#but i really admire the fact that she still critiques the show instead of defending it like some fools

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

so i got on this dating app recently and met a really cute girl who also dislikes catra and catradora. is this love?

[thinkingisadangerouspastime]

What do you think about the "Katara and Aang idolize one another" agruement?

it’s bullshit

I think this argument is a lot like many ship-related arguments in the A:TLA fandom: while perhaps it contains an inkling or two of truth, it is by and large an inaccurate assessment. Here’s the thing about Katara and Aang idolizing one another: they did! But only for a brief portion of Book 1. That is all. People who insist Aang and Katara idolized each other for the entirety of A:TLA are incorrect, plain and simple, and I encourage them to rewatch the show, lol.

Before I go any further, here is a definition of “idolize”: to admire, revere, or love greatly or excessively. Obviously, the qualifier of “excessively” is what demands attention, as “great” admiration and love are not emotions inherently bad.

So let’s jump right in - I’ll start with Aang, since fandom launches most of its “critiques” on him when they examine Kataang. Aang’s idolization of Katara in early Book 1 is pretty straightforward: he had a crush on her!

(Note that Katara had a crush on Aang, too, but her idolization overall presents itself in a different form that I’ll discuss later.)

But yes, Aang had a crush on Katara. And like anyone who’s ever had a crush, he definitely idolized her in the beginning! We see in “The Fortuneteller” the rose-tinted lens he views her with; the scene is cute and relatable, as a majority of alloromantic people have had That Moment where they’re a little bit overwhelmed by their feelings towards their crush.

But Aang’s perception of Katara does not remain this way. The idolization argument implies that throughout the entire series he saw her through rose-tinted goggles, but the fact of the matter is that he doesn’t! Aang sees Katara at her lowest points (just as she sees him at his, which I will expand upon later); to name only a few:

- her frustration about her waterbending abilities in “The Waterbending Scroll” that she unfairly takes out on him

- her anger as a result of sleep deprivation in “The Chase”

- bloodbending in “The Puppetmaster”

- and, of course, much of “The Southern Raiders”

Why is this relevant? Well, human beings are flawed by nature. To idolize someone generally involves either a lack of exposure to a person’s flaws, or to see but to then actively ignore someone’s flaws (and, for the record, ignoring a person’s flaws is entirely different from accepting their flaws). So, it’s plain as day that Aang has been exposed to Katara’s flaws, meaning the former doesn’t apply. But does Aang ignore her flaws?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: no, and the series clearly demonstrates this fact.

Example - Aang experienced firsthand Katara’s frustration about her waterbending abilities, so what does he do? When they reach the Northern Water Tribe, he sacrifices a night’s rest to teach her waterbending in direct defiance of Pakku’s orders, and would have continued doing so had Pakku not found them. Aang understands her struggle, he acknowledges her frustration for what it is, and he seeks to help her resolve it! If Aang still “idolized” her by this point, then chances are he wouldn’t have recognized Katara’s conflict in the first place, namely because idolization = rose-tinted lens that would have clouded his vision and prevented him from identifying her flaw/struggle.

To jump to the end of the series, “The Southern Raiders” is a titular example of how Aang does not idolize Katara. TSR is perhaps Katara’s lowest point; if Aang idolized her as some people like to claim, he probably would have shied away from her during this episode. He would have avoided confronting her anger and her hate, because acknowledging someone’s flaws means destroying the image of perfection one has created for that person. But Aang doesn’t shy away. He tells Katara, straight to the point, that she is going on a revenge mission. It hurts, but it’s the truth. That is the thesis of the entire episode, and it is what Katara herself comes to term with by the end of it.

Basically, my point is that Aang not only bears witness to Katara’s flaws, but actively confronts them. That is… pretty much the exact opposite of idolizing someone?

To put it simply: it makes no sense to say Aang idolizes Katara, seeing as he refuses to shove her flaws under the rug rather than pretending they don’t exist (which is what idolization would suggest). He sees them, he acknowledges them, and in fact he always seeks to help her resolve those problems, which is a sign of a healthy, mutually supportive, and respectful relationship. Over the course of A:TLA, Aang gets to know Katara (and she him), thus the series itself and plain logic demonstrate how his rose-tinted lens fades away with time.

Also, please examine the progression of how Aang looks at Katara throughout the series. He clearly starts with a cute crush, but by the end of the show? No idolization in sight. That’s acceptance and love, babey.

Now let’s talk about Katara. Her idolization is less related to her crush (there are aspects to look at there, too, of course; however, most of them track with what I just discussed about Aang) and instead is largely connected to Aang being the Avatar. And tbh, can you blame her? Katara had faith in the Avatar’s return well before she met Aang - of course she’d be a little starstruck after they first became friends!

Think about the very first episode, where Katara insists that Aang is full of wisdom. Yes, she is technically correct about that, but she really hasn’t known Aang long enough to justify that conclusion - she believes it solely because she believes in the hope and power of the Avatar. (I think technically she may not have known Aang was the Avatar at that point, but like, Katara isn’t stupid lmao. An airbender who’s somehow alive after 100 years?? And yet he’s not the Avatar? Sure, Jan.) Later, in “The Storm,” she defends Aang’s actions (or lack thereof) as the Avatar. And of course she would do so at that point (i.e. early) in the series! She doesn’t want her hope (read: her idolization) to be dashed that the Avatar will save the world!

But again, Katara’s perception of Aang does not remain this way. As aforementioned, Katara also sees Aang at his lowest points. To quickly name a few:

- in “Bato of the Water Tribe,” where Aang hid the letter from her father

- in “The Avatar State,” where Aang is trying to forcibly trigger the Avatar state (not good lol)

- after Appa was stolen; when Aang learned what had happened to Appa; when Aang tries to stop letting himself feel because of his grief about Appa being gone

- after the failed invasion, when Aang is heartbroken over his own failure

Again, Katara is exposed to Aang’s flaws as he is to hers, and just like Aang, she does not ignore them. She gets understandably upset when Aang hides her father’s letter, and after thinking about his action she recognizes what incited him to do so and thus chooses to forgive him. It is not an immediate decision (had she idolized him, it most likely would have been, as idolization implies there’s no way the idolized person can be in the wrong). Similarly, in “The Avatar State,” she disagrees with Aang’s decision, tells him so, and sticks by her opinion (a direct parallel to Aang’s advice to her in “The Southern Raiders”!). Later in the series, when Appa is stolen and when the eclipse invasion fails, Katara does not look away from Aang’s pain (versus to idolize him would mean to ignore any demonstration of his flaws); like Aang with her, she faces his negative feelings head-on.

So after a while? Katara still admires Aang as the Avatar, as any normal person does, but she knows him. She knows his flaws. And she loves him regardless. Not only that, but she seeks to help him address whatever problem is at hand (e.g. her comforting him after Appa is stolen and even her simple decision to put a hand on his shoulder after the failed invasion), just as Aang does with her.

(There is a FANTASTIC gifset here that demonstrates how whenever Katara and Aang disagree, they acknowledge their disagreement in healthy ways. Quite the opposite of idolization.)

And again, take a second to examine how the way Katara looks at Aang changes, too. That’s love, babey!

So do Aang and Katara idolize each other? Sure, they used to. For all of… ah, yes. A few episodes in the very first season. But by the end of the series? Sorry, that assessment couldn’t be further from the truth. Katara and Aang know each other better than anyone, from their positives to their negatives, and that is why their relationship is a titular example of healthy and supportive best friends to lovers.

[kcwcommentary]

VLD3x06 – “Tailing a Comet”

3x06 – “Tailing a Comet”

This episode is a mess. 

This commentary is long because I have a lot to critique.

Lance is in some Galra base. He’s looking through the scope of his bayard-turned-rifle. The red of the bayard and the blue of his armor looks so dissonant. I don’t know how the visual of the colors not matching resulting from the lion switch plot ever felt right to the EPs. It might match for whatever nostalgia they have of the old 80s Voltron, but it looks like an animation error.

Keith rushes in, taking out sentries. All the Paladins are there, including Allura, whose bayard is manifesting as a whip. A very inconsistent whip. Sometimes it acts solid, like a normal whip, wrapping around sentries. Other times, without anything to suggest a change, it acts like a blade, cutting sentries apart. Purposeful inconsistencies like the nature and behavior of her bayard make it difficult to track and anticipate how anything works in this show. It’s disorienting to watch. Just another absurdity of this show’s production.

Pidge does something to a computer and all the sentries shut down and fall over. That is a serious security vulnerability that one would think the Galra, with their 10,000-year old universe-wide empire, would have figured out and built their systems so that every sentry didn’t have a singular, unified off-switch.

Given what Pidge and Keith say at the end of the scene, the Paladins must be going around taking down various Galra bases before turning them over to the Blade of Marmora.

