#god forbid we have nuance and god forbid i be viewed as human

[hilacopter]

leftists when there are bigots in their country: obviously not everyone here is a bigot because we're human beings with differing opinions and political views, people who generalize all of us as bigots are being xenophobic.

leftists when there are bigots in the country they don't like: SEE THIS IS PROOF THEY'RE ALL EVIL ULTRA-RIGHT WINGERS AND WE ARE JUSTIFIED IN WANTING THEM DEAD WE MUST CLEANSE THE WORLD OF EVIL

[blasphemecel]

Just One Fix by Death13 on AO3, Analysis (or something like that Idk how to name it otherwise, so let's call it that)(this fic has been written before kaiser backstory)

For your information, death13 is the username of blasphemecel on ao3. We all know who he is, a fanfic author.

So, Just One Fix is a one shot, which can be hard to read for some people in the sense that it approaches difficult and sensitive topics. That said, it is a fanfic which is really greatly presented and which will probably turn your life upside down.

The tone of the fanfic is quite shattering and peaceful at the same time, in the sense that it will make you feel a deep sadness by the way the characters are written and how they interact, but will make you feel calm at the same time, because the author manages to convey a strong message by means of balanced and harmonious writing that will just put you in a weird vibe of sentimentality. I wouldn't say serene because the topics discussed are there to shake things up, but it's a similar feeling, like you're put in some trance.

This fanfic can lead to educating, in a sense, people who do not live this. It also denounces, from my point of view, certain behaviors on the part of people who do not live it and certain situations that can be complicated to live during a hospitalization.

The author highlights the complexity of the relationship between Kaiser and YN through various sentences such as:

This part focus on two things that I find important and interesting: why they started hanging around each other, and what their coping mechanisms are. But also how they evolved as humans with more or less problems.

I think this is interesting how the author choose to represent them, first of all, Kaiser's representation as always is fire, but we will see that his character has more depth than just what we can see on this screenshot the more we advance in the story. Then, there's YN, he choose a complicated story with complex problems for this character, this just proves his value as a writer, to be able to portray such a difficult character.

They have copping mechanisms that are fundamentally different, one keeping things inside and dismissing everything and the other letting everything out. I find the nuance between these two characters fascinating and how he choose to make them interact during the rest of the story just break my heart because it is something that he portrayed a bit too realistically in my opinion. It is a relationship very strained and full of up and down, a bit (a lot) passive aggressive, where the characters keep having some sort of tense moments, like you genuinely ask yourself how it will end for them because the author just doesn't give anything away, mostly on YN part. We will see that on Kaiser part he's more open than YN throughout the story, which is comical since he's the one who usually keep everything in. It's actually captivating.

(I think i didnt express myself properly for the "Kaiser is more open than YN" but I don't know how to say it otherwise like... Kaiser doesnt express it verbally till the very end but through some actions and reactions that he struggles to hide.)

I'm not going to linger too much on Kaiser side because this has been written before his backstory. Though, for YN, at multiple times it has been implied that YN has suffered from abuse when being a child, with the "You were in the habit of crying over everything. There were loud noises, or god forbid someone screamed at you, and you'd cry. Someone touched you — especially an adult - and you'd burst out in tears." I would like to linger on the last part of this, "Someone touched you — especially an adult - and you'd burst out in tears." implying that there's been physical/sexual abuse. It's a complex situation that has been evoked, described, and represented with such a strong writing, all the way during the fic we follow YN copping the better they can with that, not necessarily with good ways but isn't it what happens when we are all alone and traumatized?

In this part, it's one of the few where we see the mutual trust and affection (and respect) between them. The fact that YN manages to be at ease, or something that comes close to it, to sleep beside him despite everything YN probably endured just proves my point. I liked that part, because it shows that even if their relationship is complex and with many many underlying, they still hold each other close to their heart.

Later on, during the last part of the fic, Kaiser mention something interesting before breaking down (<-something that he treated with levity just a few sentences before breaking down himself) “Forget loving me back, you don’t even believe me? You think I’m like every other monster in your life, trying to hurt and deceive you?” I find this side of Kaiser, more sensitive and emotional, interesting because it prove that he is still a human being behind all these walls, and how he considers YN despite his many indelicate attempts to help them that have been taken wrongly by YN (legitimately from YN I think, because it's a difficult situation to see someone you love fall into self-destruction more and more without being able to help, it often leads to maladroit actions and/or words, like we can see in many passages, so I think the way everything had been presented to us, adds layers of complexity and meaning behind YN strong reactions and Kaiser attempts to help!) I LOVE THEM BOTH SO MUCH :(

I would like to stop on this part too, just because the respect he holds for YN PLEASE? He takes EVERYTHING into consideration, and he's the one keeping everything in and turning everything as a joke or some sort as a copping mechanism? That's real literature, I like the fics with complex characters like that, when they are greatly written. In this fic, the balance of everything is good, like I said it's very realistic I think and I love it. The nuance between YN who doesn't want to be loved (<- cited by YN themselves) and Kaiser loving YN through so many different actions is so beautiful, it's art.

I like that part a lot, even if I found it hard to read at first glance. But with hindsight, it's actually, I think, the most interesting part to me, because we see how their behaviors push them away from each other, and how Kaiser regrets afterwards. (<-Something agreeably surprising from Kaiser) That's when we understand that really, there's so much more underlying than just a friendship by 'constraint' that just turned into a weird situationship if we could name it that. (Because let's remember that if they started hanging around each other it's firstly because they were rejected by the others.)

I like that part, it's actually YN making an effort almost superhuman for the sake of the peace between them both, after the moment where they both said they loved each other. I like this ending (this is not the last sentences but almost), and I like how the ED have been portrayed in theses last sentences:

Its immersive, the reader is really into the problematic and I liked it. I think this could easily explain to people who are uneducated on this topic how it is felt more or less from people suffering from ED. And raises awareness in them. I liked how you described it, Iliya. Thank you.

I would like to do also small parentheses on the part where it's in the hospital. You described that very correctly too, it's kind of hard for many people to be hospitalized and it results almost every time on bad experiences. I liked that you highlighted that too.

SORRY FOR THE MISTAKES BESTIE

HIIIIIII TWIN

FIRST OF ALL WOAWWWWW 😍😍😍 THIS IS FIRE

OK So wajt let me tell you since you wanted to know, I think you understood everytihing quite literally 100% correctly

I actualyl thought even at the time of writing that Kaiser had an abusive childhood too (but didn't include it bc we didnt know for sure at the time), so I imagine a lot of the attachmnt between them is based on experiencing the same things. But in this case Y/n ends up being the focus because Kaiser 'made it out' and they didnt

Also about the thing with y/n's past, you're correct it is implied that they're a CSA victim and a victim of physical abuse. I think in particular their behavior is really characteristic of someone with sexual trauma (even the ED which is the other big thing, can be a result of that + they also clearly suffer from hypersexuality and self-objectification which are also signs). For example the movie they're said to like, 'Mysterious Skin', one of the two main characters was a CSA victim too. You can also see during the tattoo artist scene, Kaiser tries to get in the way of the tattoo artist in trying to sleaze on Y/n I don't believe out of jealousy but because in that scene they've gotta both be like freshly 18 and an older dude's hitting on Y/n.

Also iirc in the hospital scene it says Y/n wasn't supposed to be getting any visitors because they thought they're family only and the thought of a family member visiting them made them panic, also implying that they're cut off from their family in some way, i.e. further insinuating a past of abuse.

You're right that it's difficult to talk or reach someone in such a position. A lot of the story is about Kaiser's troubles because he approaches it in a self-involved way that Y/n understands (or tries to pass off due to their not wanting to accept love) as him just feeling an obligation or a savior's fantasy towards them, even tho I think it's quite obvious from many of his actions that he genuinely cares. Also I think due to the self-destructive nature of Y/n's behavior it's easier for them to believe they aren't loved because then they can pretend no one is affected by their actions, also making them self-centered as well, along with Kaiser.

I do think they're in a situationship lol i had the wip tagged as childhood friends to fwb best freinds situationship LIKEEEE THEY ARE BOTH SO CRASY 😭😭 But anyways..

TYYYY FOR READING AND WRITING ME THIS !!!!! AND FINDING IT REALISTIC ALSO!!!!

If anyone is interested here is the link to the fic since it's not on tumblr

[shitswiftiessay]

ALSO another thing that I can’t stop thinking about: if swifties are right and joe never loved taylor and just tolerated her all those years then why the fuck did it take taylor SIX years to figure that out? why would taylor stay with a guy who supposedly couldn’t stand her all those years. is she stupid? i certainly don’t think so. she’s supposedly such an emotionally intelligent person (according to swifties anyway). so why did she stay with a man who didn’t like her and made her miserable all those years?? you really think taylor was “led by blind faith” all those years? what a pathetic view you must have of her.

i’m so fucking tired of swifties and their constant victim narrative surrounding taylor. she is not only a grown ass woman but she’s incredibly rich and incredibly powerful. she also has more security than the goddamn president. if she was truly miserable or god forbid held hostage in the basement as many swifties claim, she could’ve ended it much sooner. she’s also had plenty of experience with relationships, good and bad ones, and if she’s really unhappy in a relationship, then she knows how to end it.

she obviously loved joe as you can see from all those songs she wrote so why are you so fucking desperate to paint him as this HORRIBLE man? why are you shitting on taylor’s judgment? just because he didn’t publicly scream from the rooftops that he’d die for her means he never loved her? just because he isn’t a clout chasing narcissist like that one football player who drops her name every 3 seconds? fuck off.

but hey, if you REALLY wanna start judging relationships by songs, let’s look at how much SHE sounds like the problem in certain songs: stay stay stay, renegade (being an unsympathetic bitch), afterglow, the great war (both songs about accusing him of cheating when he didn’t, knowing she hurt them, and then romanticising it in songs) bejeweled (threatening to cheat), false god “daring you to leave me just so i can try and scare you,” even that line in ME! is a red fucking flag, telling your partner that no one will ever love them like you do is a tactic used by abusers.

i am NOT claiming that taylor was abusive, for the record. but DAMN, if we’re going to hyper analyse song lyrics then we can certainly look at them in a way other than your biased “taylor is perfect and can can do nothing wrong ever” perspective.

i mean the woman literally said “it’s me, hi, i’m the problem it’s me” but swifties are incapable of having a nuanced view of adult human relationships. sometimes things just don’t work out and it doesn’t mean that anybody has to be a villain. swifties always want to make it to where taylor is always a VICTIM of all her exes and every ex is always a MONSTER. it’s all so fucking tiresome, and it’s a very childish way of thinking.

and if it really makes you so sad to listen to those songs taylor wrote about joe then maybe you should try listening to someone other than taylor for once.

[stheresya]

recently i was watching an youtuber react to a right-wing conservative complain about evil being too normalized in hollywood nowadays. he was upset that villains always have sad backstories that, in his mind, were an attempt to justify their evilness. and one of the examples he cited was kylo ren from star wars. he thought the idea of rey (the heroine) and kylo (the villain) falling in love was absurd, because kylo was evil and thus did not deserve love nor sympathy from any of the good guys. isn't this familiar? only i'm used to hearing this from people who claim to be in the opposite side of the political spectrum.

this also reminded me of another time i witnessed another right-wing influencer call grrm "sick-minded" for including incest in his work. mind you that this person was a fan of asoiaf and did not have any issue with all the other violences in the series. only the incest was just too much. this made me think of antis who occupy horror/gothic fiction spaces who looove spooky aesthetics and gore but lose their minds if someone holds special interest in a problematic character or relationship or, heaven forbid, if someone eroticizes the grotesque.

i'm from a country where the death penalty is outlawed. my country also has one of the highest crime rates in the world. of course, this could be explained by the fact that we have a lot of social inequality as a result of centuries of colonization + some imperialism because we're America's backyard. but some politicians and influencers try to get it all that this is a morality problem, that some people are just born rotten, all to justify them enforcing harsher security policies (re: killing people), which obviously affects poor the most. they hate the idea of morally reprehensible characters being humanized in media because it puts to question their black and white worldview, a view that is only possible through the dehumanization of 'the other' (usually poor and bipoc). the idea that people resort to crime because they are led to by the harsh conditions they live in infuriates them because, in some way, it puts these people as victims of their circumstances, victims of a harmful system that they keep enforcing. and so they need pop culture to keep reinforcing the good vs evil mentality, because nothing is more threatening to the authoritarian worldview than nuance.

anyway, this made me come to the realization that we're too obliging with antis. we treat them like misguided teenagers who just need to live a little more and understand that fiction isn't reality, that fiction exists as a safe space to allow our imagination to venture in the wildest and darkest places. but this is a case of a harmful ideology infiltrating spaces that should be celebrating freedom of creativity. everyone knows (or should know) that believing the main role of art and fiction is to promote good morals is borderline fascist rhetoric. certain "progressives" are parroting that idea by turning it into rainbow puritanism. but it's still conservatism nonetheless. just because they don't use god's name to justify their stances doesn't make their goals any less conservative.

