in which there will no longer be an after for humans to inhabit. The meanings of these sites and those who visit them is continually in flux, and relates largely to the society that is taking note at the time. But how we make meaning of these sites tells us about our current society, whether we like what we are hearing or not. It is romantic to think that we only travel to dark tourist sites because we are contemplating our own mortality, but it is ignorant to forget that history is a spiral – events will happen again if not in the same circumstances. Witches are replaced by minorities and religious groups that we don’t want to understand. Natural Disasters like Vesuvius are happening more and more as we continue to ignore climate change. Chernobyl will not stay the worst nuclear accident in mans history for very long, as every year we outpace ourselves in technological advancements. A hopeful part of me wants to think that we are participating in Dark Tourism because we want to learn from our mistakes, but the way history is presented to the visitors, both intentionally and unintentionally and interpreted, seems to always come back to schadenfreude. Death has been removed from us for so long that we seek it as a macabre pleasure, one that society doesn’t allow us to have – and that’s fine, but only when it is the death and suffering of someone else, somewhere else, sometime else. Our fascination stems from ignorance, but not from wanting to learn from our mistakes, but from a place of relief that it wasn’t us. ________________________________________________________________ I hope you enjoyed this! I know the writing isn’t as high quality as a paper traditionally would be, but if there seems to be interest I can do future posts breaking down each site further <3 Thanks!

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murasaki-murasame · 4 years

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Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep10

I’d like to make some sort of jokey light-hearted intro, but this episode was just straight up painful [in a good, intentional way]. Ryukishi clearly has a lot of personal experience dealing with child abuse and the ways that social services operate, and this is the part in Higurashi where that really starts coming through.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

My memory of how this whole arc plays out in the VN is super foggy, so it’s hard to tell exactly how this compares to it, but I think this is still continuing to be like 90% the same as Tatarigoroshi, at least, but there’s still lots of hints that things are gonna start diverging heavily soon.

I haven’t actually watched the 2006 anime yet, but going by the Wikipedia plot synopses for it, it seems like this episode pretty much covers up to the same point as the second episode of the Tatarigoroshi anime adaptation, with them both ending with Satoko’s panic attack in the classroom. So things seem to be going at a pretty similar pace, and we know that this arc will be five episodes long, like the old Tatarigoroshi anime arc was, but I think the next episode will be where things start to heavily change as a result of the foreshadowing we’ve gotten in these last two episodes.

Going by what Wikipedia says again, the third episode of the original Tatarigoroshi anime arc is where Keiichi comes up with and then executes his plan to murder Teppei, but I think it’s pretty likely at this point that that won’t happen this time. This episode started with him having a flashback dream to him killing Teppei in Tatarigoroshi, which I think is a pretty big hint that things will play out differently this time. I think in this episode he was also notably less aggressive and over the edge about the whole abuse situation compared to the VN, so I think the dream ended up subconsciously pushing him away from the idea of going into murderous rage about the whole situation.

I don’t think the situation is going to be resolved quite as diplomatically as in Minagoroshi, but at the moment it feels like we’re in a middle-ground between that, and having Keiichi jump straight to murdering Teppei. But even if Keiichi ends up not resorting to murder to try and solve the situation, that probably just means that at this rate someone else is gonna end up murdering Teppei instead.

I still think it’s very likely that we’ll see Shion at least try to murder Teppei, even if she doesn’t go through with it. I like the theory that she was pretending to be Mion for at least some parts of this episode, but apparently some of the stuff with Mion being kinda zoned out and forgetting stuff already happened in the VN, so I dunno how much I want to read into that. But one way or another she’s probably gonna find out about the abuse situation, and going by her being in more or less the same place as Minagoroshi, she’d probably immediately start plotting to murder Teppei.

From a meta perspective, I think that Shion should probably be the ‘culprit’ in this arc to make up for how Watadamashi ended up being more of a Mion arc than a Shion one, and it’d be pretty fitting if we get a ‘Keiichi decides not to murder Teppei, but Shion does it for him anyway’ development, considering how the last two arcs were specifically built around the idea of having tragedies occur even when Keiichi makes the right choices and learns from his past mistakes.

It’s possible that the two of them will end up teaming up to kill him, but that seems unlikely. And maybe Rena could end up getting involved, but at this point that doesn’t seem to be where they’re going with it.

There’s always the possibility that Satoko herself will murder Teppei this time, but I’m really not sure how I feel about that. But in general I have a lot of mixed feelings on what I think is going on with Satoko at this point, lol.

After how this episode went, I really don’t think she’s some kind of actively malicious, antagonistic force in the story like some people think. I’m also getting a lot more doubtful of the idea that she’s experiencing the time loop.

