#but it cannibalizes itself even when taken on its own merits

[randomfoggytiger]

Scully's Survival Broke The Field Where I Died's Cycle

I noticed something while scrubbing through Mulder's hypnosis: in each past life (the concentration camps and the Civil War battle), Scully is always killed first; then Mulder; then Melissa Reidel.

I think that not only were the souls reborn correctly in this life, but they also ended in the correct order-- that Scully circumvented her destined end in order to save Mulder from his tragic, heroic pitfalls. And, more importantly, that she was alive at the crucial moment of Mulder's life: the moment his exhausted soul was almost doomed to repeat another failed cycle at the hands of Melissa Rydell's destined self-sabotage.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SCULLY'S UNPRECEDENTED SURVIVAL

Mulder has a history of being the first one to get into trouble: it's not two cases in before Mulder sneaks onto an airfield base and gets mindwiped. We know Mulder takes impossible risks even when Scully isn't there to back him up; so, it's more likely he would die on the field than live long enough to be canned from the FBI.

Although Mulder wasn't going to be killed in Deep Throat (just returned more scrambled on release) Scully wouldn't have been able to save him from fate or himself if she'd died later in Squeeze, Ghost in the Machine, Eve, Gender Bender, Lazarus, Young at Heart, Shapes, Darkness Falls, and Tooms. Or, more particularly, in One Breath.

If Scully had died in the forests of Darkness Falls, then Mulder would have been died underground in Tooms. If Scully had died in One Breath-- as she was meant to, it seems-- then Mulder might have died in Firewalker and Aubrey but most certainly in End Game; and when Irresistible didn't kill her, cancer tried to throughout Season 4, which almost caused Mulder's death in Demons, regardless. If Scully died in Kitsunegari, Mulder would've died in Kill Switch and Bad Blood. If Scully died in The Red and the Black, Mulder would've died in Folie a Deux. If Scully had died in Fight the Future, Mulder would have died then or perished soon after in Triangle. If Scully had died in Tithonus, Mulder would have burnt alive at the One Son hanger. If Scully had died in Field Trip, then her presence wouldn't have brought Mulder out of his psychosis (and death) then or in Amor Fati. And lastly, if Scully had died in Orison, Mulder would have died in First Person Shooter and Brand X, etc.

The infamous ending to Pusher exemplifies this dynamic to a 'T': Mulder rushes in without caring for his own safety; but the kill shot was turned on Scully, not Modell or himself. And if Scully hadn't saved them both, Modell might have taken a bullet to the chest or he might have manipulated Mulder's mind further for his own ends.

But it all ties back most pivotally to One Breath, where she chose to stay instead of pass on. By fighting to live another day, Scully began a pattern that lead to her and Mulder's salvation.

MELISSA RYDELL GOES FIRST

Not only is this the first life cycle that Scully survived, but it's also the first cycle that places Scully, Mulder, and Melissa on an even romantic playing field. Mulder subtly acknowledges this by asking where he and Scully still fit with, he assumes, a soulmate wedged between them: "Dana, if, um, early in the four years we'd been working together... if we'd been friends together, in other life times, always, would it changed some of the ways we looked at one another?" Scully doesn't believe in fate, living her life by the dictates of her conscience; and Mulder's question doesn't shake those beliefs, either.

And not only does Scully survive with the ability to rival Melissa's hold on Mulder, but she and Mulder are also this cycle's first unprecedented survivors: Melissa (Mulder's tragic mirror) dies first and dies alone. Mulder still broke rank in his attempts to save her; but by heeding protocol as long as he did, Mulder was too late to be killed before Rydell or to join her in death.

Why did he play by the rules that long? Because the impact of Scully's partnership-- years of insisting he follow the guidelines created for his protection-- kept his destructive tendency at bay long enough to save him from certain death. Her active presence by his side reinforced this decision when it mattered most: the moment that changed the course of their fate.

CONCLUSION

It's like Scully said: "Even if I knew for certain, I wouldn't change a day." She doesn't believe in fate; and The Field Where I Died's implications would therefore suggest Scully beats back destiny through sheer force of will, besting the monsters that hunt her as easy prey and saving Mulder from the demons driving him harder and faster into irrational action.

And she won. Cancer was already growing in her brain; but Scully outlasted the cycle that trapped her, Mulder, and Rydell's souls: that she die first (or that she die at all.)

Souls may mate eternal; but her choice broke old chains and saved their fate.

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

[rainstormcolors]

it's totally cool if you'd prefer not to answer this (i've noticed it's a bit of a sensitive subject in fandom)- I was a bit curious, What did you personally think of the Ceremonial Duel?

This is a very good ask, though my answer may not be able tomeet that expectation.

The Ceremonial Duel is something of a multifaceted topic,isn’t it?  My own take, the reception itreceived overall by fans, and the behind the scenes aspect, as well as my ideafor how it both fits and clashes with various aspects of the series if I feellike including that break down too. It’s also something I’m not emotionallycharged on. My feelings on it are neutral and I’m able to see the merits ofboth sides of the argument of whether it’s a fine or garbage ending.

If I had to sum it up in one sentence: I think the endingwas very heavily foreshadowed from early on within the series, but it has majorproblems, and that Atem’s feelings were left so intentionally ambiguous isintriguing to me.

Prior to DSoD, as a lurker coasting around odd fandom spacesfrom time to time, I did have the impression YGO’s conclusion was somethingpeople were iffy on. As far as I’ve been able to gather, Japan’s fandom hadsome iffiness too. I think the announcement of The Darkside of Dimensionsreally illuminated the fandom divide on the ending in a way. There were manyfans who were flatly rejecting DSoD altogether on principle, but the film ofcourse set out to examine some of the wounds left in the wake of Atem’s departure,and that’s something many fans had also felt haunted by. (There are of coursefans who despise both the original ending and DSoD, and there are of coursefans who are alright with both the original ending and DSoD; my point is more noticingthe split of fans’ receptiveness to a continuation.)