[nightswithkookmin]

Goldy I never thought I would reach out to any Jikook blog but after your last post I have to. I am an east asian american and trans. I have never spoken on this issue, commented or posted about this. I am a Jikook supporter but sometimes Jikook supporting blogs don't feel like the friendliest place. I want to thank you for changing my opinion on that. It is an insult to BTS to say Jikook don't know they seem gay or that they don't know what gay looks like. It is an insult to fans like me to say it would be OK to do the things they do if they were cisgendered straight men. I personally saw a few people say or dance around this and they got intimidated by big blogs for it. I would never name names because I beleive in free speech and the right of people to express themselves, as long as it isn't hate speech. Supporting lgbt people and making sure they don't feel endangered is MORE IMPORTANT THAN STANNING A KPOP BAND and I say this as a 4 year long bts and Jikook stan. So many people don't want to touch this issue and I understand why.

But thank you for supporting ACTUAL lgbt people as well as bts and showing stubborn people that BTS mean gay rights when they say gay rights.

I don't know why but this Ask made me cry...

I've been reading it over and over for the past two days and each time I feel humbled by it. Thanks so much for sharing this with me.

I think the era of the obsessed 'kids' and '13 year old shippers' in this space is coming to an end. I think it's time for a more nuanced mature conversation on what it means to ship and stan our faves in today's sociopolitical climate.

Let's intellectualize shipping and use it as a vehicle for social change not just pleasure. Sabotaging political hashtags is a start. Trending and donating to BLM is equally important. Fighting for gay rights and recognition is the next step and a natural progression from here- and about damn time!

Gone are the days where celebrities and idols were immune to accountability and personal responsibility. We live in a world where everyone is required to be converstant in and sensitive to social issues. Awareness is woven into our collective consciousness and for some of us we cannot divorce that from our pleasure receptors.

Hate to quote my pastor but, 'As a kid, I spoke, thought and reasoned like a kid. As I grew up, chilee darling, I put my ghetto ways aside. You feel me?' Lol. Yea, my pastor hood like that. Lol.

The fact of the matter is, BTS has a higher mature demographics now. Majority of us grew with them, if not past them. They are not seventeen anymore, Jin is almost thirty, the youngest in the group is past twenty three and majority of their fanbase are breaching Young Adult well into Adulthood and beyond.

We simply cannot view them with the same lens anymore. If we did, we would be infantilizing them if not enabling them.

We ought to be able to have certain conversations that reflect our age, hearts, backgrounds, experience, values and beliefs.

We can't sit behind our television sets and smart phone screens in this day and age and assume BTS sat through a performance like this and did not for a second think about what it meant, why the crowd cheered at certain moments or even understand the impact, message and intent behind it- especially not when Halsey, an openly bisexual woman and advocate for LGBTG rights is an acquaintance of thiers.

I don't know how a fraction of this fandom can assume BTS would have a collaboration of this nature and not know anything about the gay rights discourse or what queer baiting is or not consider how their actions may or may not be contributing to the marginalization of persons as these- to not have agency and personal responsibility or empathy.

JK cannot stan a gay artist such as Troye Sivan and divorce his music from his sexuality because it flows from it. Not when Troye has openly spoken about the struggles he went through as a closeted gay man, coming out and how that affected his mental health.

JK knows what gay is, he is aware of the struggles queer people face on a daily. His decision to cover, license and recommend songs by this artist is a deliberate act coming from a place of being informed on the matter.

Jimin knows. RM knows. Suga knows.

BTS cannot prepare a speech like this while oblivious to the plight of the LGBTQ plus community. I refuse to believe that simply because it's not true. Anyone who says otherwise is a scammer. Lol.

And I think they are intelligent enough to have cognisance of the fact majority of the world view certain aspects of their home culture as problematic and non-progressive and that this same world is watching them and what they do in this space matters.

They are part of the conversation. And it's in their interest to present themselves as queer a queer friendly band and company by distinctifying themselves from these 'traditional' Kpop bands.

I believe they know that being woke gives them a competitive advantage as MCs and advocates for the youth in today's world.

I believe they are aware certain things in their 'fan service culture' doesn't fly in the space they compete in and want to compete in. They are competing and rubbing shoulders with top LGBTQ plus advocates, sharing seats with them at awards, standing next to them- they best to look sharp.

It's obtuse for anyone to fall on the 'culture' rhetoric to excuse certain behaviors of their idols when actual queer people from and within that same culture fight against it.

Most S. koreans I know and have come across complain about their 'culture' and some even harbor strong resentments against this whole fanservice culture.

Holland, an openly gay Idol from South Korea, has equally spoken out against the 'fan service' culture prevalent within Kpop on several occasions and laments how it depoliticizes queerness and affects actual queer people within S.K.

And isn't it funny that the same conservative Christian population who strongly oppose homosexuality in S.K often lead online campaigns against Jikook for 'promoting homosexuality' because of certain fanservice and skinship they do?

If skinship is normal and fanservice is culture, why does conservative S.K keep pushing back against it? It's their culture uno?! Lmho.

Queer south Koreans and conservative Christians hate fanservice culture and yet here we are using their culture to defend it as if it's all black and white. Lmho.

Did they or did they not see South Korean's reactions to this performance by Jikook? The mixed feelings most had about it?

Men can nibble on men's ear but God forbid they toss them in the air and catch em💀

South Koreans are not a monolith. Their culture is nuanced like any culture. It's not static and not clear cut black and white either.

It's one thing to respect other's culture, it's another to perpetuate it in ignorance. Perpetuating their culture and being religious about it does not allow for the dynamism inherent in their culture.

Troye Sivan talked about how he'd stop in the middle of his concerts and performances upon seeing the hyper fangirls in the front row and then think to himself, 'I know they know I'm gay, so why are they still here...'

And this was before he came out.

Jikook know we know they are queer or that we think of them as queer. When Jimin talks about 'those that love me for me' he knows exactly what he is talking about or rather who he is talking to- it's not these hets I'm afraid.

Troye also talked about being privileged because he lived in a rather queer friendly neighborhood where everyone is gay and so he'd always felt safe coming out.

Isn't that what JK is doing?

Now this is a person who's without a doubt had a lot of influence on JK in his early formative years as an Idol right down to his decision to move into a much queer friendly neighborhood of Itaewon.

They know we know. Jikook is gay.

Thankfully, there are reports of a rising number of LGBTQ plus in South Korea, a lot of allies, a lot of queer folks coming out and a lot of companies opening up to working with gay idols and aspiring idols.

It's such a relief but a lot of work still needs to be done and I stand with them on behalf of Jikook and any queer folk in SK.

My sister is helping me reach out to an LGBTQ plus advocate from Seoul for an interview for my blog. If everything goes well, I'd love for her to share her thoughts on queer passing, queer baiting and fan service within Kpop and how that affects LGBTQ youth in South K.

It's a conversation I'm really passionate about and interested in.

I love me some ships, but I also love me some queer advocacy and human rights uno? Lol.

Thing is, I may quit BTS one day, but I can never quit being me. Being human. Always put the human first is my motto.

Oh and I hear people are plotting to cancel me? Chilee. Y'all do that but:

Let it echo.

Signed,

GOLDY

[katsidhe]

15.20 Final Thoughts

Supernatural is over, and somehow, despite itself, it did the very best it could to please me. That was always going to be an impossible task. But truly, sincerely, that finale was as close to my desires as the show could ever bring itself to come, and so, so much closer than I ever dreamed it would dare.

I am so, so glad that no other regular characters were involved (Bobby aside, but he was brief). How better to encapsulate their own emptiness? How fundamentally fitting, than in the epilogue to their final battle, wherein the entire world beyond them was erased, the wider universe is merely set dressing for them to move through. And it was so quiet this way. This finale wasn’t overcrowded or rushed. It kept its own peace. And it preserved the tangible claustrophobia that 15.19 invoked: that tangled, lovely, solipsistic, toxic conviction that these are the only two people on earth that matter.

It’s unclear exactly how much time passed between 15.19 and 15.20. I like to think it’s been at least a year, given that they’ve settled into routine and that their grief seems less fresh. (Although yes, the concept of Dean dying on his very first hunt without a resurrection available is hilarious, I must confess.) Their calm domesticity, their peace, was lovely to watch (Sam kicking the laundry machine! Sam with wet hair! Sam running! Sam cooking, Sam looking a little less bulky than usual, and happy!) But man, it really is Dean’s world, isn’t it? Even the DOG, which really, really, really could reasonably have been primarily Sam’s, was Dean’s dog first and foremost. Then on Dean’s say-so, they get in Dean’s car to drive to a pie festival for Dean. Sam is perfectly content to go along with all of it.

As if we hadn’t gotten enough delightful fanservice, we also got one last scene of Sam threatening to torture someone to death. :) what a king.

I love that Dean died to an OSHA violation while fighting a random loose end from season 1 (which, by the way, I CALLED IT, I am so proud of myself). It’s perfectly mundane. I truly and deeply do not understand anyone complaining that Dean should have gone out in a way that’s more epic. He’s been there, done that, guys, and remember how miserable it was? Now there’s no cosmic safety net. Dean died in a broken down old barn, saving some kids. Moments like these are when Dean is at his best, at his most fundamentally sympathetic: when he’s not trying to control the shape of the universe or dictate righteousness or let his anger drive himself down into a destructive spiral. He’s just putting his money where his mouth is. He’s not making a broad moral statement. He’s simply putting his life on the line to defend someone who needs defending. It is not an unworthy end. It’s so much better than going out to, god forbid, God.

Did Dean earn a lifetime of peace? The concept of just desserts is fraught. But I also don’t think it’s something Dean wanted. He wanted to keep killing things in tetanus-infested barns until he died. He got what he wanted. And while the arc of his wants has adapted over the years, MOTW hunting is fulfilling for him.

Dean’s deathbed speech was, oh man. It got me good. Like many of the things I loved in this episode, it was quiet. No desperation, no revising history (or not too much, anyway). Just, “stay with me, please. I love you. Tell me it’s okay.”

The quiet of Sam’s grief, alone in the bunker. How still his face is, until for a little bit it crumples again, and then it comes back and goes still. He’s not trying to control his reactions or press back against his sorrow. There is no work to do, nothing to avenge, no one to find, nothing to defeat. He is alone, and the washes of visible grief simply come and go in waves that he doesn’t try to fight or force.

I need the gif of him flinching at the toaster. His startle reactions are my favorite thing. He’s alone underground, there is not a living soul for miles and miles, he’s just buried his brother, not for the first time, but this time, he knows, for the last. And the goddamn toaster goes off and he cannot control the way his heart leaps up into his throat and the way every one of his muscles tightens.

Sam grows old. Sam. Grows old. Sam grows old! SAM GROWS OLD.