I’ve seen people speculating that she might have been faking her whole panic attack, but I really doubt it. It’s not impossible, but I think people are just being nitpicky about how they think the scene was directed, and they’re trying to fit it into their existing theory. I also just think that the idea of her going that far to fake a panic attack seems extremely implausible for a variety of reasons, and I also just kinda feel like it would be an insensitive portrayal of trauma and abuse in a way that Ryukishi just wouldn’t do. This episode does touch upon the idea of ‘faking abuse’, but there’s a drastic difference between Satoko calling social services and lying to them about being abused, and everything she did in this episode. So I think everything that’s going on with her at the moment is more or less the same as in the VN.

It’s still possible she’ll end up killing him, but I don’t really think she has any meta awareness of what’s going on, or anything like that.

I do think she’s going to be important to Gou’s overall meta-narrative, but rather than her being the villain, or being some kind of looper, I think it’s more likely at this point that a witch might be using her as a piece, for some reason or another. Or maybe there actually isn’t any important meta stuff going on with her, lol.

On the whole topic of Gou’s meta-narrative, I’m starting to think that maybe these arcs are like forgeries that someone’s writing about what happened in Hinamizawa. I think we’ll have more evidence one way or another by the time this arc ends, but there’s various things that make this feel like a subtly warped version of the original story written by someone who has incomplete knowledge about what was actually happening.

Mainly this just stems from me thinking about how they’re going to handle stuff like Takano, the virus, and the GHD later on. Especially if we assume that this will just be a self-contained 24 episodes with no sequel. Like I’ve said before, I think that Takano isn’t going to be the villain anymore, and they won’t really have as much time as the VN and the 2006 anime had to get into the background political conspiracy stuff, but there’s still elements to Gou that point toward the Yamainu still being around, the virus still existing, and Takano still having been adopted by her grandfather.

So I’m wondering if maybe this is basically being written by someone post-Matsuribayashi where the GHD never happened in the first place, and information about the virus, Takano’s villainy, and the background politics surrounding everything, got suppressed. So they’d only have a surface-level understanding of Hinamizawa’s history and the nature of the curse. Which could explain the idea of Takano seeming to be the same as the VN in the surface, but not actually being a villain this time, if the ‘author’ knows about her but just thinks she’s some random nurse. And they could have a vague awareness of there being shady people working with the Irie Clinic, without actually knowing what their whole deal is.

Which raises the question of who could be writing forgeries about Hinamizawa, if it’s anyone specific or important at all, and going by the OP I think it’s safe to say that it could easily be Featherine. It’s 100% her sort of thing to learn about Hinamizawa’s history and to write her own murder mysteries based on it. We also know that in Umineko she’s Bernkastel’s master, and that she likes to get people to read her stories for her, so it’s entirely possible that Gou’s whole plot is about Featherine getting Bern to read her forgeries about what happened in Hinamizawa, and we’re seeing the process of how Rika is going through these different fragments without knowing what the actual purpose of this all is.

If this is anywhere close to being accurate, then it’d make me even more salty if we don’t get any type of Umineko anime remake after this, lol. But either way we’ve literally seen Featherine in the OP, so it’s pretty likely she’ll be relevant to this somehow, and that in general Gou might exist to help bridge Higurashi and Umineko.

I think that sometime in the second half of Gou we’ll flash forward to Rika as a teenager post-Matsuribayashi, and we’ll see how she ended up coming into contact with Featherine, and probably ended up giving her enough info on what happened in Hinamizawa to write her own stories based on it.

Lambda might also be involved in all this, but I’m not really sure how that’d work.

Anyway, about how this arc will pan out over the next three episodes, I still think that at the end they’ll include Keiichi’s letter from Onikakushi, since there was a line from it in one of the PVs that hasn’t been used yet. So maybe Keiichi will end up going down an Onikakushi-style path of paranoia even if he doesn’t kill Teppei.

My main question about how this arc will end is if it’ll involve the GHD, since this is the first arc in the VN where it really comes into play, and whether or not it happens here would go a long way to confirm or deny some of the theories I have about what’s going on.

I’m also gonna be keeping an eye out for what goes on with Takano and Tomitake in this arc, since I still want to figure out what exactly is going on with Takano this time around.

I think this might also more or less be the final ‘question arc’ for Gou, so this would be the last time to cement any patterns and provide any big hints about what’s going on. Going by what little we know about Gou’s structure, I think the fourth and fifth arcs will be the two ‘answer arcs’. It’s possible that the fourth arc will be another question arc, and only the last arc will be an answer arc, but I kinda doubt it. There seems to be an intentional divide between the first 13 episodes of Gou and ep14 onward. I think the broadcast schedule will be adjusted for the second half, with there maybe being a one week break between ep13 and ep14, and I’ve heard rumors that for ep14 and onward the subtitle of the show will change, which would imply a shift into Gou’s equivalent to the answer arcs.

With that in mind, I’m still going with my theory that the next arc will basically be Gou’s version of Meakashi [but probably more specifically focused on the flashback content since it’ll only be four episodes long], and then the final arc will probably be a mix of going back and directly revisiting the first three arcs, and showing the whole teenage Rika time period in more detail to tie the whole story together.