The sequence ends, revealing itself to be just an action set-piece. There was no narrative relevance to the scene, no reason for the scene to be in the story. It was solely there as pointless spectacle.

Back on the Castle Ship, Keith is talking to Shiro. Shiro remembers the battle with Zarkon, he remembers the Black Lion telling him to use the black bayard, and the next thing he remembers is waking up on a Galra ship. While Shiro could use a haircut, him in his white tank top is nice. Initially, I was just going to write that as a side-note in parentheses, but looking at Shiro’s bare arms, seeing precisely how the prosthetic connects to his arm is important. This won’t be relevant to some of my criticism for several seasons, but I want to point it out very specifically now so that I can come back to it when Shiro gets his new arm in season seven. It’s something I suspected, but I couldn’t remember any absolute textual evidence for what I have long thought. Seeing him in this tank top now, I know for certain, I’m right. This makes the new arm he gets in season seven even more abhorrent. I’ll wait until I get to those episodes to point out specifically why.

Keith points out that Shiro had “just unlocked the Black Lion’s ability to teleport.” He suggests maybe Black was trying to save Shiro by teleporting him or that maybe Zarkon somehow made Black teleport Shiro into Galra hands. This would have at least explained what happened to Shiro’s body. But since we know from future episodes that this isn’t Shiro, and that Black did not teleport Shiro to the Galra, the show leaves us with no explanation for what happened to Shiro’s body or how he died.

“Hey Keith, how many times are you going to have to save me before this is over?” Shiro asks. “As many times as it takes,” Keith answers. I love that they care about each other. And that makes the fact that they don’t talk to each other in season eight, acting as if they barely know each other, more infuriating.

Hair cut and face shaven, Shiro joins the others on the bridge. The first thing he says to them is to congratulate them on the work they’ve done in his absence in fighting against the Galra. Pidge interrupts with information she’s gotten from data she’s analyzed about Lotor, saying his most recent sightings have been in a particular “quadrant.” Shiro comments about the quadrant being huge. As I complained about the use of the word in 3x02 “Red Paladin,” I really don’t like that “quadrant” has become some go-to word for miscellaneous area divisions of space. The show remembers that Hunk is an engineer and intelligent, so they have him and Pidge go back and forth discussing a way to try to track the “comet.”

Lance actually comes to Keith’s room to talk to him. “You’re the leader now, right?” Lance says to Keith. This is an unnecessary, uncomfortable situation the show chose to put itself in. Lance talks about how they have “one Paladin too many.” Lance doesn’t want to take Blue away from Allura, so if Shiro resumes as Black Paladin and Keith goes back to Red, Lance thinks he should step aside. If the EPs of the show didn’t want to contort this show to fit their nostalgia of the old 80s Voltron, then this wouldn’t need to be an issue. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with having Allura as an admiral-level commander stationed on the Castle Ship. There she could be written as a leader, but as the Blue Paladin, she’s just kind of there, following orders instead of giving them.

Keith tries to convince Lance to just focus on the missions instead of worrying about it. To a small degree, Lance talking to Keith about this is Lance revealing some of his significant insecurities. With the unexplained rivalry between these two characters, character growth for them could have been built around Keith helping Lance learn to deal with his insecurities. This scene would be a step in such development, so Keith not recognizing here how severe Lance’s insecurities are makes sense. But the character development would need to continue in the future, and I think the show thinks that they do keep working on this character development, but they don’t ever really resolve the arc. It just sort of fizzles. At least, I don’t remember the show explaining how Lance deals with his insecurities.

Once again, the mice are shown having gone into the same (or similar) area of the ship’s systems with the two small crystals that they went into in 1x03 “Defenders of the Universe.” Like then, I don’t understand why the system was designed so that a technician couldn’t access it, thus necessitating using the mice to do so. Hunk promising the mice a “mouse shower” is cute though.

Hunk hitting the panel to make the ship send out whatever energy ring that is shown beaming out from the Castle is cliché, and, given the command input interface of this system, not really sensical. They detect the “comet” and begin pursuit. Their system locates the “comet” on a standard Galra ship, not Lotor’s, at a planet. Once again, the planet does not look like a planet.

Both Keith and Shiro simultaneously go to give the team commands. Keith defers to Shiro. I guess it makes sense that a readjustment like this moment might be realistic given the plot as it’s been this season, but I can’t watch it and not think about how the EPs wanted Keith as Black Paladin and wanted Shiro dead. Shiro thinks that the Galra must be transferring the “comet” to the base, but the ship ends up blasting the base. Shiro says they need more information, and Keith tells Shiro to take the Black Lion, that he’ll stay on the Castle with Coran and help provide support.

This suggests something that bothers me throughout the show. The Castle is a large ship and must have been designed with the intention of a larger crew than what Team Voltron has. They never do staff the Castle with such a crew though. Despite the show telling us about people joining the Voltron Coalition, none of those who join work on the Castle. The Olkari are a culture significantly made up of engineers, yet none join the crew. Slav supposedly helps on the Castle Ship at the end of season two, but he’s nowhere to be seen now. That the crew is never realistically staffed annoys me.

The Black Lion won’t respond to Shiro, so he tells Keith he’ll have to lead the mission. “It looks like you’re its true paladin now,” Shiro says. Ugh. Contextualizing this with the clone storyline, this is supposed to be a hint that this Shiro isn’t the real Shiro. The problem with that is that just last episode, Black specifically reacted to this clone, detected him, roared for him. There is literally no explanation for why Black would be interested in directing Keith to this clone last episode only to reject him now. Black wanted the clone last episode, but for Black now to not want the clone: the show is just ridiculously inconsistent. It’s like those in charge of the story cannot make up their minds about what the story is from one episode to the next.

The show expects us to think that somehow Black has bonded with Keith more than Shiro? That Shiro’s right in saying that Keith is Black’s “true paladin now.” That attempt by the show to make Keith Black Paladin is an act to delegitimize Shiro’s character entirely, including to degrade him from seasons one and two. The only explanation the show ever gives for Black choosing Keith over Shiro is that this is not really Shiro but a clone. But then, even once the real Shiro is put in the clone’s body, the show still has Black choose Keith over Shiro. That’s still the show delegitimizing Shiro in seasons one and two.

I can’t help but to feel insulted and offended by this storytelling decision. It’s like the show is ridiculing me for having thought the unified story of Shiro and Black in seasons one and two was good. This is the show calling me a fool for thinking Shiro and Black’s joint story in the first two seasons of the show meant something.

Shiro still tries to give leadership from the Castle Ship (there’s no narrative reason this couldn’t be Allura like it had been in the past).

Lotor’s generals bust in the base. (I still think Ezor’s sock head is an absurd design.) The Galra commander of the base shouts, “Lotor sent you to finish what he started!?” The episode doesn’t explain what the Galra commander meant by this.

The Paladins board the Galra ship, but there’s no crew. Even if Lotor is trying to act outside of the knowledge of the other Galra of the Empire, why wouldn’t there be sentries on the ship? They’re just robots, which means their allegiances should be programable.

Narti takes psychic control of the Galra base commander. She makes him shut down base security, which again makes all the sentries turn off. This again emphasizes what a severe security risk it is for the Galra to have all the sentries effectively have a singular off-button. Narti has him open the base’s roof, and inside is part of the teludav Team Voltron used to transport Zarkon’s ship in 2x12 “Best Laid Plans.”

The Paladins track down the “comet” to find instead a ship that’s been made from the “comet.” Wow, Lotor was fast. (So fast that it doesn’t feel realistic.) Episode 3x04 “Hole in the Sky,” wherein Lotor steals the “comet,” takes place between when Voltron fights him at Thayserix, seen in both 3x03 “The Hunted” and 3x05 “The Journey,” and when they find Shiro. Shiro loses consciousness during his pursuit of Voltron in “The Journey” seven days after Thayserix. Assuming a day or two of recovery on board the Castle before Keith and Shiro’s conversation at the start of this episode, that would mean Lotor would have had the “comet” processed and the ship constructed start-to-finish within maybe a week-and-a-half?? That is an unrealistic manufacturing timetable, especially if he’s doing all this relatively covertly.

Allura thinks that the Galra would never be able to operate the teludav without an Altean, and then she remembers that Haggar is Altean. This is written like Allura had forgotten and only just now remembered. The way she reacted upon seeing that Haggar is Altean at the end of season two, there’s no way that that would not have been something that was at the forefront of Allura’s mind. That’s why it’s weird that the show never made that revelation about Haggar a topic of discussion among Team Voltron before now.

Keith and Shiro have a disagreement. Keith thinks they should find and attack Lotor directly, thinking that stopping him will stop everything. Shiro thinks the most important problem to deal with is to prevent Lotor from having this ship he’s built and the Paladins should return to the Lions. Allura argues that Shiro has a point, Keith doesn’t exactly disagree, and says everyone else should return to their Lions while he looks for Lotor. Shiro tells Keith they all need to stick together. The rest of the Paladins concur. Keith gives in to the group.