Ohhh my God, Sam grows old. Without Dean! Without hunting! Without Cas! With people outside that claustrophobic world, beyond the four tight walls of SPN, beyond the people approved by Dean and by Fandom, who give him peace and love and fulfillment! SAM GOT OUT. Even with the truly terrible wig the image brings me to actual tears. I cannot believe SPN would allow him to have this. I cannot believe that the show let him be happy without Dean. I want to read the set of novelizations about Sam’s recovery.

Of course this was the only way for Sam to get unwound, and of course it had to happen offscreen in flashes. Thank god for the ambiguity. There’s so much potential there, years and years, we were simply told: and at some point Sam’s life gets better, at some point his mental health improves and he feels safe enough to start a family, with someone, and at some point he has a child, and he dies peacefully, he dies loved and with people who love him, and dammit I’m getting weepy again.

Sam quit hunting. Not in a sudden jolt. We see him leaving the bunker on another job. But when he leaves the bunker, he leaves for good. He has so much knowledge, but he does not preserve the Men of Letters. He does not honor their legacy of extermination and experimentation. Maybe he gives someone else the keys, for the books. Or maybe he’s digitized it all, and maybe it’s done.

Maybe his wife is Eileen, or maybe it’s Amelia, or maybe it’s Piper or Cara or maybe it’s someone new. Maybe it’s not even a woman. And maybe she’s a hunter, but I hope she isn’t, and when Sam tells her, haltingly, in fits and starts, the bare outline of the truth, she looks at him and she believes him. And she understands the shape of the trauma he carries, even if Sam can’t quite speak the details, and maybe Sam goes to therapy. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he wakes in pain and fear for many years, but over time, it dulls.

Sam’s son is still a young man when Sam is on his deathbed, probably in at least his eighties. Think about the mountain Sam had to climb to reach that point. How many years and years of work did it take before Sam felt safe enough to want a child? How long for him to gently conquer his terror at the legacy his blood might carry: Lucifer and Azazel are dead, he knows this, but how long before he lets himself believe it enough to permit the risk? And then he raises his child, not in fear and loneliness, but with love and support and care. And he makes sure his son is protected, that he knows to salt his thresholds and ward against demons, but his son will not suffer the way he suffered.

Maybe he untangles his thoughts about Dean, maybe he learns that to feel angry with his brother is not to betray him or to dishonor his memory, maybe he comes to a more complex understanding of their relationship. Maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he simply enshrines Dean, and Dean’s memory becomes ever more golden and untarnished, and the Impala becomes truly an altar. The details of how Sam carries Dean with him—the watch, the car, the absurdly large photos, his son’s name—perhaps these are played straight, and perhaps Sam never finds a more nuanced love. In the meta sense I think we are certainly meant to think this. We are meant to see Dean deified here, canonized into a saint. We are meant to view Sam’s fifty more years of life as worship, as a dedication and an offering.

This is the long shadow of the finale. These are the things untouched by necessity and by design: this is Dean’s apology in 15.18, this is Sam not wanting an apology, and not wanting to hear Dean offer one. This difficult work was always and inevitably going to be elided. But there is so much time, decades and decades, offscreen, for Sam to come to a quieter peace.

I think he can do it.

I think Sam can do anything.

I’m crying again.

I really didn’t think I would cry much about the finale. I thought I would cry at the concept of the show ending, but not at what the ending was. I didn’t think any details would actually affect me. But then Sam got old. I am truly and genuinely hung up on the canonical image of Sam finding peace. Good god. He had GLASSES. Help.

My chief complaint (aside from that absolutely awful Carry On cover, why oh why, they should have just played the original again), if I felt at all like complaining at the moment, would be how happy this ending is. But I can’t begrudge Sam that. I can’t even get too mad at the scene that I was SO SURE I would despise: that of Sam and Dean content in a Heaven that is now apparently Great, Actually (even though a prison dimension with an open floor plan is still a prison dimension, but hey, I guess we humans can’t leave earth either). Supernatural clearly wanted Sam and Dean to not be facing down an abyssally bleak afterlife, and I think I’d be complaining about the lack of bleakness a whole lot more if it didn’t have the (perhaps unintended??) side effect of giving Sam even more freedom from Dean than SPN already deigned to give him. Sam isn’t in a shared cell with Dean. He can be with his friends and his wife and his son.

One of the fundamental questions of SPN is, would Dean ever let Sam go? And it’s a question that the bulk of s13-15 has rendered moot with Sam’s growing passivity, and one that 15.20 neatly dodged. And I’m glad it did, because I wouldn’t have liked whatever 15.20 had to say on the matter. This deflection feels true to the spirit of what the show has become.

It was impossible for Sam to find peace while Dean was still alive. And on its own that kind of says everything, doesn’t it? And Sam is still forever denied the peace he truly longed for. Sam didn’t want death to force Dean’s hand. Sam wanted Dean to want to let him go. But the only way Sam and Dean could heal is apart. The potential of their relationship on earth becoming untangled is forever precluded, explictly. And yet Sam’s freedom is validated, Sam is allowed what he sought in season 1 and season 8, Sam is something beyond a hunter and Dean’s brother, and the show let him be, the show let him grow.

Supernatural said Sam Rights, and the world shook.

[nerdygaymormon]

Genesis 2 : The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

In the Garden of Eden, God plants the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and forbids Adam from eating the fruit of this tree. 

Let’s note that God formed woman after the command was given to Adam not to partake of this tree’s fruit. 

The serpent tells Eve that eating the fruit of that tree will make her like the gods because she’ll know good & bad. It appears Eve did not know that she already was like God, humans were made in God’s likeness. Eve chooses to eat, and also hands over the fruit for Adam to eat. 

This tree, it’s not just knowledge, they already can know things, it’s more that it will give them a sense of morality about what is good and what is bad. There is a sense in how God talks about the tree and the warning God places on it that suggests humans won’t truly understand, they will have a sense of morality and will act on it in imperfect, messed up ways.

After eating the fruit, Adam & Eve realized they’re naked and they are embarrassed. Being naked isn’t bad or sinful. It’s as if the humans were deciding for themselves what is good or evil, and that does make them like the gods.

One way to think of this is Adam & Eve were given the concept of binaries, everything is either “good” or “bad,” and they try to force things to fit without the nuance to understand that a lot of things simply exist or are on a spectrum. 

Human history is full of people defining and redefining what is good or bad, often as a way to elevate themselves and to diminish or exclude other people.

————————————————————

Adam & Eve hear God walking around in the Garden, so they hide themselves. Suddenly they’re acting deceptively, yet one more way in which they seem to not handle well the understanding that was gained from eating the tree’s fruit.  

God calls out to the human and asks where he is. Adam says he heard God and hid himself because he’s naked. God asks, “Who told you that you’re naked? You’ve been eating from the tree, haven’t you?” Adam then says he did so  because the woman that God gave him, she handed him the fruit of the tree. The knowledge from the fruit has Adam seeking to shift blame from himself to another person and even onto God. 

God turns to the woman and asks what she’s done? She answers that the serpent tricked her and she ate the fruit of that tree. 

God then curses the snake. The ground gets cursed which will cause Adam to labor by the sweat of his brow to obtain vegetables from the ground. 

Much of Christianity views Eve as the person to ‘blame,’ but God doesn’t. While the serpent is cursed, and the ground is cursed for Adam, God does not curse Eve but does say she’ll have hardships in pregnancies and giving birth. It’s interesting that eating the fruit caused her to become like fruit (can reproduce). 

It seems like the real hardship placed on Adam & Eve is getting gender roles, something that had been absent up to this point.

Many Christian sects view the eating of the fruit as a sin which caused disorder in creation, and thus humanity inherited sin and guilt from Adam and Eve. 

A Jewish concept is that good & evil were separate, but eating the fruit caused the two to become mixed. Humans now had both a desire for good and for evil inside of them. Evil now becomes part of human nature, not just an external influence. We’re still supposed to find the good and make earth like heaven, but now we also have to find the good inside of us and others.

————————————————————

How does all this apply to queer people?

I want to start with God questioning them “Who told you that you are naked?” In other words, who told you this is something to be ashamed of? For queer people, we can imagine that today God would ask us, “Who told you that you are broken?”

Another lesson we learn comes from Adam’s choice to either follow God and his understanding of what God wanted, or to be with this person he loves. He chose love, he disobeyed God. Love was most important. It shouldn’t be a surprise that most queer people will choose love over remaining in church. I hope the families of queer people can similarly choose love over the anti-queer teachings they learned. 

We have to trust our own understanding and then make choices based on that, even if that is uncomfortable or puts us at odds with religious leaders. We need to move from Eden to the world, from comfort to opportunities to experience sorrow and joy, from stagnation to growth. God trusts us with agency, we’re expected to make choices even if sometimes we make mistakes, that’s how growth happens.  

God created the humans without gender roles, only after the transgression do these get imposed. One thing about queer couples is traditional gender roles don’t fit us, we have to collaborate together on how our relationships will work, there’s no stereotypes to define for us who is in charge of yardwork or cleaning the house or the other multitude of tasks that are part of life. Our relationships are more similar to Adam & Eve’s before they ate the fruit. 

Humans have been messing up morality and what to do to with it. Adam & Eve right away felt guilt over something that isn’t sinful, they were deceptive, they were blaming others for their actions. It seems having a sense of good and evil is not easy, that people mess up and can be ruled by their emotions. 

People see binaries where binaries don’t exist and trying to make everything fit into those binaries, such as is this right or is this wrong? The reality is there’s shades of gray, differences can exist without one being ‘good’ and the other ‘bad.’

People mess up a lot in applying “right” and “wrong,” or “good” and “bad.” Getting people to see each other, all of us, as equal, as the same, and have the same standards apply to all, it is a hard thing.

Just because cis straight people feel a certain way doesn’t mean that’s how queer people should feel or react. Being different doesn’t mean one group is “good” or “bad,” that these feelings are “right” or “wrong.”

[art-now-south-korea]