By extension I think that they’re entirely gonna skip Himatsubushi, and instead of Rena getting her own answer arc, I think they’ll just dedicate part of arc five to revisiting Onidamashi from her side of things. For all I know that might take up most of that arc.

Anyway, I think we can all agree that the main take-away from this episode is that watching Satoko suffer never stops being super painful.

[Also, shout-out to Satoshi for finally getting a proper appearance in Gou, lol. I’m still hoping we get more of a satisfying resolution to his whole role in the story this time, but we’ll see how it goes]

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi gou #in this house we love and protect Satoko u_u

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skybird13 · 5 years

Text

My Thoughts on Clover’s Introductory Scenes in RWBY vol. 7

Ask and ye shall receive.

@fairgame-is-endgame actually requested that I go off on another long-ass ramble about Clover Ebi. (Okay, full honesty, I don’t know if he was actually expecting another massive post but... it’s happening anyway. Such is life 😉 ). Rambling about Clover and Qrow has been my favorite thing to do since they came on screen together so how could I possibly say no? As the title states, I’ll be focusing primarily on Clover’s introductory scenes back in volume 7 chapter 1, the narrative decisions made by CRWBY in framing and animating those scenes, and whatever other little tidbits I can coax out in the process.

But first, a quick shoutout to @lady-branwen who made an awesome post about these same scenes a few weeks ago I think? You can check it out here and you should definitely check it out. It’s fantastic and we touch on a lot of the same things.

[vol. 7 spoilers ahead]

Also, this thing is freakishly long so I’m going to put it under a cut. Happy reading y’all!

The Lead-In

I was going to start this post off with the first glimpses we get of Clover Ebi’s character, but I think the moments leading up to his arrival are pretty damn important to this analysis, so let’s take a look at how this whole thing is set up.

The events just before teams RWBY, JNOR, and Qrow are captured by the Ace Ops is one completely focused on the “kids” (Ruby in particular) and their reunion with Penny. Qrow is there but he’s mostly uninvolved in the whole thing, hanging in the background.

The scene shifts focus on to Qrow a little when we get to see his actual reaction to Penny’s return, but he’s still being portrayed in the context of something that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with him personally:

That’s not the best still shot of his somewhat goofy smile but he’s clearly very happy for Ruby and pleased overall with how things are going in Mantle so far. He says something to the effect of Penny’s arrival is a surprise “but not unwelcome. I was honestly expecting things to go a lot rougher.” That line right there is a pretty classic narrative device to signal to the audience that some type of shit is about to go down. The fact that it is said by Qrow himself is pretty significant. This interaction could have been played out by Weiss, Blake, and Yang, and it would have accomplished that same tip-off, foreshadowing effect. Instead, through his delivery of the line, the narrative focus is very subtly shifted to Qrow. This accomplishes a few things:

1) It reminds us of Qrow’s Semblance and his base-level expectations for just about anything in his life (as if any of us could forget, but this is relevant to a point I’m going to make later).

2) It transitions Qrow from background to foreground in a narrative sense. Again, Penny’s arrival had very little to do with him personally. He didn’t know her, never interacted with her, and probably would have only heard about her from Ruby (or potentially James, though considering the nature of their relationship in vol 3, I find that highly unlikely). Thus, this shift offers the audience another clue: whatever is about to happen, it will have a lot to do with Qrow specifically.

3) It establishes the grounds for the subversion of expectations. Point #1 ties into this. Because we are reminded of Qrow’s Semblance and his own personal expectations, we are fully set up to believe that whatever is going to happen next is going to be bad. We expect this because he expects this, and because we have been conditioned to expect the worst when it comes to Qrow. CRWBY absolutely leans against, plays with, and then subverts those expectations entirely, which I will get into when Clover actually shows up.

4) Closely related to #3 is the fact that it brings out a line of tension surrounding Qrow specifically. What that tension is going to be as of this moment, we have no idea, but we know that it’s going to be closely tied to (if not revolve entirely around) Qrow himself.

5) Because of the shift in focus, it smooths the way for what happens next.

Narrative Focus Shifts Fully to Qrow

This scene right here is where the narrative shift to Qrow reaches completion. The line delivery right before this, which is the last thing said before they are captured, functions as a sort of transitional phase. It does bring Qrow back into the forefront but doesn’t put him center stage. This scene, however, does do that.

Now, from a character’s perspective (i.e. the incoming Ace Ops), if you’re going to make an arrest on a large group of people, subduing the most dangerous member of the group first is probably the best way to go. We can see in this shot where Qrow is standing in relation to the others:

Qrow is by far the most physically imposing and the oldest of the group, which sort of makes him the de facto leader, at least from outward appearances. He’s not out of reach or significantly distanced from any of the kids. The sensible thing would have been to take him out first and then deal with teams RWBY and JNOR. Instead, we get these progressive shots of team JNOR being targeted followed closely by team RWBY.

