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freewheelshippin · 4 years ago

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FIC: “be proud”

Let me indulge in the fantasy that I got to help, just a little bit, in making one of the only ballads on this earth I like. More “utapri characters that aren’t ranmaru” content than usual, especially Ai, since this is vaguely based on their Idol Songs album!

Content warnings include an allusion to home invasion, Ranmaru’s usual backstory things (i.e. dealing with debt), and some eating/meal scenes.

Ranmaru was surprised to receive the package, a fairly big box from someone he never expected to get mail from. Something in the pit of his stomach half-expected it to be everything he’d sent her, unused and returned to sender.

For a second, he thought he was right. It was a similar array of trinkets and colors as the merch she’d designed for his album, but it quickly became obvious this wasn’t his merch, but hers. Trinkets from her shop, like patches and pins, and one of those handmade prints she liked making on weird paper. Candies he didn’t recognize, some American snacks he did, a little box of something that looked homemade with a hand-scrawled label on it. At the bottom, a shirt, printed with a cleaned version of an album art draft he’d especially liked but the agency didn’t approve. Folded within it, a note, written in English on one side and clumsy Japanese on the other.

Yo, Kurosaki!

I know I already messaged you thanks for sending me my comp copies of everything, but I wanted to return the favor! You really didn’t have to go out of your way get it to me like that, much less pack in all the other shit you did. But I’m glad you did! It arrived on the day I got another rejection, one I was really hoping would pan out. I got back all the time I would’ve spent feeling sorry for myself and instead just wanted to try again. That’s kind of the message I got from the sound of your album, so I guess it’s appropriate!

Honestly, even if it was tough figuring things out sometimes, I had more fun on that job than any other one I can think of. You don’t have much to apologize for, I’ve survived way worse than some grumpy e-mails from a cool client, and you actually had pretty good feedback to offer. I think the end result was pretty metal. (Or well, rock, since it’s your shit, after all.)

If you’re cool with it, I think it’d be fun to keep sharing our work with one another, outside of just being a client and artist. Get some fresh perspectives, you know? You know where to message me if you think so, too.

-- M

P.S. You’re the first person to get this custom pick I got designed. Be grateful (LOL).

Taped to it, there was a pearlescent pick, red and black with white lettering. Ranmaru took it off, careful not to tear the paper, and ran his fingers over it. It wasn’t even close to the type he’d tolerate using if he wasn’t going to finger-pluck his bass.

He clasped it in his hand, pausing for a moment, before he let out a ‘hmph,’ equal parts amused, relieved, and a little bit giddy.

---------

“...Ranmaru,” Ai said, looking at him with those big saucer eyes. Sometimes Ranmaru felt like the guy never blinked, which made his curious once-overs scarier than he’d ever admit to.

“What,” he growled back.

“...according to every piece of data I know about you…” he started. He already didn’t like where this was going. “Nothing would point to you being the cell phone charm type.”

“So?!” he barked, frowning at Ai as he self-consciously stuffed his phone into his pocket. It buzzed from a message notification, as if on disastrous cue, making a plasticy noise as it rattled against the charm. “What’s your data know about the real heart of people, anyway,” he continued, crossing his arms as he leaned back in his chair.

“It hasn’t been wrong about anything yet.” Ai tilted his head. “Why do you have a charm all of a sudden?”

Because I saw she uses one of mine, Ranmaru answered frantically in his head, thinking back to the video chat they’d had where she showed it off. His hand was in his pocket, muffling his phone buzzing as more messages came in. He ran his fingers over the smooth pick, the subtle grooves where the letters were, the jagged hole he’d poked into it, the string that ran through it and knotted into a hole on his case. Because she told me about how much she liked it, so I wanted to return the favor.

“Why is this so goddamn important to you, Ai?” Ranmaru bristled. “Can’t we just get on with work already?”

Ai stared at him a moment longer before shrugging slightly. “I’m simply curious. What would motivate you to act against your usual protocol seems interesting. But if you won’t tell me, I suppose there’s no use prying, especially when we have work to be done.”

Ranmaru grunted back, leaning back to the table and looking over the notes. “We’re decided on what we wanna do for our duet, but we still have to decide on a direction for our solo songs on the album. Something that makes each of us stand out but doesn’t ruin the cohesiveness of the whole thing.”

“You should do something slow,” Ai said, after a moment of thought.

“Why should I?” Ai should know by now Ranmaru wasn’t about that sort of sound, especially when Ai already had the sad lullabies more than mastered. “Nothing about that’s very rock or wild. It won’t work with my image. Or do whatever that “gap” shit is that people like…”

“Really?” Ai looked at him again. “Ballads are an intrinsic part of rock music, and wouldn’t it be ideal for communicating feelings that aren’t as energetic as your usual work?”

“You should’ve just said power ballad in the first place,” Ranmaru grunted, but he had to admit it wasn’t a bad idea. “It’d work better with your usual style. And the duet, from how it’s going so far.” The biggest problem Ranmaru could think of was he couldn’t imagine what on earth he’d want to sing about in one.

“Then it’s decided,” Ai said decisively.

“...Oi, Ai, when did I say I agreed to this?” The kind of thing he’d rather shape into a ballad instead of his usual, urging style was a complete mystery, which Ranmaru didn’t like the idea of committing to in a partner project and on a deadline, even if it was months away. But like hell he’d admit that to someone else in Quartet Night, much less Ai, who’d just give him “logical” suggestions Ranmaru already knew he’d hate.

“Was your reasoning not enough?” Ai tilted his head. Ranmaru met his eye. Something about the curiosity on that blank face felt less pointlessly prying this time. Now it was more like someone who just wanted to see something new.

Ranmaru couldn’t fault him for that. And he was due to challenge himself in this way, anyways.

“....Fine. Whatever. That means you can’t do your usual sentimental stuff. You should do something that’ll lift everyone up after the heaviness of the other songs.”

“That sounds logical,” Ai replied. His eyes moved to Ranmaru’s pocket as it buzzed once again, but quickly turned back as they brainstormed ideas.

--------

He wiped his eyes as he leaned back from the computer, surprised by how quickly and unbidden they came. He hastily tore up a strip of paper and hung it over the camera built into the laptop -- he knew it wasn’t on. This wasn’t a video call. But the idea of someone seeing him like this felt surreal and, frankly, too scary to confront right now.

They chatted a lot more, now. It’d been about half a year since they’d started talking outside of work. It wasn’t just occasionally sharing art and music with each other anymore, either, it was a big stew of ideas, inspiration. A lot of breaking down what they liked in all the albums they shared with one another, and how they wanted to integrate all that in their work. Her siphoning gear and singing tips off of him, while she broke down expressions and visual composition to a science to help him out with modelling. And amid all that, something easygoing. Complaining about work, about weird clients, about shitty train rides, but also the nice parts of their days, too.

He’d gotten short with her today, and she got frustrated with him. They argued -- for the first time since they’d tossed aside client-and-professional for friends-and-colleagues -- and it turned out she was as passionate a spitfire as he, assuming she got in the right mood.

And in the middle of all that furious typing, she paused.

M: You know, it’s kind of relieving to argue with you like this.

Ranmaru was so startled, he forgot the point he was making.

R: what the hell are you talking about?

M: oh, come on, we both know I’ve used diplomacy to handle your grouchiness before, and that worked fine enough then. But I just appreciate that I trust you enough to not take such a safe approach, for once, and the thing you’re most upset about is that I didn’t feel comfortable calling you out on your horseshit sooner.

Ranmaru didn’t have an answer for that as she typed on and off. He imagined if this were a verbal conversation, this would be the point where he’d just listen while she strung her thoughts together -- wordily, but getting to good enough of a point that it was worth letting her meander.

Instead, she cut right to a point he wasn’t expecting.

M: hey, I’m not taking back anything I said, but I probably should’ve asked sooner. Are you doing OK? You always get stuck in asshole mode for a reason. I don’t have classes to teach today, so you can bend my ear if you need to. even on voice chat, if you like, japanese or english.

An uncomfortable wave of relief washed over him. He hadn’t told her about it, but things were the kind of stressful that pushed his stoic approach to its limits. Too many deadlines at work. Too many people there talking, too few saying anything he gave a damn about. Money was tight this month -- the debt collectors suddenly hiked up what he owed, and they’d banged down his door to “tell” him that. And another shitty argument with Camus, after he “freed” all his bananas for some ridiculous flambe parfait he just had to have for lunch on a day when Ranmaru couldn’t afford any.

This was just how things were. Why was he upset about it now? He was beyond cursing how things had turned out for him. Making useless wishes when there wasn’t anything to do but work and survive until he didn’t have anything to lament.

M: alright that’s a suspiciously long amount of time between messages for you when you’re riled up. are you OK? It’s fine if you’re not, and it’s fine if you don’t wanna talk to me about it, but i’m here if you want. If something’s really eating at you, that’s more important than me being mad. (for now, anyway)

It felt surreal as he leaned back to the computer and felt his fingers find the keys as he started finding the right words.

R: it’s not a light subject R: and it’s not on you to deal with it M: LOL bro c’mon. M: I eat heavy for breakfast, and I said I’m here for you. M: lay it on me

He wiped his tears away with his sleeve. It’d been long enough since he’d cried that he didn’t even think about how it’d smudge his makeup and stain his clothes, but he didn’t especially care as he started to explain himself, the words coming out hesitantly until they coalesced into a small cascade of short, tight sentences, heavy with years of restrained sorrow he’d ignored so aggressively until now.

---------

Recording Haruhana went well. Ranmaru expected it to, somewhat. Ai’s cold problem-solving could be annoying, but they never got in the way of the heart of his vocals. Their voices blended into an interesting harmony, and the acoustic guitar bridged their styles into a bittersweet sound they slipped into easily enough that recording sessions went uneventfully.

“It does not surprise me, but.“ Ranmaru couldn’t bring himself to outright glower at Ai as they stopped recording and stepped away from the mics. “You’re very good at conjuring a strong, wistful image with your voice.”

“Then why do you look surprised…” he grunted back, loosening and lowering the mic for whoever had it next. “...You do it well, too, but we already knew that.”

“The heart of things you’re so obsessed with,” he said plainly. “It wouldn’t do if we couldn’t bring truth to the emotions we write about.”

Ranmaru hadn’t given much thought to why Ai’s songs were so lamenting and sad, for the most part. He’d acknowledged they were genuine, had a tone color that suited him right, and made the fans happy. Truthfully, he’d only thought of those songs in the context of work -- Ai was a rival and a colleague he respected enough to sing with and not want to lose to, so he’d only looked at his songs from that standpoint, too. But Ranmaru realized better, now, just how good Ai was at sharing sadness that wasn’t so heavy it dragged people down with it. Wistfulness that grasped forward towards something, like a greater understanding.

“How’s the ballad going?”

Ranmaru clicked his tongue. “How’s your synthpop bubblegum bullshit going?” he shot back.

“Well,” Ai replied, unfazed. “I have the chord progressions and kits mapped out.”

“Good for you, then,” he grunted back. Great. So Ai was making good progress while Ranmaru hadn’t made any.

“Are you struggling?”

“Isn’t that the point of a ballad?!” Hopefully Ai couldn’t argue with that and would leave him alone from there.

“Shouldn’t you defer to a composer or lyricist if you’re stuck?”

Ranmaru glared at Ai. “If it’s a ballad, I should write it myself, not leave it to someone who’s just gonna put words and music I don’t mean into my mouth.”

“Past data suggests you won’t back down about this,” Ai said smoothly, stacking the notes and papers they’d brought into the studio neatly. “I suppose I should wish you luck, in that case, and remind you this is my album, too, and it’s the fans who are most important.”

“I know that,” Ranmaru spat, long done fussing with the mic.

*************

R: you hate ballads, right M: I sure do! :D R: why M: too slow for my tastes, sentimentality done like that isn’t my thing, don’t always feel genuine, you know R: that’s literally every problem i have with the big project at work right now M: oh no you have to make a ballad?? Like….poppy enough for shining agency and all that? Oh boy.... R: what’s your advice to making a ballad you don’t hate, then M: HMMMMMMMMMMMMM M: pass a kidney stone M: WAIT RANDY COME BACK I’LL HELP FOR REAL R: If you want to help why are you calling me randy?! M: suffering is the root of all good ballads. I’m helping R: can you at least remind me what the one ballad you like is M: oh, turn on your light M: judas priest M: it’s always judas priest R: so why don’t you hate it R: other than it’s judas priest M: oh, nothing big M: my first gf just made me a mixtape and confessed with it is all M: and that was my entry point into western metal M: sealing my fate forever as a queer metalhead and thereby forming the foundation of all my aesthetic, social, musical, and auditory sensibilities forevermore M: and some other stuff R: oh is that all “We are about to arrive at ____ station, please make your way to the doors if your stop is ____ station....”

R: what’s the other stuff M: oh dw about it M: it’s, you know, the stuff everyone brings to listening. the mushy baggage that lets ‘em connect with strangers. you know how it is

The train arrived right after that message went through, and he had to put his phone away over questioning her further. Recently, he’d felt more irritated with himself than usual. He knew he got this way when he felt he owed someone and hadn’t done his part to even the score.

He was kind of in the same camp as she when it came to slow songs. Rock was about energy, passion, an urging sense of power, and even if he could understand why those slower songs were important, it didn’t mean they had to always resonate with him. He thought about their exchange. She dropped art into their chats a lot because, as she insisted, it helped having a musician look at her work, instead of another illustrator. And he liked her perspective for the same reason -- more personal than a fan, but more refreshing than everyone else at the agency.

Really, it sounded like what made the ballad feel genuine was the context she could apply. It wasn’t just a song, but a personal gesture that singled her out from the millions of other people who’d hear the song and imagine it was for them.

Ranmaru frowned as he exited the train station. The solution to his ballad problem was simple, so obvious he felt stupid for overlooking it. If he expected people to connect to his music, he had to give people something to connect to. All he had to do was what he always did -- just go for what his heart told him to. No frills, no fancy trimmings, just something he wanted to honestly express.

He strung basslines in his head as he walked to his apartment. Let the music-making guide him, instead of demanding it follow rigid instructions. As he pushed the key into the lock, he caught the faint stain of his eyeliner on his sleeve.

Don’t look at me … while I dry my eyes....

His stomach lurched a little, but moreso he felt his body surge with the truth of the song he wanted to write. The same rush of a surging venue, somehow, but with the kind of wistfulness and earnest desire he appreciated in Ai’s work more now.

Tama had started to squeeze through the little crack in the door, investigating why Ranmaru had just stood there like an idiot for so long.

“...c’mon, you little dope,” Ranmaru said softly, surprised how breathy he needed to keep his voice to get past the tightness in his chest. He squatted down, scooped the soft little creature up, and walked straight to his workspace. He did the once-over his apartment he’d gotten in recent habit of, seeing if anything had been seized by the collectors while he was gone, before depositing Tama on a cat tree where Mike was sitting. He hummed a melody that was quickly taking shape, his hands barely keeping up as he grabbed a scrap of paper, scrawling notes as fast as his hands would let him.

*******************

Reiji looked up at Ranmaru in disbelief. Ranmaru scowled back.

“If you don’t want it,” he growled, reaching for the box he’d put in front of Reiji. “I’ll fucking take it back.”

“No! No no no, Ranran, I’m so grateful!” Reiji exclaimed, scrambling to slide it out of Ranmaru’s reach.

“Humph! If I didn’t know of your peasant tastes,” Camus started from across the table. “I’d just tell you you’re better off skipping this slop.”

“Oi!” Ranmaru pointed a spoon threateningly at Camus. “You don’t have to eat, asshole! You still owe me for ruining my bananas, and as far as I’m concerned this just means you owe me another meal!”

“You think your pauper’s tongue deserves the fineries I’d select, I see,” Camus said challengingly, tilting his head and crossing his legs. Ranmaru was a hair trigger away from just throwing the box with Camus’s portion right at him. Maybe it’d ruin that stupid suit and he’d learn to shut up.

“He-heeeey, Ranran, everything smells super good….I’m so excited to dig right in, but are those sauces I see?” Reiji interrupted. Ranmaru clenched his fist around the spoon as he turned his glower towards him.

He slammed the spoon down in front of Reiji. “Which sauce do you want, the spicy chili one or ketchup,” he managed through gritted teeth.

“O- ohhh, wow! So gourmet! We have options!” Reiji cheered, in that singsongy way he did when he was trying to smooth over disasters. “Ranran, I knew you could cook, but I never knew you were so talented! I wonder what’s in ---” Ranmaru was losing his patience, and he grabbed the bottle of homemade chili sauce, hovering it above Reiji’s portion. The bottle sputtered as the air escaped, and Ranmaru’s grip threatened to explode the whole thing right then and there. “ -- I’ll have just a little bit of the spicy one, haha…”

Ranmaru held his gaze a moment more before he focused back on the food, squeezing a reasonable amount onto Reiji’s portion. He opened the box with Camus’s, already dressed with a mountain of sweet chili sauce, stabbed the spoon into it, and slid it over.

“Is this omurice?” Ai asked. Ranmaru handed him his own box.

“Is the rice in the omelet?” he grunted. “It’s just a stuffed omelet you eat with rice.”

“Mm-mm! So good! I’ve never had spices quite like these! Is this a secret specialty dish you’ve been hoarding to yourself?”

Ranmaru, at this point, just wanted to sit down and eat. “No,” he grumbled, hoping they’d get the picture.

“I can’t recognize this preparation against any recipe I know of. Did you make it up yourself?”

“It’s one from a friend, alright? She sent me a bunch of chilis and herbs and I had to make something to use them all up. If you don’t like it, then you don’t have to eat it. Stop asking questions and let me eat!”

They ate quietly for a while, much to Ranmaru’s relief. Camus, of all people, was the one to end the silence.

“Kurosaki,” he said, taking an odd tone for a conversation with Ranmaru. “....You will share the recipe for this sauce immediately,” he said, an odd hush to his voice.

“And what if I don’t,” Ranmaru sneered back, feeling just a little smug. “You gonna pass out from a sugar crash and finally give me some peace?”

Before Camus finished his reply, Ranmaru took a bottle from his bag and tossed it at Camus, who disappointingly kept his composure through the surprise. “Maybe you’ll learn to eat some meat, now that you’ve got a way to slather it in sugar.”

The rest of Quartet Night all stopped again in surprise, the same way they did when Ranmaru said he’d made them all lunch for today. Their eyes burned on Ranmaru as he went back to his meal, and he tried very, very hard to not let it bother him.

“...Ranran, you’ve been acting different lately. Did you--”

“No,” he growled. “Whatever you think it is, no.”

******************************

M: oh dang M: wow dude M: i really don’t know what to say

Ranmaru stared at his phone in the dark, waiting as feedback from the other side of the world came in.

M: you fucking nailed it. I don’t know how you did it, like a week ago this wasn’t anything. M: now it’s a whole new side of you i don’t think your discography’s shown off yet M: the fans are gonna go apeshit

The rest of the song came to him in the kind of exciting, passionate fervor where his hands couldn’t keep up with the ideas. The melody followed the bassline very naturally, peppered in by flashes of lyrics that slowly built and reorganized themselves. And from there, more instrumentation became evident. What he had now was just enough to make the soul of the song clear, finished late tonight in the studio.

Already his head was filled with what more he could add, but they blended into blur of ideas he was too tired to separate.

M: can I confess something? I mean, i don’t know why I’m asking, you’re probably already asleep M: what you have here already made me cry a little bit M: i don’t know what you did, but you made a ballad that works so well. It really feels personal and so full of the soul everyone loves you for, but there’s something really sad and kind in there that makes my heart squeeze. M: and that’s even in the lyrics! (what i can understand of them, anyway haha) but you know how saccharine I find ballad lyrics most of the time!!! M: then again, it is you. I don’t think there’s anything you could ever make that would feel disingenuous lmao M: is it too late to ask if i can illustrate this album too....would Ai and the agency let me do that…. M: i can draw something that’s soft and rock as shit!!!! M: anyways M: you’re probably dead asleep but just know this: good work, dude. M: it really felt like you were saying something very heartfelt, even in this rough cut, and i think how personal that voice is is gonna make everyone feel such a feeling. M: it sure made me feel one!

He locked his phone, tearing himself away from the slow stream of messages coming in. He laid on his back, phone facedown in the blanket, as he stared up into the dark swallowing the room back up again. Every part of his body felt like it was on fire, burning to get back into the studio.

The lyrics weren’t complete yet. He wasn’t the poetic type, so it’s not as if he’d let himself overthink his words and lose their heart in too many revisions, but there were still blanks. The phrase that’d pull it all together, the words that summarized the message of the song, they still weren’t there, but he could feel himself getting closer.