People dissect apart that final duel to try justifying theirtake on Atem’s feelings. An expression that could be taken as somber, anexpression that could be taken as one of relief; dialog drops grabbed fromcharacters who are not Atem but instead projecting onto Atem; etc. The truth isthere isn’t an answer in canon on whether Atem definitely wanted to leave ordefinitely wanted to stay. His feelings were left ambiguous; and I find thatchoice intriguing. It would’ve been so simple to give lines to Atem announcinghis relief at finally being able to rest, or announcing his crushing pain athaving to depart from the world. Instead the event is treated like a mechanismof nature.

My personal interpretation on this ambiguity is this: “ifthe items wanted to reunite inside the Millennium Stone, if the items couldmanipulate their bearers for the sake of reuniting there, if the items had noconcern for human life… I don’t think it’s out of the question the MillenniumPuzzle planted an inescapable urge inside Atem to depart to the netherworld. Ithink it really is like a salmon swimming upstream to die.”That’s not to say I’m correct; it’s just my reading.

And I also wrote this bit some time back, back before the “discourse”regarding the finale bubbled over and became bright: “I think, like so manyshonen series, Yu-Gi-Oh! was ultimately a metaphor for the journey fromadolescence into adulthood. Yugi saw Atem as a kind of idealized self. “Youwere my goal,” as he says. Their relationship became much more complex thanthat, but I think Atem leaving was meant to symbolize Yugi letting go of thisidea of an idealized self, this person he thought he should become when he wasyounger, and accepting himself for who he is. The metaphor becomes messy thoughbecause Atem is a character in his own right, with his own identity and desiresand fears, and his departure does contradict several other messages of theseries (staking your worth on a game??).”

The characters left behind would be wounded. It would hurtand they’d be haunted. Atem was not Yugi’s idealized self. He was a person. Hewas their friend.

But I don’t actually hate the original ending, in partbecause it seemed so obvious to me. I feel the immense foreshadowing shouldn’tjust be brushed aside in this discussion. And the behind the scenes aspectlooms large here: there was no time to course correct for KT. Either he had toshatter all the foreshadowing he spent seven years crafting, or he had to sendoff Atem with exceedingly poor justification in text. By that time, he’d beenabandoned by his audience and may have felt little need to break away from theoriginal plan. But that doesn’t mean fans can’t be upset about it.

The precise reason fans are upset is because they care aboutthese characters so much; I have to respect that. It’s honest pain. There’ssomething sour with this ending to leave that kind of scar on fans. But I findthe occasional mocking and moralizing comments that have come up aimed atpeople who liked the ending to be uncalled for. Humans read into fiction invery individual ways, and I think that should also be respected. (Though I’ve beentold this situation of one side sometimes mocking the other used to be inreverse.)

If I have to play defense for the original conclusion, it’dbe in how I feel there’s shades of sad nostalgia enveloping those moments. Despitethe metaphor of growing up itself collapsing, the feeling of ghosts and lostthings from adolescence you can never get back is there.

Even for fans who see the ending as something uplifting andhopeful; it’s a personal feeling and reading. Yugi accomplished his goal of helpingsomeone who had helped him. Likely, they interpreted Atem’s expressions in the endas ones of relief.

(I actually realized not too long ago that the anime had itsown foreshadowing, unintentionally perhaps, in Noa Kaiba as he understands he’salready dead and must accept his fate.)

If I have any last thoughts to include, they are unneededbut it’d be that the longest fanfic I ever successfully completed kind of examinedthe holes in the finale. I have no intentions of ever posting this fic and havealready cannibalized pieces of it for other fics but it was like this: Atem,feeling the strange tug on his heart to go to Egypt but hesitant, decides he’llwait to make his decision. This enrages the Millennium Puzzle and it seals Ateminside, not allowing him to manifest or communicate with the world at all untilthe Millennium Items are gathered at the tomb in Egypt. Yugi units the Items insidethe Millennium Stone, at which time Horakhty emerges before Atem inside thePuzzle. The Items combined allow a wish, one far more powerful than anyindividual Item’s wish. Horakhty tells Atem this wish even has the power toreturn life to a ghost. But now see, this fic was an edgy angstfest whereanother character had been killed off near the beginning of the story. Atem hasno hesitation in spending his wish for this person, and time loops back. Atemis able to stop the accident from happening. No one else remembers anything.And as time moves forward again, that’s why Atem’s feelings are so nebulous andyet set on his departure from the world. …… I don’t know if this was relevantto include, but it seems kind of related.

Thank you for the ask. I hope I gave an adequate answer. I’mopen to the thoughts of others on this.

[bethgreeneishopeunseen]

Gimple’s Pantheon: Freyja

Gimple loves to incorporate literary and mythological allusions into his story, the story he’s been telling since he took over as showrunner for season 4. For example, Bethyl and Carzekiel both have similarities to Hades/Persephone. He wants his story to ultimately be timeless. Glenn and Maggie’s search for each other in 4b is compared to Ulysses/Odysseus (X). During season six, @bethgreenewarriorprincess noticed two Easter eggs that connected Michonne to the Norse goddess Freyja/Freya. She suggested that Richonne was partially based off/modeled off of Freyja and Odr. Freyja and Odr are believed to be the same as Frigga and Odin, due to linguistic and narrative similarities (X). Christy planned on writing up a Richonne meta, but she decided to leave it alone, so with her permission I took the two Easter eggs she showed me and researched the idea myself, diving into 4x09 and 4x11. Along the way I discovered parallels and eggs related to Beth’s story. This meta will be split between Michonne/Richonne and Team Delusional, as warning for those who aren’t TD.