Then there is a pause in the action. Qrow is left standing alone, as depicted in the header image above, weapon drawn, ready to fight. This pause, like everything else in these scenes, operates on a couple of different levels:

1) It gives the audience a chance to absorb what’s happening and sets up the Ace Ops to enter the scene. We know from the relatively “gentle” nature of the take-down that whatever is happening, while not ideal, probably isn’t going to be as bad as we (and Qrow) would normally expect. Salem’s agents sure as hell aren’t going to try to capture them all with some fancy bolas; they would just kill them all on sight, with the exception of Ruby. It’s also not Grimm. So the subversion of our expectations starts here.

2) It also functions to completely divert any errant scraps of our attention onto Qrow. Again, the narrative shift is completed in this shot.

3) It reinforces the fact that the following events are going to have a lot to do with Qrow personally. He’s alone in the frame here, the sole center of narrative focus and attention.

4) Again, this focus paves the way for what happens next.

The Arrival of the Ace Ops and Clover Ebi

With our focus fully resting on Qrow now, he is able to function as the lens through which the audience is meant to experience the next sequence of events. We’re with him when he gets snared. We’re with him when he hits the ground. And we’re with him when the camera pans out to show the kids around him and the arrival of the Ace Ops behind him.

Here is where things get fun.

The first glimpse of the Ace Ops is another massive step in the subversion of expectations. They’re about the furthest thing from threatening that we can probably get while still maintaining some level of weight in the scene. They’re uninformed, which is typically not a bad thing (it lets the audience know that they’re likely some sort of official Atlas patrol force) and their postures are not aggressive in the slightest. It’s made pretty clear that we’re not meant to be overly concerned with them, which means that the tension of our main cast being in any sort of danger disintegrates almost instantaneously.

So where does the tension go, you may ask?

To the dramatic entrance of Clover Ebi, of course! More specifically, it goes to the fact that while all of the other Ace Ops are introduced as a group, Clover is deliberately and carefully singled out, just as Qrow was singled out in the scenes directly preceding this.

Remember that Qrow is supposed to be the lens for the audience in this whole sequence. Now take a look at the way that Clover’s damn boot is framed. Remind you of anything?

(This man and his whole portrayal by CRWBY is so deliciously extra, I swear.)

From the very beginning, the scenes between Qrow and Clover are framed in such a way that, even when not spatially close to one another, they are still depicted as being together. Connected. And it all starts with the hilariously deliberate placement of that damn boot.

Now, I’m not saying this is where the romantic tension begins (that comes in chapter 3). It’s a little hard to introduce it when Qrow is tied up on the ground and all we have is some footwear from Clover (unless you’re that kind of person, in which case... god’s speed to you). But it does set it up to come into play later in the volume.

The fact that we don’t get to see Clover directly is also pretty significant and, once again, this decision does more than one thing for the story.

1) As I stated, Clover is singled out. This is accomplished not only by his delayed entrance into the scene and the fact that he enters from the complete opposite direction of his team, but also because we don’t get to see him right away. You know who sees him first? Qrow. And because we’re meant to experience the scene through Qrow, our attention and curiosity are immediately piqued because we’re being denied something that he already has: a view of Clover.

2) It kicks up dramatic tension, which at this point I’m pretty sure is almost a necessity to Clover the way oxygen is for the rest of us, but on a narrative level it really works out. Despite the fact that everyone has just been apprehended, in these moments of Clover’s appearance and Qrow’s reaction, the Teams and the Ace Ops are 100% in the background. The narrative focus at this point has not only shifted but has completely inverted from the norm, putting full focus on these two characters as opposed to Ruby or any of the others or even the group as a whole. This is, by the way, the nature of nearly all of Qrow’s and Clover’s scenes together, no matter how brief. CRWBY bookends them out (usually through key visual cues, such as the not-quite-over-the-shoulder thing), lingers exclusively on them for a time, and then shifts right back into the main narrative structure. This is not something that can be achieved accidentally.

3) It really does this amazing thing where the focus is bounced around between Clover and Qrow until we realize that we’re supposed to be focusing on them together. We get Qrow in this shot and Clover’s entrance as a sort of disruption. Literally, the man walks into Qrow’s shot the way he walks into his life, and we the audience are meant to feel the impact of this.

4) It answers the question put into our minds during the post-Penny build-up to these scenes: if the next events after Penny’s departure are going to revolve around Qrow in some way, how? What exactly is the big impact going to be? Clover’s entrance, and particularly the way it was handled by CRWBY, gives us that answer. It’s not the things that are happening or anyone in the scene behind Qrow. The significant missing part of the equation is Clover himself.