It was about paying an unspoken debt, and it was about shame, but above all, it was about pride. In himself, for letting himself reach this point, and in someone else. That was the sort of connection he could sing himself to tears with, whether on the stage, the studio, or the clean, edited album, and for that, he was proud.

#iron maiden & rocka rolla #scribblings #it's been a while since i procrastinated shit i had to do with furious fic writing #and i've been some kind of feral lately over Be Proud like the song #so i guess this is where we're at lads

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girl-in-the-tower · 5 years ago

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Dorm Prefects as MtG Colours + Requests

Ok, so I know that the number of Magic the Gathering fans that are also Twisted Wonderland fans must be low, but I’ve been playing with this idea in my head for a while now and said ‘screw it! I’m gonna make it anyway!’

For those not aware, MtG is a card game that’s been around for a long time now and there are basically five main colours that each represent a particular type of magic. Those colours are White, Black (the best colour, btw), Blue, Red and Green. They also represent five different ‘philosophies’ (ie, the way in which a person sees the world around them and their relationship to it) and by combining these colours you get even more possible ideologies.

So what I am about to do is to try and match each dorm leader with the colour or colour combo that I think best suits them based on their personality and Unique Magic. Some of them may even have a counterpart in a specific card or playing style which I will mention in this short analysis. (I am excluding Idia, Malleus and Vil from this part given that we don’t know their Unique Magic yet.)

Anyway, I mentioned requests! So basically if your interested in this and are curious to see what ‘philosophy’ best fits your OCs, go ahead and send me a link to your OC or OCs profile(s)! You can also contact me via DMs!

What I’ll do is match your OC with a colour philosophy, give an explanation as to why and try to find either a specific card or playing style that I think is similar to your OC’s Unique Magic.

Now, without further ado, here are the matches for the dorm prefects!

Riddle Rosehearts - Azorius (White/Blue)

Riddle was pretty much the first one that came to mind when I was thinking about this crossover and it became immediately obvious to me that he was an Azorius character. Why? Because it is the colour of ‘structure’ achieved through order (White) and knowledge (Blue). Basically, Azorius people believe that happiness can be achieved through adherence to rules and regulations.

Riddle is obviously a model student who made it a point to learn all the rules that Queen of Hearts has instated and he literally Overblots due to people not following said rules.

Moreover, both White and Blue are the colours most likely to lock down an enemy. White has ‘Pacifism’ which makes it so your creatures can’t attack or block anymore, while Blue has counterspells which basically kill your card before it has the chance to enter the battlefield. It basically leaves you completely defenseless to their attack, which reminded me of his Unique Magic.

Azul Ashengrotto - Dimir (Black/Blue)

Azul was the second character that came to mind, as his philosophy was a pretty good match for Dimir. Like I said before, Blue is the colour of knowledge and those that are characterized by it are often people who possess an intrinsic need to understand things as well as finding other people’s secrets. Black seeks power and independence. Black players always seek to subvert things to their benefit, so the overlap between these two colours can be pretty high.

As we all know Azul is the type of character that uses knowledge to advance and his main concern is to gain power. His whole backstory is about how he used other people’s desires for his own benefit with magic that he learned for that express purpose.

Dimir has a few archetypes, but the one I had in mind for Azul would be the ‘Surveil’ mechanic. Surveil basically let’s you look at the top cards of your deck and lets you decide whether you want to keep it or trash it for something better that may come along. Moreover it has cards such as ‘Thief of Sanity’ which lets you steal from your opponent’s cards and use them as your own.

Leona Kingscholar - Rakdos (Black/Red)

Leona was a bit difficult to pin down, because while I was sure he would fit in with the Black philosophy, he wasn’t 100% in sync with it either. Black’s main concern is independence, which makes it similar to its neighbour on the colour wheel, Red. Red, as the colour of passion, seeks to avoid coercion and pressure from outside sources. Rakdos as a result characterizes people that are dismissive of society’s standards and pretty much just march at the beat of their own drum.

Like I said, Leona is a good fit for Black because he is cunning and uses underhanded techniques to achieve what he wants. But he also is surprisingly passionate and impulsive at times and it’s clear that he dislikes people interfering with his way of life.

Rakdos does not have any particular cards that would fit Leona’s magic, but the main strategy of Rakdos players is to beat their opponent into submission through sacrifices. There are a big number of creatures whose main job is to get killed and then inflict additional damage upon the opponent in order to reduce their life points. You just need to be smart about what to sacrifice and when.

Kalim Al Asim - Selesnya (White/Green)

Kalim was also a pretty easy fit for Selesnya, as he matched quite well the White philosophy. Though White is the colour of order, it is also the colour of peace. White is often said to be suffering from ‘good guy syndrome’ in that it has a very low number of ways to actually kill an opponent’s creatures. The best they can do is pacify it, exile it or imprison it temporarily. Green meanwhile is the colour of harmony as it seeks to live life according to the natural order of things. Selesnya places a big emphasis on community and they both believe in the greater group taking precedence.

Kalim immediately brought to mind this notion of suffering from ‘good guy syndrome’, as well being very big on community. He is the sort of person that doesn’t seem to stress out over smaller stuff and is ready to just accept things as they are.

The biggest similarity with Kalim’s magic would be White’s hexproof ability, basically it prevents an opponent from targeting your creature with a spell, and the prevalence of creatures with Lifelink, which means that when that creature does damage the players gains life equal to the damage done. Oasis Maker is said to have healing properties which reminds me of these two concepts, as it seems to cure ailments and fatigue, much like White would protect a creature from being killed.

Idia Shroud - Simic (Green/Blue)

Idia was another difficult character to pin down (not as difficult as Vil or Malleus, but still). He obviously fits in the Blue philosophy which is characterized by progress, knowledge and technology, but also has some Green traits too, as it is the colour of preservation and restraint. Simic combines these two notions and creates a philosophy whose main goal is to improve upon the already present foundation. In its view, change is natural and technology merely speeds up the change that it would inevitably go through.

Idia’s talent for tinkering is in line with the Blue philosophy, but him being based on Hades, the Greek God of the Underworld, also brings to mind the colour Green. Yes, Black is the one associated with death, but the Underworld wasn’t only Tartarus, it was the Elysium too. For me, Idia embodies that notion of preserving life through the intervention of technology.

Malleus Draconia - Bant (Green/White/Blue)

Malleus was hard. I’m not gonna lie. Dragon boy has a lot of traits, but none that really stuck me as belonging to any particular colour combo. So I decided to approach this differently. Instead of thinking about which colour best fit him, I thought about which colour didn’t and the answer I came with is Black and Red. Black is the colour of those that work only in their self-interest and Red is too extroverted for someone like him. Malleus seems to me more of a White person, he’s a good guy and even a dork in some instances, with a bit of Blue as well since he’s a fairy with a bigger lifespan than normal humans, so he must know a lot of things even at a young age. But he didn’t really fit the Azorius character either and it seemed to me that the missing element would be Green, which is the colour of maturity and serenity.

Bant people can be characterized by a calm and patient attitude. They are certain of the stability that they posses and work towards evolving and bettering themselves through the acquisition of knowledge about the world around them. The colour that is primary for Malleus is Green, as it centers the other two quite well.

Vil Schoenheit - Grixis (Red/Blue/Black)

Vil was hard too, but after I applied the same thought process that I did for Malleus, I realized that his main colours would be Black, Blue and Red. Black is the colour of independence, as mentioned before, and while Red’s passionate search for authenticity compliments it well, it needed to have Blue’s quest for perfection added in order to properly represent Vil’s character.

Vil is definitely concerned with expressing himself and going against society’s restrictive norms, but he is too focused on perfection for Rakdos’ taste, which revels in chaos. Instead he fits with Blue, whose personal goal is to achieve excellence through knowledge. Similarly Vil excels in potions and is often looking for way to expand his knowledge regarding beauty.

#twisted wonderland #riddle rosehearts #idia shroud #azul ashengrotto #leona kingscholar #vil shoenheit #malleus draconia #kalim al asim #so yeah #I spend a lot of time on this #colour philosophy

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ctl-yuejie · 6 years ago

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My thoughts on the conflict between TangYi and ShaoFei, the tone of HIStory3:Trapped and how conflict and reveals get presented

Disclaimer: I love this show, I think the acting is great and I am very excited that the production team challenged itself with a more complex story than past HIStory seasons, upped the production quality and overall seemed to pour all the heart and hard work into this. Never forget that I love this show even though this might come off as very critical. Me nitpicking at a piece of media however doesn’t mean that I don’t like it (I seldom waste my breath on bad-mouthing something I didn’t enjoy unless it personally offended me), it only means that I enjoyed it so much that I spent hours thinking about the plot and the characters and generally had a lot of feelings.

- spoilers up until episode 16 -

Now that the show has only 4 episodes left to air I wanted to take some time to sort my thoughts and feelings.

Overall, I really do enjoy this show, especially the acting, the chemistry between Chris and Jake is stellar (not to leave out Andy and Kenny, I just don’t think I’ve seen enough of their story to comment too much on them yet) and the brilliantly written romance of TangYi and ShaoFei.

In the beginning the premise sounded tropey and fun and I didn’t expect them to seriously tackle the issue of a cop falling in love with a criminal because the trailer, while being action-packed, looked too light-hearted.

The show however took a surprising twist.

Sure, much of what happens is not realistic: the crime rate in Taiwan is famously low (we had one too many shootings and violent deaths on the show to match with the statistics) and I am pretty sure ShaoFei drawing his gun at TangYi every chance he gets in the beginning and not facing any backlash doesn’t comply with police protocol at all.

However, when they introduced the whole background story of TangYi I started to take the set-up more seriously. Prior to this I thought that I just had to suspend belief in order to enjoy the cop/gangster romance aspect of the show and to be able to ignore any ethical issues that might arise with such a dynamic. But introducing him as this young adult who’d grown up into a life of crime and no choosing of his own, who tried to cut ties with the criminal world because of a promise he gave to his foster father made me rethink the tone of the show and I started to believe that they would honestly tackle the ethical issues of the relationship between ShaoFei and TangYi.

Trying to live an honest and upright life doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to stop committing crimes on your way to achieve that goal (and I am pretty sure that HongYe setting up that business is textbook money laundering) but I liked to believe that revealing TangYi’s motivation would mean exactly that. Because this promised a challenge, suspense and a struggle worth watching.

Refraining from committing crimes and dismantling his organization while upholding his front as a stone-hearted mob boss would result in much more difficulties when interacting with gang members and trying to not get overpowered by enemies. TangYi would be too powerful otherwise. Most of the problems he has encountered on this show were connected to him trying to protect people that are dear to him, a task that is much more complicated to accomplish when you cannot resort to violence.

Additionally, I don’t think I could root for TangYi and ShaoFei as a couple if TangYi doesn’t try his best to not hurt other people. Not only because ShaoFei is a policeman, there are enough corrupt or misguided policemen around, but because ShaoFei is introduced to us as someone with strong convictions and an even stronger sense of justice and upholding the law. And to me it didn’t seem like his character arc was set-up for him to delve into a moral grey-area or even to switch sides with TangYi. I thought that his journey would be to fall for TangYi and accept that not everyone is necessarily entirely good or evil and having to grapple with his senior being not the person he thought she was. This does fit in with the latest revelations that the police chief with whom he has a kind of father-son relationship is indeed not the good person we thought he was.

I have no idea how ShaoFei could deal with the idea of TangYi being capable of hurting people when it isn’t done in self-defense and if there are other, albeit more difficult, ways in which he could’ve taken action.

Especially because in the reality this show creates the problems a cop/gangster relationship entails don’t get entirely glossed over. Yu Qi reminds ShaoFei in the hospital that him and TangYi cannot be together, not because they’re both men, but because of their professions. (To be honest the only real beef I might have with this show so far was the weird “love is love” analogy that they freely applied to a gangster/cop relationship. I don’t think it was in any way intentional but reversing that thought might lead the viewer to the conclusion that you are either born into a certain profession or you can choose your sexuality...which is definitely not what the show wants us to think, I hope.) Even earlier on ShaoFei denies that he could have developed feelings for TangYi on the basis that they’re playing on opposite teams. So we have to assume that the show acknowledges the ethical problems of this romance in general but somehow conveniently forgets about this conflict when it should have an impact on the characters behavior. This is especially bizarre because the only function of those scenes then is to act as a tool to not make as forget how cold and ruthless TangYi can be. Because he is a gangster boss.

After revealing TangYi’s backstory on the mountain top I got more excited about the show because I thought I’d understood in which direction they wanted to take the main romantic plot and what kind of tone they wanted to set. The show would be slightly more serious and solemn than I anticipated but I welcomed that approach because it would make for an interesting show while not excluding any possible humour.

However, immediately in the next episode I had to start and rethink my assumptions. By now the low respect for rules on the police’s site and dilettante approach to their job started to stand out, however I was willing to not head those details that much attention because most tv series, even mainstream crime shows, mess up the actual technicalities of the jobs they’re trying to portray. ShaoFei’s fever dream on the mountain however took the disconnect with the previous episode a little bit further. The scene overall did fit in with the humour of the show but the way it was acted out and shot didn’t make it look like an organic part of the rest of the series. However, the scene just left me with a small nagging feeling and wasn’t anything that really bugged me.

My feelings for the show however got tested a bit when TangYi beat up that henchman. I was so convinced that the main conflict of the show would be TangYi trying to maintain is image as a gangster so his gang wouldn’t find out that he is trying to dissolve the organization while having to abstain from using any violence. Something that is made even more difficult by the police getting involved and the mystery from 4 years ago looming over him.

I truly believed that TangYi being left alone in that room would turn out to be a ruse to shake up Ah De (whom, as we later find out, he was already suspicious of). It also made me hope that Wang Kun Chen might have not actually died but that his death was faked in order to go after both the criminals and any corrupt policemen (I will come back to his death later on). But afterwards in a talk with Jack it gets confirmed that TangYi indeed beat up the henchman. This course of action didn’t surprise me that much but to be honest I was just disappointed with how straight-forward and unexcitingly TangYi dealt with Ah De and possibly some other close people going behind his back.

The intention of the set-up with Old Tang’s wish was only based on my assumptions so I can’t really feel that let down by it, but TangYi beating up that henchman threw me because I thought we were supposed to read more into Old Tang’s request and conclude that TangYi would have to live through a constant internal struggle.

In general, I don’t mind when unrealistic things happen in a series, however there has to be an internal set of rules that gets followed and scenes and characters have to make sense within the reality the showrunners created.

To me it is curious that TangYi doesn’t think that he has to adjust how he acts in order to disentangle himself from a life of crime in some scenes but in other scenes suddenly cannot take action in a certain way because of the same reason (mostly when it becomes urgent to eliminate direct threats). It is always up to ShaoFei to actively stop him from committing crimes and we never see an internal struggle. Sure, the task got imposed on him by Old Tang and TangYi doesn’t seem to be propelled by intrinsic motives but due to his emotional connection to Old Tang I’d have thought that he would really have to constantly struggle mentally and physically to refrain himself from using violence.

That does, in no way, mean that I wanted this show to be less dark. I think there’s still a lot of room for even more cruelty and angst even if the main character tries his best not to use violence. The whole set-up is very sad, the element of corruption could also lead to emotional distress at how hopeless ShaoFei’s investigation is, drug trafficking in particular comes with many victims, the betrayal inside the gang and every parental figure in this show either not living up to expectations or being outright abusive are also heavy subjects they could lean into even more. Heck, ShaoFei’s whole investigation and the police’s involvement raise the stakes because there is the possibility of capital punishment for drug offenses in Taiwan. We also have to deal with the fact that TangYi most definitely committed heinous acts in the past, the same might go for Jack. All in all, there are still many options left to make this show even more grim and bleak.

In the end it is up to the writers how they want to spin TangFei’s romance but to me it seemed like they were laying the ground for a different approach to the story then what actually played out. While I am not mad at this show (as I said before this is me nitpicking at a series that I highly enjoy) at this point I don’t know whether I can trust the hints I pick up because I don’t know if it was the intention of the writers to built-up a storyline or if what they did was totally arbitrary, or if they indeed simply forgot what they established in earlier scenes (this is where I had my problems with Hong Ye’s attack on ShaoFei and Ah De’s assault of TangYi. HongYe was introduced as more intelligent than that planned attack was and Ah De’s premeditated assault didn’t fit with his goals and the way he crossed the line earlier on).

This back and forth on characterizations, storylines and tone does confuse me quite a bit and is the only thing so far that made the show fall slightly short of what they could’ve accomplished with more consistent writing.

- - - - - -- - - - - - - -- - - - -- - - - - - -- - - - - -- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Which leads me to how the show is dealing with its reveals. So far, we have the mystery from 4 years ago that still needs solving, TangYi’s real parents’ identity which got revealed in episode 16, Ah De not only being in love with TangYi but selling drugs behind his back, Jack’s identity and real motivation, who really killed Wang Kun Chen, Ah Zi being up to no good and finally the police chief being dirty.

I enjoyed/am enjoying all of these plot-twists, some were more obvious than others but again, the writing of how these things unravel or got revealed is very inconsistent.

I will start with our mystery men. The reveal I enjoyed the most was the police chief being a dirty cop. It pretty much came out of nowhere but now a lot of his actions do make much more sense, especially how he didn’t give much support to ShaoFei and how he was mocking about with his work which I initially wrote off as missing motivation instead of passive sabotage. It also gives us enough room to guess his motivations and to whatever conclusion we might come to, it fits perfectly into the story so far. He might have needed money, or averting his eyes might have led to bigger consequences than he expected, now he is scared to lose his job because his daughter is marrying, or he worked too long in the force so he decided to side with what he felt was the most harmless kind of corruption to be able to focus on the big fish. What is important is that regardless of his motivation his past behavior fits with the reveal and added excitement to the show (to behonest at the moment I kind of lost interest in what happened 4 years ago because it is both obvious and confusing at the same time). Ah Zi was an okay reveal and the general topic of corruption in the work force and presumably good characters turning out grey or bad is pretty interesting but how his identity got revealed with those taunting shots of a man in a jacket were somewhat lackluster. They only spanned over two episodes before the reveal and were pretty on the nose. I would have loved it if they’d built-up his betrayal over more episodes with secretive shots of money and drugs exchanging hands where we couldn’t be sure if we were just shown the inner workings of TangYi’s gang or outsiders trying to get their hands on some extra cash.

Again, two similar reveals came about very differently and with a different kind of depth and detail to attention as well as being tied into the show organically and not so much.

This change in style doesn’t do much good in my opinion. Jack remains much of a mystery even though we need at least some hints in order to root for him and ZhaoZi. Instead their scenes are sweet but not that telling and they never just appear in the background to tie in their romance at all times. There were missed opportunities and many scenes that they could’ve been in finished without them and we went two whole episodes without them. Hong Ye and DaoYi had the big advantage to be present in many of the main couples’ scenes so their romance felt very well written and satisfying. I wish they’d spend even more time and attention to detail on Jack and ZhaoZi because with the added mystery element to Jack’s persona I really need more to get emotionally involved.

Again, I am confused as to how deep the show wants us to analyze its characters’ actions and how tricky the story really is. Ah De selling drugs behind TangYi’s back was mentioned only in a throw-away line and we are to believe that TangYi wouldn’t act more guarded or cautious around Ah De? Are we supposed to question that Jack killed Wang Kun Chen? If so, why was TangYi supposed to get fraimed for his death when it was a set-up by possibly the police? If it was as straight-forward as it’s presented I have my problems with rooting for TangYi/ShaoFei and ZhaoZi/Jack because it would be the first kill since the start of the show and setting up TangYi and Jack as unredeemable in ZhaoZI’s and ShaoFei’s eyes (see my huge paragraph about violence above). If we are supposed to scrutinize the show on the same intricate level as the police chief’s betrayal, some of the other reveals fall flat and are just not on the same engaging level.

The same goes for the messaging: are we to believe that Ah De’s actions were despicable? Wouldn’t we have to apply the same rules to Jack kissing ZhaoZi?

Overall I wish this series was written more tight-knitted, intricate and consistent in tone and message. Because I believe that this otherwise very entertaining story could’ve only benefitted from that.

#history3圈套 #history3: trapped #history 3: trapped #ctlyuejie writes #ctlyuejie rants #longpost

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tropicoola · 6 years ago

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Character backstory and explanation for one of my main inquisitors under the cut. Will feature images.

So I wanted to write about one of my main inquisitors, this is Levant Lavellan. She’s not really a Lavellan, because she was adopted into the clan when she was exiled from her home to the west.