image-face, GyoBeom An

I was born in 1973, and my parents were farmers. In 1999, I got enrolled into an art college with a dream of becoming an artist. I am currently a father, a husband, and a painter. The duality and struggle between a domestic life of being a parent and spouse with a working life became a subject matter to my work. My work expresses conflicts and emotions aroused from distinct social roles through figurative subjects that ranges from models and cartoon characters, to gods. For each piece, I start with a simple drawing on a canvas of a chosen figure/ image. Then, I go into a constant exploration of constructing and deconstructing the image with obsessive amount of acrylics or oils to ease out my emotions. I adapt myself and live out the society through such actions. Painting, and Painting Over: Closing In On the alternation of repetition and reversion in An Gyo Beom’s portrait paintings Yi Hyun(Art Criticism) Francis Bacon asked himself how he differed from dead animal meat at a butcher shop. He used to say that more cruel is the scene of a live meat that drools with saliva over the sight of another meat hanging at a butcher shop. No matter how grotesque the scene of meat as portrayed in his paintings, Francis Bacon claimed that they are not nearly as brutal as human life in reality and the horror we experience in them. In the likewise manner, An Gyo Beom’s portrait paintings evoke in its viewers the strong feeling of confusion and the sense of ferocity that borders insanity. The material aspect of An’s paintings — fiercely pasted lumps of paint over the surface of canvas that easily exceeds the height of an average male — amplifies the impact of the content. Stylistic detail is where An’s painting differentiates itself from the great Francis Bacon: whereas Bacon’s meat can be compared to the meat of prime quality that was chopped and handled by a skilled butcher, An’s meat resembles scraps of meat left over from the butchering process. Leftover is often synonymous with low-grade. But the things we throw away can often tell us clues that can provide us with insights on what we as a community are eager to deny or forget, knowingly or unknowingly. An employs various media for his work. They often come in two kinds: Pen and pencil are dedicated to contouring and detailed portrayal; Oil and acrylic paints are used to express chaotic and abstract qualities. If the former emulates and builds human figures, the latter dissects and deconstructs such figures. If we were to compare the former to a bone structure, the latter can be likened to flesh and bowels. That is, of course, metaphorically speaking and not in an anatomical sense. Let’s dig in further into the artist’s day-to-day method. An constructs human figures with the most delicate of his media: pen or pencil; subsequently, he paints over completely the so-formed figures; or sometimes instead of complete cover-up, he deliberately leaves hints of the original figure by unveiling traces of human form in a subtle manner, say, a hint of an eye here and a nuance of lips there. As a consequence, a viewer can recognize not much else than the pure materiality elicited by the crumbled mass of wildly mixed paints. It is not to say, however, that An’s methods, apparently tilted towards abstract style, merely aims at totally concealing the figurative sketches with paints. The same goal could have been easily achieved by just starting out with paints in the first place. The artist appears to be purposefully attacking the preliminary sketches: he pokes, scratches, and glides over his figurative sketches, as if out of temperamental outbursts, with palpable intent. Hence, it may be reasonable to assume that although the pencil sketches are destined to be hidden eventually beneath the paint layer, they do seem to have a distinct purpose of existence. It seems safe to presume that An intends the traces of his procedure to be visible. This whole process resembles an act of a person in a constant and desperate struggle to forget something. Again, the artist would have just skipped the sketch part, if his purpose was the total elimination of it. If this is the case, what is the artist so desperately trying to put behind him, beyond the horizon of oblivion, perse? The subjects of An’s paintings range from models and manga characters to painting classics, and even God. They tend to vary but have one thing in common: they’re all socially accepted generic images. One thing to note in specific is that An portrayed professional models and rarely, if ever, painted off of his friends or family. What is the socially accepted role of the models? A person who is a model is scarcely regarded past his or her occupational description. Models serve the role of promoting or enhancing the value of the main products and thus consumed as human “samples”. Manga characters and iconic images of God are not much different from models. They are quite the universal and unidiosyncratic signs that effectively appeal to the masses across many cultures and regions. An collects images on the internet and recreates them rather honestly on his canvas, as though he consents to their given meanings and roles. In the course of his painting, however, he inadvertently shifts attitude. As if suddenly grown disgusted at his own conformist images, he adds to them the abnormal shapes such as horns, dogs, or even dragons. He obsessively paints over the initial image until he completely turns it around. In the Baconian sense, by the act of altering the reality An forbids his work to end up yet another one of those portrait paintings and imprints a violent subjective mark in his work. He appears to be doing so for the purpose of creating a false that is truer than the truth. The role asked of individuals by a State or a society resembles that of a model. Individuals are called upon as a mere component, regardless of their individual context, then consumed. All member are required to act accordingly to the cause of their community. The pressure to act as an ethical, compliant member of the society is almost inescapable. To be specific, the standardized social role that is cast upon a middle-aged man in the Korean society does not allow an artist any latitude necessary for his artistic practice. If you comply and carry out the role of a model as expected, you end up a model. If you don’t, you are labeled a questionable character, and the social retribution follows. In this circumstance, An chooses to consciously deny the dilemma. He does so by way of repetitively painting (about repression), and painting (about his impulse). In the face of the unavoidable situation, the artist oscillates: he chooses to comply one moment, then retracts his compliance in another. By doing so, he can defer his impulse to flee. The notion of oblivion logically requires the preceding act of memorizing. An is on a crusade to his personal calling, ceaselessly balancing himself between where he stands and where he’d like to be.

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-image-face/781688/4344516/view

[sincerelysamedt]

HIIIIII IM dropping in both ur askboxes to ask if u guys think that there's a possibility that killugon could always stay one-sided (killua never confessing, aro gon, or any scenario tbh)? - im asking u girls because u can provide an artistic/writer point of view - as an artist, wouldn't it feel wrong/incomplete to make a character fall in love with another only to be rejected and be told that they wanna stay platonic friends, when they have such a deep relationship and potential for romance?

*flips table* Tele, why must you.

As an angst gremlin who cries too easily, why the fuck not. Killua falling out of love, Gon realizing his feelings too late, Gon never realizing his feelings, both of them being too afraid to go the distance. LET'S GO.

But, from a (admittedly amateurish) writer's perspective, this doesn't seem to be the case. This isn't Game of Thrones or the MCU or (god forbid) Voltron. Togashi subverts expectations, yes, but never at the expense of the narrative. Togashi never flips the script for just the sake of thwarting his audience's expectations, to the detriment of the plot and the characters, bcos at the end of the day a writer's job is to tell an effective story.

There's just too much build-up, too much subtext and raw emotion and realistic, complex portrayal of humanity in HxH's story. It's constructed so well and so subtly, but also DELIBERATELY. Togashi-sama has been so DELIBERATE in how he portrays Killua and Gon's relationship. You yourself and many others have picked apart such exquisite nuance in Togashi-sama's masterful storytelling, the foreshadowing and symbolism as well as character growth and development, and the overarching themes of life, death, vengeance, pain, and the love that conquers and exceeds all is too vital to throw away so easily.

So, no. I don't think the love story (and it IS a love story), the story of healing and self-worth and discovery in a terrifying world, is too interwoven in the KilluGon narrative, which is one of our primary if not the primary mediums with which we experience and interact with those themes, to be or remain unrequited.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Six (31.57% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Entertaining, but overrated.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Though Nebula and Gamora trade a couple of lines on a few occasions, they invariably speak about either Thanos, or Ronan. 

Female characters:

Meredith Quill.

Bereet.

Nebula.

Gamora.

Carina.

Nova Prime.

Male characters:

Mr Quill.

Peter Quill.

Yondu Udonta.

Ronan.

Korath.

Rocket.

Groot.

The Broker.

Drax.

Thanos.

The Collector.

Denarian Saal.

Denarian Dey.

OTHER NOTES:

Seatbelts on spaceships should really be mandatory.

Aahahahaha Peter has a woman on his ship whose name he can’t remember and whom he forgot was even there! Oh, it’s so funny and charming! What a classic misogynistic cliche intro! Garbage.

Rocket chastises Groot to ‘learn genders’, and I don’t think the irony of a raccoon (a species with almost no visually-evident sexual dimorphism) saying that to a tree-person (whose species - if sexually dimorphic at all - certainly has no reason to adhere to the humanoid/mammalian model) is deliberate. The other alien higher-life-forms they encounter in the film are pretty uniformly human in appearance (not much effort going on in the ‘alien’ department besides just painting people in bright colours), but lack of imagination from the creative team doesn’t mean that the binary gender system we’re accustomed to on Earth has any broad bearing on the galaxy at large. 

Aaahh, and now Peter is explaining his scars to Drax, with lovely stories of women he cheated on in the past because he’s ~such a stud~.

Thanos tells Ronan off for his dull political raging and whiny behaviour, but he’s sitting on a shiny floating throne himself, so I’m not sure he’s earned the right to criticise what other people have got going on.

Rocket suggests that Gamora trade sexual favours to get things from other prisoners, because we’re being Like That with this movie.

The Collector keeps female slave ‘assistants’, whom he evidently treats so nicely that Carina commits suicide by infinity stone at the first opportunity in order to escape him. We’re just doing so well for the ladies in this film.

As a great comedic beat, Drax calls Gamora a “green whore”. It’s both a shitty line, and nonsensical, since Drax isn’t supposed to comprehend metaphors and he has no reason to believe Gamora is a literal ‘whore’ (nor is he likely to use such a colloquial term, considering the calibre of his standard vocabulary). Basically, it’s a rubbish line from every angle, and all in service of a misogynistic joke. 

This film is a terrible waste of Djimon Hounsou.

Ronan is very theatrically over-the-top in his pronouncements, but Lee Pace does his damnedest to make it work on delivery.

Why does Ronan’s flashy purple infinity stone weapon not kill people when he shoots them with its energy blast? Obviously it would be terribly inconvenient to the story if he just casually killed all the good guys, but honestly. It doesn’t make much sense. They coulda at least pretended there was a reason.

The part of me that is susceptible to acts of heroism is affected by the guardians all joining hands to share the stone’s power. Not enough to feel that the film or the character relationships actually connected on an emotional level, but enough that this ending doesn’t feel totally unearned.

Drax patting Rocket’s head while he’s crying over Groot is a lovely touch. THAT is the strongest character interaction of the film.

So. I’ll be honest: I don’t like this movie. I don’t think it works. I think it’s essentially just a string of gimmicks, loosely attached, entertaining enough on the surface but with no meaningful depth to hold in the mind or keep the audience engaged once the credits kick in (it’s also much heavier on the sexist tropes than any other MCU film previous). I don’t hate it, but it doesn’t give me anything that I value in a viewing experience, it just happens and then ends and that’s it. And the reason it doesn’t work is, frankly, the writing is lazy as shit. It makes a sub-par effort at establishing character and thus relies heavily on cliches, it rarely bothers to incorporate relevant plot and motivations and such into the story at early points in order to generate narrative pay-off, and the world-building is hazy at best and, like the characterisation, trades predominantly on expectation of stereotypes rather than actually creating anything original.

Let’s start in the obvious place: with our lead character. I’m tempted to just say ‘Peter Quill is garbage’ and then move on, because it’s true and also, he’s just not complex or interesting at all, which is ridiculous because he’s got that whole ‘alien abduction’ origin story and there should be like, literally any layers at all to his story instead of him just being an obnoxious Lothario who makes pop culture references like that counts as having a personality. But, here we are. I’m not familiar with the comics so I don’t know if this is a common complaint from fans who can’t believe their boy got all his nuances deleted in favour of such an inane cliche, but if this is exactly what Quill is like in the comics too? That’s no excuse. Part of the magic of adaptation is the opportunity to improve upon things the source material did wrongly or badly. The Quill we’ve got here in this movie is such a bland template he’s almost functionally useless; he barely impacts the story at all, especially in any way that is relevant to his personality or skills and necessitates his presence (the dance-off distraction is the only good Quill moment, and it’s also one of the few inspired choices in the whole film). At the end of the day, Quill exists so that the story has a Main Guy, being a straight white American male (and making sure we all, excessively, know about it), because God forbid we be expected to identify with anyone else. I have heard people sing the praises of the film for ‘subverting cliche’ by not having Quill and Gamora actively hook up by the end, as if that somehow makes it better that every single other aspect of that tedious forced romance plot is still squarely in place and set to play out in future films (pro tip: if the main guy still ‘gets the girl’, only it doesn’t happen in the first film, that’s not subversive. That’s still playing the trope dead-straight). Quill not immediately being shown to be rewarded with sex is not some incredible feat of original storytelling, and it certainly doesn’t absolve him of being a dime-a-dozen pig of a character. If that’s the most ‘unexpected’ character element you can cite, you’re in dire straits. 

Now, I’m not gonna talk about every character individually, because in most cases there’s not much to talk about; Drax is the big warrior guy with the Fridged Family backstory we’ve seen so many times before it elicits zero (0) emotions now; Groot - though an interesting idea on paper - is basically just a Deus Ex Machina of whatever ability is most useful at any given moment, too ill-defined to have boundaries to his powers and conveniently not using his full potential whenever it would allow the characters to win too easily; and Rocket, well, Rocket is actually the only one of the leads who manages any meaningful nuance, which is unfortunate because most of the time he’s just used for sarcastic comic relief. The other character I am going to talk about is Gamora, and it’s because she’s a prime example of how this movie fails to establish things so that they feel like they actually matter or the character’s motivations are understandable, etc. We are introduced to Gamora when she overrides Ronan’s order for Nebula to retrieve the orb from Xandar; as it turns out, Gamora’s introductory moment (literally the first time we see her or hear her speak) is also her act of rebellion when she puts into action her plan to escape Thanos’ clutches and go her own way. The problem, obviously, is this is her introduction. We’ve never seen this character before, we’ve only just met Ronan and Nebula as well, Thanos is barely more than a concept, as is the planet Xandar and the politics around it. Nothing has been established yet about the life that Gamora occupies, so her ploy to escape it? Meaningless. We don’t even find out that Gamora was not planning to retrieve the orb for Ronan until she tells us so after she’s been arrested, and we have literally no reason to believe her because we don’t know her yet because her character has not been established at all. The traditional way to do this would be to show her in her old life, doing as she’s told and/or witnessing terrible things being done by her compatriots, and showing the audience that she has clear misgivings so that when she turns, we understand the context and can believe that’s a logical character decision based on established personality and morals (think of Finn’s introduction in The Force Awakens for a textbook example). Because no time or effort is ever invested in establishing who or how Gamora is, everything we know is delivered to us directly in dialogue, all tell, no show, and what could easily have been the film’s most dynamic character is instead hampered by having her development choked off to avoid spending time on letting her origins matter (despite the fact that those origins are essential to the plot).