5) Continues to subvert expectations. Remember waaaay up there where I said that the subtle reminder of Qrow’s Semblance and his typical mindset was important? Well, here would be why. I’m not sure what I was expecting on my first viewing of this episode, honestly. But that nudge at Qrow’s Semblance amped up my nerves a little and I’m pretty sure that was entirely on purpose. At first we the audience see the arrest as a potential side-effect of Qrow’s Semblance (again, we’ve been conditioned to accept this correlation). But the fact that it’s Clover we’re meant to focus on, and not the arrest itself, takes that off the table. This scene isn’t about Qrow’s Semblance screwing him over again. It’s about this particular man being introduced into his life.

Clover’s Full Introduction

That right there is the second glimpse we get of Clover. Again... THE FRAMING!!!!! But I’ve said enough about that in this and other posts, so I’ll go into some other details that get laid out in the following interaction.

First of all, Clover walks right up to Qrow (completely bypassing Ruby, which I’ll get to in a second), further cementing the fact that we are meant to be focused on him through Qrow as a lens. If you have doubts, look at where Qrow’s focus is. We get a little more of Clover in this shot and, honestly, I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but I find the fact that we get a glimpse of Clover’s long coat (something that directly echoes Qrow’s own coattails/cape) at least worthy of note. Especially in light of the next shot that shows us just a little more:

*cough* Framing *cough* (Seriously. This might be a drinking game next volume where I fully expect them to get some more screentime together.)

The lucky rabbit’s foot offers a pretty significant clue to who exactly is standing in front of Qrow. It’s this slow piecemealing out of Clover’s appearance that leads me to believe that the shot where we can see his coat wasn’t 100% by chance.

This shot also totally removes all others from the scene, thereby keeping them in the background and Clover and Qrow in the narrative foreground.

And then, finally:

In the previous shot, Qrow tries to offer some explanation that he hopes will get him out of the bolas and off the ground: “Hey, pal, I’m a licensed Huntsman. Just helped save everyone?”

And this right here is the shot we are given in direct response: Clover Ebi in all his glory. Lucky rabbit’s foot, four-leaf clover on his chest, horseshoe... everything that we would pretty much identify as the antithesis of Qrow’s character.

Now. I will fully and completely admit that there are a large number of ways CRWBY could have taken this whole scene and everything that comes after. He and Qrow were clearly framed together in the shots leading up to this, but as of this moment, it could have just as easily leaned towards a rivalry rather than a romance. Clover could have done any number of things that would have established him as an ass-hole that we all would have hated right along with Qrow. But he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t gloat or give off any malicious vibes. The guy is cocky and at ease, but that’s part of what we all love about him.

Also worth noting is the fact that this is the first look he gives Qrow. This is the established baseline right before he bends down to pick up Harbinger. He’s not hostile or off-putting or smug (at least not overly so). He’s professional with a healthy dash of confidence and a hell of a lot of presence.

We’re still with Qrow here, obviously, and the steep angle of this shot makes it clear: we are meant to see Clover Ebi the way Qrow does at this moment. Inherent in this perspective is the line of tension that we are meant to be following. (A quick clarification: the word ‘tension’ here carries no negative connotations. I’m talking about narrative tension, the forward movement of a story, the thing that makes the audience perk up and go “Oh? What’s this?” And I would say these scenes accomplish that extraordinarily well.)

The Harbinger Moment

*cough cough* FraMInG!!!!!!! *cough cough*

Funny story. This particular shot where Clover picks up Harbinger is the one I was actually asked to comment on. But as no scene exists in a vacuum, I think the analysis for this relies heavily on everything I’ve already said. It’s all about the build-up, the already established framing, the line of tension that we are meant to be following (namely, who is this guy going to be to Qrow?), and the way that Clover again enters the scene as a sort of disruption into Qrow’s space.

Now, if Clover had done any of those things I mentioned above (gloated, smirked in a hostile way, sneered, etc.) that’s all it would have taken for this disruption to be coded as negative. Setting them up as rivals would have literally been that simple. But because he didn’t we’re left in an area of... comfortable curiosity, is the phrase I’m gonna go with. The first disruptive entrance into Qrow’s scene (with the boot) introduces Clover as a character, and the second (this one) makes sure to let us know that, while CRWBY isn’t making it entirely clear what exactly these two are going to be to each other just yet, their relationship is going to be far more nuanced than the obvious antagonistic crap they could have gone with.

As far as the event itself (Clover picking up Harbinger), this is absolutely meant to resonate on an emotional level with the audience. We watch this unfold, again with Qrow as our lens, and knowing what he has been through with that weapon, we know what it probably means to have another person handle it. Clover does so respectfully and carefully and without comment. Also notice that while Clover seems to be ambidextrous for the most part, he wields his own weapon almost exclusively with his left hand, which is the same hand he picks up Harbinger with. If anyone wants to get into deep psychoanalysis of the implications behind that, I will love you forever, but if you don’t I’ll probably circle back to it at some point XD

Worthy of note here too, though I’m not entirely certain what to make of it just yet, is the fact that Clover’s armband is fully visible in this shot. And we all know how CRWBY loves their armbands.