She’s a teenage inquisitor (16 when Inquisition starts and 20 when Trespasser ends) and a descendant of Ghilan’nain’s mutated slaves who escaped slavery before the fall of Arlathan/Elvhenan. It’s been referenced in the game that Ghilan’nain would create creatures and even experimented on her own followers/slaves so this was where I took the idea from, I suspected that there were at least some failed attempts. Anyways, eventually the slaves grew fed up with how they were treated and attempted to flee. Fortunately (or unfortunately) Fen’harel had heard of this and wanted to help them, so he did but they were terrified. Having heard the terrifying stories of him. In addition, they were afraid they would no longer be treated as Elvhen for how beastly they looked and the fact that they were no longer immortal due to their mixed bloodline. So when Fen’harel was not looking, they escaped him and fled to the west over the Hunterhorn Mountains.

It was a mass exodus of grand peril, for the journey was filled with monsters, dark jungles, chilling mountains, scorching deserts, and, for the most part, uncharted territory. A normal Elvhen would have died, however they were no normal Elvhen. For they carried animalistic traits. For having the blood of animals and beasts, they had claws that could help them climb, some had wings, others had gills, others had fur that kept them warm, and most had unnatural colored skin (green, blue, silver, etc) that helped hide them from predators. Despite their different powers, there was one thing they all had in common - a deep tie to the nature that surrounded them. These people were almost entirely cut off from the Fade and instead they turned to the Earth beneath, but not to the Titans. They paid close attention to the sun, the stars, the winds, and all the creatures that crawled on the crust of the world. They did not talk to animals, but they understood that animals knew the way through these places the best and so they listened to them, followed them, and eventually found a clearing far from monsters and even farther from Elvhenan. It was here where they built their first settlement, living in peace with the animals. Eventually the settlement turned into an Empire and they dubbed it ‘Neo-Arlathan’ and closed its gates from foreigners for a very long time. Ever since, paying respects to natures and having beastly roots have become an intrinsic part of their culture.

I made art of what Neo-Arlathan would look like and although it is by no means as beautiful or intricate like Arlathan, it does have a charm of it’s own. Much of it and the people - I have taken inspiration from myths and legends of Faeries and their courts, their politics, and their appearances. Here are examples of the kind of aesthetic it would have: x, x, x, and x, x, x, x. The last four are mainly to point out how beastly they can look and yes, some do look exactly like that (also follow the artist!! they deserve a lot of love!! i admire them a lot).

(Pictured above, Levant with her claws coming out during Trespasser - a sign she is slowly maturing into whatever form she’ll be in as an adult)

In much of Faerie lore, the Fae are depicted as having pointed ears and dressed in clothes woven from insects (butterfly wings, moth wings, etc) and plants. They are known to be tricksters and volatile when even the slightest bit offended, their politics are commonly divided into two - the seelie and unseelie court. The first being filled with kinder Fae and the latter with more malevolent ones. Levant belongs to the latter, specifically the Autumn court. I won’t get into too much about this but if you think human politics is complicated, Fae politics is ten times more. Taking inspiration from this, the court Levant is in has a High Power (the king or queen) and needs an advisor because of how dangerous the politics are. Levant was studying to be the next advisor and was close to becoming one until a dispute between her and the High Power caused her to get exiled.

In short, the High Powers (plural because the others in different courts were involved) wanted to 1) destroy any remnant of Arlathan/Elvhenan and 2) rename Neo-Arlathan under the basis of ‘why should we keep records of our abusers? let us burn it and move ahead’. Levant was extremely against this, especially because she was a scholar who was very interested in her people’s past. She even started a rebellion with her colleagues but that was stopped fast by the ones in charge, although her colleagues were allowed still in the Empire - because she was their leader she was sentenced to be exiled into Thedas under the basis of ‘if she loved Elvhenan so much, she can live there for the rest of her damn life’.

Distraught and alone in Thedas, she was surprised to find.... well... a lot of things (racist things, war things, apparently Elvhenan was dead things, and did you know about the Fade? WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF THE FADE things). She literally did not understand anything, that was until she met the Dalish - until she met clan Lavellan. They were literally everything she could have hoped for. Unlike her people, they cared for what was left of Arlathan and Elvhenan. They also worshipped the Evanuris/Creators, unlike her people who saw them as slave keeping monsters (Levant is a rebel, at this point she’s everything against her people). This, in retrospect, is incredibly funny for me. Because she has been fed nothing but the truth since she was born, ‘Evanuris bad, they keep slaves’ ‘We have actual records of them being bad’ ‘Why do you think we look like this, Levant’ and Levant’s just ‘(in Dorian’s mocking voice) tRiTE pROPagANDA’.

Anyways, although Levant wanted to share what she knew from her home she knew they wouldn’t believe (after meeting with other Dalish that didn’t really agree prior to clan Lavellan). She simply went along with the ‘City Elf who wants to be Dalish’ and she was in (reminder that she was 14 when she was exiled into Thedas)! She became a hunter and was much loved, and she loved everyone back just as much. Yet over time, it seemed like her secrets could not be kept for long. Eventually it got out, drama ensued, and after so much time trying to be Dalish - something she was not, Levant felt something in her broke. She knew she would never be Dalish, never be like them, so she refused her Vallaslin and told them she had to leave - she needed to see Thedas and find out where she really belonged. Her clan forgave her over time and advised her to be careful, for an unmarked elf meant something - usually easier prey for slavers. Understanding this, Levant made it routine to draw her Vallaslin on every morning with a special ink and wash it off every night. She chose Mythal and clung to her religion of the Creators like a child to their mother’s skirts, praying she’d find her place.

She just never imagined it would be the inquisition.

Now since we know how inquisition plays out, here are just a few tidbits:

Nobody believes her at first (typical)

Until they find her notes and books she took with her from the Empire (at which point Solas is ??????? ???????? SHE KNOWS ?????????)

Solas’ reactions are the funniest because while she sees him as a mentor and eventually a father figure he is almost constantly on the verge of ‘she has so much potential’ or ‘i need to get the fuck out of here’

Also it’s funny to see him going absolutely crazy at the fact she’s like ‘yeah my people said the evanuris were bad and they kept slaves and vallaslin r slave markings but they’re really not’ and he’s like (in a croaked voice) ‘oh??? who said so?’ ‘the dalish’ (in an even more croaked voice) ‘and you believe them?’ ‘i swear by the creators’ (cue solas’ inner monologue going absolute bonkers) IT’S LIKE SHE’S HITTING ALL THE MARKS BUT SHE KEEPS MISSING THEM AT THE SAME TIME???

‘oh but my people said fen’harel was bad’ ‘at least your people and the dalish have one thing in common’ ‘right?’ ‘.... yes’

which only makes the ending of inquisition and trespasser hurt even more

finding out that her people were right and Levant has been playing ‘know-it-all’ for the past 6 years of her life, that the creators really were bad, that mythal is in a form of a human woman, and that a man she considered her father figure and mentor was the dread wolf? who tried to help her people but they refused him? and now he wants to destroy the world?

her troubles with identity (inquisitor? levant? a lavellan? elvhen? an elf? a fae? a beast? a person? an imposter? a fool?), religion (who to believe, the maker? the creators? the earth and beasts, as her people do?), family issues, and culture.

culture because she suddenly finds it unfair that her people got off this train wreck of a history before the fall, how many lives were spared because they left early. how grateful and horrified she might have been when she saw the shattered library, heard the voices of the distant brethren of her ancestors.

standing before solas at the end and wondering if she should just go home, beg for a place in her court, wait for the world to end - what hope did thedas have? after having her heart shattered like that?

were her people right? was burning anything they had of arlathan/elvhenan justified? were her emotions just stupid, insensitive of the truth of it all? were her people being prideful and haughty as usual, or was there an act of kindness and progress in it? what if they were right? what if they really should just move on? should she move on as well?

god knows if she doesn’t, she might end up like Solas.

but like... despite that i feel like she’d still come to believe what the dalish believe. sort of caught in between her leaving thedas to go back home or just fully 100% acknowledging herself as a lavellan or just being a silent and distant protector of the dalish

yknow, like a wolf (considering she’ll grow to have a wolf and lion-like appearance)

like a neo-fen’harel.

O SHIT I LIKE THAT!!!!!

anyways sorry for all the word vomit but this is what i have on levant so far!

also cool tidbit: instead of Solas offering Abelas another place in the world, it’s Levant who offers him the secret to getting to the Empire in the west. After a lot of talking, he takes it and leaves.

#dragon age #levant lavellan #JDFSJSADNJLKSDJN BE WARNED THERE'S A LOT UNDERNEATH THE CUT #I COULDVE ADDED MORE BUT ID RATHER NOT JDKSFNA

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wasneeplus · 5 years ago

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Why Bojack Horseman season 5 was disappointing

So it ends with a car slowly disappearing into a tunnel. The driver is probably just as confused about her motives as I am in that moment. The music plays, the camera zooms out, the credits roll, the curtain falls. And here I am, feeling more conflicted than I’ve ever felt before about a piece of media.

By now it’s well known what kind of heights the Netflix show Bojack Horseman can sore to when it’s in its element. This show is truly something special. I’ve never seen anything that can touch me, delight me and, at the same time, depress me the way this show can. Catch me at the right time and you might even hear me confess to this being my favourite show of all time. So rest assured that everything I’m about to say I say out of love, and because of the incredibly high standards the show has set for itself. That being said, I do think my complaints are legitimate, and there were enough serious shortcomings to make me feel very disappointed in season 5.

According to many, Bojack Horseman had kind of a rocky start. Looking back at the first few episodes I think they are decent enough, but they’re certainly not representative of what the show would become known for eventually. But we didn’t have to wait very long to see a drastic increase in quality, which kept on going until the season 3 finale brought it to a preliminary climax. I still think season 3 is the strongest one overall, though the highest highs probably occurred in season 4. And then there’s season 5, which is the first time I feel the quality has dropped significantly. Worse, it detracts from previous seasons by putting certain moments in a new, quite unflattering light. But we’ll get there.

Themes of Ruin

The first thing I have to talk about, and I just have to get this out of the way so please bear with me, is feminism and my intense dislike for it. A lot of people when they hear this still think that I feel this way because I have a problem with women’s rights. Nothing could be further from the truth though. If feminism was just a women’s rights movement I’d have no problem with it. But it is way, way more than that. Feminism is an ideology, that brings its own ideological lens to the table. When viewed through that lens the world turns into one where society is dominated by an all encompassing power structure called the patriarchy. Men and women are related and locked together by a massive class struggle, although some more modern strands of feminism hold that men are just as much puppets of the patriarchy. The patriarchy, then, is the source of all the world’s social ills, and puts upon us a moral obligation to overthrow it in some kind of world revolution. Worse still, feminism in recent decades has become more and more anti-science in an attempt to discredit scientific explanations for social ills that they attribute to the patriarchy. It’s gotten to a point where the whole concept of the scientific method is under attack from academics who bought into this world view. I’ve written about this before, if anyone’s interested. All of this makes it impossible for me to view feminism as anything but a nutty conspiracy theory, akin to the kinds of things the alt-right movement would say about Zionism.

So to make the character of Diane Nguyen a feminist was always going to result in an uphill battle to make me lik her. Again, if this confuses you: imagine if she’d been a white supremacist instead, or some other kind of ideologue which would be completely disgusting to you. Imagine if instead of going on about the patriarchy, she went on about the conspiracy to commit genocide against white people, organised by a shadowy group of Zionists. That’s what it feels like for me. No matter how sympathetic the rest of her character is, her spouting that bigoted nonsense from time to time was always going to be a mark against her. And yet, amazingly, for four seasons the writers did make me like her, quite a bit actually. She was shown to be a caring, principled person who held herself to very high standards. While she had her flaws, she also seemed acutely aware of them. So much so that her season 2 arc revolved entirely around her hiding away from one of her failures out of shame. This season however her dark side just can’t be ignored anymore, because it’s intrinsically woven into the entire theme of the season. And the Diane that it brings out is one that the show is trying to frame as an improved version of herself, but honestly she just seems like kind of a bitch to me. But I’ll get back to Diane’s character this season in a moment. First I want to start with some of the more minor annoyances.

The Road to Nowhere

Throughout season 5 of Bojack Horseman I continually felt like I was waiting for something to happen, like the show was promising me something but dragging its heels to get there. I think the main reason for that is that nothing this season really got resolved, and some promising plot lines were barely explored. I know a lack of resolution is kind of Bojack Horseman’s thing. Life doesn’t suddenly end with a credit roll; it just keeps going even after what you think is a happy ending. The creator of the show, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, has stated that he doesn’t believe in endings. A bit of a worrying statement, since Bojack does have to end one day, but it has worked so far. Here’s the thing though: Bojack Horseman is not real life; it is a tv show. As such it needs to keep to a certain structure to tell an effective story. If you want to show something resembling real life that’s fine, but do cut out the dull bits please. We get an entire arc of Princess Carolyn looking for an adoptive child which seemingly gets resolved at the end by.... her adopting a child. Maybe it’s just me, but that feels way more like the beginning of a story than any kind of resolution. We get some interesting backstory about PC during her search, but the whole things ends up feeling like padding. Certainly nothing that compares to her arc in season 4, where we see her go from heaven to hell in the span of several episodes.

Bojack himself this season doesn’t seem to go through any kind of character growth either. There are no moments of revelation that give him and us more insight into his tortured soul. Everything we see of him we knew already, and all the problems he faces are ones that get introduced right at the beginning of the season, to be seemingly resolved at the end. Again, I will get to the ludicrous season climax in a moment, but as for the main character of the show: it seemed like the writers were either disinterested in him or really had no clue where to go with him next. Bojack kind of disappears into the background altogether during much of the season, since most of the other characters get way more development than he does. We do get some interesting interactions between him and Hollyhock, but that doesn’t really go anywhere either.

Mister Peanutbutter’s arc is actually kind of interesting and I have no major complaints about that. Todd on the other hand is probably one of the biggest missed opportunities in the show so far. His asexuality, and the problems coming with that, are barely explored. When Todd first came out as asexual I was a little disappointed I have to admit. I saw Todd as someone who was just really shy about sex, even though he had a healthy social life in most other respects. I saw a lot of myself and my own complicated relationship with my sexuality in Todd because of that, more so because there just aren’t any characters in fiction which represent that side of me. So when that turned out to be wishful thinking on my part, for a moment it was quite a letdown. But hey, the show doesn’t have any obligation to cater to me specifically, and it’s true that I’ve never seen an asexual character either so this could be quite interesting after all! Or so I thought.

In reality the issues surrounding asexuality barely get a mention. I don’t know any asexual people, so I can only go on what I’ve heard. My understanding is that most asexual people are indeed interested in romance, but finding someone who will be there for them, with which to form an emotional bond and a life partnership, but who at the same time is okay with never having sex with them, is quite hard. In fact, it’s something that a lot of asexual people really struggle with. I was a little disappointed that none of that really came into play in season 4, but it seemed season 5 was going to remedy this. As it turned out we get only a few brief moments where its mentioned that asexuals shouldn’t date each other just on the basis of both being asexuals and that’s it.

The rest of the time Todd doesn’t appear to be struggling with it. In fact, he doesn’t really seem to need any kind of genuine human connection at all. That’s fine for a comic relief character, which is how Todd spends most of his time, but if you’re going to tackle a serious subject like this then don’t half-ass it. Hell, Emily seems to struggle with it a lot more than Todd, even though we have seen that Todd does have feelings for Emily. All of the above is mentioned at one point or another, but we never see the consequences play out the way we usually do on this show. More time is spend on the social stigma surrounding asexuality than it is on actually living with it. Maybe season 6 will finally go deeper into the nitty gritty, but if so it remains just another thing that this season sets up only to do nothing with.

Diane

As the final episode of season 5 ends we focus on Diane driving a car. It’s a departure from previous seasons where we would focus on Bojack in the final moments, but it’s a fitting one since season 5 was much more Diane’s story than it was Bojack’s. It’s also a departure in another way, namely that I have no fucking clue what I’m supposed to feel while watching this, nor what’s supposed to be going through the head of the person I’m watching. Diane is probably the most prominent victim of this season’s smothering theme. Normally a theme should strengthen the material by binding everything together in a package that’s greater than the sum of its parts. But as previously mentioned this season has a strong feminist bend, and one of the stated goals of feminism is to make the personal political. As such, everything having to do with it is swallowed by the political message it’s trying to get across. At least, that’s what it seems like. With Diane we start out observing a woman who is trying to cope with her recent divorce. This was the obvious angle to take of course after season 4, and certainly one with a lot of potential. I really felt for Diane as she had to struggle with her newfound poverty, both in her love life as well as her, well, actual life. In episode 4, titled BoJack the Feminist, it all comes to a head for the first time however, beginning with the following stupid line:

Who? Who loves male feminists? As far as I can tell they’re one of the most despised groups of people populating the political landscape. Obviously anti-feminists loathe them, often even more so than their female counterparts. But judging by the portrayal of every man claiming to be a feminist in this show I doubt even the person who wrote that line holds them in very high regard. I would think that someone trying to write political satire would at least have to be grounded enough to know something like this. During this scene we are also subjected to the following tired cliche:

One would think that by now everyone knows this simply isn’t the case. It’s not like feminists have never tried to broaden their appeal by finding a man to speak for them. As it turns out this never works. Because the world in which a man’s word is taken so much more seriously that it’s the only way to get a message into the public consciousness, that world exists only in the heads of the most devout feminists. The only way to still be clinging to this notion is by completely ignoring reality. As it happens that’s exactly how it goes, and time and again I have to sit through another incarnation of a feminists “brilliant” “new” idea of: “hey, what if we let a man say it?!” I’m sure every time this happens the person in question thinks they’re the first to come up with it and thinks themselves very smart indeed. I don’t know how they respond when it fails yet again, but I doubt we’ll see any introspection on it from the writing staff in season 6.

In any case, this episode was probably the most annoyingly feminist one out there. We get the conformation that Diane also buys into the behavioural psychology side of the ideology, with her whole “media normalising the wrong things” shtick. It’s quite a worrying thing to me that the writers themselves seem to buy into this as well. There is a fine line between weaving a message in your art and making soulless political propaganda. If you care more about the message your art gets across than the quality of the art itself, as Diane appears to do, then it becomes damn near impossible to stay on the right side of that line. Last season there were some signs of this already, when we got the amazingly ridiculous Thoughts and Prayers. It made some interesting points about women and gun ownership (an argument straight from the NRA as it turns out) but ends in a spectacularly ridiculous fashion.

This after the Californian state legislature just passed a ban on all guns after a woman committing a mass shooting, described by PC as “sensible gun legislation” after a whole episode of arguing why gun ownership might be a positive thing for society in some cases. I can’t believe the Bojack writers are that cynical about the motives of gun ownership advocates. I really don’t know what they hope to achieve by knocking down such a clumsily constructed strawman either. In any case, besides the obvious bullshit conclusion the episode itself wasn’t that offensive to me, unlike BoJack the Feminist which wears its biases on its sleef.

The next big development in Diane the soapbox straddler’s journey comes in episode 7 called INT. SUB, where we get this bit from ms. Nguyen:

Admittedly Bojack spends most of this episode being a huge dick, so a verbal slap down was probably the appropriate response here. One might be tempted to brush off this comment as Diane just being angry, and rightfully so. But the way it’s framed it comes across like Diane is supposed to be speaking some hard hitting truth. She’s not though. We’ve been with Bojack for 44 episodes by this point and the changes have been so gradual they’re sometimes hardly noticeable, but they’ve been there. Bojack went from someone who did nothing but keep Todd down to being genuinely supportive of him when he admitted to being asexual. Yes, there was this one episode where he almost helped Todd launch a music career, but I always interpreted that as him trying to impress Diane. He went from someone who would turn down everything he got offered for the flimsiest of reasons to doing a show he knew nothing about as a favour to PC.

He went from someone who cared about no one but himself and his own misery to someone who genuinely cares about the well being of Gina, his costar. He went from someone who pushed everyone away to someone longing for the company of his sister, who he clearly cares about very much. Can you imagine the arsehole of early season 1 doing any of that? So Diane’s comment appears very misplaced and mean-spirited. With some different framing this whole situation could be about unfairly judging someone’s past. Of course we know the show is definitely not going to go there; it railed against forgiving public figures, that is men, for past transgressions just three episodes ago. Anyway, the point is that I can understand Diane saying it in the heat of the moment, but why does it seem like the writers are agreeing with her?