On which note, lets talk bad guys. Thanos first, because there’s not much to say, and that’s not a good thing: Thanos is actually pointless to this film, the only reason he’s there is so that the MCU can use him to actual purpose in later films and his relation to Gamora and Nebula and the hunt for the Infinity Stones needs to be established first, but as with everything else this movie is terrible at establishing things effectively. Consequently, Thanos...just floats around on a chair, and then Ronan tells him to piss off and we don’t see or hear from him again in the rest of the film, and there’s no real effort made to integrate Thanos into the story so that he seems like anything other than a dead-end subplot cluttering up the movie for no reason. The closest Thanos gets to anything notable is when he chides Ronan for his boring politics, but even that is symptomatic of the wider problem with this movie’s lazy writing: Ronan’s whole character is essentially just another dull archetype - in this case, the extremist villain - and a solid nothing at all is done to establish his politics or what they mean, other than death for the people we’re told are the innocents. This is a problem with the world-building of the film as a whole, because none of the galaxy’s politics is fleshed out, there’s no context to why the Kree have a problem with Xandar or why we should care, and Xandar kinda gets treated like the centre of the universe but it also seems that’s just for convenience sake so that the plot can return to a previous location for the final act. Hell, I haven’t the faintest fucking idea where Earth is supposed to fit in to all of this, other characters talk about it so it’s clearly a known quantity to the rest of the galaxy, and yet no one knows any details about it and Quill never bothered to go back there for reasons which really SHOULD be explored and yet are not even mentioned (that would seem like some of that characterisation he doesn’t have), so I don’t know what we’re supposed to interpret from that. I’m not confident that the creative powers bothered to think about it, considering how much they didn’t think about anything else. This is a movie where ‘human, but painted’ passes for ‘alien’ and society apparently functions exactly like Earth, tedious misogyny and all, despite the absence of cultural sharing to explain the Earthlike similarities (and boy oh boy do I HATE the laziness of science fiction where everything being identical to Western culture on Earth is treated like it’s ‘just the natural order’ that should be expected to develop in any sentient species, instead of a complex system shaped by unique and varied influences over thousands of years and dependent upon environment, religion, philosophy, and a myriad of other factors not replicated in these poorly-drawn ‘alien’ cultures. I get that you’ve gotta employ at least some shorthand in order to get on and tell your story within time constraints, but come on. If you’re not gonna think about world-building at all, don’t set the story on an alien planet). Above all else, we know that Ronan is the villain because he’s painted (literally) as one; he’s the bad guy through visually-indicated othering, because we all know good guys don’t look like that (whereas most of Ronan’s enemies on Xandar are just regular-looking white folks. Curious...). Sure, Ronan is also introduced spouting rhetoric and then smashing a dude with a hammer, and that seems like villain behaviour, but that only reinforces the point: Ronan’s role is made unmistakable through age-old tropes, and it’s never explored or subverted or made dynamic from there. Like Quill as the ‘hero’, Ronan is a dime-a-dozen cliche.

So anyway. Lets talk plot. This one goes like so: Quill collects the orb from Morag, where he coincidentally runs into Korath and company who just-so-happen to be after the orb at the same time (how it is that multiple interested parties only just found out that one of the most powerful destructive forces in the universe is just chillin’ on this abandoned planet, they don’t bother to explain). Quill runs into both Gamora, and Rocket and Groot, the other parties happening to be after him for different reasons and coincidentally converging on Xandar at the same point. Everyone gets arrested and sent to prison, where they meet Drax and promptly escape and fly to Knowhere so that The Collector can exposition-dump about Infinity Stones. Drax calls Ronan up, just literally straight-up calls the bad guy to come and find them because I guess figuring out a normal plot reason for the villain to catch up with the good guys was too hard, so we had to go for extreme stupidity instead. Ronan gets the orb and goes back to Xandar to destroy it, and our main characters figure they should stop that, so they do. Roll credits. Now, you can make pretty much any story sound basic and stupid by breaking it down into its component pieces, but the important thing to note about this layout is how many convenient or just plain stupid aspects there are. There are almost no character meetings or story developments that come about logically through the sensible development of plot driven by character’s motivations springing from established narrative, etc, and part of that problem is absolutely because there’s so little established character/world-building to begin with, but it’s also because whatever there is tends to apparate when it is needed without any sign of existing beforehand; that is, very little of the story is seeded early on so that it can come to fruition later in a narratively satisfying fashion. The Nova Corps sentence the characters to the Kyln prison as if it’s a big scary concept, but we’ve never heard of it before so we have no reason to consider it trouble. Drax appears and other characters literally tell us why we should pay attention to him, instead of him being, say, pre-established (SUCH AS by having his family tragedy shown on screen as a dual-establishing event for him and Ronan, or something to which Gamora was privy in some way in order to intro her misgivings as discussed above, or even just having someone reference the legend of Drax the Destroyer BEFORE getting to the Kyln (you could also, y’know, establish the Kyln itself in talking about how Drax was sent there. Just saying)). Intro the idea of Knowhere and/or The Collector BEFORE heading there so that it’s less convenient for Gamora to just-happen to have a buyer already set up for the item we didn’t even know she had planned to steal as part of the escape plot we didn’t know she was hatching. For the love of everything, establish some actual REASON for Ronan to follow our characters to Knowhere, instead of just ‘Drax got drunk and called him’. Link the pieces of your story together with concepts and developments that build upon each other in a narrative progression. That’s the difference between having a plot, and having a string of chronological set pieces (some of which - like Morag and the Kyln - don’t even have a purpose anyway beyond providing some action-scene opportunities). 

Before I close this out, I just want to run through a little exercise to demonstrate something that you never, ever want to happen in a story. You never want to have a lead character who can be deleted from the plot without leaving a hole too big to be easily filled by the rest of the cast. But what happens if Peter Quill is removed from this story? Well, pretty much all of the misogyny disappears, so that’s a plus. Someone else is gonna have to retrieve the orb from Morag, but we could easily send Rocket and Groot to do that. Gamora can still fight with them on Xandar exactly as it happens in the actual movie, only this time it’s not just pure coincidence that they conflict. We saved vital time that the film spent on Quill’s inconsequential childhood abduction (and we could save more on trimming the pointless action on Morag), which is time that could be better spent on all that other establishing crap I was talking about earlier, tightening up the narrative. Quill doesn’t serve any important purpose in the Kyln, so we can remove him from that no problem, nor does he matter on Knowhere other than a frankly stupid and ultimately pointless moment when he saves Gamora (definitely unnecessary when we’re removing the romantic subplot bullshit along with Quill). And then what? The characters agree that not letting Ronan destroy the galaxy is probably a good call (not Quill-relevant), they head back to Xandar, fight some bad guys, hold hands, win the day. We lose Quill’s only good moment in the form of the dance-off, but it’s an acceptable loss in order to strengthen the entire rest of the film by deleting the most meaningless character: the lead. We also arguably lose the Ravagers in the process, but as much fun as Yondu is, the plot can also survive completely intact without him (the only time the Ravagers matter is for the previously-identified useless damsel contrivance with Quill saving Gamora, and then they do help out on Xandar in the end, but they aren’t necessary for that - the Nova Corps could have been expanded just a smidge and taken care of everything). On the other hand, if you remove Gamora, you lose the connection to Ronan/Thanos as well as the moral compass of the Guardians; some other character would have to be significantly altered to fill the gap. You lose major Deus Ex Machina skills without Groot, and without Rocket someone else’s narrative has to change in order for Groot to have a buddy (plus you need a new mastermind for various plans, though that’s an easier hole to fill). You skip Drax and you do lose a major plot development in the form of him drunk-dialling Ronan, but admittedly that’s one of the worst things in this whole dumb waste of a movie, so maybe it’s not such a loss. You could ditch Drax. But, that’s not important, because Drax isn’t packaged as the leading man: Quill is. If you delete Drax, you don’t really streamline or improve the story (you could fix the one big flaw in his character very easily, he doesn’t have to disappear for that). You delete Quill...I know, comic book adaptation, dropping the main character is not considered an acceptable alteration when you’re improving the story for the screen. But come on. The least they could do is make him actually matter, not just be a perfunctory inclusion for the sake of sticking this ‘weird sci-fi’ as firmly in the centre of over-done cliche as a lazy gimmick story ever could be. There are a few chuckles to be had with this film, and it’s not entirely boring, but it’s not half as endearing nor even an eighth as inspired as it thinks it is. I’m not impressed by any of it.

[pickyperkypenguin]

some reflections on mental health and public gatherings

Maybe there will be one day when I remember that I do need people, and I’m feeling much, much better after any kind of human contact. Well, not any as in not a negative one, but positive occurrences do snap me out of my general state of steady panic that grows on me like lichen and moss every time I stay in, and work alone for longer periods. That is the dire consequence of good home conditions for working, and living in a remote area, and generally not having to take as much of an interest in daily life management as a person who lives on their own. I just sort of marinate sometimes in my own intellectual juice enough to become a bog body. There’s that picture, you know the one: “When is it Safe to Leave the Bog? → Tuesday”. Sometimes I forget that the Tuesdays of this world exist.

That also makes me wonder, again, again, again and again, in a true Chidi Anagonye style: am I meant for this job? Will I be able to not only execute this four-year feat, but could I possibly exist like this, sustainably? Is a sturdy mental health required to be an academic? Will my mental health become better with time, with some adjustments that I am planning for this aspect of my life? Or will it be degrading, because this job will put a strain on me? (An asterisk here: will any job do that?) Is this the direction of that process, or is it going the other way: because my mental health has been in a rough place, this job is putting a strain on me?

Gods, I really hope it’s the second option, and I am, after all, if not “meant” for this, then at least able to function like that. I sort of really want to. I like my lifestyle that’s not the nine to five kind. I like having time.

And that is, for some reason, not really understandable for most of the people that I know. Not having time is equated to being an adult. Is that really the only way? Am I a worse, immature person, because I’d like my life to be slower than most that I know? 

(An asterisk here: when I am making time for a person, because they need to talk and I am their friend, and that’s how I express my feelings, by making time  – but they do not do the same for me, and (I assume) just think that I am that lazy of a person/have so much free time that I am always available  – am I allowed to be mad at that, or because their life is, in fact, busier than mine, I should not be expecting the same effort for me and not feel sad and disappointed that I feel like they do not value me as much as I value them? Or should I get over it, because actual adult people cannot make time as easily as they once could, when they had more time on their hands and less to care about? 

An asterisk to an asterisk: first, I do see all listed points of view as equal possibilities for directing my thoughts, and as much as it would be incredibly easy to just get mad/sad/disappointed, I do very seriously consider that I could very well get over it, because real life knows no mercy. Second, I need to check if I am communicating clearly enough that I need to talk to them and that them making the time is their language of love. To the last one, I think the answer is positive, to the first: entirely unclear, because I often am shit at communicating my distress. However, I’d like sometimes for people to figure it out on their own, when they’ve known me for literal years, so I don’t have to always be the one caring about proper communication. Also, again, I do like having unregulated time. Why should I be regularly busier just to be busier, so my time can be valued as much as anyone else’s?).