As they move to leave, Lotor’s generals return and attack.

Keith and Axca fight, and for some unknown reason, it makes Keith think of the helmeted, unidentified Galra he ran into in the Weblum in 2x09 “The Belly of the Weblum.” There is literally nothing the episode presents about this moment of combat between Keith and Axca, nor about the Weblum meeting revisited in a quick set of flashbacks, to explain why Keith connected the two here and now. This moment of recognition is absolutely contrived.

Allura uses her bayard whip and wraps it around Zethrid’s rifle. Why she doesn’t use the whip to cut through the rifle, as we’ve seen her clearly cut through sentries with it, I don’t know. I know this is a show for a younger audience, so they can’t have Allura cut through Zethrid herself, but she could destroy the gun. Also, Hunk could have used his big gun to lay down a lot of suppression fire, but he never does. This fight does not feel well crafted.

The Paladins regroup and flee. Zethrid wants to pursue, but Axca orders her not to.

The Paladins discuss everything as they make their way back to the Lions. Keith confirms he knows Axca from the Weblum, but again, there is nothing about this fight now that would explain his realization. There’s worry about Haggar using the teludav to create wormholes, but honestly, I don’t see how this is an increase in Galra ability. Despite the Castle Ship’s having used wormholes in trying to distance themselves from Zarkon, Zarkon’s ship was able to traverse the same distance easily and quickly during his pursuit of them in season two. The distances traveled in this show are huge. We’re not talking from one star to another, we’re talking across the universe. Galra ships would have to have some form of travel comparable to wormholes to be able to do so, even if they don’t have teludavs specifically. Allura’s more concerned with Lotor having a ship made from the “comet.”

Pidge finally brings up something that’s at the core of this episode’s conflict: if Lotor has taken over for Zarkon, then why is he attacking a Galra base. I honestly would have expected this question to have been asked way earlier in the episode, like as soon as they detected the Galra cruiser firing on the base.

As Shiro and Coran bring the Castle Ship toward the planet to try to stop the Galra cruiser, Lotor’s “comet” ship attacks them.

A few words about the visual design of Lotor’s “comet” ship: to me, it looks silly. It looks clearly like a pair of legs. While I know that it eventually combines with other ships to form Sincline, and this ship is Sincline’s legs, it would have been nice if this ship didn’t look so obviously like legs.

When Voltron shows up, the “comet” ship takes off. Keith orders Voltron to form sword, and he uses the black bayard to do so. This doesn’t make any sense since in the past it was the red bayard in the Red Lion that formed the sword. This demonstrates another problem with the Paladins switching Lions: inconsistency of how Voltron is operated. We learn that Axca and Narti are piloting the “comet” ship, not Lotor. He’s off somewhere else, communicating with his generals here.

Shiro, Keith, and Allura kind of argue about attack priorities: The “comet” ship or the Galra cruiser with the teludav. “I thought taking down the ship made from the comet was the most important thing,” Keith aggressively says. It’s within character for Keith to become narrowly focused on something, so it’s not that it is unreasonable that Keith would find the need to deal with two targets in this situation difficult to think about. It does feel though like the show is purposefully trying to put Keith and Shiro at odds with one another in team leadership. Shiro yells to Keith that the Galra ship with the teludav is getting away.

Here’s another problem with this moment that reveals the whole dilemma to be contrived: While Voltron is fighting the “comet” ship, and Shiro is calling for Voltron to stop the ship with the teludav, the Castle Ship is doing nothing. The Castle Ship has been shown to be able to take out Galra ships many times before on this show. So why doesn’t it go after the ship with the teludav? Because the narrative is being forced to artificially manufacture contention between Shiro and Keith.

Shiro tells Keith to “lower your shield, shoot the cargo ship, and deal with the consequences.” Keith still thinks they can deal with the “comet” ship first before the other. Shiro yells, “There’s not enough time. You need to make a decision.” This is even writing Shiro’s character badly. If the decision is up to Keith to be made, then it’s clear what Keith’s decision is, so then Shiro shouldn’t be arguing otherwise. Again, this whole dilemma is totally contrived because the writers think that they’re making some big statement about how you can’t have two leaders. It feels like such a false, unnatural conflict between Shiro and Keith.

Keith eventually orders the team to execute Shiro’s plan: lower the shield and shoot the ship with the teludav. Given Lotor’s communication with the “comet” ship, he somehow knows that Voltron is going to do Shiro’s plan of lowering the shield to shoot the cargo ship. There is no reason that Lotor should know this.

Voltron drops its shield, brings up the shoulder canon, and Lotor orders the “comet” ship to “Fire, now!” Where is he that he can see this battle in such precise detail to order a ship to fire at such a specific moment? With the Paladins having said the cruiser was empty when they were on the planet, and with the way Lotor has been talking during this fight, he’s not here, so he wouldn’t be able to make such precise orders.

Keith seems to sense the “comet” ship firing, so he maneuvers Voltron out of the way, and the “comet” ship’s blast hits the teludav. That is a very precise angle that Voltron would have had to create in order to ensure that the “comet” ship’s blast would hit the teludav, so Voltron’s maneuver being purposeful to result in this outcome is highly unrealistic.

Voltron, now out of the way, just sits there, giving the “comet” ship time to re-aim and fire on them, this time hitting Voltron. The “comet” ship goes over to the cruiser so Zethrid and Ezor can board the “comet” ship. They then flee. Keith wants to pursue, but Shiro tells them to return to the Castle, that they need to figure out what is actually going on with Lotor’s actions/plans.

Shiro talks to Keith alone, apologizing for “stepping in.” Keith says he “thought he had it under control.” Shiro tells him, “You need to learn to pick your battles. Sometimes you have to make hard choices.” But Keith’s problem wasn’t that he wasn’t picking a battle or making a choice, so I don’t understand this supposed wisdom from Shiro. Shiro says that it was Keith’s “quick thinking that prevented Lotor from getting away with the teludav.” This confirms that we’re supposed to read the moment earlier when Keith maneuvers Voltron out of the way of the “comet” ship’s blast and the blast hits the teludav as being intentional, but setting up the necessary angle for that to happen is not something that could have happened as quickly as it did and in as stressful of a situation as it did, so again, that moment was highly unrealistic.

Shiro then again says, “The Black Lion has chosen you.” Ugh. It’s one thing for Black to chose Keith when Shiro’s unavailable, but it’s another for Black to choose Keith over Shiro. At this point, we’re supposed to think this is the real Shiro, so that’s explicitly what this scene is saying: that Black has chosen Keith over Shiro. Setting aside that this is a clone, the episode gives no explanation for why Black would choose Keith over Shiro. Shiro did the work of freeing Black from Zarkon’s influence. Shiro did the work to acquire the black bayard. And here the show is telling us that that strong bond Black had with Shiro that was necessary for it to be freed from Zarkon is now meaningless? Recontextualizing to view this as Black rejecting the clone, then the show needs to explain why Black was so connected to the clone last episode that it sensed the clone and directed Keith to go get him.

The Galra base commander is being interrogated by Haggar. He says he can’t remember anything other than whoever came had the correct landing codes. Narti must then be able to erase memories with her psychic powers. I’m still surprised that she’s not seen as a threat to Haggar. Haggar says she believes the commander, “but [he] still must pay for his failure” and she uses some miscellaneous purple energy to make him scream. Standing a short distance from her is Lotor, looking smug. For the commander to be there now, this scene has to have been some notable amount of time after the battle at the base.

And the episode ends.

So much of this episode is unexplained and contrived. Keith knowing Axca was the Galra he met in the Weblum. Lotor’s real-time awareness of the battle despite not being there to observe it, and his knowing precisely what Shiro’s attack plan is to relay that information to his generals. Shiro and Keith butting heads. The Castle Ship completely dropping out of the fight instead of attacking the one ship so that Voltron can attack the other. While there are a couple of good, yet brief moments in this episode, the vast majority of the episode is contrived or incoherent or disrespectful of past story.

[betsynagler]

Critical Thinking is Hard

I’m lucky: I grew up in a family where thinking was encouraged. My parents treated me and my brother like we were brilliant, which makes you want to be brilliant, and come up with your own ideas. They liked to talk about stuff, and, while they definitely treated us like kids, they also didn’t really shelter us too much. My mother was always ruining TV shows for me by pointing out the sexist moments in television, from reruns of The Brady Bunch and Star Trek, to Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company and, well, it was the 70s and 80s, so pretty much all TV shows. But they still let us watch them, as well as R-rated movies which may not have been age-appropriate, and while they told us not to smoke pot, when we found out that they smoked pot, they gave us reasons for why it was okay for them and not us (since they “weren’t going to have any more children,” which seemed to make sense at the time). Another thing they did was encourage us to take responsibility for our own decisions from a fairly young age, which meant that you could stay up until 10 or 11 pm on a school night if you really wanted to, but it’d be your fault when you felt like shit all the next day. One can debate the pros and cons of this method of child-rearing (pro: de-mystifying drug use and other taboo behaviors to the degree that they actually start to seem uncool; encouraging kids to develop strong ethical compass and think through their actions; con: kids are even more weird compared to their peers, and precociously develop anxiety and guilt about their own actions). Nevertheless, it did start me on the road to learning the value of thinking for myself.