Choices

And that pretty much wraps up the extent of the interactions between Clover and Qrow in this scene. This shot above just illustrates something @lady-branwen pointed out, which I find incredibly funny.

Upon entering the scene, Clover has two obvious options as to who he approaches first. Even if he comes down from a roof, he is either approaching from the front (top of the image), in which case he had to bypass Ruby (and the relic!) entirely to reach Qrow. Or he comes from that side street off to the left side of the image, in which case he is probably equidistant from Qrow and Ruby (and the relic! which he knows about!) and still chooses to approach Qrow first.

Intent, people. None of it is accidental.

Bonus:

The remainder of the scene does a pretty fantastic job of shifting the focus to Clover and establishing who he is. He’s charming, professional, a people person, and definitely lawful good. All of this further draws out that line of narrative tension between him and Qrow, leaves us wondering where exactly this is going to go, and perfectly sets us up for all of their scenes after this.

#fair game #fairgame #lucky charms #luckbirds #qrover #qrowver #qrow branwen #clover ebi #rwby7 #rwby #is this my longest one?#it feels like it #holy crap #passes out

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astriiformes · 4 years

Note

As someone who is aroace and agender; I am SO TIRED of cis women acting like "transformative" fandom is theirs alone and that shipping = fandom. It's shit like this that put me off writing fic back when I was into Mass Effect. Bonus points for the people who think that shipping is in some way activism - it's not, it's just one way of interacting with a text. And it's not the only way.

The “shipping is activism” crowd is a lot. It’s rough because there are absolutely ways that the two can be tied together -- looking at some of the people out there writing really good representation today, a lot of them did get their start in fandom spaces, writing fanfic and talking meta with other fans! And of course there are many examples of people who have turned to fics featuring queer headcanons for comfort in ways that I don’t want to downplay the significance of -- it’s been important for me, too -- and sources of comfort can be critical to marginalized people!

(As an aro/ace person myself, I have some thoughts on how aspec people have been pretty sidelined in that process, but that’s an entirely different conversation)

I think the thing that causes it to cross a weird line is the idea that it enacts significant social change as opposed to providing comfort. At least on its own. Both are really important things, and it’s one reason that fandom is a place that a lot of marginalized people turn to for community and solace. I’ve even been personally involved (in a somewhat adjacent way, but like, helped out a fair bit at the booth) with helping a queer affinity group that tabled and ran panels at a major convention, talking about things like queer representation, and it was genuinely an incredible experience for me. There’s a significant place for that stuff! But it’s not the be-all-end-all and I think there are some people who elevate it to be a lot.... more than it is

Plus the supposed gender dynamics of it make me super uncomfortable too. I would never deny that women have experienced gatekeeping in fandom, but the narrative some of them (cis women, I should specify) have constructed around the transformative and curative divide (which is...... a hot mess and something that’s also a lot more complex than people talk about, as well as kind of uncomfy to me as an autistic person since a lot of the “curative” stuff is also... how neurodivergent people like to engage with fandom) as a result of it is so, so cis-normative, and does an incredible disservice to marginalized men and nonbinary people in fandom as well. Even if the two were distinct categories, why would turning them into a second gender binary help anyone!!

#silvertonguedaggermaw

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arcticdementor · 4 years

Link

Oscar Wilde supposedly said George Bernard Shaw "has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends". Socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer is the opposite: few allies, but deeply respected by his enemies. I disagree with him about everything, so naturally I am a big fan of his work - which meant I was happy to read his latest book, The Cult Of Smart.

DeBoer starts with the standard narrative of The Failing State Of American Education. Students aren't learning. The country is falling behind. Only tough no-excuses policies, standardization, and innovative reforms like charter schools can save it, as shown by their stellar performance improving test scores and graduation rates.

He argues that every word of it is a lie. American education isn't getting worse by absolute standards: students match or outperform their peers from 20 or 50 years ago. It's not getting worse by international standards: America's PISA rankings are mediocre, but the country has always scored near the bottom of international rankings, even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon. Race and gender gaps are stable or decreasing. American education is doing much as it's always done - about as well as possible, given the crushing poverty, single parent-families, violence, and racism holding back the kids it's charged with shepherding to adulthood.

…

For decades, politicians of both parties have thought of education as "the great leveller" and the key to solving poverty. If people are stuck in boring McJobs, it's because they're not well-educated enough to be surgeons and rocket scientists. Give them the education they need, and they can join the knowledge economy and rise into the upper-middle class. For lack of any better politically-palatable way to solve poverty, this has kind of become a totem: get better schools, and all those unemployed Appalachian coal miners can move to Silicon Valley and start tech companies. But you can't do that. Not everyone is intellectually capable of doing a high-paying knowledge economy job. Schools can change your intellectual potential a limited amount. Ending child hunger, removing lead from the environment, and similar humanitarian programs can do a little more, but only a little. In the end, a lot of people aren't going to make it.

So what can you do? DeBoer doesn't think there's an answer within the existing system. Instead, we need to dismantle meritocracy.