Before I go any further into my findings, I want to make something clear: Gimple seeds storylines in advance. Sometimes years in advance. No prop or other cinematographic element goes wasted in a scene. In 4x09, when Carl finds a boy’s room filled with video games, there is a Swedish eye chart (X). It foreshadowed Carl losing his eye exactly two seasons later, which is further supported by other similar props showing up in seasons 5 and 6. In 4x11, while recuperating, Rick reads a collection of Jack London’s short stories, which includes theme of cannibalism (X). This was right before Terminus was introduced to the Grimes family’s arc. In 7x12, the Richonne “Honeymoon” episode, Gimple symbolically marries the couple. During the opening montage, Rick finds a wedding dress, then he and Michonne are shown having sex, “consummating” the marriage (X). The rest of the episode is filled with romantic imagery, tropes, and them sharing intimate conversations about their relationship. All of this takes place in an episode called “Say Yes”. Gimple is a certified nerd.

The two main storylines in 4x09 follow Carl and Michonne on their own, learning about themselves and how they’ve changed. Carl declares that, “I can take care of myself,” before launching into a grief-filled monologue about Rick’s failings. With his father unconscious, Carl sets out on his own to find food. Beth told Daryl the same thing when he tried to take her back to their suck-ass camp. Like Carl, she was grieving, and Daryl was shut-down, emotionally as comatose as Rick was physically. She wanted to find a drink, to give herself a purpose and to live for once. She and Carl share parallels as their stories are both apocalyptic Bildungsromans (coming-of-age). Christy found a plaque that read “Fredag”. Much like the eye chart, the plaque is also in Swedish. It means Friday, but more specifically, “The modern Scandinavian form is "Fredag" in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, meaning Freyja's day” (X).

The sign is even next to the can of pudding, so the audience is primed to notice to it.

The other Freyja egg that Christy discovered is in the Alexandria Safe-Zone tour. Near the mantle, where Michonne hung her katana, is a horse statue. Freyja is a goddess of beauty, love, lust, fertility, war, and death. Horses fit all of these attributes, and one of Freyja’s titles even means “Mare of Vanir”. Michonne also had a pet horse, Flame, during 4a.

In my research, some traits of Freyja immediately jumped out at me:

“A pair of cats work together to draw her cart, proving her sovereignty as a goddess. Diana Paxson suggested the names Bygul and Trjegul - "Bee-gold" and "Tree-Gold" - for Freyja's cats, to honor her connections with honey and amber.”

“Freyja's power and beauty are symbolized most strongly by the necklace Brisingamen. The four dwarven smiths, the Brising brothers, forged a golden necklace of unsurpassed beauty, which Freyja could not bear to let pass from her grasp.”

Freyja has many lovers/commits infidelity against Odr. (Source: X).

She and Freyja share similar traits and symbolism. The cat connection is obvious. But Michonne also has a deep appreciation for art, most famously embodied in her cat statues from 3x12 and 7x10.  In 3x13, she explained to Carl that, “I just couldn't leave this behind. It's just too damn gorgeous.” Like Freyja, she values beauty. She decorated her home with paintings, went to galleries, and dressed fashionably, before the apocalypse (X). She was also very opinionated about art, indicating that she had a developed interest in that world. In the dream sequence from 4x09, she and Terry debate the merits of an exhibit. The Brisingamen necklace also fits as a trait of Michonne, because she’s worn the same gold necklace since she was fully introduced in season 3.

While the last bullet point doesn’t fit TV!Michonne, it goes along with the history of her comic book counterpart. Comic!Michonne has had the most lovers of any character in the comics, and she came on to Tyreese when he was with C@rol.

Michonne’s appreciation of art parallels Beth’s love of music and overall appreciation for beauty. They both push their men to see beyond survival, to make choices that will allow all of them live. They’re both compassionate, warrior women who came from a low period of mental/emotional instability. One symbol connected only to Beth, the ladybug, is even a symbol of Freyja (X). Freyja is described as being fair-haired and blue-eyed, like Beth, and her general attributes could also fit Beth. As I mentioned earlier, Bethyl and Carzekiel parallel Hades and Persephone, but Bethyl fits this mold the most. Gimple parallels both Michonne and Beth with Freyja, but Michonne is his main focus for this allusion.

With all of that in mind, there were also Beth eggs in 4x09. After Carl found the pudding, he went upstairs and passed some eggs, and he then had to escape from a walker, losing his shoe in the process. First he passed a box labeled “Peanut Butter”. People don’t just label a box “Peanut Butter”, especially since there was no actual peanut butter in the episode. The label refers to “Alone”, as peanut butter and jelly has become Bethyl symbols, and Beth chose the peanut butter. The peanut butter jar even reappeared in 7x08, in a Daryl-scene that mirrored his character development in Alone.

The second egg was actually a trifecta of eggs. The first room upstairs opened into an empty bedroom, and it contained a horrible sight. There was a dead canary on the carpet. The birdcage and bird caught my eye, as the last time a birdcage had appeared in the show, it appeared in Beth’s cell in 4x01 (X). Her birdcage had a number “4” inside of it, referring to 5x04 or Slabtown, which was her “cage” as she is the show’s songbird. The Beth connection goes further, as it is a yellow canary. Yellow is Beth’s signature color, as the color surrounds her and was part of her main costume, and the color keeps reappearing in moments and characters that parallel her. The same kind of yellow canary appeared in a season-4 Daryl poster, as reference to his search for Beth (X).

The fact that two yellow birds appeared in the same season cannot be a coincidence, especially since they both appeared in relation to other Beth-related imagery.

Then of course, there is the box on the bed labeled “Shoes”. Shoes, especially lone shoes, were established as a motif in this episode and continued into season 7, culminating with Boots. Who is Beth, no matter how you cut it (X). Carl loses his shoe escaping the walker upstairs, leaving a sign that references the lost shoe. TPTB wanted the audience to notice the shoe. I think all of these Easter eggs allude Beth's arc: peanut butter, dead song bird taken from its cage, and then Carl losing his shoe escaping the walker. Bethyl in Alone, Grady and Carl getting there when Beth is “dead”, and then her surviving the 800-walker herd, escaping from death, and returning as Boots/Binoculars Bethfoot. 4x09 contained symbols to outline Beth’s arc post-season 4, before it transitioned to full on parallels/rehearsals in 4x11. (In a previous meta, I already outlined how Glenn and Rick’s arcs in that episode foreshadowed Beth’s story: X.)