Of course, colour me interested in better time management than I have now. The truth I am a downright mess and suffering because of it. It is not that I do nothing, but for the last year I feel like I’ve lost all my ability to focus for long periods, to work in huge blocks of time. I was so efficient once. I knew how to be busy in a way that did not feel like a burden for me. I was existing like that, seeing no problem in it, and not asking questions. Maybe it was better for me, maybe it put the necessity to organise my time and execute things, because I simply had to – and maybe being busy again is the recipe to come back to myself again. If everything will go according to plan, I will be trying that.

Coming back to the starting point: contact with people.

Today, there was a demonstration in my city, in solidarity with the people who were at the march for equality in Białystok (and what they had to go through). There was one earlier this week, but I wasn’t there. I was scared to go, even though allegedly (for all that people are saying and for what I see) my city is considered (one of the) most liberal in whole Poland, and also I had no one to go with – I asked around, and nobody was available. I didn’t want to go by myself. With the fresh memory of the scale of violence that happened in Białystok, I didn’t want to risk – not only myself, but potentially making a target of my family. You never know how things will end and who will suffer. My mother was out of her mind just considering the possibility that I could go and something could, gods forbid, happen. She lived in the times and remembers vividly when going to any kind of demonstration executing civil disobedience was basically asking for trouble, not only for yourself (you could, for example, end up dead), but also for your family. I understand her fear. Times have, thank gods, changed so much.

(It’s the sudden reminiscence that scares.)

I thought, it’s different now. It’s allegedly still a democracy. I want to go. I am scared, but is it because I am always scared of life in general, or is it those particular circumstances? I’ve been on demonstrations before, wouldn’t be my first at all. So, was that the photos of people beaten up and spat at to the accompaniment of “God, Honour, Motherland, get the fuck out!”, or was that the fear of saying: yes, this is how I think, this is what I am convinced of – that all people have the right to love, regardless of orientation and sex/gender, and that nonheteronormative people exist and their existence should not be – not as much as political, because all our existence is, I personally thing – but should not be as politicised as it is.

I still don’t know. It’s not a question that can be answered just like that, ignoring all nuance. All those reasons are rooted in real problems, all are valid. It’s not a made up violence that made me feel fear and anger, it’s not a lack of years of repression of every divergent thought, that made me feel fear and consider things through weirdly shaped categories.

I went, and there was no violence. The counter-demonstration was about fifteen people, surrounded tightly by police cordon. Honestly, the behaviour of the police was so different from what happened in Białystok, and I was so happy it was the counter demo they were watching and keeping in check, not us. And that they were facilitating the “stroll” from one gathering to another – it was too little of a time for the organisers to register a march, so they could only do two separate public gatherings. We had to “stroll” to the next place, risking – because we were not formally protected, as a march would be. The police, however, was really nice about all of that – they were, indeed, doing things they didn’t necessarily have to, if they really didn’t want to. They were patrolling with the cars, stopping the traffic lights at some key crossroads. The friendly blinking orange light protected those, who could be potentially told they were committing an offence of sorts, if they went through, with the crowd, ignoring red lights.

Maybe it was the PR in shambles that the City Council was facing, after incredibly recent assault of an academic and a journalist, who said he didn’t like hate speech on the wall aloud. He got beaten to a pulp in your precious multicultural city, so tolerant for all minorities, welcome everyone! All citizens can feel safe! Ah, my dearest city, how wrong you are about that.

So maybe it was the potential PR disaster that made them make the police compliant, and the vice-president of the Council actually giving a speech at the demonstration. But you know what? I’ll take what I can. I don’t care about their reasons, I just care about support, and safety. It’s not the time to care about motivations.

I went there, and I saw people of many ages – not only young, but also older. People who care, who came here out of solidarity with the people in Białystok, who came because they saw hatred and felt the need to say “NO”. Even though they didn’t always felt it necessary before. The social mobilisation and reactions that I observed throughout this week made me feel something other than fear. When a friend, who could as well set his living up the way that he wouldn’t ever have to care about all of that, because for people like him there is a place in the society as it is, had said he cares about what happened, and he finds it all appalling. When my mother reacted to a person who was quite loud with their hate, when she didn’t have to, and usually just bore whatever was happening around her. When people marched the streets, knowing well they are against the current leading party and the Church hierarchs. What I was feeling was not exactly hope, but a certain bud of happiness that the hatred didn’t consume everything yet, and that for an action there is opposite reaction. Maybe not equal yet, but maybe some day.

[beinglibertarian]

Civilized Society: On the Death of Civility

One of the most influential questions I’ve ever encountered came not from a great philosopher or writer, nor from any inspiring conversation or work. Rather it came from a black comedy at the end of a rant about people throwing used tampons at each other and ripping on American Idol.

The movie (and I highly suggested giving it a watch) was called “God Bless America” and was a story of a man who decided to address the idiocy and (un)culture of the U.S. Of A.

The question: “Why have a civilization if we are no longer interested in being civilized?”

The weight of that question has stayed with me for many years. In all aspects of our lives, we see a continuous shift towards not just tolerating but accepting and rejoicing at the de-evolution of our moral and normative standards.

Before this gets misinterpreted, I am not attempting to start the “objective/subjective” morality debate. Rather I want to touch on this trend, the damage it has and will continue to do, and its effects on not just discourse but human interaction at large.

For the purposes of this piece, I feel that I need to define what I mean by “civilized” in this context.

I am referring here to a standard. A level of culture, of self-betterment, and of social advancement. I am referring to refinement, tact, principles, and all of the other things we have allowed to be eroded from our social norms. The very things that made us as advanced as we are as a civilization are the things that we are allowing to disappear, and it’s primarily due to either apathy, intellectual laziness, or the false belief that these cornerstones of our society are mere relics compared to our own decay.

Make Politics Civilized Again

When we talk about politics we usually end up discussing how terrible one politician is compared to another (which I’ll touch on later). Worse still is attempting to engage with people themselves. Moreso than our politicians, people in general need to be more civilized when discussing these topics.

God forbid one disagrees with someone these days! Outline the belief in an opposed idea and you will be beset by the tribalistic howler monkeys hungry for the flesh of the heretic.

To many, it has become as if the mere existence of opposition is equal to a personal affront or attack.

If one believes or is thinking something different than the hive they are implying that the other is somehow mentally deficient.

Everything gets couched in false dichotomies of us/them, yes/no, right/wrong, all when the world of political ideologies are far more convoluted and nuanced than that. I may disagree with someone’s views on a topic like gun control, but that doesn’t mean that that alone is justification for me to start screeching “Statist!” the second someone suggests some form of restrictions. Just the same I would hope that my opposition wouldn’t immediately jump into saying I support the deaths of children or some other absurdity simply because my stance remains unchanged after a school shooting.

The purpose of debate and civil discourse is to present and challenge ideas; not to pontificate and organize pissing contests.

I find it odd that people will demand to have their voices heard, then squander the opportunities to shift hearts and minds to their cause through empty vulgarities.

Despite millennia of evolution, we still allow ourselves to be put into the little boxes of our self-designed tribes. Even those of us who preach for individualism can be found guilty of this.

Not all is lost here though. I’ve found that much of it lies in approach. If one approaches a discussion from a good faith position with a true willingness to objectively debate and review ideas you will eventually find those on the opposition that are the same. Even the ones that aren’t can eventually be swung into a proper discussion with the right levels of tact and respect.

Obviously, there will be those that are simply there to screech, but that doesn’t grant a license to debase one’s self and do the same. Ideologies can and ought to be discussed on an ideological level. Any lower and one may as well not speak at all.

The Death of Nuance

By and large, this might be the biggest contributing factor to the issues spelled out above and below.

Even those that maintain the ability to discuss, debate and create tend to have lost this necessary skill. The ability to understand and look for the nuance in things.

We design things around simplicity rather than quality. Whether it’s our political arguments or our art, we are constantly aiming to accomplish some form of streamlining that in turn means the frills need to be trimmed.

Arguments are reduced to dichotomies and art reduced to the most easily packaged thing. We see this with our politics especially. We will ignore the nuances of arguments that have vastly different implications because they are outside of our tribes.

There is a massive difference between saying “I’m against the existence of unions” and saying “I’m against government empowerment of unions.” Supporters of unions will treat these as the same thing, even if the latter statement came from a supporter of unions themselves, or if the opposition is some form of left-libertarian. Logical consistency and honest review of the details of their opponent’s arguments are thrown aside for the sake of their tribe.

As I mentioned above, we try to reduce all things into “yes/no” categories and trap ourselves within them. This does far more harm than simply amputating the civilized tones political discourse once held. It also kills our ability to think outside of these dichotomies.

If what one has to say can’t be reduced to a tautology or syllogism then it isn’t worth hearing in the eyes of our generation of pundits and keyboard warriors. As a society, we have stopped our exploration of philosophy and the arts and moved into a phase of rearrangement. We no longer strive to make something wholly new, but simply remix and argue over what has already come before us.

Most of our media and ideas are not our own anymore. They are remixes of ideas and arguments from before.

While it is worth understanding and appreciating what came before us, we should strive to move past it. We should strive to improve rather than regurgitate the ideas that came before us. We should take the time to learn the subtleties of what we engage ourselves in. I brought it up in one of my podcast episodes where I talked about the human habit of overcomplication, yet I am equally astounded by the amounts of those complications and nuances that we add to our interests that we then summarily ignore.

We will spend all of this time debating philosophy, politics and economics, but we won’t take an equal amount of time to review the basis for the arguments our opponents use, or in some cases ourselves. Instead, we will defer to the basics of what we encounter and fight from there.

In art, we will accept a lower quality of music lyrically because we’ve reduced our listening experience to the beat. We examine our world from generalizations rather than attempting to view things as a whole. We discard the whole once we’ve decided what is in front of us. There are some out there reading this that likely saw the repetition of the word “we” and got their backs up. It should be easily understood that the usage of the word here is in a generalized form and thus should receive no contention from those this critique doesn’t apply to. The fact that this likely needs to be explained further illustrates my point.

“It’s Art”

It is saddening when people say this in defense of baseless vulgarity or unoriginal pieces of “art.”

Through the postmodernist lens, we’ve come to accept anything as art so long as it was made in expression of whatever the “artist” whips up as a reason after the fact.

While some pieces can indeed be interesting, on the whole, much of the talent the art world use to hold has been replaced with expression for the sake of expression; no actual skill required. We’ve turned the study of the aesthetic into a scatological field.

The truest shame of this is the amount of true talent that gets passed over in place of these works of “art.” The amount of technical skill and artistic vision that likely went into your phone’s background or those random “cool art” Facebook page posts you’ve seen massively outweighs anything I’ve seen from the “performance art” crowd in recent years.

Outside of the regular talentless hacks that throw the term “avant-garde” around like they actually know what it means, there’s the overpackaged side of this decline as well.

Now it needs to be stated first: I understand that most television, movies, and pop hits aren’t designed to be masterwork expressions of the craft. They’re designed to be popular. The problem is twofold here.

First, we are a very systematic species. We’ve devoted thousands of man hours and resources into the study of what makes certain music or shows popular and reduced these fields to a science rather than the art it ought to be.

Not every TV show needs to be some high-level journey of wonderment, but at least they could stop redoing the Three’s Company formula every time they need a new hit. Even some of the better works that have come out in recent years like Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad, while refreshing, ended up doing little more than creating a new system for companies to flood the market with.

With every repetition of the model, it becomes weaker and more deformed.

Pop music has always suffered this, but the emphasis on it has eroded the usefulness of the media form.

Even older pop hits still had to reach a certain level of quality before we would begin to eat it up. Instead of keeping up with that trend, we’re fed things that are scientifically designed to be appealing; rather than being appealing on its own artistic merits.