DeBoer is skeptical of "equality of opportunity". Even if you solve racism, sexism, poverty, and many other things that DeBoer repeatedly reminds us have not been solved, you'll just get people succeeding or failing based on natural talent. DeBoer agrees conservatives can be satisfied with this, but thinks leftists shouldn't be. Natural talent is just as unearned as class, race, or any other unfair advantage.

One one level, the titular Cult Of Smart is just the belief that enough education can solve any problem. But more fundamentally it's also the troubling belief that after we jettison unfair theories of superiority based on skin color, sex, and whatever else, we're finally left with what really determines your value as a human being - how smart you are. DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'" DeBoer was originally shocked to hear someone describe her own son that way, then realized that he wouldn't have thought twice if she'd dismissed him as unathletic, or bad at music. Intelligence is considered such a basic measure of human worth that to dismiss someone as unintelligent seems like consigning them into the outer darkness. So DeBoer describes how early readers of his book were scandalized by the insistence on genetic differences in intelligence - isn't this denying the equality of Man, declaring some people inherently superior to others? Only if you conflate intelligence with worth, which DeBoer argues our society does constantly. It starts with parents buying Baby Einstein tapes and trying to send their kids to the best preschool, continues through the "meat grinder" of the college admissions process when everyone knows that whoever gets into Harvard is better than whoever gets into State U, and continues when the meritocracy rewards the straight-A Harvard student with a high-paying powerful job and the high school dropout with drudgery or unemployment. Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".

DeBoer isn't convinced this is an honest mistake. He draws attention to a sort of meta-class-war - a war among class warriors over whether the true enemy is the top 1% (this is the majority position) or the top 20% (this is DeBoer's position; if you've read Staying Classy, you'll immediately recognize this disagreement as the same one that divided the Church and UR models of class). The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins. Opposition to the 20% is usually right-coded; describe them as "woke coastal elites who dominate academia and the media", and the Trump campaign ad almost writes itself. But some Marxists flirt with it too; the book references Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's Theory Of The Aspirational Class, and you can hear echoes of this every time Twitter socialists criticize "Vox liberals" or something. Access to the 20% is gated by college degree, and their legitimizing myth is that their education makes them more qualified and humane than the rest of us. DeBoer thinks the deification of school-achievement-compatible intelligence as highest good serves their class interest; "equality of opportunity" means we should ignore all other human distinctions in favor of the one that our ruling class happens to excel at.

So maybe equality of opportunity is a stupid goal. DeBoer argues for equality of results. This is a pretty extreme demand, but he's a Marxist and he means what he says. He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth.

…

I'm Freddie's ideological enemy, which means I have to respect him. And there's a lot to like about this book. I think its two major theses - that intelligence is mostly innate, and that this is incompatible with equating it to human value - are true, important, and poorly appreciated by the general population. I tried to make a somewhat similar argument in my Parable Of The Talents, which DeBoer graciously quotes in his introduction. Some of the book's peripheral theses - that a lot of education science is based on fraud, that US schools are not declining in quality, etc - are also true, fascinating, and worth spreading. Overall, I think this book does more good than harm.

It's also rambling, self-contradictory in places, and contains a lot of arguments I think are misguided or bizarre.

…

At the time, I noted that meritocracy has nothing to do with this. The intuition behind meritocracy is: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

The above does away with any notions of "desert", but I worry it's still accepting too many of DeBoer's assumptions. A better description might be: Your life depends on a difficult surgery. You can hire whatever surgeon you want to perform it. You are willing to pay more money for a surgeon who aced medical school than for a surgeon who failed it. So higher intelligence leads to more money.

This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper. More meritorious surgeons get richer not because "Society" has selected them to get rich as a reward for virtue, but because individuals pursuing their incentives prefer, all else equal, not to die of botched surgeries. Meritocracy isn't an -ocracy like democracy or autocracy, where people in wigs sit down to frame a constitution and decide how things should work. It's a dubious abstraction over the fact that people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen.

…

I think DeBoer would argue he's not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.

DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he'd been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it's important to confront his opponents' strongest cases, so these are the ones I'll focus on here.

…

These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he's willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that's failed every time it's tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that's succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities - DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let's just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I'm willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on 'high' all the time.

…

DeBoer spends several impassioned sections explaining how opposed he is to scientific racism, and arguing that the belief that individual-level IQ differences are partly genetic doesn't imply a belief that group-level IQ differences are partly genetic. Some reviewers of this book are still suspicious, wondering if he might be hiding his real position. I can assure you he is not. Seriously, he talks about how much he hates belief in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page. Also, sometimes when I write posts about race, he sends me angry emails ranting about how much he hates that some people believe in genetic group-level IQ differences - totally private emails nobody else will ever see. I have no reason to doubt that his hatred of this is as deep as he claims.