Overall, the house that Rick, Carl, and Michonne stayed in from 4x09 and 4x11 had Scandinavian elements. There was Nordic-looking artwork, which made me think of Rick as Odr/Odin, the supreme god in Norse mythology and a warrior god.

There is also a recurring water bottle from a company called “Wolford Springs”. The name itself sounds Scandinavian/Germanic, but I had never heard of it. The show has created fake brands in the past, so I looked up “Wolford Springs” and nothing direct came up on Google. Most results led me to a European company called Wolford that is known for its lingerie.

And Freyja is the goddess of lust and beauty.

Antlers also popped up in the background as decoration, which probably means the image is to be associated with Michonne. I looked up Freyja and antlers, and I was not disappointed. Freyja had a twin brother, Freyr, and they had a relationship.

On the god’s Wikipedia page, the introduction mentions that:

“The most extensive surviving Freyr myth relates Freyr's falling in love with the female jötunn Gerðr. Eventually, she becomes his wife but first Freyr has to give away his magic sword which fights on its own "if wise be he who wields it." Although deprived of this weapon, Freyr defeats the jötunn Beli with an antler. However, lacking his sword, Freyr will be killed by the fire jötunn Surtr during the events of Ragnarök” (X).

Gimple combined Freyja and Freyr for his story. Antlers appeared around Michonne because they refer to her katana, her signature weapon and her most iconic feature.

(Notice also the silver wind chime on Carl’s left. The D.C. spoon is one of the central symbols foreshadowing Beth’s survival.)

Before I go more into the other Beth eggs in 4x11 I found this time, I want to wrap up the Michonne/Freyja parallels. Freyja and Odr/Odin were a power couple in Norse mythology. They were both warriors, both rulers. Odin is probably most known for ruling over Valhalla, the celebratory hall meant for people who died in battle. Well, Freya had her own, in a sense, to compliment her husband’s:

“Freya is living in Asgard (the home of the Gods), the name of her house is Sessrumnir and it is located by the field Fólkvangr which means “field of the host”, “people field” or “army field”[.] It is a place where half of the people who dies in a battle go for the afterlife, while Odin will receive the other half. Freya is always given the first choice among the brave warriors, after she had picked the ones she wanted, the rest were sent to Odin” (X).

Makes you think of Rick and Michonne ruling Alexandria, doesn’t it? If you need further proof, here you go:

When Rick gets into bed to read that Jack London book, he sets his watch on the nightstand beside a tube of lipstick and a gold necklace. The gold necklace goes back to Freyja’s prized necklace, and in this set-up, the bed is a domestic space. It foreshadows Rick and Michonne sharing a bed for real two seasons later.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this meta, Gimple seeds plotlines early on. In this episode, Carl and Michonne scavenge through a house. There was a sunflower painting and a painting that resembled Mary from Terminus. Even major media sites picked up on these eggs (X). The other paintings, and the scene itself, allude to Beth. Michonne opens up to Carl in 4x11, revealing pieces of a past she had long kept locked up, but to keep herself from getting overwhelmed, Michonne has Carl play a game:

“Okay. I'll answer one question at a time, one room at a time, and only after we've cleared it. [...] You know, you could be a spy. Or a cop.”

The game parallels Zach and Daryl’s game in 4x01, about Daryl’s job. Zach even asked if Daryl had been a cop before the Turn. It’s been theorized that Beth would spy for Team Family, if she were in an enemy group. I believe that Beth is taken shelter, intermittently, with the Scavengers/the Heapsters. She’d become a spy for her family. Michonne also looks at a painting of a dog looking up at a full moon. My mind immediately jumped to Beth, who would be following the North Star in order to reach Virginia. There were full moons in 4x01, 4x12, and throughout season 5 (X).

Carl is eager to learn more about Michonne and impatient, so he asks, “Does this hallway count as a room?”

Michonne: If you can find a something we can use.

And this exchange takes place in a yellow hallway, one filled with Easter eggs. Tunnel imagery surrounds Beth, and the theme of “usefulness” is all Grady. Back at the house, Rick escaped from the Claimers through a yellow bathroom. Two yellow rooms, in completely different houses. Again, not a coincidence. As Michonne was meant to become a queen who would co-rule with her husband, Beth was meant to return.

[dailybestiary]

Knight & Megapon Ants

Knight ants are a special caste of ants dedicated to defending their colony’s home.  They grow particularly wide heads to protect their colonymates, who also benefit from the greater coordination signaled by the knight ants’ pheromones.  

Megapon ants, meanwhile, have the rare distinction of being (in the editions I own, anyway) the only Bestiary species I’ve seen to not merit a description. (Heck, I can’t even Google a good definition for megapon.)  But at CR 6, they’re nothing to sneeze at; they can carry prodigious amounts of weight; and their Strength-sapping poison suggests the sting of a fire ant or some aggressive, prehistoric lineage.

A clan of dwarves uses alchemical scents to tame and coax behaviors out of their ant livestock.  A local war calls most of the clan elders away from the hold, and when they return they discover that the artificial scents have spoiled.  Their knight ant guards now bar the way to the lower levels, no longer recognizing the dwarves as friends.

A martial arts master with some training as a druid believes in basing his forms and stances off of those in nature.  In order to learn his specialized skills (in game terms, teamwork feats), adventurers must study knight ants in the tunnels of their hill—without killing a single one.

Adventurers are racing through the canopy of the great god’s-home trees, fleeing cannibals hot on their trail.  They come across a column of megapon ants using their bodies to create a bridge for themselves and their giant aphid thralls.  If the adventurers can find a way to sneak across the ant bridge, they will easily lose their pursuers.  Otherwise they might have to fight the enormous ants and the kuru-maddened cannibals at the same time.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 27

I recently relistened to the audiobook version of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, read by the outstanding Simon Prebble.  I first listened to it during a massive, speeding ticket-filled, two-day road trip from San Francisco to Portland via Crater Lake several years ago.  I’m happy to say I loved it then—so much so that in my hunger for more I discovered Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin books—and I loved it now—so much so that I accrued $28 in overdue fines because I had other books checked out and didn’t want to give any of them back.  (If you throw in the speeding tickets, that’s compelling evidence that good books make me make bad choices, apparently.)