Luckily there are definitely acts out there that bring that higher level of quality, but sadly they simply aren’t as big or on the same level of reach as the cookie-cutter ensembles that I’m referring to.

I’m not suggesting we need to go back to some idyllic civilized high society that only listens to classical and jazz (though I wouldn’t really oppose that either), but rather that we pay more attention to the art we consume and demand more than a catchy tune with an appropriate level of compression.

The Pursuit of Knowledge

As of the beginning of this sentence, this article was already at 1795 words. For most of those that read web articles, I’m already over the average attention span by about 1000 words.

Even in libertarian circles, there are tons of people that will fight you to the death on an economic or philosophical concept, yet they’ve never read the source material these ideas came from.

They’ll have gotten their arguments from watching others debate online or by parroting whichever YouTuber they happen to follow.

They’ll attack commies for their ideological views, but have never picked up a copy of anything by Proudhon, Marx, or Kropotkin. This isn’t a libertarian issue alone though as those same commies are just as likely to have never read the material either.

We’ve bred a social order that values the products of knowledge, but not it’s acquisition. Sure, we push our youth to run off and get their degrees, but we do that for the sake of them gaining better  employment rather than to actually learn.

Shows like “Are you smarter than a 5th grader” are only possible in a society where we treat the civilized pursuit of knowledge as a means rather than an end in and of itself.

Even when we do pursue knowledge, we aim for summaries. In order to stand for something one first needs the legs that true knowledge grants you. After reading a single Wikipedia article or listicle people consider themselves educated enough to discuss the finer points of Spinoza. And that’s if they even read non-fiction to begin with.

The average person reportedly reads twelve books per year, though this is largely believed to be inflated with the actual average closer to four. This is out of the nearly one million books published every year. Obviously, it would be physically impossible to read that much per year, but even when we do read the quality is suspect.

Look at the explosion of YA novels. Most of it is average, slightly above dime store level tropes repackaged in slightly different arrangements. These sell millions of copies and get turned into blockbuster movies.

Even “Adult” (no, not that kind) novels tend to follow the same path of repetitive swill. The bulk of the variety ends up coming from the types of characters rather than the plot itself, or the authors will predictably try to over M. Night Shyamalan their works with more twists than a 50‘s sock hop.

All of this may sound like some form of intellectual elitism, but rather it is a call for standards. We can enjoy the odd bit of trite every once in a while (one of my favorite films is still “The Room”), however, we cannot sustain ourselves on it.

Civilization and culture around the world has been built on the backs of the thinkers and the dreamers. If we only feed our brains garbage then we will produce the same. To make society more civilized we need to start by making ourselves more informed and demand of others and ourselves the higher standards that would grant us.

Psuedos: A Cancer on Culture

In listing all of this I feel it is important to list the worst offenders of those that erode all that is civilized: Psuedo-intellectuals.

These are the types that list their IQ and pedigree within the first 5 facts you learn about them. They learned all they need to know about being successful from reading 7 habits of successful people and a handful of Malcolm Gladwell books. They took not one, but two CrossFit classes and are ready to become personal trainers and dietitians. They are plebs in Armani.

The reason I think they are contributing to the uncivilized trend that we have been experiencing is that they steal the limelight from real thinkers in the name of egotistical desire.

They speak less for the purposes of sharing any real knowledge they might, by chance, have gathered, but solely to express that they are the ones that know it. They are not agents of enlightenment, but rather of sophistry.

They make compelling arguments completely devoid of any nuance that could show true thought behind their ideas, and become excessively defensive should their supposed superiority be questioned.

They’re willing to show how civilized they are in a discussion right up until any of their ideas are challenged. In their eyes, to challenge them is to say they are wrong which is tantamount to blasphemy.

Their involvement in a conversation sullies it, which in turn turns people away from engaging in the material at all.

Worst still, it can lead to people quietly settling into their little tribes on the topic.

A true thinker should want people to engage in their material. Critiques help people hone their ideas, add to their knowledge base, and offer perspectives that may previously have been unconsidered. A Psuedo-intellectual wants none of that.

The Psuedo just wants to be right from the start, and acknowledged for it. Most painfully, they are likely to self-victimize. They will claim they argue purely from facts and reasoning, but they will also be offended on a personal level if they are sufficiently challenged.

Most commonly this results in pedantic commentary, condescending remarks and stances, and a transition of the discussion from the topic at hand to an emptier game of linguistics. If one dares stoop to their level they’ll immediately decry that they’re being attacked and turn the discussion towards tone and words to gain some level of superiority out of the exchange.

This erodes not only civilized and intellectually honest discussion, but also the foundations of knowledge in the public sphere. Discussion gets driven not by the wisest voices, but rather the loudest.

I think the best example of this committed to film was in the movie “Good Will Hunting.” In the famous bar scene where the pretentious grad student attempts to browbeat Ben Afflick’s character solely for the purposes of browbeating him and making a spectacle. Matt Damon’s character (Will) comes forward and begins to pick him apart for the ideas stolen from entry-level books, generic stances, and walks him through what his academic and general future will encompass being that way.

He quotes the authors he’s stealing from (and even the damn page number), and generally summarizes all of the issues with this breed of person; all through a thick Boston accent.

I highlight this scene because it perfectly encapsulates what I’m referring to. Unfettered pedantry by those that overvalue their own knowledge and capabilities.

Now, I’m not lacking in self-awareness to the degree to not notice that one might think the same of me for writing such a lengthy piece as this attacking all of these aspects of discussion and society as if I am somehow above it all.

I am the first to acknowledge if and when I slip up on the things listed here, and truly without pretense welcome it when others notice so that I can course correct and improve. Noticing these traits and taking the time to improve upon them is what separates us from those that are simply in it to put on a show. True learning and development start with a real hunger for the knowledge, and a humble willingness to be wrong.

Civilized Office Starts With Civility

Look at the news. Just look at it and weep. People have always gotten heated and thrown mud in the political arena, but it had generally been understood that there are levels to which one simply does not stoop.

As time progresses that notion has been eroded.

Even during the infamous Watergate fiasco, we could still see a level of civility in the commentary and discussions on Nixon’s actions, and what should follow. I doubt that reporters from most MSM outlets could sit down through an interview with Trump and remain as civilized yet to the point as Frost could.

Even amongst the general public, we’ve seen this shift. After Clinton and that little blue dress, the respect for the presidency as an office plummeted as seen with the open hostility towards Bush, the baseless attacks against Obama (which tended to ignore the large list of factual reasons to criticize him), and the circus around this current presidency.

I welcome the reduction in the worship of the office as much as the next libertarian, however, I cannot support the lack of civilized discourse regarding it.

One doesn’t need to pretend these politicians are good people (generally they aren’t), but debasing one’s self for the sake of attacking them is unnecessary and pointlessly negative as well.

Civilized discourse is built around maintaining a level of decorum and mustering enough respect to effectively and fairly engage an opponent. As we remove our respect and decorum we also erode our expectations.

You don’t get a Trump (or a Hillary, or Bernie) in office if you actually demand a higher quality from these offices. While one may be on the anarchist side and against the existence of the offices themselves, that doesn’t mean we should treat the offices so poorly as to turn them into a joke. When we do that we don’t reduce the power these offices currently hold; we only reduce the quality of those who hold them.

Put another way, one can question the legitimacy of these offices and want them abolished, but simply treating them sloppily only results in lower quality people hold these positions of power, making them that much more dangerous. Conflating that these offices ought to be removed or reduced with the idea that they hold no power is a root cause of the continuous degrade in the quality of people that hold them.

Conclusion

This also needs to be said: I’m not dictating that we need to make these changes by force. That’s an important detail that is likely to be missed by some on first glance.

Cultural direction works the same as markets in the sense that changes only happen three ways. They happen by environmental factors (abundance of a resource in one area, natural disaster, etc), by the force of an interloper (such as the government), or by the sum of the actions of the individuals of society.

The environmental influence on civilized societies are mostly immutable (note: mostly), and, while there are those that attempt to enforce their cultural views via force and law (From the Puritans of old to the archetypical SJWs of today) I am attempting neither.

I write this in an attempt to get people on a different track and to change how the sum of our culture will look. Between these three factors, I personally will always bet on the individual as being the greatest genesis of change. It’s the individual I seek to showcase this to, and to engage. At the very least I hope this sparks a discussion and consideration of the points herein.

The Dalai Lama had a book titled “How to see yourself as you really are” that I think is apt to mention here. The book discusses the concept of self-knowledge, and removing the biases that attribute to both false negative and false positive interpretations of yourself.

The goal of the exercises and philosophy presented is to direct the reader towards being able to see the reality of themselves, and act accordingly rather than from empty pretenses they might have of themselves.

While I most definitely am nowhere near his levels of understanding or wisdom, my intentions here are the same.

It is my hope that those that read this will aim for more civilized heights than they had before, and will look for opportunities to improve the way we function.

I hope that you will self-reflect and take something away from all of this. It is my hope that we can answer the question of whether to have a civilization anymore with a resounding yes, but that will only be possible if we as individuals are willing to fulfill our parts.

* Killian Hobbs is a writer for Think Liberty.

The post Civilized Society: On the Death of Civility appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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[him-e]

this might be a dumb comparison but would you consider star wars/skywalkers in general to be kind of like a greek tragedy? or at least inspired by greek tragedies? i just really love mythology and would like to think there’s some sort of connection in some way. thank you! :)

Definitely! Star Wars relies heavily on archetypes and psychological motifs, and many of them come from Greek and Latin literature. In the original trilogy, taken in isolation, you see more echoes of arthurian myths and classic fairytale elements than tragedy. It’s when you think of the three trilogies as a whole, particularly in terms of Anakin’s arc, his rise and fall and redemption and the repetition of the cycle with Ben’s fall just a generation later, that the Greek tragedy vibes become evident.

To put it in very simple terms, Greek tragedy typically revolves around a good/average man who has one “fatal” flaw (usually an error in judgment or hubris). Because of this, but also because of the crucial role played in the genre by the inevitability of fate and the cosmic order dwarfing humanity, fragile and powerless even at its best and at the mercy of much bigger and incomprehensible forces, the hero is bound to fall. And one fundamental aspect of tragedy is that the audience knows he’s going to fall, and watching the events unravel to the inevitable gut wrenching conclusion is cathartic. (see how the whole prequels experience is built on the premise that you know exactly how it’s going to end.) (also, side note, catharsis is a major reason why even today we need fiction, including “dark” fiction.) 

The fall of the hero often takes the form of a heavily immoral act, a horrific crime against the aforementioned cosmic order that the hero performs either in good faith, as a result of his hubris, anger or passion, or because he feels he has to—be it accidentally killing your father and sleeping with your mother, sacrificing your own daughter to the gods, punishing your asshole ex husband by killing your own children, or choking your pregnant wife who has come to confront you after you slaughtered a temple of younglings. As monstrous as the act can be, the audience can’t help but sympathize with the fallen hero, because it’s clear he’s motivated by a desire to do the right thing (or to fix some wrong), he loves fiercely and intensely, he is (at least in part) a victim of circumstances, and the pain and punishment inflicted on him and everyone who he loves and who loves him is disproportionate. What happens to the protagonist is a metaphor of the fragility of human condition, in which sometimes a minor mistake or an unforeseeable chain of events leads to catastrophic consequences. Individual responsibility matters, but it’s always portrayed in tension with the cruel irony of a blind, irrational fate who tears good people and bad people down alike, which it often succumbs to, or is proven to be eventually irrelevant.

You can see how Anakin is in this sense the quintessential tragic hero. A good man raised in humble conditions but destined to be royalty, to be the hope of a galaxy, the fulfillment of a long awaited prophecy, who rises to a state of quasi-kingship (becoming a Jedi master, marrying a former queen), but remains ultimately a slave—to his own passions and fears, to destiny (as personified by Palpatineworking slowly to corrupt him), to the will of the gods (the Force), to the trappings and limitations of a corrupt society (the Jedi order and the republic). His one fatal flaw, loving Padmé, backfires and turns him into the very cause of her death. 