Here we come back to the crux of Diane’s arc in this season. The reason she inflicts her feminist side on us so much is not because it’s in service of any kind of character development. Her arc should've been about her standing on her own two feet again after the divorce, like it seemed to be at the beginning. Instead somewhere along the line the writers decided to make her the mouthpiece of the message this season is trying to send, thus making her character subordinate to political considerations, just as I feared. This is expressed most clearly in episode number 10, Head in the Clouds. Bojack and company are at the premier of their television show Philbert when Bojack is asked to say some words to the waiting public before the screening. Since he has nothing prepared and his head is at a totally different place at the moment he mutters some lines which barely make any sense.

They are enough to set off Diane’s righteous fury however and after the screening she first confronts Flip, saying that she “screwed up”.

The idea is that she thinks because people will identify with Philbert they will rationalise their own awful behaviour. So what we learn here is that Ms. Nguyen, despite her lecturing about media and how it influences people, doesn’t actually understand the first thing about how art interacts with the human mind. The big problem with most human beings is that they tend to overestimate their own goodness. This is not my observation, in fact it’s widely known among folks who study this sort of thing. The best way art can shape us into better people is not by being purely didactic, that is, trying to teach us what’s good and what’s bad. People above the age of nine are not going to absorb that message. Instead, what a piece of media should aim to do is try and help the observer become aware of the darkness in their own soul. The best way to do this is to make them identify with a character like Philbert, make them feel what he feels and then show them the shitty things he does because of it. And everyone feels vulnerable at some points. Everyone, even the biggest arseholes. So when you show someone like Philbert doing something nasty, and the viewer is seriously questioning whether or not they’d be doing the same thing in that circumstance, then you’ve written something successful. Then you’ve written something that can truly affect people for the better.

Of course all of this is completely lost on Diane who, after getting nowhere with Flip, goes to Bojack and confronts him with his earlier statement. She tells him that the point of Philbert was never to make him or anyone else feel okay about what they’ve done. She says she doesn’t want anyone to justify their shitty behaviour because of the show. Naturally Bojack asks her what the hell her problem is, so after some back and forth she confronts him with the tape describing what happened between him and Penny in New Mexico. The situation escalates until Diane starts berating him about what happened with Sarah Lynn. The fight ends with the apparent end of their friendship.

I hate everything about this whole scene. It fact it might be the whole reason I decided to write this. It’s downright uncomfortable to watch at some points. That probably was the intention to some degree, but it’s uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons. I don’t feel “confronted” by anything. Rather I weep for what the writers have done to Diane. This scene feel’s like a bully kicking their victim while they’re down. I’ll talk about the whole Penny and Sarah Lynn thing in the next part, so let me just say here that I don’t understand what Diane is hoping to accomplish with this. She asks Bojack if he feels bad about all the things he’s done, and he admits he does. He does try to excuse it.

But after receiving no sympathy he goes on to claim that he is the real victim, because he has to live with this shit. Whether or not he really means it or is just trying to upset Diane is unclear. What is clear that Diane’s approach is entirely unproductive. Bojack becomes more and more defensive as she becomes more aggressive and unsympathetic. I would also like to know who all these women are that Bojack has wronged. It’s implied that Bojack doesn’t care about their feelings as long as he feels sorry for himself. Diane’s scrutiny isn’t exactly not making him feel sorry for himself, in fact it has kind of the opposite effect, but it’s also hard to sympathise when I don’t give a shit either. Who are all these women? What has Bojack done to them that was so horrible? Again, we’ll get to Penny and Sarah Lynn in a second, but I almost get the feeling that the show is trying to shame Bojack for having lots of casual sex. You can say that’s not exactly a good thing, but it’s not something that he does to other people. Sex, believe it or not, is still something that two people do together under most circumstances. I’m not going to feel sorry for all those vapid starfuckers for getting exactly what they were after. Even in the case of, say, Emily I don’t think he owes her any apologies. He certainly did to Todd for sleeping with the girl he was infatuated with, but then I don’t remember Todd being particularly upset at any of those firemen either. Emily could’ve just said no and that would’ve been the end of it. Instead she decided to approach Bojack and sleep with him.

The fight culminates in Bojack confirming her earlier accusation.

Which we already know isn’t true. After all, what is the point of this whole damn tv series if we didn’t see Bojack change at any point. But the writers put these words into his mouth not because it is in line with the character development we’ve seen so far, but because is serves the message. This season is about confronting powerful men with their awful behaviour, so Diane has to become belligerent to Bojack to confront him, and Bojack needs to tell us she’s right for doing so because he’s learned nothing. Screw you if you’ve become invested in his growth as a character. You’re no different from those who get invested in Philbert and cheer for him, even though he’s awful. That’s what I mean when I say Diane’s just become a mouthpiece for the writers. This scene is to show that Bojack is one of those awful powerful men that needs to be confronted, and the fact that it’s Diane doing it, the same person responsible for making Philbert “too likeable” says something about what the writers think about their main character. One gets the distinct impression that the earlier quote from Diane about Philbert is exactly how they think about Bojack. Given that, who do you think the people who excuse their behaviour because of Philbert are supposed to represent? Why do you think this season is so concerned with teaching us about how media normalises things? What we are watching is the writers confessing to realising how many people like Bojack, and them being afraid their audience is too stupid not to idolise and emulate him. So it has to be more obvious that Bojack is the bad guy, and believe me: they will make it very obvious in the next episode.

But first to wrap up Diane’s... I guess we should call it her “arc”. After angrily leaving the premier with her ex-husband she tops off the night by sleeping with him, despite his new girlfriend. Two episodes later it happens again. During the whole process she explodes several times about how bad it makes her feel, which prompts Mister Peanutbutter to ask:

Which she shoots right back at him. His answer is clear: because he loves her. But we never get an answer from her, and frankly: I would like one. It completely baffles me why she would do this. If her arc would’ve been more about her divorce perhaps this could’ve been explained. But as is it’s a shocking piece of hypocrisy that never gets addressed.

She does mention being a hypocrite and not knowing what she’s doing later on, but naturally there’s someone on hand to excuse her, since she isn’t a man.

Here Diane shows some much needed introspection, but she doesn’t really go into any specifics. What’s more, the final conversation between Bojack and Diane doesn’t even reference any of this. In fact there is no reason given for why she’s helping him beyond a simple “eh, we’re still friends”

What she should’ve said of course is that she realised she can never expect to truly forgive herself if she can’t also forgive him. All the pieces were in place, and it would at least have given all the previous scenes I talked about some kind of point. The execution would still have been awful, but at least I wouldn’t have to use quotation marks around the word arc. But no, we can’t have the author insertion character come off her moral high horse, no pun intended. She just has to do it because she is such an awesome friend.

So yeah, bit of a mess this character. I can almost discern the contours of a logical character progression, probably as it was originally intended. All the ideas were there: her being confused about where she stands with Mister Peanutbutter, being confronted with her own insecurities at the same time, and Bojack trying to get her to play ball with his shitty schemes and her finally putting her foot down. But Bob-Waksberg has admitted that changes were made to the story after they decided to play into the #metoo controversy going on at the time. I wonder if those changes involved sacrificing some parts of Diane’s arc, to give us the mangled corpse of a character arc that we see here.

The Whole Penny and Sarah Lynn Thing

The two main things thrown at the feet of Bojack in the fight with Diane are his involvement in the death of Sarah Lynn and his almost having sex with the daughter of his old friend. Let’s start with the more justified one. What happened between him and Penny was that Bojack, a way older man who should’ve known better, gave in for a moment to the avances of a seventeen year old girl and might have done something with her if her mother hadn’t walked in. Now, I can fully understand why Charlotte would be very angry about this, and why Bojack feels guilty about it. After all, he found something out about himself which wasn’t pretty. But what I never understood was Penny’s reaction to all of this. Specifically the moment in what is probably one of the most profound episodes of the whole series, That’s Too Much, Man!, in which they go to her college and Bojack almost literally stumbles into her. Her reaction to this is... quite bizar. She acts like a traumatised child stumbling into her abuser.

Keep in mind that this happened just last season. So how old is Penny now? Eighteen, maybe nineteen years old? No one says this about themselves just one year later. Never mind the fact that seventeen does not equal little child, I don’t buy that Penny had such a sudden leap in maturity. Maybe if it was ten years later and she had a lot more sexual experience, enough to know that sex can be a completely unromantic act to satisfy some urges sometimes. When she looks around and sees some seventeen year olds, and suddenly realises how young she was at the time, and then she realises she was taken advantage of and feels disgusted? Yeah, I’d buy that. But this is just nonsense. I thought so at the time as well, but I supposed it wouldn’t fit into the story line if we’d had to wait ten years for the revelation. What compounds it is this simple observation by Bojack himself.

And he’s right about that. Nothing actually happened. Sure, there were probably some exceptionally uncomfortable conversations between Penny and her parents afterwards, but I get the impression they worked it out between them. So at most I would expect Penny to look upon Bojack as a rather disgusting old man who she once, in a fit of youthful naïveté, felt attracted to. But this whole trauma angle stretches credulity. I was willing to put up with it as long as it was just another thing to weigh on Bojack’s conscience. The way he saw the incident up to this point was way more important than how it actually happened. After all, only he knows if he really would’ve gone through with it, or at least he thinks he knows. But now, because of the meta-commentary at work here, we as the audience are being scolded for not caring enough about Penny’s feelings by still rooting for Bojack. I’m sorry, but that’s where I draw te line. The reason I don’t care is because what you’re telling me makes no sense, and that’s not my fault.

On a side note: I do find it a bit rich that Diane essentially chastises Bojack for presumably intending to have sex with Penny, when in season one she was singing a rather different tune.

Whether you agree with that or not (I happen to think there’s a bit more to it than that) you have to acknowledge that it works both ways. Maybe Bojack is convinced deep down that he is capable of something like that, but until he actually does we’ll never know, and all we can judge him on are his actions. His actions don’t include sleeping with a seventeen year old girl. I wonder where the writers of season 5 stand on this, and if they realised this character inconsistency. Then again, I think we already established they didn’t really give a toss about Diane’s character this season.

Sarah Lynn then, the drug addict who overdosed on Bojack, thanks to Bojack. Or so we are led to believe. The truth of the matter is a lot more complicated I think. The only thing that Bojack bares the full responsibility for is him calling her up and asking if she’s up for going on a bender. Yes, that’s certainly not the most responsible thing to do, but she’d already revealed to Bojack she was fully intending on going back to doing drugs anyway. So let’s unpack the accusations regarding Sarah Lynn one by one.

So how was that his fault exactly? We see in one episode that her mother was right there on set with Sarah Lynn all the time. Sarah Lynn isn’t and never was his responsibility. The guilt he feels over that was more because of his inaction, which is understandable. Maybe he could’ve helped her, maybe not, but he probably should’ve tried. But when the only father figure in her life is an actor she works with then something has already gone terribly wrong, and not because of Bojack. The real reason it eats him up is probably because he cared about her and because he likes himself much more as a jovial dad than the grumpy washed-up celebrity he became, not because his actions led her to growing up the way she did.

When did that happen? Sarah Lynn never came to him for help. They accidentally ran into each other and after a little incident he immediately checked her into rehab. She refused to stay there though and came to Bojack to ask him if she could crash at his place. That’s the story, morning glory.

You could say it like that. Or you could say that she had sex with him. What’s the difference exactly? That Sarah Lynn was a washed up star, and addict who had a really rough childhood? All of that also applies to Bojack. Sarah Lynn wasn’t some wide eyed, innocent, naive, young thing. She was a grown woman in her thirties. Yeah, her and Bojack probably weren’t good for each other, but she came to him, remember? I can’t for the life of me think of a way of looking at this where Bojack was the one doing wrong to Sarah Lynn and not the other way around. Surely we aren’t supposed to think it’s because Bojack’s a man and Sarah Lynn a woman, right?

She seemed awfully eager to abandon her sober streak though. She lived in a house made of drugs with bottles stacked behind her calendar. Besides, as I said before, according to her she was planning on doing drugs again eventually.

But I get your point Diane. Maybe without Bojack this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe without Bojack she would still be alive. In any case it was pretty reckless of him to do that without any regards for her safety. So, where were her regards for his safety? Remember, he was an emotional wreck when he called her, and she didn’t give a damn. Under similar circumstances Bojack insisted she go to rehab, but she immediately agreed to take him on a bender and didn’t suggest to stop even when he started having severe blackouts. What if Bojack had died instead? Would Diane be giving this speech to Sarah Lynn now? Again, clearly these two weren’t good for each other, but I don’t see how Bojack was so much more responsible for this outcome than Sarah Lynn herself. How are “his actions” solely to blame for this? They were two damaged people doing stupid things together. Should he now feel guilty over having better luck than her?

Well yeah, Diane. What are you, some kind of psychopath? Of course it was rough for him. He was there and could’ve stopped it, but he failed her and so his friend died. That would be very rough on anyone, and especially on someone who is already emotionally crippled. This is what I mean when I say Diane really comes across as a spiteful bitch in this scene. Can you imagine rubbing someone’s face in their friend’s death, even when you’re angry with them? I sure can’t.

In the end I think it’s a good thing for the show that Bojack isn’t actually as horrible as he believes himself to be, or as this scene is trying to imply for that matter. Bojack is an arsehole, sure. He does stupid things sometimes, he does things that hurt other people. But generally those people choose to associate with him, and we see the sometimes twisted, but relatable rationale behind his actions. It’s a good thing that Bojack retains a certain degree of likeability that keeps us rooting for him. If not I probably wouldn’t have watched the entire show up until now. These two incidents were the most shocking ones that happened before this scene, and although we’ve been told before that Bojack is not the good guy of the story, the writers clearly haven’t dared making him the bad guy either. In the end they know what they’ve got with him. Even the climax of this season, although probably even more shocking than anything that came before, they didn’t pull of without leaving lot’s of wiggle room to excuse Bojack. Here, let me show you.

Bojack’s Big Break

Bojack’s arc this season is almost none-existent as far as I can see. We find out literally nothing new about him, and I don’t know how he’s supposed to have changed by the end of it. Maybe it’s because I don’t follow the logic behind anything that happens between him and Diane at the end, but I never had that problem in previous seasons. There are two main developments. The first is Bojack starting to conflict the fictional world of the character he plays on Philbert with the real world and his own life in it. The second is his related drug addiction which begins around the start of the season and drives most of the plot surrounding him.

For starters I would like to say how strange it is to see Bojack develop a debilitating drug addiction. Not because he would never touch the stuff, but because he would, and has, many times before. In fact, he’s been an addict for years by now, and it never seemed to affect him the way these pills do. What’s so special about them? I don’t know. Granted, I’ve never taken them, but are they really that potent that Bojack would rather drown himself in those things than just drinking his pain away, as usual? I know a lot of people don’t realise this because of its pervasiveness, but alcohol is just another drug, same as cocaine, meth and xtc.

So that’s the first problem. The second problem is an out of universe one: it doesn’t tie into any previous character development. It resolves nothing, nor does it really further anything, except Bojack going to rehab at the end of the season. Maybe there we can see some character development, but it would then just be another thing that season 5 sets up only to do nothing with. Given that it doesn’t really affect anything until episode 11, the whole thing feels like an artificial substitute for a character arc. More like a contrivance for the sake of the big climax than something that flows naturally from the themes and character. Well, maybe that’s a bit unfair of me. It only really feels like a contrivance at the climax itself, and only in light of everything else I’ve discussed. In all honesty this plot line is actually woven pretty well throughout the events of season 5, and it does come into play a few times. We see it slowly escalate from the point where almost no one seems to notice to a the complete breakdown of Bojack’s sanity at the end. The problem, once again, is that it doesn’t develop Bojack as a character in any way. This becomes very clear in the big whammer episode when it culminates into a violent outburst on set between him and Gina.

So, the strangling incident then. There are two contradictory motivations at work here on the part of the writers. first, Bojack needs the be firmly reestablished as the bad guy in the story. It needs to be shown that he will just keep doing more and more horrendous things as long as he’s allowed to have a career despite of it and never learn his lesson. The point is hammered home when he strangles his costar on set in a fit of rage. To be sure, it’s the most shocking thing we’ve seen him do so far. Naturally it destroys his relationship with her and when they see each other again she is understandably wounded and furious do to his actions. But something doesn’t add up here and the writers hint at it without even knowing it.

Would he though? Admittedly I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure there are some mitigating circumstances in this scenario. Leaving the legal technicalities aside for a moment, what does our intuitive sense of justice say?

It’s clear from the weird, trippy blurring of fiction and reality in episode 11, the fact that Bojack doesn’t remember anything of it afterwards and the clear implication that he isn’t being himself in the heat of it, that he’s having some kind of drug induced psychotic episode. Considering that he himself brought it on by taking way too many of those pills he’s certainly not blameless. But there was no way to predict this woud happen. Bojack’s never been violent before, as far as we’ve seen. He’s also done a lot of drugs, but it’s never triggered any kind of psychotic break. Not to mention that he got hooked on the pills due to a doctor’s prescription, not because he tried to get high. So at the very least there’s a bit of a moral grey area. In fact, I would say it completely undermines the moral picture this episode tries to paint. Bojack didn’t do this because he’s a bad guy. He did it because his mind wasn’t functioning properly due to outside influence. So the message falls flat. Of course it does: it conflicts with the writer’s other motivation, the reason a scenario where Bojack wasn’t himself for a moment had to be concocted in the first place. If they hadn’t it would’ve completely alienated the entire audience from the main character of their show. As we’ve established that was a bridge too far, so this weird compromise has been put on the screen where we are both supposed hate Bojack but excuse him at the same time. It doesn’t work because those are two contradictory aims.

Let me take a moment to point out how weird this whole conversation is. Gina implies that there’s been no justice for her. Yeah, but the reason there was no justice is because you haven’t pressed any charges, despite overwhelming evidence in your favour. You didn’t, because you cared more about your career than about justice. Now don’t get me wrong, I think the indictment of celebrity culture and the whole Hollywood publicity machine in this scene is actually very well done. But of all the things to get angry about, why bring this up? The one thing you yourself are responsible for. I mean, for crying out loud!

While we’re on the subject, am I the only one that finds it weird how she describes the incident?

He did a little more than that, didn’t he? Just physically overpowering someone is what you do when you want to restrain someone from getting away, or doing something you don’t want them to. In some cases it might be for their own good even. What Bojack did was lay on top of her and strangle her with both hands. If that happened to me I would never describe it in those terms. I don’t know what exactly the intent was with choosing these words. Maybe it’s supposed to show how reluctant she is to talk about it. But it comes across as either an attempt to trivialise the whole incident, or to place any instance of a man overpowering a woman on the same level as what Bojack did.

There is, admittedly, a more charitable reading of the climax, namely as an indictment against Diane’s behaviour in the previous episode. While the theme of the season is evil men and their evil deeds, it also shows there are no easy solutions. Directly after Diane’s confrontation at the premier Bojack is shown to take a large dose of pills to cope. It’s implied that his drug problem only really gets out of hand after that. So while Diane’s outburst might be justified, her moral grandstanding is not the solution to the problem. In fact it only made things worse. The final conversation might make slightly more sense in that light as well. Though only slightly, and it doesn’t exactly fix any of the other problems I’ve mentioned so far. Still, I suppose I should take what I can get. Which reminds me...

You’re Adopted!

Of all the many things that irked me about this season by far the most egregious one, the one that really made me angry, came right at the end. It was the rather underwhelming conclusion to PC’s arc. Her adopting a child and becoming a single mother in the process. What irked me wasn’t the underwhelming part, or that it didn’t fit into her character development, because it did. No, it was the huge blow to my respect for her, and the way in which it was framed. It’s made to look like this happy ending for both mother and child, but it’s quite possibly the most selfish thing I’ve seen anyone do in this show, which is saying quite a lot. Not because of the adoption itself, but because of her choice of doing it as a single mother when a suitable father is available right there.

Now, I realise that this is what PC’s journey as a character has been building up to for quite a while. She’s had difficulties excepting help from other people. She’s also consistently pushed people away who didn’t need her as much as she needed them. In fact, the problem has been escalating as the series went on. First there was Rutabaga Rabitowitz, who was kind of a dick to her so it was probably a good thing to rid herself of his antics. Then there was Judah, who was nearly perfect in every way. She fired him for just one screw up. After that came Ralph, who did absolutely nothing wrong before she decided she needed to break up with him out of nowhere. Contrast that with the infinite number of chances she’s given Bojack over the years. Bojack can, at some points, barely function without her. That’s what PC needs in a relationship, any kind of relationship. Strong, independent people scare her, and she is completely incapable of accepting she might need help from anyone.