But I understand why some reviewers aren't convinced. This book can't stop tripping over itself when it tries to discuss these topics. DeBoer grants X, he grants X -> Y, then goes on ten-page rants about how absolutely loathsome and abominable anyone who believes Y is.

Remember, one of the theses of this book is that individual differences in intelligence are mostly genetic. But DeBoer spends only a little time citing the studies that prove this is true. He (correctly) decides that most of his readers will object not on the scientific ground that they haven't seen enough studies, but on the moral ground that this seems to challenge the basic equality of humankind. He (correctly) points out that this is balderdash, that innate differences in intelligence don't imply differences in moral value, any more than innate differences in height or athletic ability or anything like that imply differences in moral value. His goal is not just to convince you about the science, but to convince you that you can believe the science and still be an okay person who respects everyone and wants them to be happy.

He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message. He could have reviewed studies about whether racial differences in intelligence are genetic or environmental, come to some conclusion or not, but emphasized that it doesn't matter, and even if it's 100% genetic it has no bearing at all on the need for racial equality and racial justice, that one race having a slightly higher IQ than another doesn't make them "superior" any more than Pygmies' genetic short stature makes them "inferior".

Instead he - well, I'm not really sure what he's doing. He starts by says racial differences must be environmental. Then he says that studies have shown that racial IQ gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, because the gaps remain even after controlling for these. But, he says, there could be other environmental factors aside from poverty that cause racial IQ gaps. After tossing out some possibilities, he concludes that he doesn't really need to be able to identify a plausible mechanism, because "white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it", no matter how many studies we do or how many confounders we eliminate. His argument, as far as I can tell, is that it's always possible that racial IQ differences are environmental, therefore they must be environmental. Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic. Such people are "noxious", "bigoted", "ugly", "pseudoscientific" "bad people" who peddle "propaganda" to "advance their racist and sexist agenda". (But tell us what you really think!)

…

This is far enough from my field that I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment). I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on (I'd be very relieved if anybody could find those, or if they could explain why the ones I found were fake studies or fake experts or a biased sample, or explain how I'm misreading them or that they otherwise shouldn't be trusted. If you have thoughts on this, please send me an email). I've vacillated back and forth on how to think about this question so many times, and right now my personal probability estimate is "I am still freaking out about this, go away go away go away". And I understand I have at least two potentially irresolveable biases on this question: one, I'm a white person in a country with a long history of promoting white supremacy; and two, if I lean in favor then everyone will hate me, and use it as a bludgeon against anyone I have ever associated with, and I will die alone in a ditch and maybe deserve it. So the best I can do is try to route around this issue when considering important questions. This is sometimes hard, but the basic principle is that I'm far less sure of any of it than I am sure that all human beings are morally equal and deserve to have a good life and get treated with respect regardless of academic achievement.

…

That last sentence about the basic principle is the thesis of The Cult Of Smart, so it would have been a reasonable position for DeBoer to take too. DeBoer doesn't take it. He acknowledges the existence of expert scientists who believe the differences are genetic (he names Linda Gottfredson in particular), but only to condemn them as morally flawed for asserting this.

But this is exactly the worldview he is, at this very moment, trying to write a book arguing against! His thesis is that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among individuals, because that would make some people fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - but those voices are wrong, because differences in intelligence don't affect moral equality. Then he adds that mainstream voices say there can't be genetic differences in intelligence among ethnic groups, because that would make some groups fundamentally inferior to others, which is morally repugnant - and those voices are right; we must deny the differences lest we accept the morally repugnant thing.

Normally I would cut DeBoer some slack and assume this was some kind of Straussian manuever he needed to do to get the book published, or to prevent giving ammunition to bad people. But no, he has definitely believed this for years, consistently, even while being willing to offend basically anybody about basically anything else at any time. So I'm convinced this is his true belief. I'm just not sure how he squares it with the rest of his book.

…

"Smart" equivocates over two concepts - high-IQ and successful-at-formal-education. These concepts are related; in general, high-IQ people get better grades, graduate from better colleges, etc. But they're not exactly the same.

There is a cult of successful-at-formal-education. Society obsesses over how important formal education is, how it can do anything, how it's going to save the world. If you get gold stars on your homework, become the teacher's pet, earn good grades in high school, and get into an Ivy League, the world will love you for it.

But the opposite is true of high-IQ. Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter. Admit to being a member of Mensa, and you'll get a fusillade of "IQ is just a number!" and "people who care about their IQ are just overcompensating for never succeeding at anything real!" and "IQ doesn't matter, what about emotional IQ or grit or whatever else, huh? Bet you didn't think of that!" Science writers and Psychology Today columnists vomit out a steady stream of bizarre attempts to deny the statistical validity of IQ.

These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.

Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.

…

I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one. I am going to get angry and write whole sentences in capital letters. This is one of the most enraging passages I've ever read.

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT SENDING PEOPLE TO SCHOOL FOR THE SAME REASON.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of vital social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

#scott alexander #substack #book review #fredrik deboer #public schooling #long #read the whole thing

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