JS&MN truly is an extraordinary book—all the more so because it’s a first novel.  (Neil Gaiman’s quote about a fragment from one of Clarke’s early drafts—“It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata”—still holds up.)  The true-to-the-1800s language, the sense of place, and the treatment of academic arguments as being as important as a battle are nearly perfect.  I love the characters; I love the world; I love the faerie lore; I love almost everything.

Because I love it so much, certain things still drive me nuts.  Most of these little things are insufficiently answered (to my mind, at least) questions or breakdowns in verisimilitude: How can Mr Norrell justify obstructing the progress of all other magicians if he publicly claims to want to restore English magic…why does Childermass remain with Mr Norrell for so long even after the meanness of his master’s character is revealed…why do Lady Pole and Stephen Strange’s maladies go so long undiagnosed, even with a faerie glamour to blame…things like that.  In reality, the book may be better for not answering these questions, but they still leave me fidgety with agitation.

A second listen did also confirm a major beef I had the first time I listened to it, though: It is a figure eight of a work, its whole shape constantly circling around two black holes of noninformation.  

The first is that the actual working of magic is barely shown and never explained.  Clarke has said that she “really like[s] magicians,” but weirdly she seems willing to gloss over the magic they do almost entirely. (Early in the book this is amusing—even the characters are impatient to see magic done—but by 2/3s of the way in it’s infuriatingly coy.)  We almost never get a sense of how it feels for the magicians to do magic, or why these two men have succeeded where almost no one else has.  (That they were prophesied doesn’t cut it.)  It’s a staggeringly strange omission, especially to a fantasy fan audience used to reading about how it feels to come into one’s power, whatever that power may be.  Strange in particular stumbles into magic and then the narrative curtain closes; when it reopens he is already a thaumaturgical Mozart.  That is, as the South Park kids would say, some total BS right there.

The second problem is that this is a work of alternate history that refuses to share its alternate history.  True, the novel purports to be written by someone from Strange’s acquaintance only a generation or so later, so much of this knowledge is assumed to be held by the reader.  But despite all its many, many, many footnotes, the book barely gives us a coherent alternate timeline, and so much of how the novel’s history diverges from our own is unclear.  (For comparison, Philip K. Dick is a downright clumsy author compared to Clarke, but I can tell you more about the history of Man in the High Castle, and it’s a mere pamphlet next to the Bible-fat JS&MN.)  I don't need much more detail, but I do need more.

Worse yet, not only has Clarke created a fictional northern England with a fictional Raven King that we don't know enough about, but she also seems to have fallen a little in love with him. (Strong evidence of this is that the characters positively won’t shut up about him; he even gives his name to the novel’s third act.)  It is dangerous to fall in love with fictional people or settings, and doing so is a surefire way to undermine the story.  (Notice, for instance, how Tolkien burns the Shire, and how J. K. Rowling—whose writerly smarts are often underrated—is careful to get her characters out of Hogwarts after the love letter to it that is The Order of the Phoenix.  Now compare that to, say, The Name of the Wind, which struck me as loving its central character just a bit too much, or the insufferable anime Clamp School Detectives, whose love for its own impossible setting is a veritable fountain of onanism (see what I did there?) that eventually feels like a taunt to the viewer who will never attend there. You can’t love your fictional children too hard, and Clarke loves John Uskglass.

So as I said, a great novel, but a figure eight thanks to these two crucial holes.  Do not under *any* circumstances let these prevent you from reading it though!

Unfortunately, a new qualm came up as I was listening this time: the novel’s hagiography of Englishness. In a 2005 interview with Locus, Susanna Clarke practically quoted Tolkien word for word in her lament that England did not have a myth of its own. (Sidebar: English culture is odd in that its most famous legend, Beowulf, takes place in Denmark, a divorce of a people from its mythic geography that seems to really bother certain writers.  In fact, this lack is responsible for both The Silmarillion and JS&MN.  King Arthur doesn’t work for them for some reason; he’s either too British rather than English—a distinction too arcane for my American mind, but there it is—or too Welsh, and his legend has definitely become too French.  Robin Hood doesn’t work either, for some reason, despite his being safely nestled in the East Midlands.  The tl;dr of all this is that there is no understanding the English mythic imagination when you’re a fat Yank git.)  So Clarke fills JS&MN with her love for England—its people, its cities, and its countryside, especially the North, where she revels in its preindustrial wildness.  And Englishness as a laudatory attribute fills nearly every page.  (More on this can be found over on Wikipedia, but don’t go there until you’ve read/listened to the book, because it’s spoiler central.)

The thing is though, Clarke is smart enough to know that glorifying England, Englishness, Englishmen (emphasis on the “men” there), and king/queen and country has caused a lot of pain for other folks in the world.  So she works very hard to undercut this worship of Englishness, giving strong roles to women, nonwhite, and poor characters, and amplifying their voicelessness in the society of that time through the narrative.  It’s all a genius balancing act, and it all serves to intentionally undercut and deflate the project of England worship that the novel is busily engaged in…

…And yet, Englishness, in the end, wins out.  England remains the hero.  The English countryside itself is instrumental in turning the tide in the final encounter.  Lovely, lush, green, hilly, moor-covered England is still the hero.

Which should be all well and good, but…  Well, I’m just not on board with cheering for England right now. 

I’m a Top Gear fan.  And I watched Jeremy Clarkson’s no-one-is-better-than-us casual racism—as an American I’m spared the overt racism of his other appearances—wax stronger with every season, slowly curdling my affection.  And I watched Brexit throw my expatriate scientist friends’ careers into a tumult and imperil their research.  It was also, more to the point, a triumph of Englishness over the needs of Britishness.  