Now, all of those are interesting character flaws and serve to make her more sympathetic rather than less. That is, as long as she herself is the victim of them. But when an innocent child is dragged into it I can no longer sympathise. No matter what the personal demons you’re struggling with, when you take on the responsibility of raising a child you should do your best to put them aside. That’s the time to think about what’s best for the child, not about what you want out of it. To just brush of Ralph because “she’s made her plans” and he’s “not in them” is such a shallow reason to rob the child of the chance to have a father in its life. What, she’s going to take care of it when a lot of the time she’s already too busy to pay any attention to her personal life? Or is she waiting for someone better than Ralph to come along?

I probably wouldn’t make such a fuss out of this if the framing wasn’t so horrible. I hoped I wasn’t imagining it at first. That’s when I saw a certain popular youtuber claim that it was clear she was going to handle single motherhood just fine. That’s just such a baffling thing to say, I don’t know where to start. Okay, I have huge respect for women who are thrust into single motherhood and rise to the occasion, making the best of a difficult situation. To willingly foist that upon your little family when there’s an easy alternative is not a sign of “self-sufficiency” however, but of sheer stupidity, ignorance, narcissism, or all of the above. Furthermore, PC’s problem has never been a lack of self-sufficiency. Quite the opposite in fact. Self-sufficiency is her drug. It’s what she uses to plaster over her other problems. So is taking care of others. Which brings us to the last point: I really doubt PC is doing this for the right reasons. With her compulsion chances are she’s taken on this responsibility to solve her own problems. That’s not how this works though. Couple that with the fact that she’s got plenty to do already, and I can’t see this turn into anything but a huge disaster.

I don’t know if the showrunners are smart or honest enough to see the problems that should arise from this. I think they are, they’ve planted hints to that effect throughout season 5, but I’m not sure. Abandoning their female empowerment trip of late will certainly displease a few people. Showing the worst case scenario will be ugly and uncomfortable. Let’s hope the writing staff shows the same kind of bravery with that as they’ve done with showing Bojack’s debacles.

Conclusion

Well, if I think about it for a while I can undoubtedly find a lot more things to bitch about, but I think this will do. All in all I certainly can’t say I hate season 5, or that it was a bad season, but it was a huge step down. The main problems are that the characters just don’t progress naturally, or that their arcs are thin to the point of being almost non-existent. Not that everything that is there is bad, but it just doesn’t feel like enough to fill a whole season. It started out promising, but somewhere along the way the decision was taken to focus more on sending a political message than on where the character’s current journeys would take them and that was really to its detriment. All of the issues I mentioned in this piece could be fixed in season 6, in which case season 5 would become just a slightly too long buildup in hindsight. I do think the team behind Bojack has proven they have more than enough talent to bring this around. However, if Game of Thrones taught us anything it’s that no matter how good a show is in its first few seasons, it can always turn to shit later. Let’s hope Bojack Horseman is spared that fate.

#bojack horseman #bojack season 5 #netflix

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itsclydebitches · 6 years ago

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RWBY Recaps: Vol. 6 “The Lost Fable”

This is a re-posting from Nov. 10th, 2018 in an effort to get all my recaps fully on tumblr. Thanks!

Today is a glorious day. Today, Ozpin stans and Ozpin haters must unite in friendship against the real assholes on this show:

The Gods.

But I’ll get to that. First, we start off with the clip that we were given earlier this week. Thrown into a high def pocket dimension housing all of Ozpin’s personal backstory (still not letting the girls off the hook for that one) we see Salem when she was still human, a lonely girl locked in a tower by her “cruel father.” She desires freedom above everything else, but can’t achieve that without help, despite her own magical power.

Lucky for Salem, a warrior by the name of Ozma arrives. He’s a man of “pure heart and courageous soul,” driven by righteousness and justice, not greed at the prospect of securing the maiden’s hand. So here we see a possible explanation (though not justification) for Salem’s father’s actions: it sounds like she was the prize for whoever could fix the problems in the kingdom. Ozma does this and, through the common irony found in fables and fairy tales, wins the girl’s heart because he was never looking for it in the first place. They fall in love, travel, and Jinn gives us a “happily ever after,” only to pull back and say that’s how it should have ended. Of course, we know that’s not the case.

The beginning of this tale is everything RWBY is trying to undermine: the simple, predictable fairy tale. There’s a helpless woman, a warrior arrives to save her, they fall in love and live in bliss. End of story. However, even in the simplest tales there’s still conflict and I want everyone to keep that in mind as we move forward. The original world Ozma and Salem inhabited was by no means a paradise. We’ll come back to that.

So, despite surviving beasts and battles, Ozma falls ill and dies, leaving Salem a wreck at his passing. Let’s keep in mind that this was an abused woman who, presumably, was locked up for most—if not all—of her life. Ozma was the one person who cared for her and then suddenly she was left alone in a world she’d never learned how to navigate. We’re told it straight out: Salem found freedom in Ozma’s eyes, not the act of leaving her tower. Without him she doesn’t know who she is. The idea that you’d go to any lengths to win your true love back is always a good story. Combine that with your true love being your only link to the outside world and suddenly Salem’s actions read as pretty inevitable.

She immediately heads to the God of Light’s temple to ask for Ozma back because, presumably, that’s what the temple is there for. To pray for things. The Gods literally want the mortals to kneel, beg, and then they get to decide whether they'll grant the favor or not. In this case Light says no. Resurrecting Ozma would upset the balance of life and death.

Except… it’s already upset? Because of the grimm. It would be one thing if this was a world where people lived and died naturally; by old age, disease, and even by one another’s hand. But this is a world where one God has created an un-ending stream of destructive monsters that Humanity has very little defense against, and we know from past stories that the grimm have frequently pushed Humanity to near extinction. Death is already winning. What freaking balance?

Regardless, Salem isn’t happy with this decision.

Salem: “That’s not fair!”

Now we start getting into the morality attached to this episode and you know what? Salem’s right. We—meaning the actual humans watching the show and currently reading this recap—understand that the cycle of life and death is something we need to accept because for us it’s inevitable. On the surface that seems like a good thing for Light to demand Salem come to terms with. However, Salem is not living in our world. Why does a cycle of life and death exist for her, particularly one where death comes violently and unexpectedly to those who don’t deserve it? Because this God said so. He and his brother have the power here. They could change things if they wanted! Make a different world with different rules! Again, we think of death as inevitable because for us it actually is, but given the option why not create a world where everyone’s immortal? I’m not claiming that’s actually the solution here—people need space, resources, they want freedom from the pain life can bring—only that Light is acting like this balance is something intrinsic and not of his own creation. He could literally say, “Yeah okay, from here on out if people die when they’re not ready they can come back until they want to move on.” But he doesn’t. He's denying her this because he wants to, not because he has to. I can already hear people going, "Too bad, snowflake, the world isn't fair" but the entire point is that this world could be.

Light tells her to “let [Ozma] rest,” establishing that these beings are hypocritical as well. He preaches letting a mortal move on, but then drags that exact mortal into an endless existence when it serves his purpose. So yeah. These guys are dicks.

Ultimately, they want an unfair world. Why? So people will revere and pray to them. If they actually created something that was close to a paradise, well, then Humanity wouldn’t have need of Gods anymore. And as we’re about to see, the Gods are far more arrogant beings than Salem ever was.

God of Light won’t grant your prayer? Well, there are two brothers. I’m not blaming Salem for making use of her options here especially when, as established, she recognizes that things don’t have to be this way. She approaches the God of Darknesses’ domain and we have a more overt characterization that paints him as incredibly fallible. He’s not some omniscient, greater being that stands above Humanity in terms of ethics. He’s a megalomaniac, thrilled to have the “prize” of a “low woman kneeling before him.”

Keep the parallel imagery in mind: Salem is under the thumb of her “cruel father” and now she’s at the mercy of brothers who delight in her subservience. She’s a woman who is pushing against the presumed power of men… and she’s about to be punished for it.

Salem recognizes that the Gods have emotions just like Humanity because she’s careful not to mention the God of Light, acting like Darkness is the first one she approached. Thrilled at her supposedly blind faith in him (catching the theme here with Ozpin?) he immediately grants her prayer and Ozma is resurrected in a panic. For a brief moment Salem thinks everything is going to be okay.

Then Light shows up and the brothers start squabbling like, well, siblings. Just like it’s bad when teenagers with powerful weaponry and relics throw temper tantrums, it’s bad when super-powered gods start bickering. We see clearly for the first time that they really view Humanity as toys to fight over, rather than beings to be respected: Ozma is resurrected, killed, resurrected again, and killed again as they fight. Salem has to watch it all.

The fight finally ends when Light says that he doesn’t want to control his brother, but Salem does. She lied about approaching him first. So… she’s evil incarnate?

Seriously, this is some crazy manipulation on the Gods’ parts. They claim that Salem is punished for her arrogance, but what’s arrogant about praying to the gods who wanted your prayers in the first place? Of course, the real issue is she didn’t pray in the right way. They’re not upset that she’s messing with the (not intrinsic!) balance of life and death, they’re upset that she dared to question them. Light hates her because she didn’t say, “Okay, master” like a good girl and drop the subject. Darkness hates her because she didn’t feed his ego and actually approach him first. He doesn’t have any problem with resurrecting Ozma until he learns that the measly mortal managed to trick him, and then his pride is hurt. It’s not about the resurrection. It never was. It’s about a woman who won’t stay in her place.

“You monsters!” Salem cries and yeah, I agree.

They claim that they made her immortal so that she can learn the super important lesson that death is supposedly inevitable, but the real punishment is announced just a second later: “You cannot be with your beloved.” The immortality isn’t to teach her, it’s to make her suffer. It also says a lot that Light literally tortures her before explaining the curse: he swallows her in dragon form, has her fall from a great height, briefly drowns her, and then slams her against the now hard water. They want to bring her low.

Which might make sense to some people because in the real world a lot of religions teach that God is absolute and we must never, ever question Him. But in this world the Gods only have authority because they have the power to enforce it. We’ve been shown no reason why Humanity should obey them like this.

Oh but wait… it's because the brothers created them. So Humanity should be grateful and obey them in return, right? Except that argument has never worked for me. We see the same logic applied to parents and their children: I created you, so you have to do everything I say. Um, what? Keep in mind that I'm not talking about basic respect or parents enforcing rules because they have actual experience to draw from: i.e. you have to eat your vegetables because it's my job to make sure you grow up healthy and I actually understand why vegetables are important in a way you don’t yet. Rather, I'm talking about parents who see procreation as a catch-all excuse for blind obedience in all things. A child didn’t ask to be born and eventually they’re going to grow up. They’re their own, autonomous person who is not beholden to the people who first put them into the world. Have you ever heard parents claim that you should keep quiet because they gave you existence and food and a roof over your head? As if those aren’t the basic requirements of deciding to have a child in the first place? Have you ever had or met a parent who refuses to let their children become independent—including forming their own opinions and asking their own questions—because they like the feeling of power the current dynamic gives them? Yeah, we’re seeing the same thing here. Salem is starting to question her parents’ actions and they’re coming back with the God equivalent of, “How dare you defy me I am your father!”

[Insert obligatory Star Wars GIF here.]

Light: “Your selfishness and arrogance have led you astray”

Seriously, that line reads as a lot less damning if you question why Salem is selfish and arrogant for asking for happiness--happiness the Gods can easily grant her.

So she’s a prisoner again and Salem lets her anger guide her, deciding that she’ll take down the men who cursed her for—again—doing nothing except questioning them and their pride. She unites all the kingdoms together… which is supposedly what Light wants from Humanity. But oh, your unity is at the expense of worshiping us? Yeah no, don’t want it anymore, sorry. Granted, Salem unites them under a falsehood—she didn’t steal immortality from them—but the goal of this crusade, achieving immortality for all, is something that can happen. Salem has gotten all of Humanity to ask the question she started out with: why do you insist on governing an unfair world and why should we stand for that?

The Gods’ response? Kill everyone who’s questioning them.

From the Gods’ perspective Salem has infected Humanity with real independence. They don’t have blind faith in them anymore. So they should just be wiped out. Darkness kills every human alive for the actions of a few, further reinforcing that they’re interested in promoting an unfair existence. Light does absolutely nothing to stop him.

Salem calls it what it is, a “massacre.”

Then the Gods decide to leave. They made what they saw as pets, the pets started questioning their masters, so they slaughter them and move on to try again. “This planet was a beautiful experiment, but it’s merely a remnant of what it once was,” meaning that the time when Humanity possessed blind faith in the Gods was supposedly when it was “whole.” Darkness destroys the moon on his way out (finally that’s answered!) and “once again, Salem was alone.”

They’re still torturing her though. They’re mad at the pet for its lack of obedience, so what’s the best way to hurt it? Leave it isolated. The worst parts of Salem’s life were when she was alone in her tower, so now she can be alone once more with an entire planet as the tower instead.

And this is a common abuse tactic, the “see how better things could have been if you’d just listened to me?” The Gods are setting up a lopsided comparison. If you’d just obeyed us from the start you could have had the world even without your love, but because you didn’t you get nothing. Think about that the next time you want to question us.

So Salem wanders alone, trying to find some way to die. What else is she going to do? Really can’t blame her for throwing herself into the grimm pool, thinking that would finally get the job done. Instead that magic creates a “being of infinite life desiring infinite destruction” and the Salem we know today emerges; one who is literally incapable of working towards true peace. Destruction is all she understands now. In some ways, from then on she’s lost some responsibility for her actions. Oh, I’m not saying team RWBY and co. can just ignore her—still trying to destroy Humanity here—but if magic warps you into something that literally can’t be reasoned with, and you had no idea the magic would do that, and the magic was your only hope after the Gods royally fucked you over… yeah, talk about a tragic backstory. I certainly don't claim to know whether RT is going to go the redemption arc route (even if Ruby’s silver eyes look a lot like Light’s power and could perhaps destroy the grimm part of Salem…), but there’s leeway to do that if they wanted to. Remember our opening?

Salem: “There will be no victory in strength.”

Ozpin: “But perhaps victory is in the things you’ve long forgotten… a smaller, more honest soul.”

Strength quite literally won’t work because Salem is a cursed immortal. All the armies and relics won’t put a dent in her power. She can’t be killed… but maybe she can be redeemed. To me Salem the human and Salem the grimm are distinctly different people and if you can get rid of one half, the other might finally take responsibility for her actions and find some peace.

For now though, we get this bullshit between Light and Ozma.

Talk about further manipulation. Light tells him that “a tragedy has befallen your home at the hands of my brother” and while technically that's true, he’s spinning it like Darkness went AWOL and caused all this without Light’s knowledge or consent. He’s painting himself as the Good God here that Ozma should listen to. He was dead for pretty much all of these events and thus doesn’t know how cruel the Gods have been to Salem. If he had, I doubt he would have listened.

Light then gives Ozma a job: unite Humanity and then summon us with the four relics. If we like what you’ve accomplished we’ll live among you again; fail and we’ll destroy you. Oh, and here’s four powerful relics to help you achieve this. Remember though, what the Gods actually want is obedience, not harmony. There never was harmony! This is why I wanted everyone to keep “cruel fathers” and a kingdom at war in mind: even when the Gods considered Remnant “whole” there wasn’t peace. Things were still awful for humans, it’s just that humans had blind faith in the Gods at the time. That’s what they want again. It seems significant to me that Jinn—a being created by Light and probably a reflection of his beliefs—says at the very beginning that this was the age where Humanity was “capable of greatness.” Only in the shadow of Gods is Humanity supposedly at their best.

So basically, “Re-train the puppies so that they’re obedient. If you don’t we’ll just kill everyone a second time.”

However, all of this hangs on Humanity actually wanting the Gods back. I wouldn’t, and at this point I don’t think Ozpin does either. He’s trying to unite Humanity in his own way—bring about true peace by getting rid of Salem and defeating the grimm; working through the problems they have amongst themselves—and intends to use the relics’ power to achieve that goal. I’d be super shocked if after 2000 years and hearing at least part of Salem’s story, he’s still all, “Yeah let’s bring the Gods back! They seem like cool dudes.” Not unless he thinks that’s the only way to get rid of Salem’s immortality. The lesser of two evils and all that.

Back to the conversation though. It’s important to note that Ozma doesn’t want this responsibility. He wants to join Salem in the afterlife… who he apparently doesn’t know is still alive? He’s been dead for a while now so I guess Light just had him hanging unconscious in this space between worlds?? Idek it’s so messed up. It’s more manipulation. Ozma goes back not because he thinks the world should really rest on his shoulders (something that will change in time as survivor’s guilt starts eating at him—our current Ozpin think it’s “all [his] fault”), but because he wants to see Salem. He goes back for love of her, just like all of this began because of Salem's love for him.

This is why choice is so important to Ozpin. This is why he didn’t let Pyrrha rush into the decision to become a Maiden and questioned her convictions all the way up until seconds before flipping the switch. He once made a decision impulsively… and this is where it got him.

How the world was re-populated and why it’s so different isn’t made clear, but it sounds to me like Light deliberately created an even harder challenge—a more interesting “experiment.” Ozma has agreed to unite Humanity? Okay, okay, but how about we make two separate races that already hate each other? And take away all their magic? And scatter the relics so he doesn’t have easy access to them? And have him reincarnate in other people so it’s constantly a battle to balance their lives with his duty? And change all the cities so he can’t pull from any of his former political power? And keep the grimm so the people he’s trying to bring peace to are constantly threatened and terrified? Ozma is a rat running around a very complicated maze, one the Gods keep chucking traps into while wondering curiously if he’ll still manage to succeed. I don’t think they really care if he does or not. It’s a win-win for them. Ozpin either creates a world willing to worship them again, they destroy the world and move on like they’d originally planned to, or they just never come back at all. What have they got to lose here?

So Ozpin reincarnates in a man with short white hair and a green necklace, tiny bits of personality that he’s clearly held onto. He emerges into a world literally on fire, but after a panicked “Where am I?” and the staggering trauma of no longer being sure of who he is, he immediately jumps into saving people mode, cutting down a grimm that threatened a civilian. Ozpin is a good man.

During his travels he learns about someone known as The Witch and realizes it must be Salem. It doesn’t surprise me that after everything they’d just bask for a while in finding one another again and eventually question whether they shouldn’t be Gods in the brothers’ place. That’s the kind of arrogance that caused all this trouble to begin with. Not Salem’s supposed arrogance for questioning them, but the Gods’ warped logic: you should bow to me because I happen to have more power than you. Luckily, Ozpin realizes after a couple of years that this isn’t how to bring peace to Humanity. Especially when your wife wants to kill everyone who doesn’t agree with you.

Who did that before? Oh yeah! The brothers.

He doesn’t leave before having children with Salem though and oh my god they’re such cuties I'm so upset. They’re also clearly the first four Maidens: girls pure of heart who can wield magic. I don’t think Ozma’s daughters are literally reincarnating though. Rather, I think during one of his lowest points he met four kind sisters and was reminded of his own children; what Humanity is capable of achieving when driven by hope and love. So he gives them his magic and tells a story that further reinforces the connection in his own mind. Every time a Maiden is created there’s a little piece of his girls still living on.

Which puts an entirely new spin on how much he cared for Pyrrha… and how difficult it must be seeing Cinder wield that power.

Ozma tries to sneak his girls out during the night, but Salem finds them. Here we finally see how the grimm pool twisted her. It’s not just a nebulous “oh we should destroy people who don’t agree with us,” now we—and Ozpin—see first hand what a magical appetite for destruction creates. It has you attacking your husband while your children stand directly beside him; burning him to death while he tries to talk.

Yeah. Regardless of whether or not we think Salem is responsible for how she got here, the fact remains that she has to be stopped. A force like that can’t exist among Humanity.

Oh, and for the record? This is why Ozpin has trust issues. Even putting aside all the other times he’s been betrayed, the first time he spilled his secrets to someone he trusted, this is what it ends with.

And Yang is yelling about how he hasn’t shared shit with them. His own wife murdered him and their kids when he told this story and you literally just pulled out your weapon. Yeah, I’m sure Ozpin is feeling real comfortable right now.

We see some of the lives he’s lived since then. Old men just trying to get by, younger men who drown everything with alcohol (no wonder Ozpin doesn’t criticize Qrow for his drinking), but also men who keep moving forward and try to make a difference. Dadpin creates the cane—and I really like the idea that he did that so there’d be no more killing. Like Kenshin’s reverse blade sword or the Doctor’s screwdrivers. You might need a weapon in a war, but you don’t necessarily need one that kills. Ozma has seen (and experienced) enough death already.