I didn’t really come into my own as a critical thinker until junior high, however, when I spent two years in a program for gifted students. First, isolation from my peers at a time when I was supposed to be learning the social skills of adulthood and the bullying that naturally flowed from that taught me to look for other people’s faults as a means of self-defense. That made me critical, if not necessarily thoughtful. But then I also had two years of Mr. Snyder teaching me social studies. Many of us in the gifted program had all of the same teachers for all of our academic subjects two years running. This meant that we got to know those teachers really well, and, in the case of Mr. Snyder, came to greatly admire and be shaped by his worldview. Mr. Snyder wasn’t an obvious candidate for intellectual guru to early adolescents. He wasn’t particularly handsome, and he’d had polio as a child and walked with a prominent limp. But he was funny and charismatic, gave terrific lectures that were like brilliant comedy monologues or TED talks, and knew how to make his students feel smart and special — in part because we had made it into his class, but still. We liked him so much that several of us would get to class early every day so that we could draw cartoons of him on the blackboard with clever word bubble-jokes, and he loved that. Too see him come into the room and look at our clever depictions of him and smile and make jokes right back at us, to feel appreciated for our intelligence and creativity, a sensation could be hard to come by as a suburban New Jersey youngster, was wonderful. The class was a mutual admiration society and a bit of a cult of personality that I think hugely affected all of us who took it.

I learned a lot there, as we studied political systems, geography and the history of the ancient world, among other things. We were assigned projects that were unlike anything you’d typically get in junior high or even high school, a combination of fun, self-driven exploration, and out-of-control amounts of work. We had to make a map of the world that included every single country, city, major mountain range and body of water, using color-coded overlays — something that I would have enjoyed, and sort of did, except that, since I was in 7th grade, I was terrible at judging how long it would take and left it until the last minute, and had to repeatedly re-letter the smudged plastic to make it readable in my 12-year-old handwriting. The following year, when we did separate units on Greece and Rome, we had to either fill in an entire outline that he provided with a paragraph or more on every subject, or do a handful of more creative projects designed to help us probe the topics in more interesting detail. After choosing to do the outline for Greece, thinking it would be easier, and ending up with several pounds of handwritten paper (I could not type) on everything from Sparta to Socrates to Doric columns that was probably 75+ pages long, Mr. Snyder had stared at the pile and admitted to me that he hadn’t really expected anyone to choose that option, that he’d made the outline so absurdly long to encourage people to do the creative projects. I probably got an A more because he didn’t want to read the whole damn thing than anything else, and on Rome, I did the projects, like going to a Roman-Catholic service and writing about it — which I did by interviewing my Catholic friend, Tara, instead of actually going to the service myself — or going to the Met to observe and then expound upon the differences one observed between the Greek and Roman statues — which I did after 15 minutes of taking furious notes on a Sunday when we arrived just as they were getting ready to close. Just because I loved Mr. Snyder didn’t mean that I, like any other kid, wasn’t always trying to get out of doing homework in any way I could.

The thing I learned and remember best, however, was not the facts, but the method. We had a class about political and economic systems — communism, socialism, capitalism, authoritarianism — and the first thing Mr. Snyder did was define these terms for us, explaining that they weren’t what we’d been told they were. Specifically, “communism,” the way it was looked at in the budding Reagan Era of the early 1980s, wasn’t actually communism at all. Real communism was an economic system that someone named Karl Marx had come up with, in which everyone owned everything, nobody was rich or poor or more powerful than anyone else, and that was, in fact, kind of the opposite of what the Soviet Union had become. This somewhat blew my mind. Here was the boogeyman that everyone talked about as the great evil threatening us with destruction — and remember, in the world of an American kid who had trouble sleeping at night because she obsessed with how we were one button push away from nuclear war, that meant genuine annihilation —  and it wasn’t even what it really was. How was this possible? How was everything that we saw on TV and in the newspapers and at the movies just plain wrong? It turned out that, once you delved into it, the evolution of the term “communism” in the popular vernacular was an education in how concepts entered the public consciousness and then were propagated endlessly in the echo chamber of the media and society until they became something else entirely, usually in the service of some political or social end. Sound familiar? It wasn’t the same then as it is now that we have the Wild West known as the Internet, in some ways it was easier to get an entire culture to basically think one incorrect thing rather than many insane things, but the ability to miseducate a huge swath a people without their questioning it? Yes, that existed, and understanding that was a very big deal to me. It meant that you always had to look deeper than the surface of things to be sure you understood the reality, even when it came to what those things were called.

Why doesn’t everyone get taught to think this way? Well, like most things in life, it gets increasingly harder to learn as you get older. The more set in our ways we get, the tougher it becomes to look at ourselves critically (which is essential to critical thinking, because to truly get that you must dissect and assess the viability of ideas, you have to start with your own assumptions), much less change the way our brains function in terms of adopting new ways of doing anything that’s really embedded in there, much less ways of doing everything, which is kind what it means to change the way you think. Plus, it’s in the best interest of those in power to keep the bulk of the human race from doing it. It’s tough to build an army of people who don’t automatically follow orders, or have a religion made up of people who are always questioning the word of God, or build a movement if the followers are continually asking the leaders, “Is that really true?” And so we’ve arrived at this situation where we have so much information out there now to make sense out of, and the bulk of us without the tools to figure out how to do that — and many who reject those tools because they’re told education is just liberal elite brainwashing. Instead, you see a lot of people turn to a kind of twisted, easy version of “critical” “thinking” espoused on the fringes of the left and right, which disposes with the thinking part and instead just espouses wholesale rejection of anything dubbed “establishment” or “mainstream,” no matter how awful the alternative may be (and at this point we know: it’s pretty awful). Add to that the folks who skillfully exploit the overwhelm of information and lack of analytical skills to support their own greed, lust for power and desire to win at all cost, and you end up with an awesome new and different kind of embedded orthodoxy, that encourages us to silo ourselves within “our” (really their) belief systems, walled in with “alternative facts” and media that support them, and defending it all tooth and nail with false equivalencies that encourage us not to critique thoughtfully based on evidence, but to to pick apart every idea that doesn’t fit or even makes us uncomfortable (“Well, every politician lies” was one of the most egregious ones I heard used recently to defend the president). 

And, when it comes right down to it, can you blame people? Thinking is exhausting, especially in this environment, and even human beings with the best intentions manage to ruin everything good anyway. Like, even though my parents didn’t make us believe their ideas, of course they still managed to inculcate in us their most mundane opinions. My father was particularly good at doing this, particularly when it came to eating (yup, Jews), like how fast food and chain restaurants should be avoided not based on nutrition but on lack of flavor (which I guess is why we still ate at White Castle), or how chocolate was really the only kind of acceptable dessert. It’s amazing that, no matter how far I’ve come as an adult, I still find it really hard to shake these ideas — like I saw a conversation on Facebook about how pie was superior to cake, and I just thought, Huh? But there aren’t any good chocolate pies. Another case in point: by the time I was a senior, Mr. Snyder had moved up to the high school, and was teaching an AP history class that I had the option to take. I decided to take economics instead, because I had never studied it, because one of my best friends was taking it, and, on some level I’m sure, to show that I didn’t need the wisdom of this idol of my 7th and 8th grade self, now that I was all of 16. I heard from people who took Snyder’s class that in his first opening monologue of the year he mocked those of his former students who had decided not to take his class — which I think might have just been me. That wasn’t really an appropriate thing for a teacher to do, especially since I was kind of doing what he’d taught us: to move on, do my own thinking and evaluate him critically. But as a human being, it’s hard to be a charismatic leader and just let that go — which is why the world has so many despots, and celebrities, and despotic celebrities. On other hand, my economics class was a terrible waste of time because it turned out that I didn’t like economics and the teacher was boring, so perhaps my premature rejection of Mr. Snyder and my 8th grade way of thinking, just to prove that I could do it, hadn’t been the best decision either. It’s hard not to wonder if I’d be just a slightly better, smarter person today if I’d accepted one more opportunity to take his class.