And here on this side of the pond, I’ve watched a similar dynamic play out, as many Americans have taken to celebrating America—or at least, their mean, small-minded, and resentful notion of it—to the point that pride of place and race have become more important than the principals that make America work.

So I still love JS&MN.  And I think you should read and even love JS&MN.  And zero of what I’ve said in the previous two paragraphs is Susanna Clarke’s fault.  But in JS&MN, a country is a character—the protagonist even. And right now, in 2017, loving a place more than people doesn’t feel that good.

So I’m going to return JS&MN back to the library for another 7 years or so, or maybe for longer.  And the next time I get it out, I hope I’ve fallen back in love with England and America.

Because that is the magic I most want to see.

[decolonizingmyfeels]

LET'S TALK ABOUT THE GENDER COMMENTARY IN MOTHER!

There's been criticism abound for Requiem for a Dream/ Black Swan director, Darren Aronofsky's latest emotional roller coaster, but the vast majority of it is founded upon a refusal (or inability - who knows?) to note even a snippet of the allegory to be found in it. Were I to have taken this movie literally I'm sure I'd have been similarly frustrated, if not downright annoyed, by the subsequent apparent lack of coherent plot and sudden, drastic, unexplained crescendos and denouements in its pace.  Without acknowledging the metaphor rooted in this dizzying presentation however, these criticisms, I feel, hold little relevance to the movie and my intent here is not to exhaust them any further.

The critique I do find interesting, however, is Dahlia Grossman-Heinze's at Bitch magazine, due to the sheer irony of what I had, until then, taken to be an explicitly and objectively feminist film being completely slandered by a feminist magazine, for feminist reasons. I had even assumed Mother!'s feminism played a part in its dismal reception, disgruntling the overwhelmingly white male demographic of powerful movie critics with its rare lack of regard for placing their priorities at the forefront.

Grossman-Heinze, on the other hand, argues she "didn’t need another pop culture artifact about the innate selflessness and nurturing qualities of women as they give and give and give until everything, including their hearts, have been taken from them;" and I’m suddenly wondering why more critics didn't hail this film as prime jerk-off material. Grossman Heinze is as sick as the rest of us of being forced to watch the white male's idealized conception of femininity dote on her man and take the bludgeoning for his mistakes. But I think such a vision of this film in particular fails to recognize femininity, specifically the western social and cultural conception of it, as a concrete entity able to be critiqued and metaphor'd; it instead assumes that to personify this conception is to claim it is a real one representative of actual persons. I personally felt Aronofsky is no more claiming Mother represents actual women than he is claiming that the 'Poet' represents an actual God. Mother!, to me, was a picking apart of a mythos, being of course the western Biblical story and its imagery. The story he is telling is someone else's story, not his, and these are not his characters or archetypes. It was not his fetish to put Mother through this torture. He is simply taking the already written story western culture has told itself for centuries and flipping it on its head. He makes Mother a caricature intentionally, asking - if Christianity's 'ideal feminine and mother' truly existed as she's been described to us, what would her story be? How are we treating her and how would she feel about it? The overwhelming majority of the film is shot as literally as possible from her point of view, from above her shoulder, or in close-up inspection of her face and emotional expression. This in itself is vastly different from the tropes Grossman-Heinze is referring to. What Aronofsky is doing is the equivalent of retelling the biblical parable through the perspective of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother, and in trying to recall the last time we saw anything of the sort, we realize just how radical Mother! is as a film, especially one that so sneakily found its way into standard theatres. He is framing for us our own imagery of womanhood, the one we ourselves constructed and have romanticized for so long, while we also spit on everything she supposedly cares about, considering her always an accessory rather than a full-fledged character with an experience of her own.

I understand the apprehension against just another male saviour complex in the case of Aronofsky: yet another man thinking he has anything to say about the plight of women or what to do about it. But it's a fine line to draw between checking that privilege, and tabooing men away from having their own experience of feminism. It can be difficult to draw the line between keeping feminist dialogue centered around women, and from designating the responsibility of it entirely onto women. The latter would only be a continuation of thrusting society's emotional labor onto women's shoulders, expecting them to be our saviors from patriarchal ruin by curating themselves into a new ideal. Yes, we are tired of the old narrative that expects women to prioritize doting commitment and motherhood above all else, but it does not make sense to reject that stereotype by rejecting motherhood and commitment as concepts. We have to make sure we are distinguishing clearly between expectations of women, and actual women, because it is the former, not the latter, that is problematic here. And yes, it is nice to witness women in media taking control of their bodies, and their work, and denouncing those who mistreat her - it is a woman's story that, for centuries, we've not been allowed to see, at least not in a positive light. But Mother's story is also a woman's story, and to deny hers for the sake of feminism is contrary to all that feminism is trying to accomplish. To do so comes dangerously close to declaring there is a 'right type' of woman to portray on screen. Even if not Grossman-Heinze's intent, I think it an important idea to address, for it’s not as if it’s rare to find people within the feminist movement rejecting ideals of womanhood simply by staking their flag in a new one. If it is not okay to depict quiet, docile, mother-oriented women in the media, we aren't liberating women to be themselves, but only perpetuating our connotations of femininity, as we imagine it now, as undesirable. Feminism can't only be about proving that women can be 'one of the guys' too. It can't just be about freeing people from adhering to gender expectations, but also about refusing to think of traditionally feminine traits as inherently shameful, weaker, or undesirable, for those women and men and others outside the binary who do happen to embody them (which is in some degree, all of us).

In regards to the romantic relationship between Lawrence and Aronofsky outside of the film, it doesn't feel appropriate to me to play it as evidence of Aronofsky's inherent martyring of women. To assume anything about the power dynamics at play between them, and implying Lawrence's only role within the relationship is as 'muse' to her man, is to deny Lawrence agency and her own vision of this film as an artistic piece, just as it does to assume that embodying femininity is only the result of having had it forced upon us (read: it is so abhorrent, who would want it otherwise?).