Ozma finds peace with his hosts, learning to live among them instead of fighting them, and he hopes he can achieve the same sort of cooperation with the rest of Humanity. So he finds the relic of knowledge and asks the three most important questions:

Where are the other relics?

What are their powers?

How do I defeat Salem?

Jinn’s answer to the last question? “You can’t.”

It’s hardly the hopeless situation that the last frame paints it as though. As I said last time, jinns and genies are notorious for twisting wishes or taking questions too literally. So though that perhaps adds a grain of salt to all that we’ve learned today, it also means that Ozma’s initial question may have been too specific. “How do I defeat Salem?” You don’t. Not alone.

It reminds me of (minor spoilers!) Castlevania, where Big Bad meets Big Good and Big Bad wants to know why they think anything has changed. After all, you couldn’t defeat me before.

Big Good: “I was alone before.”

(Seriously please watch that show it's great.)

But that’s RWBY. From the Beacon teams to this entire volume talking about trust, cooperation is the key to survival. For reasons both personal and practical Ozpin has been fighting this war primarily on his own, like the God of Light willed him to, but that’s just another manipulative distraction. Saving Humanity is not Ozpin’s sole responsibility and even if he thinks it is, going it alone will never work. But with Team RWBY and company? Now he stands a chance.

I’m hoping now that the end of RWBY sees the destruction of the grimm and Salem (either completely or just her destructive half) with the acknowledgement that Humanity will never find paradise… but they can keep striving to make things better. The relics are destroyed, the Gods can no longer be called, and these creations live out the rest of their existence without cowering in any being’s shadow.

I’d like that for them.

So yeah. That’s the takeaway. The Gods are dicks. Direct all that visceral hatred towards them instead of Ozpin. I’d like that too.

See you next week!

Additional Notes

So when does Ozma change to Ozpin? He seems to have been Ozma for all of his reincarnations up until the one we originally thought of as Ozpin—unless Jinn is just picking a name and sticking to it. Still, I wonder when and why that syllable changed.

A couple of other fans have pointed out that the markings we see around Salem’s room look like an incomplete version of Jaune’s symbol—the one that would have been facing outwards on his shield when Tyrian says that Jaune interests him. It could be that Jaune is a direct descendant from the revamped version of Salem’s kingdom. The kind of person that Ozpin might have a soft spot for and let into his school even though he can’t fight yet…

I enjoy the twist on “ever after” here: Salem wanted to be with Ozma for forever—he wanted the same in the afterlife—and they both technically got what they wanted, just in the most horrific way possible.

The God of Darkness moves the same way the Nuckelavee does. Creepy.

Ozma is destroyed by the God of Light in the same manner that Cinder killed Pyrrha. Hmm…

Jinn says that “fate led [Salem] back” to the grimm pool, which is another odd mention of fate in a world where the Gods are canonically fallible.

“The brothers’ grimm”—excellent line.

I’m kinda bummed that the Faunus theory didn’t pan out. The one where Ozpin accidentally created them while figuring out how to turn people into animals lol.

So magic is inherited even if the rest of the world doesn’t have it… is that connected to semblances somehow? Because they still seem pretty magic-y to me. I hope we get an explanation of how those abilities tie into Humanity 2.0 this volume.

#rwby #rwby spoilers #mymetas #RWBY Recaps

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dent-de-leon · 7 years ago

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This may be old hat, but I have seen people talk about how Shiro clearly favors Keith to the detriment of other team members. Namely, Lance. I don't feel like this very IC, but I wanted to get other opinions and I enjoy your meta.

This is something in fanon that’s always kind of bothered me honestly. I have a whole meta here about how Shiro protects Lance and cares for him throughout Sendak’s takeover. I honestly don’t understand how people could say Shiro doesn’t care enough about Lance when Shiro was literally willing to get captured and tortured again for his sake. “But that was one time!” some fans will say. As if putting your life on the line and getting a few thousand volts of electricity surging down your spine isn’t a big deal apparently?? Shiro cares for Lance, he does. He could’ve won that fight, but he threw it for Lance’s sake.

Something that I repeatedly see people cite as a sign Shiro “favors” Keith over Lance is their talk before the BOM. Shiro decides he’s going to take Keith with him, and Lance lashes out. He claims Keith is unable to stay calm, and yet, he’s the one losing his temper. And this is only the latest in a long line of instances in which their supposed “rivalry” is really just a one-sided game where Lance is the instigator and Keith repeatedly has to remain calm and either try to make peace or just tune him out. Throughout season 2, he really snaps back. In contrast, Lance has demonstrated again and again that he is childish and self-centered, that he himself has a quick temper. And yet, he’s quick to direct the blame at Keith. Who handles it quite gracefully, might I add.

So yeah, anyway, Shiro was right. It was a good call to bring Keith instead of Lance. But because Lance is often placed upon a pedestal, somehow not coddling him 24/7 can be misconstrued as abuse. I think another reason people are so quick to say Shiro doesn’t treat Lance the way he deserves is because he doesn’t talk Lance through all his insecurity issues. But you know what? If Lance wants to talk about it, then he has to bring it up. The only two people that have actually addressed that directly are Allura and Keith. And both of them only do so after Lance brings it to their attention. If Lance doesn’t speak up or keeps up an act, how is Shiro supposed to see the signs and help?

More importantly, people act as though all of Lance’s insecurities are somehow Shiro’s fault. Why is that? Shiro has been imprisoned and tortured for a year. His PTSD and consequential paranoia, depression, and anxiety are far more difficult to deal with than Lance feeling upstaged. And yet, Shiro would never presume that this was somehow everyone else’s burden, or that they owed him more because of it. So why should Lance merit special treatment? Yes, Shiro isn’t as attentive with Lance and Hunk. But that’s because they’re so much more well adjusted.

I don’t mean this badly, it’s just a fact. They came from good, loving homes. Hunk feels fondly enough about his family to want to return, and seems to have no baggage associated it. Lance meanwhile we know was the youngest sibling and somewhat spoiled. They had it good before. There’s nothing wrong with that. Characters don’t have to have traumatic backstories to be deep or meaningful. But this also means that these two aren’t dealing with the same shit as Keith and Pidge. They don’t have Keith’s abandonment issues or the shared grief he and and Pidge feel over losing their family. These two need more reassurance and guidance and comfort, and Shiro is of course there to provide it.

Bizarrely enough, it also feels like fans are unable to believe that Shiro has friends. Lance treats Hunk significantly better than Keith from day one, and in fact forces his personal vendetta on Keith for purely selfish reasons. But Keith is expected to graciously accept this because “it’s just from Lance’s insecurities.” Meanwhile, Shiro clearly has nothing against Lance and has never singled him out or treated him poorly out of nowhere. Yet he’s accused of favoritism. This favoritism is really just friendship. He knew Keith before Kerberos, was so close with him he literally brought Keith to the launch instead of his own family. They’ve clearly been side by side for a long time, long enough for Keith to develop an intense desire to be with him when he shuts out everyone else. Long enough for Shiro to not be surprised that it’s Keith of all people who shows up to save him.

Romantic or not, “Shiro and Keith have the closest relationship.” In Joaquim’s own words, that’s canon (source). So of course their interactions will be different from everyone else’s. That gravity and vulnerability is unique to them alone. And honestly? Removing that link is clearly detrimental to both their coping mechanisms. I think it’s selfish for people to expect Shiro to either push Keith away or pull everyone else in. He’s not ready for something like that, and it shouldn’t be forced on him. Everyone else is allowed to have best friends or romance or whatever’s happening here. Why can’t Shiro? Why is that so wrong? And, to take this in another direction–were Lance to somehow become Black Paladin, does that mean he has to distance himself from Hunk? That he can’t still be interested in Allura? No, I don’t think so.

And I mean, Shiro does trust Lance, you know? He does still take Lance’s input into account. When Lance says he wants to try to make that impossible shot in Beta Traz, Shiro lets him. Shiro trusts him. And when he makes it? Shiro compliments him! And the reaction is immediate–Lance is clearly thrilled. So yes, Shiro does think Lance is capable of great things. Yes, Shiro lets Lance know when he does a good job and wants to be supportive of him. That much is clear.

I think the other reason why people assume Shiro is somehow biased against Lance because he made Keith Black Paladin instead. And, I’m going to be completely straightforward here–the idea of Black Paladin Lance just makes no sense to me. Neither in the narrative nor thematically and it certainly doesn’t fit with his character development. The thing is, I think people have lost sight of what Black Paladin really means. It’s not a popularity contest. It doesn’t mean you’re the “best” and you shouldn’t just want your fav to have that spot. Lance is far more suited to the role of a Red Paladin, as reflected in his parallels with Alfor, his talk with Allura, and his character arc. To quote my other meta:

It’d be a huge setback and really detract from his character development. When he sits in the Black Lion for “like half a varga” Lance’s main motivation here is seeking his own glory. His character arc is about learning to grow past that and see the bigger picture and realize everyone in Voltron is part of a whole and you’re not better because you’re the leader.

The way he treated Keith earlier in that episode was also incredibly malicious considering the guy was grieving the loss of the person he loved most. And Lance still has the audacity to spit on Shiro’s last “dying” will and continually provoke Keith until he lashes out or leaves. Learning to see the wrong in that and instead supporting Keith was a huge step for him, and I don’t see why he’d ever still take Black after that.

It also makes no sense thematically. When Keith steps into Black again, he says, “I know this is what you wanted for me, Shiro. But I’m not you. I can’t lead them like you.” And Lance just goes, “This is your moment.” Keith’s concern first and foremost is with what Shiro wanted and what’s best for the team. Lance just wants to steal the spotlight. He has no intrinsic connection to the Black lion through his bond with Shiro the way Keith does. He also doesn’t have those thematic parallels to Zarkon the way Keith does–instead, he’s recognized as being very similar to Alfor.

People act like Shiro and Keith stole away Lance’s chance at leadership, but Shiro wasn’t even considering anyone else. Lance was never even in the running.

The thing is, I kind of understand where people are coming from. To my knowledge, a lot of fans find Lance to be the most relatable, and reflect on him–likewise, I often do this with Keith. But anyway, people really feel for Lance and see their own insecurities through him. But that still doesn’t mean everyone should drop everything to immediately focus on him. Shiro is a good leader. Shiro cares about all of his paladins. Shiro by no means has anything against Lance. But that doesn’t mean he should be given the spot as Black Paladin just because he’s Lance, or that Shiro should be micromanaging his and the other paladins’ emotional needs 24/7 when he’s just trying to get by himself. I understand people feeling for Lance and wanting to see him reach his full potential. But that doesn’t mean everyone has to bow down to him. In fact, going by his daydreams and personal arc–this would significantly negate a good amount of his character development.

#shiro #sheith #lance #keith #voltron

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doyouwanttoseeabug · 4 years ago

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The Lock In by Phoebe Luckhurst - Review

Have you ever found yourself stuck listening to someone tell a long, desperately unfunny story? Maybe even something that, wrestled from the hands of this comedy blackhole, might have been interesting? Something with the bones of a pithy anecdote, but plumped up beyond all recognition by tedious backstory pseudo-‘drama’ about people you’ve never met? I feel for those people. God, I’ve been those people, and if you haven’t I salute you on your superhuman charisma/sobriety. But dear god, I’ve never tried to package those moments of abject social misery and sell one as a book.

Jennifer Probst, author of the fantastic guide to romance writing Write Naked, said that the hardest task any contemporary romance writer faced was answering the question why aren’t they together yet? With historical settings, this is always going to be intrinsically easier – whether it’s class, gender, race, a family feud or a history as a rake, the wrong romance meant that your life would be completely over. Contemporary romance has an uphill battle in creating something in the battle against love. Some go big – Clara in The Roommate has a company, a fledging PR career and a family terrified of scandal weighing against her relationship with porn star Josh, while Red, White and Royal Blue puts a whole US election at stake. Others, such as You and Me on Vacation (People We Meet On Vacation in the US), take our intimate, personal dilemmas and elevate them on the page until they feel exactly as urgent and awful as they do to us in real life.

There are no stakes in The Lock-In. Nada. None.

Oh, I guess they’re stuck in an attic. And yes, there is technically a flood in the kitchen while they’re stuck there. But you don’t read romance for other people’s real estate disasters. You read it for the romance and the humour, and this book has precious little of either.

Here’s the plot: Housemates Alexa, Ellen and Jack get stuck in the attic of their horrible rented house with Alexa’s hinge date, Ben. The book spends a tedious amount of time getting there, and the characters display very little urgency to leave once there. Alexa and Ben met on Hinge, had a few good dates and then he seemed to lose interest in each other until he suddenly texted her the night before attic-gate for a perfect date. She’s crazy into him, he seems crazy into her, Jack is busy having a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere. Ellen has to pee a bunch of times. I wait with bated breath for either joke or plot.

And then suddenly, during a conversation about their past, Ellen and Ben realise they grew up in the same place. At which point Ellen announces that she remembers him now, and he’s a total arsehole!

Fucking finally! I was on the edge of my seat. What dramatic break-up story happened here? Did he promise to run away with her and never appear? Cheat on her? Say something truly terrible?

He ghosted her on MSM ten years ago.

They never even met in person.

And (forgive me for spoiling the plot here) it turns out it wasn’t even Ben, in a ‘twist’ ending one could see coming from a mile away and has absolutely nothing to do with that bit where he semi-ghosted Alex. That detail was just included to be a faintly pink herring, I guess.

Look, I tend to switch between hard sci-fi, political fantasy and contemporary romance, and of the three contemporary romance is always going to have the fluffier problems. But these people? They have no problems. Oh, Ellen is worried she might have said mildly awkward in front of her boss at the CBD Tampon start-up, and Jack is feeling a little bit lonely in London, and Alex feels a slightly embarrassed by her civil service co-workers and really hopes this thing with Ben works out. Problems so slight that they could at best sustain three minutes of pub conversation, and even then only in the hands of a talented raconteur or the absurdly self-obsessed. 378 pages? Jesus wept.

It’s frustrating, reading this book. You can see the bones of a good idea for a novel in there. The desperation of the four of them, the wacky antics they might get up to trying to get out. The pressure-cooker tension building and building. Simmering grudges and old fights coming to the fore between Alex and Ellen, a millennial Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? full of absurd declarations and emotional clawing. Even the slightness of Ellen’s gripe with Ben could have become part of the joke. Instead we have this; a book where three people have a conversation that makes them slightly uncomfortable, while a fourth checks Twitter.

So much for the rom, but what of the com? There’s honestly not much to say here. If Phoebe Luckhurst did attempt any actual jokes, they flew under my radar. At any moment where there could be humour, Luckhurst dispenses of it with the ruthless efficiency of a kitten-drowner. There there, amusing-example-of-human-folly. Just stay under till the bubbles stop.

I ‘like’ Alex, Ellen and Ben, in that they’re fine. Nice, even. If they were real, I’d probably spend a happy twenty minutes chatting to them at a party before I left to find some people I actually clicked with. But if they told me this story? In the words of my braver self, the one who doesn’t just rictus-grin it through fifteen-minute recounting of someone’s sister’s break-up – I’m sorry, I just don’t give a fuck.

(Oh, the Jack subplot? Words cannot convey my fucking exhaustion. Don’t. Just don’t.)

#bugs reads #the lock in #phoebe luckhurst

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paleorecipecookbook · 7 years ago

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RHR: The Power of Motivational Interviewing, with Ken Kraybill

In this episode we discuss:

Information is not enough to support behavior change

Most of us resist being told what to do

How to guide a conversation to strengthen a person's internal motivation

The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

MI’s beginnings and growth

Partnership, acceptance, compassion, evocation

OARS: questions that invite people to tell the backstory

Traditional coaching vs. MI coaching

An ally approach vs. an expert approach

Show notes:

ADAPT Health Coach Training Program

The Center for Social Innovation

t3 – Training for organizations, city, counties, and statewide organizations, promoting best practices in working with people who are vulnerable or marginalized in our society.

[smart_track_player url="https://ift.tt/2LRlfBq" title="RHR: The Power of Motivational Interviewing, with Ken Kraybill" artist="Chris Kresser" ]

youtube

Chris Kresser: Ken, thank you so much for being here. I’ve been really looking forward to this interview.

Ken Kraybill: You are most welcome. I’m happy to join you.

Information is not enough to support behavior change

Chris Kresser: So, something I’ve been saying quite a bit lately and maybe to the point where people are tired of hearing it, but I really want to get this message across is that information is not enough to support behavior change. We know that only 6 percent of Americans engage in the top five health behaviors. Things like maintaining a healthy weight, not smoking, not drinking too much, getting enough exercise, and getting enough sleep. And it’s not really because they don’t know that those things are healthy. It really comes down to not being able to successfully change their behavior.

And I’ve often said that if information was enough, then Google would solve chronic disease. And so this is why I’ve been really looking forward to talking to you as an expert in motivational interviewing, because I think a lot of people who go into health coaching or become a nutritionist or go into medicine may have the idea that if they just tweak the information that they’re delivering just so, or maybe learn new information that they can get across to their patients or clients, then that will somehow do the trick. But what’s the problem with that kind of thinking?

Only 6 percent of Americans engage in the top five health behaviors—not because they lack the knowledge, but because they’re unable to successfully change their behavior. Learn how to encourage lasting behavior changes with motivational interviewing.

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, your comments remind me of a quote that I heard from Bill Fordyce at one point, who was out of the University of Washington, who said that patient education is to behavior change as spaghetti is to a brick wall.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, I love that. That really gets to the heart of it.

Ken Kraybill: And I suppose if the spaghetti has been cooked, maybe it will stick a little bit. But generally speaking, it doesn’t stick. And I think that’s just one of those things that we in all fields have convinced ourselves, that somehow it’s education that creates behavior change. And there’s no doubt that it helps. Knowing more about something is helpful. But it’s not quite enough to tip the balance towards people actually acting on it.

And when you just mentioned those five health behaviors, I realized I’m not in the 6 percent, I’m in the 94 percent. But yeah, it’s one of those things that it turns out that motivation itself to change is actually fairly complex. It has different facets to it. And so education, knowing something about something is helpful and important, but not enough.

Chris Kresser: So why is that, do you think? I mean, most people do probably understand that getting enough sleep and getting enough exercise is important to their health. I mean, we see headlines every day in the news about that. And what is this conflict about? Why is it that it’s so difficult to change?

Ken Kraybill: Yeah. I think part of it is the dynamic of how the information comes to us. It’s often coming to us from an expert of some sort, whether it’s in writing or spoken. And there’s something about human nature, which I think is healthy, actually, that pushes back when somebody tells us what we ought to do. So I think there’s that at play.

I also think what’s happening is that there are other parts to readying ourselves and then taking action that have to be fulfilled. And that includes being clear to ourselves what are the reasons why we would want to exercise one of those behaviors and practice it more consistently. Another might be how to go about it because each of us has unique ways to go about making changes that we want to make. Another might be how important is it to us. It might be that we have a lot going on in our lives and it’s important at some level, but not so important that we give it priority.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Ken Kraybill: It’s also confidence. Confidence is a huge part of this. And so all of those things kind of conspire together, if you will, to determine whether we actually take action.

Chris Kresser: And it seems to me, I know this is part of the idea of resolving ambivalence in motivational interviewing, which maybe we’ll get to. But a kind of lightbulb for me when I was learning about this several years ago was that we often have good reasons for not changing as well.

Ken Kraybill: Exactly. I think right in this very moment you and I and anyone listening is ambivalent about something. We have mixed feelings about things. Sometimes it’s about something that’s not all that important, like what am I going to have to eat tonight? Shall I eat Mexican or shall I eat Thai fusion? And sometimes it’s about things that are such deep, dark issues in our lives that we barely want to go there. And so we avoid that. But a lot of the things are around like these health behaviors that you mentioned, as well as attitudes. And so there are many, many things about which we have mixed feelings.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, an example of that, we had a picnic with some friends last night and mothers and fathers of relatively young kids—our daughter is six, going to be seven soon—and some of the moms were talking about how they are just not getting enough sleep. And they really know they should get to bed earlier, but once they get their kids down to bed, those evening hours are one of the few times they have during the day to do things for themselves, whether it’s to get some work done or read a book or do something pleasurable. And so to me that was a really good example of where it’s not so simple. They know getting to bed earlier is good for their health, but then there are other needs they’re trying to meet as well.

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, that’s right. Our needs don’t stand in isolation. We have competing needs, or at least co-existing needs. And so which do we give attention to? I often think when I approach a dessert table, you’ll either see people, or sometimes it’s myself, I’ll say something like, “I really shouldn’t, but …” And then of course you decide whether or not you’ll have that dessert or you won’t. And that’s just, the ambivalence is in the air. It’s everywhere.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Ken Kraybill: A very natural, normal part of human existence. And it’s not a problem per se, unless we get stuck in it for a long, long time and it starts to really decrease the quality of our lives in some way.