I’ll never know, but I guess the fact that I’m telling you this story means I haven’t given up on critical thinking. Maybe it’s because self-flagellating comes naturally to me, but these days, more than ever, I try to employ those skills as much as I can, even as it grows increasingly fucking hard. On top of all that media landscape stuff I mentioned a few paragraphs back, I also have this stupid menopause business I mentioned in my last blog post, which just amplifies all of the emotion that drives me as a human to err on the side of insanity, as if there weren’t already enough bad news, and bad “news,” out there driving a person in that direction. There are so many bad actors with so many tools that can be used to manipulate our fear and greed and lust into steamrolling our thinking these days, and all we have to fight back are these little broken piles of poop in our heads. And yet, we all do have them, aka brains, and so we have the ability to use them. And as one of those cynical-on-top-but-at-bottom-idealistic folks who believes we all also have the capacity to change, no matter how hard it might seem, until the day we die, I think we all have the ability to learn how to use them better. And yes, that means you, and your friends, and your kids, and even your cousins in Florida maybe, if we all just try a little harder.

I’m not sure what Mr. Snyder would say about me now, as I try to get people to think about stuff with this blog that almost nobody reads, but considering how many years he spent trying to teach adolescents about Platonic ideals, I’d imagine he’d approve. So in honor of him, and any teacher you’ve had who inspired you to think more, and more better, let’s advocate in 2019 not just for “our values,” but for the value of intelligent thought, even if we have to do it one mind at a time.

[helenekuraginaarc]

the great comet hélène  vs.  war and peace hélène

@carnovalesque said:  i would kill for a post where u talk about differences btw tgc helene and w&p helene

here it is! i’ve talked in passing many, many times about my displeasure with great comet’s interpretation of hélène, but i’ve only mentioned in passing my problems with it. it’s about time i actually laid out my critique and sorted out the differences! because, really, it’s not that i don’t like great comet’s hélène, it’s that it’s just... not hélène kuragina. i think dave malloy took a lot of liberties with the characterization in great comet and it often makes me wonder why he didn’t just write something completely new, like ghost quartet, instead of adapting war and peace, since it’s really so far from the original work. great comet is an incredible work, don’t get me wrong, but it’s really ingenuous to the novel and it makes it hard for me to enjoy.

now to the actual analysis. in the blockquotes i’ll summarize/quote great comet, and beneath that, without blockquotes, i’ll counteract that with the novel. here we go. under the cut because this got long as hell. i have a lot of say about my girl, alright?

“hélène is a slut. anatole’s sister, married to pierre.” — prologue.  the audience is immediately informed of this “trait” of hers and essentially is made to view her in that light for the rest of the musical. dave malloy did try to defend it by saying she’s reclaiming the term, but it is not clear enough in the slightest. additionally, she isn’t the only one to say it, the entire cast does. that one gendered slur is meant to be her defining trait, said like a fact as simple as anatole being her brother or pierre being her husband.

while it is true that hélène does have a few affairs in the novel, most notably with dolokhov and boris drubetskoy, this contrasts with the book interpretation in a couple of ways. first of all, using this as an introduction to hélène’s character goes completely against what tolstoy did. the first descriptions of hélène talk about her calmness, her embarrassment at her effect on men, even her insecurity and vulnerability. she isn’t brazen or outwardly cruel, she’s human, soft, shy. it’s only later that her flaws are revealed. “but, charlie, that’s because great comet takes place in the middle of the book, she already grew out of that!” okay, but? her reputation was still fairly unscathed. in fact, at this point, her reputation was on the uptick. relative to war and peace, great comet begins right after pierre and hélène reunite after the period of time they spent apart after the duel. she’d come out of just fine, passing any blame from the conflict with dolokhov onto pierre and painting him as a jealous, angry husband and herself as innocent in every way. and in some ways, she’s right — her affair with dolokhov is never even canonically confirmed. but more on that later. the point is, she’s still seen as kind and innocent in society, just with the added on qualities of also being charming and confident. virtually no one knows of her promiscuity.

moving right along into the second point, how can she reclaim something that hasn’t been used against her? no one is calling her a sl*t in society. she isn’t known that way at all. additionally, it is not something she would want to reclaim. if you don’t believe me, look to the end of her life. when she becomes pregnant from a man other than pierre and her affairs begin to be impossible to hide, she panics. this eventually leads to her overdosing and killing herself. i really don’t think she wants to be known like that. 

disclaimer: i’ve received a lot of flack of this in the past, so let me be clear. i have no problem with reclaiming the term! at all! women owning their sexuality is fantastic! it’s just not hélène. 

“hélène and dolokhov, arm in arm. pierre, the cuckold sits at home!” — the opera,  along with hélène and dolokhov’s flirting/obviousness in the duel. it makes it clear that hélène does not care for pierre’s opinion of her, nor that he knows she is being unfaithful. in fact, she rubs it in his face. she is completely smug about it and without shame.

now, in the novel, the duel and dolokhov and hélène’s supposed affair is closer to the beginning of their marriage, perhaps a year or two after if i remember correctly? meaning, it is the first hint at hélène’s unfaithfulness to pierre. it’s not a pattern. it’s never happened before. as previously mentioned, hélène’s reputation is still unscathed, she remains a soft-spoken and innocent girl, albeit with a newfound confidence from her marriage and rise in status. still, she very much values her marriage and bezukhov’s name and her relationship with him—not in a romantic sense, of course, but in a respectful and appreciative sense. she knows she would not be where she is without him. she knows she owes him for raising her status. she really doesn’t want to jeopardize her relationship with him, meaning if she were having an affair with dolokhov (which, again, it is never entirely confirmed, only assumed, and the reader is told of it through rumors spread at the rostov’s house) it’s highly unlikely she would be rubbing it into pierre’s face.

hélène would not be seen with dolokhov in public without pierre by her side, fearing for her reputation and the opinions/assumptions of others, however right they are. in canon, she goes as far as to express her displeasure at dolokhov staying with them and makes it seem to pierre as if she despises dolokhov. it is dolokhov’s actions entirely, alluding to himself being hélène’s lover, that sets pierre off. hélène does everything to hide it. it is important to note that the attention and admiration from society is hélène’s only source of validation, not being shown love from her family or pierre and only being wanted by lovers for sex and status. she does whatever possible to keep the false sense of love she receives from society. she tries this with pierre at first, but it becomes impossible for her to keep up, as the image of herself she displays in public is so different from the deeply troubling and angry truth of her mindset.

“keep drinking, old man [...] god, to think i married a man like you!” — the duel,  showing hélène’s contempt for pierre and making it clear that she doesn’t care about hiding how she feels about him. she feels ashamed to be married to him and tells him directly.  “he will kill you, stupid husband!” — also from the duel, showing that she exhibits the tiniest bit of worry for pierre, but mainly showing that she thinks he’s a fool for engaging in the duel at all.

as i previously mentioned, hélène doesn’t show her dislike of pierre outwardly at any time in the novel. throughout their marriage, while it’s clear she showed hostility towards him and commented on his way of life and certain things he did, she never makes it seem as if she does not appreciate him or what he’s done for her. she knows he’s a good husband to her, even that he’s a good man. it isn’t really him that causes her dislike of him, it’s the fact that she’s married to a man she never wanted to be married to. both pierre and hélène were completely shoved into the marriage by hélène’s father, prince vassily. neither wanted this, but they make their peace with it, even if it leads to a cycle of anger and depression and avoidance. but, all in all, the two do not fight. when things go wrong, they separate and don’t see each other, which is... rather mature for how dramatic they both can be. give them some credit, dave!

now, on the latter quote, hélène doesn’t even find out about the duel until after it takes place. it is only then that she approaches him and tells him he’s foolish. again, she tells him how he only merely assumed that she was having an affair. it’s then that he suggests that they part and hélène merely states in her own cruel, teasing way that she wouldn’t mind in the slightest. that is the point where he threatens her life, throwing a marble slab at her and literally shouting “i’ll kill you!” at her. but, in great comet, we are never shown his violence towards her, only her offhand cruelty to him. hmmm, interesting. i’m not excusing her actions in the slightest, but it seems like a bit of a double standard, given that they rarely fought and, when they did, the majority of the anger came from him. just my onion.......