And I can't take seriously a claim that stories about the subjugation and exploitation of femininity are “old hat” and unhelpful to women when, in a possibly narcissistic argument that I'll stand by anyhow, I myself spent days after watching this film reluctantly acknowledging how much I emotionally identified with Mother and with having had my body, investments, and creations shat on by patriarchal values. I was eventually forced to reconcile with the places in which I still allow these things to happen in my life despite all my feminist ranting and literature. It was reaffirming to see a protagonist with whom to identify with over the struggle of knowing when and how to hold boundaries without denouncing the 'femininities' of nurture and patience, especially when so often given only dismissive disrespect, at best, in return. Patriarchy isn't going to end simply by teaching women to embrace masculinity. We must also be willing to have an honest relationship with how we, as a social entity, treat femininity, and that is what this movie is trying to establish.

Jennifer Lawrence did express frustration that Aronofsky refused to be up-front about what this film had in store for us while instead selling it as another, mostly inconsequential, fun-time Amityville-esque horror that would pass through our systems easily some relaxed Friday night, only to leave us choking trying to swallow it down the wrong tube. She knows that in planting false expectations and not warning us of the allegory, we were more likely to miss it, and thus Aronofsky ensured the bombed ratings and criticism that might not have been quite so poisonous otherwise. But as he giggles in the background of the interview, I feel comfortably certain that ratings are not his priority here. He recognized that in disclosing the intent of Mother!, he would have attracted only a self-selective audience already interested in having the dialogue he's starting, rendering the film less impactful and frankly, less entertaining as a cultural phenomenon. Critics claim "we get the message; I sympathize with what he's trying to say. But did he really have to cannibalize a baby?" rather than admitting bluntly '"Did he really have to say we cannibalize babies? Did he really have to ruin the memory of my communion? Did he really have to be so harsh?" Whether he did is, of course, debatable. It could even be argued as a debate about the merits of femininity vs. masculinity, gentle patience vs. blunt force.  But regardless of the answer, the method was certainly intentional, and in Aronofsky's history, nothing new. His body of work pretty blatantly reveals a conviction that emotional horror and intense discomfort is the way to hit home with an audience, or is, at least, the fun he gets out of directing.

He leaves us at the finish of the movie with the face of a new woman whose innocent concern juxtaposes the doomed fate we know comes her way, having been forced to witness the Poet's insistence that the cycle must repeat itself, that he has no choice, that his fans have no choice, and that the only one who does is the woman who can choose to surrender the only thing she has left. Aronofsky gives us a new face whose treatment we can again allow to befall her, knowing full well its cruelty, or for whom we can look back upon our own mythos as a lesson in what we could change for the future. He asks if we can dare let go of attachment to our idea of womanhood and instead see actual, real life women, with wishes and needs that may not cater to our own.

[plarndude]

For those of you who are unwilling to even Glance at an article because of the website it's on, I've copied and pasted it here. I agree with every single thing this guy wrote in this article.

"Over the weekend, the Planeteers converged on Washington to hold a “Climate March.” I know what you’re thinking: didn’t they already do that, like, last week? Also, how will marching and holding signs improve the climate? And how many trees were slaughtered to make those signs, anyway? And how much CO2 was emitted by the cars and planes they took to get to this march? And how many of D.C.’s pigeons and squirrels were rudely disrupted from their daily routine because of all the extra humans traipsing through the street? Isn’t organizing a march to fight climate change a bit like organizing a hot dog eating contest to fight obesity?

I have posed these kinds of questions to environmental activists many times and never received an answer other than, “You must hate science.” I really don’t hate science, though. I love science. I hate faux-science. I hate leftist dogma disguised as science. I hate activism that calls itself science. I hate bad conclusions drawn from science. I hate hypocrisy. I hate inconsistency. These also happen to be all of the reasons why I hate climate change alarmism.

But my real problem with the alarmists, who I will now address directly, boils down to this: I don’t believe you. And when I say I don’t believe you, I mean that I believe neither what you’re saying, nor that you believe what you’re saying. I doubt both your narrative and your sincerity. I question your facts and your conviction about those facts. Allow me to explain why.

First, your facts. If you stuck simply to the modest contention that the world has warmed very slightly in the last 130 years, and you theorized — and admitted it was a theory — that humans have contributed to it in some small way, I wouldn’t take much of an issue with you. The problem is that you lie so much. You lie when you refuse to confess that the climate prediction models you use are extremely flawed. You lie when you scream about the “97 percent consensus” that doesn’t exist. You lie when you act like the real scientists who doubt man-caused global warming are all kooks and lunatics.

Most of all, your overblown, hysterical doomsday prophecies are lies. The world is supposed to already be over by now, according to you. At the very least, New York City should be under water. We should have all been dead from global warming or global cooling or overpopulation dozens of times over. Around the time of the first Earth Day, we were told that hundreds of millions would be starving to death per year within ten years of that date. Human civilization should have crumbled into dust and the few remaining survivors should be floating through a vast water world, locked in a struggle of survival against Dennis Hopper. Yet, here we are, standing on dry land. How many times are you allowed to be wrong about the end of the world before we are justified in not taking you seriously anymore? I’d say that threshold, whatever it is, has long since been reached.

Second, your sincerity. Here’s the real issue I have with you. Even if you’ve been wrong about the Environmental Apocalypse 100 times, you still insist that this 101st prediction will surely pan out. You tell us that we could be looking at an extinction event within a generation or two. Our planet will turn into Venus sooner rather than later if we don’t drastically change the way we live. Major world cities will be lost into the sea, and this will happen within decades. And even those not drowned in the depths of the ocean will face mass starvation or worse. What’s more, you tell us that Armageddon may already be happening. Even now, whenever there is a hurricane, or a tornado, or a thunderstorm, or even a snowstorm, you tell us that this is a direct result of global warming caused by our modern lifestyle. This is all quite traumatizing, so it’s good for your emotional well being that you don’t really believe any of it.