Most of us resist being told what to do

Chris Kresser: Right. And that voice of “should” and “shouldn’t” gets back to what you said about how most of us resist being told what to do. And whether it’s by somebody outside, some authority figure in our life, or that authority figure voice in our head that we’ve internalized. There’s some famous family lore in my family about how when I was four years old, my mom asked me to do something, and I said, “Mom, you’re not the boss of me. I’m the boss of me.” The classic four- or five-year-old comment, and like I said, I now have a six-year-old, and I’m seeing this dynamic play out in a multigenerational way. So what goes around comes around, as they say. Yeah, and I see it really clearly. There’s something, I’m not sure what it is, but something I think deeply conditioned in us, or it’s maybe even biological, where we resist being changed by someone else or we resist being told what to do.

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, I think, I mean, there are probably many explanations for it, but I think it is built in biologically, and I think that being able to resist things is a self-protective measure.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Ken Kraybill: And you certainly hope that folks will resist not looking both ways before you cross the street or you’ll resist drinking too much, or whatever. But resistance in and of itself is not a bad thing. It can be protective and it can also be problematic. But I think, I mean, I love your examples of yourself and your six-year-old, and I have some grandkids in that age range too. And I always think when I hear that “no” or that pushback, I think, “Wow, that’s great. They’re learning to think for themselves, they’re standing up for themselves,” and that’s, I think, both much better for the future than someone who is just totally compliant all the time. That scares me a bit when I see that.

Chris Kresser: Right, right. And understanding that ambivalence or sometimes resistance to changes is based often on other needs that you’re trying to meet shifts the frame away from, “I’m bad,” or “I’m unworthy,” or “There’s something wrong with me because I’m not doing what I know I should do,” to “Huh, well I really do want to get more sleep on the one hand, but on the other hand I also want to finish this work project that I’ve fallen behind on,” or “I want to have some fun or enjoyment in my life, and so that’s why I’m staying up later.”

For me just getting, in my own life at least, getting clear on that was really helpful, because it allowed me to move beyond that guilt-blame-shame kind of dynamic that can so often arise when we’re not following through on something that we want to do to, just coming up with strategies that might help me to meet all of those different needs.

Ken Kraybill: And it’s always best for us to work that out for ourselves. Of course, doing some with someone who is able to help us look at it and shine a light on it is helpful. But just thinking of that example, and imagine that I were to come in and say, “Hey, Chris, you really have to get that project done. You’ve got to do that. You’ve got to stay up and do that.” You’re likely to want to just go to bed.

Chris Kresser: Right. As soon as you say that, I noticed a shift in myself—“No, actually, it’s more important to get sleep.”

Ken Kraybill: Or if I said, “Chris, you’ve got to get some sleep, I mean, really, you can do that some other time.” And you’re likely to dig in a little bit. I don’t know you that well, but most people are going to say, “Well, no, I’m going to, darn it, I’m going to stay up and finish this thing.”

Chris Kresser: Yeah.

Ken Kraybill: But it’s a perverse way of motivating people to try to push in that direction, and it’s also why we’ve got some research when, for instance, somebody is a heavy drinker and medical professionals and friends and family have said over and over and over again, “You’ve got to stop drinking. You’ve got to stop drinking.” What will happen is they’ll continue drinking, but not only that, they’ll actually go out and drink even more than they had been drinking.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Ken Kraybill: I think that the dynamic there that has something to do with, “You can’t tell me what to do.”

Chris Kresser: “You’re not the boss of me, mom. I’m the boss of me.”

Ken Kraybill: Exactly.

Chris Kresser: That four-year-old voice is still there. So this is probably a good segue. We’ve already, of course, been talking about some key concepts of motivational interviewing, but I think a lot of my listeners are probably not familiar with motivational interviewing. So maybe we could back up and just, from a 30,000-foot view, what is MI, motivational interviewing? Which we’ll refer to as MI now so that we don’t have to say that over and over. And maybe tell us briefly about the history of MI, where it got its start, and how it’s being applied today.

How to guide a conversation to strengthen a person's internal motivation

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, happy to do that. You're stressing MI. I often know that medical professionals hear “MI” and they hear “myocardial.”

Chris Kresser: Heart attack, heart attack. Yeah.

Ken Kraybill: Or people from the state of Michigan hear their own state. Yeah, so there are many ways to describe MI. One of my favorites comes from Stephen Rollnick, who has co-authored a lot of these books with William Miller, who basically says this about practicing kindness with skill. And particularly in the context of having a conversation with people about change. How do we practice kindness with that person but in a skillful way? So that's one way to think about it.

I also like to just basically think of it as it's a way of talking with people about change related to things that we’ve got mixed feelings about. And that can be all manner of things, many of which you mentioned, exercise, diet, alcohol or other drug use, risky sexual behaviors, school- or job-related concerns, spiritual practices, and the list goes on.

Chris Kresser: Yeah.

Ken Kraybill: The by-the-book definition is something along the lines of a collaborative conversation style for strengthening a person's own motivation and commitment to change. And I put emphasis on “style” because I think what happens oftentimes is people hear about motivational interviewing, and sometimes it gets packaged in a way that's meant to be bought and sold, if you will.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Ken Kraybill: And it gets narrowed down to this formulaic way of talking with people, and that's kind of MI, but it's really not because it's a very relationship-based way of communicating that has a lot of heart and soul to it. But it also has a skillfulness around how do you guide that conversation to strengthen the person's already existing motivation. So that's another piece of that definition that kind of defies our own typical way of thinking about things. Because we so often, we think about motivational speakers, we think about needing to motivate somebody or get them to do something.

And as soon as we fall into that line of thinking, we've actually, we become controllers and we become, I even go so far as to say it's an exercise in practicing violence, or at least violating people's own self-determination and own ability to think for themselves and decide for themselves.

So yeah, collaborative conversation, it's a partnering kind of way. So there are two people in the room, at least two people, and both of them have expertise in particular areas. And so that's another way of thinking about that piece of it as well. There is a nice sort of elevator definition that I like too and it basically is helping people talk themselves into changing.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, I like that one a lot. It just gets right to the heart of it.

Ken Kraybill: But as you can hear in that, the necessary mindset and shift is that you have to let go of your own sense of urgency or need to get the person to change.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Ken Kraybill: And instead trust the fact that the person already has pretty much everything they need with them then to make that decision for themselves. And then we help them, we shine a light on it. Help them articulate it and help them share it in new and fuller ways and have a deeper conversation with themselves about that.

Chris Kresser: So I know I asked you to talk about the history, and I still would like to hear a little bit about that. But I just want to pause and hone in on this a little bit because to me, this is one of the key concepts for everybody to understand about not only motivational interviewing as an approach or methodology, but about change in general. This idea of people talking themselves into change rather than some external authority figure being the motivating factor for change is really crucial and in some ways radical. Because it really, it goes against most of what we've experienced in our lives.

Most of us grew up being either told what to do or advised what to do by our parents, then our teachers, also they’re giving us direction about what we should and shouldn't do, and then maybe we had sports coaches that were doing the same thing. And then maybe we get a job and we have supervisors or bosses that are also operating from that more kind of conventional framework. And I think this idea is actually pretty unconventional and maybe not what people have experienced. So I’d like to dive into it a little bit more.

Several years ago I read books by Alfie Kohn and others that talk about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation, meaning coming from within, and extrinsic, meaning coming from without. How does that dovetail with what we’re talking about here?

The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, it’s very, very much apropos. I think, just to be clear, it is possible to get somebody to do something different for a time, but it doesn't produce change, at least in terms of a change that's likely to persist. What it often produces is conformity, which we often mistake for change, I think. And there's probably a place for that, but if we’re really looking for somebody to be able to not only make the change, but then sustain it—because that's really the difficulty for many of us, it's not that we can't make that first step, it’s the second and third and fourth steps that become more difficult—and that's when intrinsic motivation, or internal motivation, is going to be the major player to make that happen. And that's when the spaghetti sticks, is internal. I’m not sure if that metaphor works anymore.

Chris Kresser: No it makes sense, it makes sense.

Ken Kraybill: So I think about situations where you might have somebody in a hospital setting, or some kind of a setting. You get them to take their medicine or get them to do their rehab, but are they going to do it when they walk out of that? Because most of us live our lives without somebody directly there sort of directing us. And so we become our self-directors. So we talk in medicine, of course, about self-management, and that’s actually something I'll just bring up here.

I think we need to recognize that there is a time to be very directive and to assess and treat, and certainly in acute care medicine of all sorts, that's totally appropriate. Because the one party doesn't have the expertise needed to fully participate. But when it comes to more long-term conditions that we all live with, and diet and exercise of course are classic to that, but it’s going to have to do with attitudes, it’s going to have to do with other kinds of things, then we need to determine a way, a pathway forward that every morning we wake up, we return to that and say yeah, this is still important to me, I have reasons to do it, and I’m going to do it, even though I don't feel like doing it. And that's where we’re talking about intrinsic change that makes a difference.

Chris Kresser: So let's talk a little bit about how MI got started and some of the research that that supports it in various contexts, because there is quite a bit of research behind it, isn’t there?

MI’s beginnings and growth

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, it's a very well-researched approach, and I read recently that the research articles that come out ... at least, or at least, articles, not all research articles, pretty much doubles every three years around MI.

Chris Kresser: Wow.

Ken Kraybill: But the start is interesting and there's a wonderful YouTube clip of William Miller describing how he got into MI, how he got to thinking about it and then how his thinking has evolved over time. That was a lecture at the University of Chicago he gave a few years ago, but he tells the story as a psychologist who really did not have much training, if at all, around addictions when he was going through school ended up in, I think it was just an alcohol treatment center, an inpatient alcohol treatment center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And this is like 30, 40 years ago or more. And he tells the story that he hadn't really been told what to do, and when he arrived there, nobody gave him any particular direction.

So he decided to just do what came naturally to him. And he sat down and began to talk with some of these people who lived there or were staying there, and of course, being from Wisconsin, stereotypically they all ate cheese and loved their Green Bay Packers. But the truth of the matter was that he found out that these were really interesting—I think it was all men—people who have had jobs, who had families, who loved to go fishing, loved to do all kinds of things, and they had a really serious issue with alcohol use.

And so William Miller then says he made the “mistake” of going and reading the literature about alcoholics and alcoholism. And in that day and time, the best practice or the best understanding was that these were folks, and the literature would say very explicitly that they were pathological liars, they were people who were not morally centered, that they were people who ... and psychologically they had this denial, this wall of denial, this defense construct that almost made it so they couldn’t recognize the fact that they had this issue and the consequences of it. And that’s why people would say, “I don't have an alcohol problem.” But what was happening is in order to confront and tear down that wall of denial so that magically somehow people would be ready and willing to make changes. To get rid of a wall, you have to practice a lot of coercive kinds of things with it.

And so you punch it and kick it and confront it, and you shame it, and that’s exactly what treatment programs in so-called therapeutic communities looked like in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s of the last century, and even persisting today, still, some. This idea where people would sit in the middle and be confronted and bombarded by their colleagues or their fellow patients and residents, you heard stories of people having to wear placards that were shame-based or having to wear an adult diaper in the milieu if they broke a rule. I mean all these crazy things that today we wouldn’t even consider using for anyone, especially with any other kind of concern, like depression or schizophrenia.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Ken Kraybill: So anyway out of that, William Miller, I think, probably both figuratively and literally scratched his head and said, “There has to be a better way.” And it was really out of that experience that he began to develop, based on the work of Carl Rogers, Daryl Bem, and others, this notion that basically alcoholic people with serious alcohol problems aren't all that different from anybody else.

And I think that was the key issue of the day that somehow these folks are different and they need to be blasted at. And I think that was the breakthrough, was recognizing these are folks who live with an alcohol problem in this case, but have a life and have the ability to choose and have values and hopes and dreams and that kind of thing.

Chris Kresser: So what kind of, I mean, it got started in the addiction arena, and it’s still very much used, from my understanding, in that arena, but what other contexts has MI spread out into at this point?

Ken Kraybill: MI has permeated pretty much all of health and human services at this point, and corrections, and schools, and the reason being is, and I want to just add here that William Miller has said that he kind of regrets having called it motivational interviewing. He kind of wishes he had just called it motivational conversations.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Ken Kraybill: And I bring that up because in all walks of our lives, even at home with your own children, we’re constantly having conversations with folks in the hopes that they'll make changes, and to do so, what we want to do is have conversations that will make a difference. And if we know that conversations that simply tell people what to do, or confront them or shame them, if we know that's not effective, then what do we do?

And so it was really in that context that Miller, and then others that followed and all the research that has followed too, has shown that what we know about motivation is it’s multifaceted, that it's relationship-based, often for most people, that we need to pay particular attention to certain things that people say and shine a light on those, we need to pay attention to ambivalence. And so ambivalence has been the construct that has replaced the notion of the denial. And ambivalence seems to be a much more both accessible way of thinking about it, but also much more accurate.

Chris Kresser: More accurate, yeah. So what are some of the other ... we’ve already touched on a few of the key concepts of motivational interviewing—ambivalence, and talking to people, facilitating people to talk themselves into change instead of talking them into change yourself. But what are some of the other key concepts that form the foundation of MI?

Partnership, acceptance, compassion, evocation

Ken Kraybill: So there are three or four things that I think that are important conceptual pieces to begin to really understand. One is that Miller and Rollnick actually in their first edition and then when they started—and that was in 1991 when they put out their first edition of MI, and then they started doing some teaching of it, they were doing a lot of focusing on the core interviewing skills and that kind of thing—but what they came to realize was that there was something missing, and they came to name that as the “spirit of motivational interviewing,” or now sometimes referred to as the “heart-set and the mindset.”

And this is really the piece that I think that appeals to so many people because it's getting to that kindness part, right? And they talk about it in terms of four elements of the spirit. One is that notion of partnership, which in and of itself is a pretty radical concept in the field of social services and healthcare services because we’re so driven by expert-driven services, but looking at partnering with people and sharing expertise.

And then there's the idea of acceptance. And acceptance gets broken down into valuing people's intrinsic worth and potential. It also includes that notion of responding to people empathically, seeing their strengths and honoring their self-determination. That's all part of that acceptance construct, as they describe it.

And then a third of these is compassion, and it's interesting, it was not until the third edition in 2013 that Miller and Rollnick added this because they felt there was a component piece missing. And compassion here can be thought of in many ways. It's clearly putting the needs of the individual first and looking out for their welfare. I think it's also feasible to think about compassion as taking the word itself. And “compassion,” surprisingly to some people, certainly it was to myself, it means “suffering.” And so to be with somebody in their suffering, their addiction, and their issues around eating, whatever those things are to walk alongside people in solidarity with them in that difficulty without trying to fix it is a form of compassion that I think is very powerful.

And then there was the fourth, and so we have so far, we have partnership, we have acceptance, we have compassion, and then the fourth, I think, really gets to the heart of the MI process, and that’s evocation. And evocation literally means “to call forth from,” like drawing water from the well, for example. And so if we see people as already having essentially everything they need and they’re filled with hopes and hurts, they’re filled with wisdom and also delusion. But we’re all filled with all of these things, right? And so what if we tap into the best parts of what people have, and tap into their hopes, tap into their dreams, tap into what they want in life, what’s most important in life to them. And allow them to articulate that and then hear it back through maybe our reflections to them, and then they continue to talk to themselves about it. There's something very powerful about that, which will lead us into the skill sets of reflective listening and asking questions.

OARS: questions that invite people to tell the backstory

So there's that spirit. Another piece is these core interviewing skills, which we commonly refer to as the OARS, as an acronym [which stands for open-ended questions, affirmation, reflective listening, and summary]. It turns out that motivational interviewing, the field loves acronyms. So the OARS are representative of open questions, that is, questions that really invite people to tell the backstory or just tell more detail of affirmations, which is a specific way of seeing in people, what I like to say, all the good stuff in them, or being strengths based. We also talk about reflective listening, which really is at the heart of this approach. And I’m fond of saying these days that if the OARS were a rock-and-roll band that the reflections would be the lead singer. And I recognize that my rock-and-roll band has four players, and it's kind of like based on the Beatles. But the reflections, if I were to audiotape practice of anybody involved in counseling who doesn't have training in MI, the research suggests that people are probably asked about 10 questions to every one reflective statement. And in motivational interviewing, we’re actually trying to flip that on its head.

And proficient MI is often like two reflective statements to every question, or three to every question, and it's great if you do one to one. But the idea is there’s something about reflective statements that they kind of go with the flow of the conversation without being interruptive, and they help build upon what the person has said in a way that has a certain kind of congruity to it and a certain incrementalism to it. Whereas questions, as helpful as they are and can be at times, are actually more interruptive in the dynamics of conversation. And so it’s not that we don't use them, but they actually insert something from us usually that takes things in a slightly different direction.

So that's, it’s a subtle thing, but that's partly the rationale for looking for more reflective statements to questions. And then the last of those OARS is the S is for summaries, which is really just a collection of reflective statements that you offer back to the person by saying, “So can we take a short break here? And let me just see if I'm getting so far what you’ve told me. You mentioned this and that, and this.” And then you ask, “So what did I miss? Or what do you make of that? Or what would you add to that?” So that's another one.

Now I mentioned OARS as being the sort of rock-and-roll band, but there actually is a fifth sometimes we think about, and that is how do we provide or exchange information, if you will, or offer our own input, our suggestions, our advice, if you will, or additional information.

And that's yet another kind of fifth skill that is considered an important part of this too. Because there are two experts in the room, then you do get to offer some things sometimes. But we almost always do that later in the conversation and do it with permission. Seeking permission to offer it and then giving permission to do with it what they will.

Chris Kresser: That's the key point here, especially in our ADAPT Health Coach Training Program, because people will be coming to the health coach for advice on certain things related to nutrition and stress management, sleep, physical activity, etc. But the key thing that you pointed out there is that you ask for explicit permission to move into that role, or you wait until you're asked to move into that role rather than starting from that place. And that to me is the most important shift that we can make in the idea of what a health coach is supposed to be doing, because I think still today in a lot of contexts the idea is that a health coach is just operating from the same expert authority model that a doctor or another licensed clinician would be operating from.

But rather than giving medical advice, they’re giving advice on diet and lifestyle. And the problem with that from my perspective, is, quite simply, it just doesn't work. I mean there's that definition of insanity, which is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And it’s certainly true that, or it may be true that, changing our nutritional guidelines so that they're more current, more in alignment with the current evidence might help more people to be able to adopt them. But I think it's a pretty overly optimistic view to assume that just shifting the nutritional guidelines, for example, is going to really make that much of a dent in preventing and reversing chronic disease. Because we know that very few people have followed any nutritional guidelines that have been issued ever, regardless of what they are. And so moving toward this approach where we’re were changing the way we’re having these conversations instead of focusing so much on the content of the conversation, to me, is where the real revolution needs to happen.

Ken Kraybill: I would agree and I think that again, it goes back to knowledge can be helpful and particularly for people who are ready, quite motivated that it can be very helpful, which is why a lot of people do in fact change on their own and do fine. But it's that person who comes in feeling mixed about whether or not to do something that we want to really look at.

Chris Kresser: Right, and on that note, I'm wondering if you'd be up for a little bit of a role-play. Because so far we've been reviewing a lot of the different concepts in MI, how they might work, and I think what would be really helpful for listeners is to get an actual sense of how this might play out in a conversation. And if you're willing, I would love to start with a conversation that’s maybe, we could say, more conventional or typical, and not using MI or the concepts of MI.

Traditional coaching vs. MI coaching

Let's say I've just been to my doctor and I was diagnosed with prediabetes. So I'm headed towards type 2 diabetes, and I've got a history of it in my family and I know I should be changing my diet, but I just can't. I stop and start. I can't do it. I feel kind of shame and blaming myself, but at the same time, I’m resistant to making that change. And maybe we can start with a conventional conversation and then we can pause and shift into what an MI conversation might look like in that scenario.

Ken Kraybill: Sure. So I understand, Chris, that you just recently saw your doctor and that you have this prediabetes condition, and your physician has really focused on suggesting you make changes in your diet. Would it be all right with you, oh, I’m slipping into MI, I’m sorry.