“she’s first-rate, my dear, but she’s not for you. you’d better wait ‘til she’s married.” — the duel. in this part, hélène actually shows some insight into the affair and warns her brother of the consequences. the quip about waiting until she’s married is supposedly meant to allude to her own affair taking place during her marriage.

this actually gives hélène credit where it ....... is not due. this line is originally from dolokhov in the novel. the kuragin siblings share the same amount of intelligence—which is, not much. hélène seems to understand the way things go a little more than anatole, simply because, as a woman, things have been harder for her, but in reality she wouldn’t have this kind of insight. she rushes into things as quality as anatole does, only having brief thoughts of their outcomes, often thinking in bias of her desired result. the line makes much more sense coming from dolokhov, who says in the novel that girls like natasha aren’t for them, not just for anatole. the quip about affairs during marriage even makes more sense, given his experience with hélène. with married women, there is no chance of anything coming of it more than they want to, if you catch my drift.

i’ve seen someone say that they could have given this line to hélène to add in that she doesn’t want anatole to go after natasha because she wants him to remain loyal to her, which is? frankly disgusting. don’t ship incest, kids. not to mention, the incestuous relationship between them assumed in many adaptions is? not canon at all? again, there’s mentioned rumors, but that’s just nineteenth century for you. with the siblings’ reliance on each other and their flirtatious nature with others, people will come to their own, in this instance incorrect, assumptions. not to mention, these rumors are taken from pierre’s perspective as he attempts to convince himself not to marry hélène, so, uh? it’s biased. hélène and anatole were not in love. they loved each other as siblings do. as family does. that is it. in fact, their closeness at all was likely a result of their parents harsh/abusive nature, so... don’t. thanks. they’re just siblings

hélène’s pronunciation of “charmante” in charming is purposefully incorrect. from dave’s genius annotations, it states that it was originally just his mistake, but turned into being kept because, in his words: “hélène is bit of a dilettante, and it’s actually kind of hilarious to me that she is so confidently butchering the french in the chorus of her big song, so… in the end this works for me!“

it’s true, hélène is really unintelligent, but! she’s honestly not bad at french. there’s only a handful of skills she’s listed at having in the novel, two of the most notable being her french and her ability to dance. her only fault in french is that she speaks with a “coarse precision of speech,” having basically no correct intonation. she speaks the words correctly and can speak fairly fluently, but just speaks incredibly monotonously. this one isn’t really a big deal, i just think it would’ve been interesting for dave malloy to show her unintelligence in another way, rather than something she’s canonically alright at! though, i guess, a charming where she speaks the french monotonously might not have the same comedic effect as pronouncing it entirely incorrectly. it’s whatever. just a difference to note. there were still probably better and funnier ways to show her ignorance/unintelligence.

the rest of charming is pretty much directly from the text level accurate. it could be gayer, as it seems to take a “oh she’s only manipulating natasha” angle, when tolstoy does make a point in the novel to point out hélène’s genuine adoration for natasha. while i do think a part of it was only to help her brother, the book makes it seem as if there’s a very real possibility that part of hélène’s motivation was selfish and in order to be around natasha herself. essentially, the book makes it way gayer

the hélène/marya dmitrievna kiss, taking place in balaga, as part of the wild and dissociative imagery of the scene, probably for some wlw fan service and ??? other reasons i honestly have no idea what they were trying to do by putting this in

as shown by a line that even makes an appearance in the musical, marya dmitrievna does not like hélène in the slightest. she scolds natasha for being around her and advises heavily against it. being, well, the iconic marya dmitrievna, she sees right through hélène’s act—or, more accurate, she sees what pierre sees her for. she knows she is dishonest and fakes her personality and that’s enough for marya to dislike her and not trust her nor her intentions. not to mention, while they’re played by actresses around the same age in the musical, in canon hélène is around 26-27 at this point, while marya dmitrievna is in her 50′s to 60′s. that’s like. a twenty to thirty year age difference. it makes me highly uncomfortable and also makes no sense. i get it’s all about the wildness™ of the scene itself, but it would’ve made much more sense to have hélène and natasha kiss at this point, imo, having her “stand in” for anatole while he kisses dolokhov. that woulda been ideal and still get the same results that i think dave was goin for?

“ah, pierre, sweet husband, you don’t know what a plight our anatole has had!” — find anatole. this is a dramatic shift from earlier, during the duel, when she called him “stupid husband” and was cruel to him. it’s, i guess, meant to symbolize how quickly she is willing to manipulate him when she wants something, like the safety of her brother.

i’ve already commented on hélène’s treatment of pierre, so i’ll just reiterate that the shift shouldn’t be so dramatic. in reality, she is usually like this, acting kind and gentle towards him and attempting to keep him happy with her. it’s very rare that she shows her frustration towards him, that’s too honest for her. she’s usually all manipulation and falseness which, y’know, isn’t good, but she doesn’t do so out of cruelty, only insecurity and paranoia. still, not good. 

other than that, which is really just a problem with the earlier lines in the duel rather than anything about this line, i really love this part. what makes it a difference is what malloy didn’t add in. in the annotations, he mentions almost adding a line about her retracting after his reaction, knowing not to anger him because she’d seen his anger firsthand and GOD do i wish he’d kept that in! in canon, she becomes very meek and quiet and does not go against him any further. this shows his effect on her and how scared she becomes of him. it balances the scale again and shows that the cruelty here is not one-sided. pierre has tried to hurt hélène before. she knows he is capable of hurting her and it scares her. it’s also a humanizing moment, taking her down from her ever-confident state. if pierre’s able to give that reaction just with an angry tone and a throwaway insult towards her? what does that say about him? about her?

well, that’s it! a tl;dr version would be — the great comet of hélène reduces her to a trope, in my opinion. she loses her complexity. in the novel she is soft, but angry. she seems confident, but she’s insecure. she hungers for love and seeks it in affairs, looking for any kind of validation or adoration she can get, but trying her best to keep her desperation a secret. just for her. great comet hélène feels boring in comparison. she’s the evil seductress alto we’ve seen a million times before. there’s none of the originality that tolstoy gave her. don’t get me wrong, i hate that son of a bitch tolstoy, but? he knew how to write complex women. he made hélène into a real, complex character and i love her too much to really accept what malloy wrote her into.

but anyways i also love amber gray and would die for her and would kill to see what she’d do with a novel accurate hélène. it’d make me die for sure i love her

[bewarethebutler]

When You Come at the King, You Best Not Miss (The Holdout by Graham Moore)

This book could not get out of its own way. It has an intriguing premise, it’s well paced, and it has compelling characters. The plot is...solid as long as you don’t look too close. It also tackles an important topic: white liberals who, intentionally or not, position themselves as white saviors. The problem is, while it lays the groundwork for a unique and timely deconstruction of white liberalism, it never quite has the balls to truly tackle the issues in a meaningful way. 

The basic plot is that ten years ago, Maya (who is white,) was part of a jury that declared Bobby Nock (who is black,) innocent of killing one of his (white) students. Initially, all the jurors except Maya thought he was guilty, but Maya eventually managed to convince them all of Bobby’s innocence, predicated largely on her insistence that the system is racist and treating Bobby unfairly. After the trial, the whole world condemned the jury, and especially Maya, for finding Bobby innocent. Rick (who is black,) another member of the jury and Maya’s friend/lover, goes on to first publicly attack Maya’s character and then spend the subsequent decade trying to prove Bobby’s guilt. The jurors are all gathered together for a ten year reunion/tv special, with Rick insisting that he has new evidence to prove Bobby guilty. Before he can share it, Rick turns up dead in Maya’s hotel room, and Maya is accused of killing him. 

The interactions between Rick and Maya are the strongest part of the book. On a DnD character alignment chart, Rick would fall solidly in the Lawful Good category, while Maya is totally Chaotic Good. They’re both young and idealistic (they bond over Maya’s Obama ‘Hope’ pin,) and have a passionate relationship largely built from their mutual admiration of the other’s intelligence and morals. Then when the jury first votes, Maya is shocked to find that Rick thinks Bobby is guilty, and he is equally shocked to find that Maya thinks Bobby is innocent. Their relationship quickly dissolves, with Maya becoming the leading voice in the ‘Not Guilty’ camp and Rick the leading voice in the ‘Guilty’ camp. Maya can’t believe that Rick, a young black man, can find another young black man guilty in a system so stacked against him. Meanwhile, Rick is understandably upset that Maya assumes he must hate the system and support Bobby, because in her mind all black people should feel the same about law enforcement. 

Unfortunately, though much of the novel is told in flashbacks, Rick dies very early in the book. So instead of two people re-examining their opinions and relationships, we get the black guy acting as a sort of object lesson for the white girl. There are several points in the novel when Maya starts to interrogate her own (well-intended but condescending) assumptions about identity politics. But then inevitably the paparazzi show up, or someone is arrested, or we jump from the past to the present or vice-versa. It’s almost as if Graham Moore feared making his protagonist too unlikable, so he lays out moments like Maya assuming Rick will be equally outraged about a racist comment, but then never really does anything with it.

The closest the story comes to really challenging white liberalism is when Trisha, the only black person on the jury besides Rick, gets angry at Maya for assuming that Trisha will automatically side with the defendant because he’s black. It was a take-down that was badly needed and almost came too late, well after Maya has repeatedly scolded the non-white members of the jury for not seeing the case as an instance of racial injustice. When Maya tells the others how they should feel about being Black or Asian or Hispanic, the moment really makes you cringe...as it should. 

White liberals (myself included,) have an unfortunate tendency to overshoot the mark when it comes to allyship. We’re so eager to prove ourselves and support people of color that we assume every person of color feels the same way about issues of racial inequality. It’s a great set-up because Maya does it with the best intentions but we still understand she’s forcing Rick and others into her idea of what a Black or Brown person “should” be, a position born of the privilege of reading about Critical Race Theory without ever having personally experienced racism. 