I can only assume that you don’t believe it because your actions do not at all resemble what one would expect from someone who does believe this sort of thing. With very rare exceptions, you continue living just like the rest of us. Maybe you recycle your plastic bottles, maybe you ordered a salad at Panera Bread today, but for the most part you are just another callous Homo sapien murdering the planet and cannibalizing the future of the human race. Why? How? You think the world is about to end, for God’s sake. What are you doing sitting at Starbucks like the rest of us? Why haven’t you renounced all modern technology? Why haven’t you fled to the mountains before the sea engulfs your family? Why aren’t you doing… anything?

I can only imagine how I would react if I actually believed that the extinction of all mankind was imminent, and my lifestyle was directly contributing to it. At a minimum, I would not drive a car anymore. Ever. At all. I would ditch electricity. I wouldn’t eat any kind of meat. I wouldn’t buy mass made consumer products. I wouldn’t give my money to any company that sells items made in factories with giant smokestacks. Those smokestacks are literally killing people. How could you continue shopping like everything is normal? What kind of monster are you? If I were you, I would live as John the Baptist, eating locusts and wild honey out in the desert. Lives are at stake, are they not? The end is near! Why are you so relaxed about it? Have you even started building the ark yet?

I’m not joking. If I were in your boat (pun intended), I would feel morally obligated to take extreme measures. As a member of the enlightened few, as a person who knows that human life is about to be eradicated, and who knows why, and even when, I would feel an incredible burden of responsibility. If I knew that driving my car, turning on my lights, shopping at the mall, and generally going about my day immersed in modern luxury were all directly causing the current and future death of millions of people, I could not continue engaging in these lethal activities. I would see them as acts of extreme moral recklessness, if not murder, to saunter along on as usual. My conscience would compel me to ensure that I am not responsible for the carnage that is about to occur. How could a person who believes what you allegedly believe possibly arrive at any other conclusion?

It’s become a cliche to point out how all of the major environmental mouthpieces, like DiCaprio and Gore and all the rest, also happen to fly private jets in between the several mansions they own. This fact alone does not disprove the environmentalist narrative, but it is a curious fact that none of its most vocal proponents seem to have taken their own words to heart. Imagine, by comparison, if almost every major pro-life activist also happened to sit on the board of Planned Parenthood. If one or two were exposed as hypocrites in this way you might overlook it, but all of them?

Strangely, only the Amish can be seen riding horses and buggies down the street in this country, but even they don’t believe that automobiles are going to annihilate life on Earth. You do believe that, yet you still drive them. You know how much CO2 was emitted in order to produce your iPhone, yet you still buy a new one every 18 months. You know that hurricanes and tornadoes are popping up everywhere because of the factories that make your trendy shoes and clothing, yet you still stock your closet full of them. You know that your air conditioning unit is slowly poisoning the atmosphere and leading us rapidly to certain death, yet you turn it on the moment the temperature rises above 70 degrees outside. You know that your refrigerator is a cancerous tumor metastasizing on Mother Earth, yet you still won’t preserve your food by drying or pickling it. You know how much safer we’d all be if we stopped using electricity, yet you haven’t gotten that ball rolling, either. WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE, aren’t we? And you can’t even be bothered to crack a window and eat pickled cabbage in the dark like a real environmentalist?

You seem only focused on insisting that the government fix the problem. But even if there were a problem to fix, the law couldn’t do anything on its own. The law can only influence or coerce behavior. So, rather than sitting around and waiting for the law to tell you to live how you already think you ought to live, why don’t you just start living that way? It’s like a vegetarian who declares that he will continue eating steaks until the government finally prohibits him from doing so. The cynical among us may conclude that a vegetarian of this type is not a vegetarian at all. If every vegetarian were of this sort, we might suspect that vegetarianism itself is hallucinatory: a belief system that many advocate but none believe strongly enough to actually live by. And if those who advocate it don’t believe it, why should the rest of us take so much as a second out of our lives to consider its merits?

Now, please understand that I’ve cut you some slack here. I’ve assumed that you don’t believe your own tales of civilizational destruction. The less flattering interpretation is that you do believe everything you say, yet you’re so unbelievably selfish and lazy that, even staring at Armageddon on the horizon, you still cannot stir yourself to make any noticeable changes to your life. One shudders at the moral baseness required for a person to sincerely say to himself, “Yes, my vehicle is melting the ice caps and inching humanity ever closer to liquidation, but, screw it, I don’t feel like walking.” I have faith that you are not so cold and heartless. I have faith that you are merely disingenuous hypocrites. Let’s hope I’m right." - Matt Walsh

original post

[almost-always-eventually-right]

People keep talking about how Peter Capaldi’s run on Doctor Who has sent the show’s marketability and popularity to a screeching halt but I would like to contend that the time when the shows popularity took a dip was the exact moment Steven Moffat undid the Time War. 

While, in principle, I agree that this story element was running out of fuel and was becoming limiting, those limitations were what proved to the audience that Doctor Who was a show with actual consequences that deserved to be taken seriously. The moment it was stripped away like nothing, not even hellishly fought for, it became clear that this was no longer a television show being supported by its own merits but a show coasting on the self-awareness that it’s an institution. It started cannibalizing itself. 

I’m not saying we needed the Time War genocide to stay in place. I’m saying undoing it needed to feel earned and not like a cheap trick. And I’m saying that, in our modern age, we need our stories to be more than just casual visits to strange places with likable people. There needs to be stakes. Without the Time War, Doctor Who feels completely different. It feels like a show terrified to make a change that isn’t self-congratulatory but is actually narratively impactful. The last two seasons, in the moment, felt interesting, but in hindsight, felt almost hollow. It was like the show’s universe was placed in suspended animation. We went to Gallifrey and nothing happened to it. Ten years of buildup and it was a backdrop. 

The show needs another limitation. Fast. It won’t stay an institution if it doesn’t earn it.

Doctor Who is built on four elements. The Doctor, the TARDIS, the companions, and Gallifrey. One of these things needs to change. It won’t make it another 50 years if it can’t shake up the formula. New Who is ready for its Pertwee Period.