Chris Kresser: That’s too natural for you. Yeah, well, maybe I'll come see you and I'll say, “Yeah, well, my doctor suggested I see you because I’ve got prediabetes and he said if I don't get this under control, there’s a pretty good chance that I'm going to head to full-fledged type 2 diabetes. And of course I don't want that. My mom died from complications of type 2 diabetes, it's all over my family, and I know I should stick to a healthy diet, but every time I start, I might make it for a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks and I feel better. But then I just, inevitably I fall off the wagon. It's just so hard to cook all my own food, I'm busy. I've got a job, I’ve got two kids and I just, it's just really hard to make it stick.”

Ken Kraybill: Yeah. Well, I know you can do this, Chris. Other people have done it and I know that if you just do what I tell you to do here, that you will be able to just stay with it, and I think you'll feel much more satisfied and you can avoid all those negative consequences.

So what I want to do is just to go through, I have a handout here, and I just want to go through these different kinds of diet choices that you can make. We can talk about when you go grocery shopping, you really should avoid going to certain aisles entirely, and certainly the dessert aisle, and just you need to go when you've eaten. And just choose the things on this list, and then when you get home, you need to make a plan, you need to create a plan for what you're going to make each day so that you're not tempted to do other things and you just stick with that plan. And I will give you that plan so that you can know exactly how to pursue that. And then there are other things we can do too, but let's start with that. How’s that?

Chris Kresser: Well, I mean, I've tried some of that stuff before. I actually, I worked with a nutritionist, and she made me a plan, and it did work for a little bit. But then I just, I get something comes up at work, I get really stressed out, I get busy, and then I grab something at the cafeteria because I just don't have time to get home and do the shopping and get my food and make these meals.

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, you just can't do that. You just have to learn to say no to those impulses you have. I think that, well, have you tried maybe, sometimes people do these little tricks where they remind themselves of something they want to do by putting a rubber band around their wrist and snapping it when they have an impulse to do something. I mean, have you tried that, for example? I think that would work.

Chris Kresser: No, I haven't tried that. I don't know. Okay, we can pause here. That’s really uncomfortable. I think it's probably uncomfortable for you as well, Ken.

Ken Kraybill: I’m not having fun.

Chris Kresser: Not the typical way that you interact with your clients.

Ken Kraybill: I’m not saying I never used to do that.

Chris Kresser: Right, yeah. And I just noticed myself just the walls coming up almost immediately and just feeling resistance, feeling kind of hopeless, like this is not going to change. I’ve done all these things before. Not feeling confident that it's going to be any different. I just felt sort of no sense of possibility for shift or movement there.

Ken Kraybill: And on my part, I was uncomfortable because I was having to do all the work, basically coming up with solutions for you. And I had to make it up on the fly. Although in real context, I’d probably have sort of a rote list of things that I tell everybody over and over again. But it takes the joy and then takes the partnership out of it, and I felt like I was just grabbing at straws and telling you to do stuff that I didn't really know if it would work or not. And I tried to convince you more, but that didn't seem useful. So anyway, yeah, it was unpleasant.

Chris Kresser: Okay, all right, well, we’ll start again and this time with the MI-inspired dialogue. So Ken, I just got back from my doctor’s annual checkup and was really disappointed to learn that I have prediabetes. And my doctor thinks that if I don't make some significant changes to my diet and getting more exercise that I'm going to end up with type 2 diabetes. And this is really concerning to me because my mother died of complications related to diabetes, it's all over my family, and I know I should get on the ball here and change my diet and start exercising more regularly, but I start and I stop, I can't seem to stick with it and I just feel really frustrated.

Ken Kraybill: So that news was both surprising and pretty scary.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, I mean, my mom died when she was 60 and I'm 48, so that's not very far away. And I don’t want to end up like her, and I’m hoping to have some grandkids, and I would love to see them grow up. I'm not ready to lose my health and vitality here.

Ken Kraybill: So you certainly have some reasons why you’d want to make this more important in your life to pay attention to.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, I mean, apart from wanting to see my grandkids grow up, I want to feel good. I know that the way I'm eating now is ... and I'm gaining more weight, and that's causing ... I just got a knee injury that the doctor thought was related to me being overweight. I'm not able to exercise as much as I know I should, so it's all connected. It feels like this kind of really messy thing where I just can't, everything’s kind of working against me.

Ken Kraybill: So you mentioned wanting to live longer for your grandkids, you want to feel better overall, you want to exercise more. You want your knee to feel more friendly towards you. Any other reasons why you would want to pay more attention and become more proactive in looking at your diet?

Chris Kresser: Yeah, I mean, I just, I'm so tired a lot of time and it affects my work, it affects my relationship. And then it seems like it also affects even my ability to do the things that I know I should do. So but, if I had more energy, I think I would be able to have more fun again. I'm just not doing, I used to love to go dancing a few times a week, and I'm just not able to do that because I'm so tired. And even on the weekends when I want to be out maybe going to the beach or doing something fun, I just end up staying home because I’m so exhausted.

Ken Kraybill: So this is really impacting your life at a lot of different levels.

Chris Kresser: Absolutely.

Ken Kraybill: When you think about the possibility of whatever it would be that you would not only help your understanding and concern, but also your activity around paying more attention to this, what are some kinds of ways do you think you could go about doing that that would be successful for you?

Chris Kresser: Well, I mean, one thing that came right to mind when you were saying that is just maybe getting a little bit more support. I feel sometimes like when I try to start a healthy diet that I'm just kind of on my own and I'm isolated, and I don't have, my partner’s not very supportive, and I don't have anyone in my life that’s really able to just support me in making these changes. And I feel like that would make a big difference.

Ken Kraybill: So having somebody who's both aware of what you're trying to do and who has your back, so to speak, and you recognize that it's harder to do alone. So you'd like to have somebody who's kind of in your camp and working alongside you.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, because it's a lot. I mean, I’m working full time, and so like having to go and do the shopping and prepare the meals, and that’s often where I get stuck. I’m tired and I end up just going and getting some fast food instead of doing the shopping and making the meals.

Ken Kraybill: And underneath that I almost hear like it often feels like a burden to do all this stuff. Like it's a long to-do list, and you’d like to incorporate it into your life in a way that was almost fun or at least enjoyable.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, otherwise, it’s just another thing to do, and as I said, I'm already feeling pretty exhausted.

Ken Kraybill: What other things do you think about that would be helpful to you in moving in this direction?

Chris Kresser: I don’t know. I think just really believing that it's going to be different this time. Like I notice when I think about making a change, I just kind of feel hopeless, because I've tried so many times in the past and it hasn't worked. And I think that might be something that keeps me from trying again.

Ken Kraybill: So you have reasons to change and you have some ideas about how you would go about it, but this notion of believing that you can actually or would be capable of continuing to do it, or the confidence factor, seems to be pretty low right now, at least for you.

Chris Kresser: Yeah, I think part of it is this, like in the past I’ve just done this low-fat diet that the doctor recommended, and it really just doesn't seem to work for me. I feel hungry all the time and I just can't stick with it at all. And I have a friend that’s been trying a lower carbohydrate diet and having a lot of success with that, so I've kind of wondered if that might be something that I should try or look into. I don't know, do you have any experience with that?

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, there are certainly ideas I could suggest to you around that, and what I'm hearing from you is that you’ve kind of tried in the past, but maybe you haven't been able to try things that maybe have a little more variety to them or are a little more appealing to you. And then you’ve kind of just given up on them. So you’re kind of seeking ideas for how to make your diet more, shall we say, interesting and inviting.

Chris Kresser: And satisfying. Yeah, I do think that could make a difference. I mean, I know my friend was in the same boat. She'd done the same kind of low-fat thing and when she tried the low-carb diet, she just said she felt so much more satisfied. And so I think I would like to try that if you have some resources you could help me with.

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, no, I would be happy to do that. One of the things I'm touched by as I'm listening to you is that you talked about all these different things that you want to be healthy for in order to experience. Everything from grandkids to dancing. And what I’m hearing in this is it’s not just the mechanics of eating better that you're interested in, although that's part of it. But you also want to make this become an integral part of your life so that you’re living closer to the values and hopes that you have than you are now. How does that ring with you? I’m just kind of curious what your thoughts are.

Chris Kresser: Oh, yeah, I mean, that really hits home. This is so much for me about just living the life that I want to live, really. When you put it that way, that's really what comes up for me.

Ken Kraybill: Yeah.

Chris Kresser: All right, that was very different for me. What was interesting to me is that we didn't necessarily get to a solution or a resolution, we didn’t come up with a specific plan. But I noticed myself being so much more open to the possibility of change and more hopeful, especially toward the end. And I mean, I was just winging that. I had no agenda or plan, but I noticed that toward the end when I raised the possibility of trying a different kind of diet, there was actually some hope and openness there because of everything that had come before that. I think if I had just jumped right to that before you had heard me and reflected what I had said, I wouldn't, there wouldn't have been that same sense of possibility and openness. So I mean the quality of the conversation was very different, as I'm sure all the listeners noticed as well.

Ken Kraybill: Well, and what's important, I think, for all of us to remember is that you and I just had a conversation for maybe 10 minutes. But you are consistently having a conversation with yourself 24 hours, seven days a week, except when you're sleeping, at some level, about these very same things. And so what I'm really trying to do is seed that conversation so that when you walk away you’re kind of going, “Maybe I should think more about that,” or “Maybe a whole new idea will come to your mind.” And so as practitioners of this approach, we don't want to be too eager to get to the plan or the solution. And in fact, most people actually generate their own plan on their own time after they've processed these things.

Now that's not to say we never want to invite, and had we had more time, I would have probably gotten to the point of saying something like, “So I’m curious, just given what we’ve talked about in this short time, what do you think you might do as a next step that you could do that is possible and doable in the next few days?” Because what builds confidence is the ability to accomplish one step at a time. And so this confidence was low, that's something I would emphasize. But yeah, I often think of MI as, it's sort of like if I gave you a seed and said, “Here, grow the seed, Chris,” you couldn't really do it easily. At least unless you had everything around you that you needed.

But if I said to you, “Please go out and create the conditions under which this seed is most likely to grow and thrive.” Then we would all know that we plant the seed in good soil and give it sunlight and water, etc. And that’s really MI. It’s preparing the soil, it’s helping the person prepare themselves for the possibility of change. And then we may or may not see the actual change take place in our midst. I'm convinced the change mostly happens, or change decisions at least mostly happen when the thought comes to us when we’re least expecting it, or we wake up in the middle of the night, or we’re in the shower and we say, “Yeah, I’ve got to do this.”

Chris Kresser: And that’s very often outside of the context of the session itself, right?

Ken Kraybill: Right, which is not very gratifying for the coach. They want to see results and they want to document that. But it's humbling to practice in this way because we can't be so results-oriented. But what we know from the research and experience is that positive results are much more likely to happen if we use this approach than if we don't.

Chris Kresser: Right. And I want to reflect something else about that conversation. There was a point when I said, “I'm interested in a low-carb diet. Can you help me with that?” And I really liked that you said yes, I could provide you some resources there, but I want to, I noted that you didn't go into that. There was a choice there where you could’ve said, “Yeah, sure I've got these, this binder here with all my low-carb diet plans and suggestions and let's talk about that.” You acknowledged the question and reflected it, but then you also took the opportunity to bring it back to what my ... all of my own motivations for change that I had mentioned earlier. Why did you do that?

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, it's kind of a rabbit hole to be drawn into that trap of being asked for something and you just eagerly want to give it, but it's not that we never give it, but what we want to do is draw out or elicit or evoke from people, first of all, what they already know about. So I might have said to you, “What do you already know about things that seem to work for other people, or what research have you done?” And I might have also said, “What would you like to know about more specifically? What would be helpful to you?”

And so again what I'm trying to do is evoke from the person everything that I can that they have inside and then consider adding to that. But you don't go in initially and just say, “Would it be all right with you if I share with you or if I tell you?” I mean, you could do that, but it would be less effective than first drawing out. Because what we know is, and this was from the work of Daryl Bem, and I’m probably not stating this all that accurately, but basically what we come to know, believe, and act upon is usually that which comes from our own minds rather than from the mind of others. And so this idea that when we generate the solutions, when we generate the rationale and generate the motivating factors, they’re going to stick much more than if somebody tells us what we ought to do

Chris Kresser: That's really interesting. I was having a conversation about this with Robert Biswas-Diener, who you may know, and he said something like, we were talking about that the difference between asking for, just telling someone what to do without permission, and then waiting until you're asked for permission to do it or even yourself as the coach, asking the client if it would be okay if you would offer this advice. And he said something to the effect of sometimes even in situations where you are explicitly asked, or when you ask permission before you give advice, it still can be maybe an obstacle to change, or not as effective to actually answer the question and give bad advice than it would be if the person went and figured it out on their own.

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, I agree with that, and it occurs to me too that there are times when we might ask permission, but the person tacitly gives permission for us to give it, but they're not wholeheartedly giving that agreement.

Chris Kresser: Right.

Ken Kraybill: Because of the power differential or the context or whatever. So just the asking itself isn’t the key; it's the relational aspect of recognizing that each of us has something to provide here, and let's put it out on the table and take a look at it.

Chris Kresser: And it seems like that in order to really get there, you mentioned this earlier, but it's letting go of your agenda and your idea for what should happen. And if that agenda is still present even kind of in the background, it seems like that's where a lot can go wrong. Because then halfway through the session, if you don't feel like you’re making progress toward—in the case of the role-play that we just did—toward me really committing to a diet, then I might be inclined as the coach to jump in and say, “Would it be okay if I gave you some specific advice here?”

Ken Kraybill: Right.

Chris Kresser: Which is really, in that case, would just be coming from my agenda or my preconceived notion of what should happen in the session.

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, if you go into a session with a preconceived agenda or what needs to get done, then I think it's best just to be transparent and say “this needs to get done.” You can do it in a nice way, but I think, I always think of MI conversations as improv theater. We have a sense of direction maybe where it's going that we don't know what the outcome will be, and then we know there are different pathways that it might take. And that's really, to me, a more helpful way of thinking about this. I'm not responsible for the outcome ultimately. But I am responsible for creating the conditions under which this person is most likely to at least explore and examine what motivations they have to do something, and then they get to decide.

An ally approach vs. an expert approach

Chris Kresser: One of the key shifts, not just in motivational interviewing, I think, but just in a coaching or ally approach versus an expert approach in general, is that, and you mentioned this earlier, that the responsibility lies for change, or for what's happening, lies primarily with the client or the person being coached rather than the coach or the person doing the coaching.

And can you speak to the shift that happens for you as the coach with that? The sense of relief maybe, or in our initial role-play when you were playing the kind of expert authority, you mentioned that it was really uncomfortable, and maybe you felt a sense of pressure and responsibility. And I'm just curious if you can speak to what changes on your side when you're not the one who is responsible for the change happening?

Ken Kraybill: I think for me the biggest learning point early on was not to learn about MI somewhat and the skills, but to learn to let go of certain expectations or needs or perceived needs. And that letting go is letting go of the result. Thomas Merton has this great quote: “Do not depend on the hope of results.” That works really well for a lot of sports teams that I follow, actually. But it also works in our relationships. That as soon as we put an eye on the result, then we are beginning to enter into coercive behavior by trying to get people to that place. And it can be very subtle, but it's still, it's demeaning, and it robs people of their own humanity when we somehow become the controllers in that situation and try to get them somewhere.

So for me, and it's a lifelong learning, is letting go of that need to make things come out the way I want them to, and instead to trust that that person already has existing within them a desire to live a life of wholeness, of integrity, of connection, of meaning, however we want to state that. But we believe that people already have that within, and thus they already have motivation to move in that direction. And it's often covered up by the muck of everything from addiction to disease to disorder to racism and sexism, and homophobia and all these other things that press down upon people, and poverty and homelessness, or whatever it is. But it’s still there.

And that's why much of MI is being able to see people for who they might be or become, not just as who we see right in front of us. And there's this great quote from Buckminster Fuller that goes something like, “There's nothing about a caterpillar that would suggest it will turn into a butterfly.”

Chris Kresser: I like that.

Ken Kraybill: I think if we can see the possibilities in people … And in my own line of work over time I've never had somebody say, come back to say thank you and say, “Oh, wow, thank you for using such great motivational interviewing with me.” No, what they say is things like, “Thank you for seeing in me something I didn't see for myself at the moment,” or “Thank you for believing in me,” or “Thank you for just listening and being there and helping me see the value of myself.” And these are the kinds of things that get back to that spirit piece.

So I think you can use the best techniques in the world. But if you don't truly, I mean, and none of us do it perfectly, but if we don’t somehow feel a genuine sense of what I like to call kind of a curious compassion or compassionate curiosity maybe, for somebody, and a hope for them, then our words are just kind of empty. And so it is that combination of using our kindness, that compassion, with a skillfulness, and that's a potent combination when you're on the receiving end of it.

Chris Kresser: Absolutely.

Ken Kraybill: And many of us don’t get that experience very often.

Chris Kresser: Yeah. I think there are quite a few people may have never had that experience. I mean it’s not the way most … we've been trained either explicitly or implicitly to communicate in any relationships in our life. I mean, I think many people who are listening are probably seeing how this could be applied in so many different contexts in their life, not just in the health and wellness field if you're a coach or trainer or a doctor, someone who's working with people, but also as a partner in a relationship, as a parent, as a colleague at work. I mean, there’s so many, there are really no relationships that we have in our life where this stuff can't be employed.

And yet it's as you said, Ken. It's a lifelong practice because it's one thing to let go of your agenda with someone that you hardly know it all. It's a whole other thing to let go of your agenda if you're a parent who is having a conversation about change with your child. Or if you're in a committed relationship and you’re having conversations about change with your partner. So I think this work is deep and powerful, and it has an incredible potential for change and it asks a lot of us as people, individuals, as we develop ourselves throughout our life.

Ken Kraybill: Yeah. That's very well said, and I would just add that I think MI is not for all occasions. And sometimes we talk about MI or kind of freestyles, one being kind of a guiding style, which is really where MI is at its best. But sometimes we take more of a following style, and particularly, for instance, if we’re talking with people who are grieving or have suffered a loss. I mean, we’re not trying to look for change there; we’re just trying to be in solidarity with them.

So sometimes that’s where we are with people. And then there are other times where we’re more directive. And of course that's … I like to say when the blood is flowing, when there's an emergency, when you are compelled to take action ethically, for example. Like, for the most part we operate in that realm of the guiding piece, and there are a lot of people in crisis maybe, but not in emergency crisis. And we have to kind of sit with that sometimes because it's not for us to work out. Now we certainly provide resources and information and good listening. But yeah.

Chris Kresser: Well, Ken, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Where can people find out more about your work and what you're up to these days?

Ken Kraybill: Yeah, my organization I work for is called The Center for Social Innovation. It's outside of Boston. There are actually several centers for social innovation. So if you Google it, you will come up on it in the third or fourth or fifth name down the list. But I particularly do most of my work through t3, which is a training institute contained under the umbrella of the center. And t3 stands for “think, teach, transform,” which we think is a clever little moniker. But what we do is fee-for-service training for organizations, for cities and counties, for statewide organizations, promoting best practices in working with people, particularly people who are vulnerable or marginalized in our society.

And so a lot of work, of course, around addictions and mental illness and people living in deep poverty. We look at a racial, social, and racial equity lens through everything we do. But what we're doing is trying to equip the workforce, whoever that might be, in practicing in a more person-centered, patient-centered way. I have this little mantra that I often say that speaks to kind of the different aspects of our training. And it's that we want to be person centered, housing focused for people who don't have stable housing; trauma informed; we want to be recovery oriented; peer integrated, meaning including people actively who are people with live experience; and also self compassionate.” We need to take care of ourselves in all of this. And that’s kind of the gist, if you will, of how I spend my time these days, both online and in on-site training. And that's very gratifying. I enjoy it.

Chris Kresser: Fantastic. And we are very fortunate that Ken is going to be creating and delivering the motivational interviewing content for the ADAPT Health Coach Training Program launching in just a couple weeks in June. So if you’d like to learn more about that and the other core coaching skills that we’re going to be covering in the training, including coaching to strengths and positive psychology and understanding the stages of change, building trust and rapport, all of what I believe are the skills that will make the biggest difference in your ability to be a change agent, you can check that out at Kresser.co, not dot “com,” but dot “co” slash coach. Kresser.co/coach. Ken, thank you again so much for this enlightening conversation about change, and I look forward to working with you in the ADAPT Health Coach Training Program.

Ken Kraybill: Thank you so much, my pleasure.

Chris Kresser: All right, that's a wrap

The post RHR: The Power of Motivational Interviewing, with Ken Kraybill appeared first on Chris Kresser.

Source: http://chriskresser.com June 01, 2018 at 11:50PM

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