And then...Moore doesn’t really go anywhere with it. In fact, Trisha changes her mind and sides with Maya shortly after calling her out, a decision born more of her uncertainty about the facts of the case than any real opinion about the situation. Trisha sort of drops her call-out without reaching a real point, which is fine, (the novel does a solid job of driving home the idea that it’s not the responsibility of people of color to educate white people,) but then when we switch back to Maya there’s never any indication that Trisha’s words made any kind of impact. 

Even worse, at the end of the novel we find out that Maya was actually right the entire time--not only was Bobby Nock innocent, but some of the parties involved in the case were deliberately using the myth of black men as dangerous to white women to get the verdict they wanted. It turns out Rick and Bobby should have trusted the white woman’s opinion about the racial elements of the case, even though they’re the ones who are being pigeonholed (Rick,) and stereotyped (Bobby). To add insult to injury, to a greater or lesser extent both Bobby and Rick’s murders result from their inability to realize they’re being manipulated by a white man.* *Yes, Rick’s death isn’t organized by Lou Silver the way Bobby’s is, but he’s only in that position because Silver used him to gather information and do the dirty work of his personal crusade. 

Honestly, the book’s treatment of Rick and Bobby might have been its biggest weakness. Even the set-up is weak: we never quite understand why Rick is so convinced of Bobby’s guilt he’s willing to spend ten years trying to convict him. It turns out he doesn’t have any new evidence, he just found a way to blackmail Bobby into confessing...for a murder Bobby didn’t actually commit. The way the novel presents it, the evidence against Bobby is pretty compelling (including traces of the victim’s blood in the trunk of his car,) but not air-tight. In fact, it’s not even clear why the public is so convinced that Bobby is guilty: it seems unlikely that many liberals wouldn’t feel the same as Maya, that Bobby is being railroaded by the system. So in the end, Rick, who is the closest thing the book has to a “moral” character (in the sense that he sticks to his principles regardless of others’ opinions,) ends up resorting to blackmail to try and “get” Bobby. 

Again, Rick’s obsession seems particularly misguided and hollow in light of the fact that Bobby is actually innocent. Similarly, while I wasn’t expecting Bobby to necessarily be grateful to Maya for the ‘Not Guilty’ verdict, I was genuinely confused by his animosity towards her. His life after the trial borders on Dickensian in its never-ending onslaught of misery, but that isn’t Maya’s fault. He’s almost annoyed that she pushed the jury to find him Not Guilty, even though, again, he’s NOT GUILTY. I think Bobby was supposed to serve as an example of how even if you’re found not guilty the system can still ruin your life, but since the alternative was life in prison the point becomes somewhat muddied. 

And then there’s the end. OMG, the end. First, credit where credit’s due, I didn’t see the twist behind Jessica’s disappearance coming, and it’s pretty interesting and well done. Her mother helped her disappear to escape her abusive father, and she now lives on a farm with a partner and a child. (Although, now that I’m typing this that does read as so idyllic as to be unbelievable, but the book presents it pretty straight.) Lou Silver genuinely believed Bobby Nock killed his daughter and arranged for Nock to be murdered. Maya wants to expose Elaine Silver, but doesn’t for the sake of Jessica’s child and Bobby’s child and the child’s mother. It’s not entirely clear how, but Elaine Silver implies that she knows Maya is lying to protect Bobby’s partner and child, and if Maya exposes Jessica Elaine will expose the partner and child. Whether or not she could actually do so is sort of up in the air. In the end, Elaine and Maya agree not to say anything, meaning the world still thinks Bobby is guilty (his death is set up to look like a suicide,) and Rick’s murderer will never be found. Elaine does express some remorse about how she used Bobby to make Jessica’s disappearance believable, but it’s very tacked-on. So, the book ends with two upper-middle class white women deciding that the potential emotional trauma for two mothers and their children must be avoided, even though it means throwing away everything meaningful about the lives of two black men. That’s...ick. So. Much. Ick. 

A major theme of the book is that no one can ever really know the full truth of a situation, even though we feel compelled to seek it out, and therefore the legal system is incapable of producing true justice. The book shoots itself in the foot in the final pages, though. Instead of a critique of the legal system, we end with proof of the larger problem: that white people are able to manipulate and discard the lives of black people with no repercussions. 

[bookobsessionxxx]

Hi @newroyalintown I understand what you are saying about Cambridge fans being eager to come to their defense, but I would like to correct that we do not consider them as Gods. For me personally, what I admire most about them is how relatable they come off. And not in a patronizing way, it just seems natural and genuine. They can even be self-deprecating when people praise them. I cannot speak on everyone’s thoughts and opinions of course, but a lot of us are willing to listen to any critiques. If we disagree, then we are free to defend our standpoint, just as you did. In response to your post, I will just go through them by numbers as well.

1. What we all know about the Cambridges or other royal members are based on what is made available to the public. Any admiration I feel towards the Cambridge family, particularly Kate, is based on what I’ve read and seen. I look at what those who have worked with her have said about her, and I can also infer from videos and photos how warm and genuine she is towards those she meets. With that said, I am aware that all this is a small glimpse into their world, therefore, I cannot claim to know her. I simply love what I see from them.

2. Regarding the inferiority complex, I will still have to disagree with that because dressing or looking a certain way for an engagement is by no means an indication of feeling inferior. It simply means that she is dressing according to what her job calls for. It is similar to any profession really. I would dress more formally if my company was hosting an evening event, whereas on a regular basis, I’d just be in smart casual attire. Or in the case when I’m working from home, I’d be in pajamas 😁 It really isn’t about me feeling inferior and having to put up a front, it is simply part of the job description. We have to realize that she is a royal and it comes with certain expectations. Despite that, the fact that Kate continues to wear high street clothing or even borrows clothes from her mother and sister, really shows that she doesn’t put much stock in status or what people think about what she wears. If you even watch her engagement interview from years back, the reporter prompts and asks her how she’s felt when people criticized her for not working. She could have easily defended and listed everything she has done, instead she quite meekly said how all she wants is that those she works with sees she’s pulling her own. That does not scream of someone who has an inferiority complex. It certainly shows a woman who is still learning the ropes and isn’t comfortable with public speaking or doing interviews. 
As for the Tatler article, I’m not sure what you mean. A Palace spokesperson made it clear that they were only aware they were doing a cover on Kate, and they said, "This story contains a swathe of inaccuracies and false misrepresentations which were not put to Kensington Palace prior to publication." I don’t think it had anything to do with who Tatler’s readers are because again, they are also not considered as the magazine for socialites, as they would like to proclaim. It really has to do with the timing and how the children were included. I’m not sure you are aware, but there have been many times when W&K have issued a statement or spoken to media outlets when their children were included. Has nothing to do with who the readers are. It simply has to do with their rights as a parent and not wanting their children be used as a headline. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the tatler article portrayed how the children will be gravely affected now that Kate has to fill in the gap now that the sussexes left.

3. Yes, no one is saying that the Cambridges have a perfect life. This is also why we responded to your comment.

4. I think I answered this on my second point. But I would also like to add that no one said that Kate didn’t change since entering into the BRF. Her first years in particular, she was still finding her style. I personally didn’t like most of her outfit choices, but I just found her lovely as a person. Everyone adjusts or changes according to their environment, and societal pressures like you say, but it doesn’t have to be an inferiority issue. I think what most people forget is that the Middletons may not have been born rich, but they became a part of the affluent community as their children were growing up. It wasn’t a case of imposter syndrome of some sort. They have earned their money through their hard work and business. As parents, you would definitely give your children the best that you can provide. I don’t see why anyone would still hold that against them. So Kate, Pippa and James were used to their environment. It wasn’t a case of them forcing their way in with the rich - they parents were also rich. Sure, they weren’t aristocrats by any means, which is why the tabloids loved to persecute their background. But as much as haughty people would like to deny it, the Middletons simply were a part of an upperclass society. I know a lot of the tabloids loved to say that William’s friends shunned or hated Kate, but she just kept inserting herself. But if that were true, I doubt Kate would ever feel comfortable to go along with his friends on her own whenever William asked them to watch out for her during events. I think the fact that they took their time with their relationship shows how much William wanted to protect her and make her comfortable. It wasn’t about her trying to be someone else, it was her being ready to take on a job (because that’s what the BRF is - an institution where your job is for the public).

5. Like I said, there’s no issue with you criticizing Kate. You are free to express your critiques, just as it is everyone’s right to defend something they simply don’t agree with. We all leave ourselves open to criticism too once we post our opinions. I don’t consider Kate to be perfect, nobody is. I simply love the few things I see or know about her. I personally don’t think she’s a great or confident speaker, but I still enjoy hearing more from her. As for the not following through, I think the issue is that Kate is never the flashy or showy type. She always does things behind the scenes, and we only see her brief appearances. I don’t think a 5-6 minute video is indicative of how much work she has done. Usually, it’s only after years later, that we hear the back story from the staff when interviewed that Kate has been visiting and calling in for years to do her work. So I don’t think it’s fair to state that she never follows through. Like you said, she is a committed mother. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her focusing on that whenever she can. I think what people don’t realize is that Kate isn’t acting like a royal for a few years. She is in this for the long-run. She is aware that she will be spending decades in public service. This is also why the Queen herself has ensured her and William spend 2 years during the start of their marriage away from spotlight so they can enjoy normalcy while they can. The Queen knows that they will have time. Also, the BRF simply had more senior royal members at the time, so Kate had time to get used to her role. Yes, it may seem slow to all of us, but if you have that luxury, why should we hold it against her? It’s not like she’s doing it so she can spend every week traveling in private jets. She is simply enjoying her time as a mother who happens to be a Duchess as her job.

6. I get what you are saying about wanting to hear more, but you have to realize that maybe it is intimidating for her to do podcasts or interviews on the regular. She is still a royal, and they are not celebrities who have to share or promote all the details of their work. Their job is to raise awareness for specific causes, or initiate projects that can help people. Many have already revealed how the Heads Together project for example was her brainchild, but she actually doesn’t focus on that. It’s all about helping the people directly for her and William. It’s not so much about showing people what they’ve done. This is the same with the other royals, such as Sophie, Princess Anne, and the Queen. You don’t hear the Queen detailing what she is doing for her causes, but we all know she has done a lot over the years. It really shouldn’t matter that they are privileged and have so many nannies or assistants because at the end of the day, if she wants to focus on being a mom, then that’s her call. All her children are under 8 years old, so it really is understandable that she wants to spend these early years focusing on them. But the fact that she still juggles other projects behind the scenes also shows how she is still committed into being a senior working royal.

Phew, that was long. I hope I expressed myself well. I am by no means telling anyone that Kate is above reproach. I was simply saying what I thought about the comments because I personally found them unfair.

Hi, Hi @newroyalintown here! I think there’s so confusion and misinterpretation here.

1. I don’t know Kate Middleton. Therefore, everything I say about her is based on speculation.

2. When I said that she had an inferiority complex, this was not meant to disrespect her, demean her, insult her, or make her seem less than she is. I actually meant it to connect with her more (but I guess not).

- I actually meant to say that she has an inferiority complex coming from the stand point that she knew about the Tatler article and just didn’t expect it to come out that badly. Even with her children being in the article, I just think that if it was another news source, like People or Gratiza, Kate wouldn’t care. However, since Tatler is read from people within her circle, I believe she didn’t want bad PR with them.

3. Something people need to realize about life is that people can everything in the world and be miserable. People can have everything in the world and be unsatisfied. But People can have everything in the world and be very happy. People can have everything in the world and be content. All types of people can exist.

4. If you’re going to act like you’ve never changed your hair, changed your wardrobe, changed your makeup, your overall looks, accent, etc or have never met someone who hasn’t tried to impress people then we must just live in different worlds. I think Meghan has done it, so why is it so hard to think that Kate could do it? Kate dabbled in smoking (I think she’s stopped) but William was the smoker, not her. From what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem like a lot of aristocrats liked the Middletons. Maybe that’s changed, but it takes a lot for someone to marry into a life where the people look down on you. Is the inferiority complex a stretch? Absolutely, but that wouldn’t stop Kate or Meghan from wanting to assimilate in a way that would make them more digestible to the aristocrats.

- I am a girl, but I do recognize that a lot of the changes that we get are influenced by societal pressures and just wanting to look normal and like everyone else, especially as a Black girl.

5. The reason I criticize Kate so much or analyze her “so harshly” is because I believe she can do so much more than she lets on. Part of that I blame on William, because he was born the Royal not Kate. However, Kate can take a really good photograph. She has really good ideas (they need to be fleshed out a bit more), she’s a really caring mom (not only for her own kids, but for other children), and has good intentions. My issue is that she doesn’t always follow through and doesn’t do as much as she could with all the resources she has.

6. My mom is a mother of 5 children, and we’ve never had help from no nannies, no family, no nothing. So I’m sorry if I’m not as forgiving when it comes to Kate and her 3 children with her nanny and her mom. However, I’m not mad at Kate for using her resources, I just wished she would talk about them more. For example, with Tiny Happy People she discussed and recognized that there is a gap with children when they start kindergarten/prep school (???) and I would love if she could discuss how she has help and other parents don’t but sometimes parenting is still difficult with help. She has discussed the insecurities and guilt she has felt as a mom, and that’s great. But she continue to be consistent. I would honestly love for her to do more podcasts.

So I hoped I’ve cleared some things up @i-grace20-love, @aimie-b, @bookobsessionxxx, and @tillyswats.

[slashers-hell]

Hey su. Could you do a character analysis about tenten covering things like her development also whether or not she is as "useless and weak" as many perceive her to be. Is she really that inferior to her fellow team mates? Does she deserve any hate/negativity at all? And is any of the hate/ negativity she gets valid/justified? And lastly do you ship her with Rock lee or Neji and Why and also what are your overall personal thoughts on tenten :)

Hey, Natalie!

Tenten is firstly introduced as the only female student of Gai’s team. As the series progresses, we learn that she has the goal to become a legendary kunoichi, admiring Tsunade, which she openly shares with others. This is initially one of the motives that set her apart from her fellow female comrades. Her dreams don’t revolve around a man. During this time, she attempts to emulate Tsunade, building up her raw strength and trying to become a medical-nin. Unfortunately, she seems to fail, but she later discovers her talent for weapons, developing a unique fighting style. Interesting to note is, Tenten’s skills are the most ninja-like in the entire franchise.

Moving forward, she still wants to become a legendary ninja without following in Tsunade’s footsteps. At this point, Tenten is strongly opinionated about women, defending girls by saying they can be just as skilled as boys when Neji claims otherwise. And while she has potential, Kishimoto decides to sideline her in order to make room for her male teammates. Especially the ending is disappointing, as she suddenly gives up her dream for reasons unknown. I fully respect any woman to choose her career; however, one cannot deny the fact that Tenten never expresses the wish to own a weapon store. 

There are three categories Kishimoto puts his female characters in 700: 

A married mother and housewife

Unmarried and heavier/older

Unmarried yet unsuccessful

Tenten falls into the last category since she has an unsuccessful weapon shop and isn’t married. To put it bluntly, she doesn’t achieve anything of significance, leaving her underdeveloped. By definition, character development is a change in characterisation. At its core, it shows a character changing. 

Didn’t Tenten change? Well, yeah, she kind of did. The problem is, her change was a downgrade and didn’t add anything to her characterisation. In conclusion, Tenten has rather poor development. I cannot say what Kishimoto did with Tenten was sufficiently developed. I cannot say how he chose to end Tenten’s character journey with her having not much screen time anyway was a good idea. I cannot say the message he sent was positive. 

As for Tenten’s skills, we know her as a quite capable ninja. Her skills are being held in high regard by her team. As an adult, Tenten is considered Konoha’s best weapon user. The question we have to ask here is, why would anyone in their right mind describe her as useless and inferior to her teammates with all these prestige surrounding her persona?

The answer is simpler than one might assume.

We never see Tenten being great. Despite her having incredible ninja skills, Kishimoto doesn’t show how she achieves her power. This makes people believe Tenten is weak and useless. We’re merely told she is powerful, and she doesn’t bring the plot much further with her abilities. Basically, Kishimoto is committing one of the greatest mistakes in literature. He tells—he doesn’t show. Now, the rule “show, don’t tell” is a technique often employed in various kinds of texts to enable the reader to experience the story through action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings instead through the author’s exposition. Readers need to interpret significant details in texts. Said details shouldn’t be forced down readers’ throats. Keep in mind, this applies to all forms of fiction.

Here is an example to bring my point adequately across:

“She was scared.”

This is what Kishimoto does. It’s telling and describing. How would showing look like, then? Perhaps like this:

“She felt her throat constrict with something unidentifiable—behind her smile, she was experiencing all forms of sheer panic. In fact, she couldn’t explain to herself why her mind was suddenly whirled with chaos, completely unable to form a coherent thought.”

This is more vivid, more relatable, more real. 

Tenten is the best weapon user in the village, which is a huge title considering how many talented ninjas live in Konoha, and yet, we rarely see Tenten display her skill set. Thus, readers perceive her as someone weak and useless.

Does this justify the hate she gets? No, it doesn’t. Hate is never justified because it’s deconstructive. Criticism, on the other hand, can be legitimised and actually expands one’s knowledge. Therefore, the hate she gets is not justified—valid critique is. One final point, I don’t ship her with any of her teammates, but if I were to, I would most likely ship her with Neji because it’d interest me how both interact with each other in a romantic context.

I hope this answers your question!