Ben’s fall is also deeply tragic, as it’s the result of a twofold lapse in judgment: Luke’s (who falls for a second prey of his own darkness and briefly considers executing his nephew for the greater good) and Ben’s himself (who mistakes this one second of weakness for a truly murderous intent, and violentlyretaliates, and never stops acting on the false assumption that his uncle was really going to kill him).

Hubris and madness are two other crucial themes in greek tragedy and I can see the dark side as a fascinating space opera portrayal of both. And then, vengeance, and family—and even more relevant to star wars, the cycle of violence-pain-revenge. The original crime opens a wound in the cosmic order (you could also say: the Force becomes unbalanced) that spreads like a cancer dooming multiple generationsand is only really healed when there is a genuine will to step out of this cycle. 

This is imo the key to understand the three trilogies in their entirety, and what they’re trying to do with the sequel trilogy in particular. Many people struggle with Ben’s fall because he “had everything”—i.e. was born in a time of peace, from a loving family of revered rebellion heroes, with unique force powers and someone to teach him how to use them, etc.—so his turning to the dark side is thrice as hard to swallow. Was he a bad seed from the start? Or did he just infuriatingly squander all he had? Other people complain that the new trilogy is built on a nihilistic concept, that evil always come back cyclically one way or another, that victory is never complete, that the heroes are bound to make the same mistakes over and over again, or that everyone is inevitably destined to be corrupted and lose hope (see the discourse re: Luke in TLJ).

Both miss the point, in my opinion. The way I see it, it all ties back to Anakin’s original crime—his tragic, blood-soaked fall to the dark side, order 66, and most importantly Padmé’s death—and how that crime was a cosmic wound that tore the balance of the universe apart and was never fully healed. So it reverberates across the galaxy, onto his progeny, and his progeny’s progeny (Ben).

Luke did begin to make things right—by choosing to reject violence he gave Vader the chance to sacrifice himself to to kill the emperor and save his son, which earned him his redemption. And…it’s a good way to end a story if you want it to end there, but if you want the story to continue, then you have to face the fact that it’s only a partial, and in many ways convenient solution to a much larger problem. Vader’s redemption did nothing to eradicate the deep-seated political views of those who were still loyal to the Empire and fighting for a dictatorship in the moment when Palpatine was killed. It wasn’t enough for Luke and Leia to actually embrace their lineage and come out as Vader’s children, if Bloodline is to be believed. It wasn’t enough to shield little Ben from Snoke’s attentions—in fact, Anakin’s blood is exactly what put a big ol’ target on Ben’s back, with nothing of his grandfather’s post-redemption wisdom to keep him on the right track, only the myth of his legacy, a myth that as we’ve sadly seen can be easily misconstrued and exploited and that Leia and Luke never properly explained to Ben either. Anakin just died, and if that single sacrifice was enough to save his soul, it actually didn’t do much to fix the countless wrongs he contributed to create during the two decades he served the Empire as lord Vader. The galaxy bled because of him. And he just died and left his children to clean up his mess. Lucas’ original idea that Vader’s redemption brought balance to the Force is a good happily ever after, but only if you don’t really plan to deal with the consequences.

More on a thematic level, RotJ represents a perfect fairytale ending on almost all fronts but it leaves a question unanswered: was Anakin wrong to love Padmé? Is romantic love wrong? Aside from Han and Leia—whose marriage didn’t end well anyway—romantic love comes out of this narrative as a tragically negative force. Specifically, romantic love for a Jedi. If you consider the first six films, the logical conclusion is that the Jedi were right, after all, to forbid romantic attachments, because look at the mess Anakin made. Anakin destroyed himself and Padmé. It was only Luke’s familial love that made him come back to the light—Luke, the eternal celibate Jedi. Familial love is good, romantic love is poisonous. The narrative absolutely implies this reading.

So although RotJ’s ending fixes everything on a superficial level, the wound keeps festering underneath, there are still many things that weren’t made right, and this is why only a few years later Luke is still so haunted by the darkness and still so afraid that a new Vader is possible that he actually considers killing his nephew for a split second. This is why the ashes of the old Empire don’t die out, but instead give birth to a new tyrannical power; and why Leia cannot be free to live her life in peace with her family, but still feels committed to a rebellion that never ceased to have reasons to exist, even after the Emperor’s death.The gods (the Force) aren’t satisfied, if you will, so they keep punishing this family. The original evil has not been completely exorcised. Love, personified by Padmé’s unacceptable, unnatural death, hasn’t been vindicated. The balance is not restored. And Ben falls.

The sequel trilogy is set to heal this wound, for real, this time. It’s also why it has a much darker tone (despite the superficial humor) than the original trilogy. It’s not impossible for a tragedy to have a happy ending, but the resolution must have the same tone, the same gravity of the premise. The prequels are a tragedy, and the original trilogy is essentially a fairytale, a hero’s journey—they’re basically two different genres, and Vader’s last minute redemption seems (and is) inadequate once you’ve seen all three movies of his very detailed and nuanced fall to the Dark Side.

We’re watching, through Ben, the tortured redemption arc that should have been written for Vader if this story had followed a chronologically and stylistically linear narrative. Through Ben and Rey, we’re watching a reconciliation of the Dark and the Light side, whose unresolved conflict, worsened by the repressive puritanical policy of the Jedi order, originated the schism in Anakin’s soul. And we’ll also (hopefully) get the answer to that question I said earlier, and see the redemption of romantic love.

[tobelongtheseries]

Laura

“To Belong” Writing Contest Entry Written by: Laura B.

During a particularly violent winter, in one most coastal big cities, two human women were giving birth; the one in an immense house, was surrounded with domestics and with a doctor, whereas the other one had for any help only that of her sister-in-law (who was a midwife) and lived in the low districts of the port. The noble, Anlune, brought into the world a charming boy whereas at the same moment was born a girl in the arms of Tharamina.

The little boy with eyes sapphire and with the hair of fire is baptized Anario, in the tribute of the god Sun companion of the culture of the country. He did not delay being known of all during his first transformation, where he took the appearance of a maned wolf completely red. Indeed, the parts of his body which should have been black were red-haired person darkened as well as her breast, with in each of the extremities (snout, pastas and tail) a spotless white. These eyes were too surrounded with this white of snow, what intensified its look, making him more piercing. The mane was of a very dark red-haired person firing at the chestnut. He had the appearance of a fox but the size of a big wolf. He was thus the first one of this new species, what attracted many curious. 

Being the third son of the family, its life was given rhythm by this popularity: lesson of fencing, courtesy, history, analytical follow-up by the scientists. Anario found refuge in this life, that in the evening, in the stories which told him his nursemaid (only person with whom he felt close). The more the time passed, the more the capacities of Anario became precise, strength of the wolf was mixed in the flexibility and in the suppleness of the fox (capacity of a maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) in bigger and more sturdy). As all the canines, his sight and its hearing were sharpened. The scientists managed to show that the dimorphism of Anario was due to a change of environment and food. Indeed, the climate drier than the big rain forests and little of fruits of the country had favored the transformation of the species. Anario in search of adventures and of new sensations the court began running away little by little as soon as people left him eyes. His teenager's favorited game was to escape people of the household to spend its time in the gardens of the family park. Meanwhile, the shouts of the girl mirror the new dad on the alert who rushed abruptly in the room. The baby was in the arms of his wife, holding in the small hand the necklace of this one. 

“Congratulation Rik, you have a magnificent girl. I am going to leave with you Thara and you, I shall return tomorrow morning.” Tharamina was in seventh heaven. 

“Thank you Luma, take off, somebody could need you. Look at Alarik there, she is magnificent, the skin is clear as the moon of this evening. She attracts to her all the stars. My girl Seleana, my small bright moon.” Alarik which usually had a violent temperament becomes softer in the view of his smiling wife, holding her child who fell asleep little by little under the rays of this winter moon. 

“You are my two treasures, and nothing will separate us.” He kissed his wife and embraced them both. Tharamina put her necklace around the neck of her daughter. It represented the moon by growing rising with a star to his extremity. 

“So that it is always a star there which stays up you”. When the child opened eyes for the first time her mother was surprised by her wall eyes: the right was of a green intense meadow which fired in the golden yellow while left was of a blue deep ocean. 

“Alarik looks she has our eyes”. In the view of his right eye, her husband made a surly grimace “I who hoped that she has yours, already that you refused me that she has your magnificent shape.” 

“We have already spoken about it, I want that she is free to see the world, contrary to me who am grateful to live near the sea water. And if you want any knowledge I am happy that she has so much of me that of you. After all it is you which stayed near me instead of leaving discovering the world.” 

“We would have been able to discover him together Thara.” 

“Ah yes. And you would have made what with a sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis) in the heart of the forest or the worse in the middle of the desert? You know very well that I check very badly my animal transformations.” 

“Yes but there is your medicine …” 

“Which cost us 3 of your teeth and 2 part of my plates of baleen a month. Furthermore, one of the ingredients of the remedy is at sea, an additional reason which binds me to this city.” 

“You always have an answer for everything, I let fall” he says in a sigh. “The boat is going to leave, I have to go to work. I like you my beauty.” 

“I also love you” She says in him kissing with a teasing smile with lips. A few hours later a little owl passed through the window. 

“Hello Luma, you have clothes on the other side of the curtain, you want to eat or to drink something?” Threw Tharamina since the kitchen. Without more formality, a small very fine and naked young woman was instead of the owl. His short brown hair in battle strewed with white drills gave him an air villain. She took a dress of blue linen and quickly put on it by answering her sister-in-law 

“Hello Thara. I am willing a glass of water and a fruit. Then how goes my small favorite niece? Had she her first transformation?”. 

“Always nothing, it is a very quiet baby, what reassures me of certain side; she will certainly not have my problem” answered Tharamina by putting on the table a big glass of water and an apple. Luma embraced Seleana. The girl looked at her before beginning twittering. 

“Actually she is quiet. But as regards the transformase, we shall be fixed only from his 10 years, up to their, it is necessary to watch her. Eh it is who the most beautiful of this house. Oh she makes a smile to her godmother.” Tharamina smiles to the young woman who had more eyes than for the baby who laughed in his arms. 

“Well tell me, you think that I be going to be able to turn to work soon? We have a new mouth to be now fed.” Hardly had she finished her sentence that two golden jewels struck her. 

“Rik and I have already paid your medicine so that you stay at least 2 months with the girl. You have to rest you are still low, you go can be not account but your delivery was very difficult with the transformase. You would have been able to be transformed hard at work but I watched that it does not occur because my stubborn person of sister-in-law had decided to bring into the world her child under the shape which she masters least. Thus for all this, I forbid you formally to leave this house without my approval otherwise I would go myself to look for you at sea, you hear me.” Tharamina looked away to put her on the ocean beyond the window. After a long moment of silence, she looked again at the girl before a small smile 

“Very well, Luma. I shall wait for the green light of my executioner before taking back the wide.”

...

When Seleana had 1 and a half month, one night, the snores of the girl were transformed little by little into humming. In the awakening, the parents discovered a magnificent kitten with various nuances of grey. Alarik left looking for her sister by running to warn it that the first transformation had taken place. The owl and the man returned in current towards the house. But as they spent the door, the girl had taken back her human shape and demanded to eat. 

“What shape did she did take on?” Questioned Luma. 

“A grey kitten, rather small.” Luma approached nude of the window having put his cape in his backpack: “I am going to go to warn the registers of the city. I return as quickly as possible to be for the next transformation there”. Then she took off, while the tears of Seleana became intensified in front of the lack of reaction of his parents. It seemed to the child that its transformations drew the attention of her mother, so that it became a kitten every time it wanted her mother. Thus Luma was able to identify his niece as a wildcat of mountains with a going dress of white verses dark grey stained and lined.

In 2 months of Seleana, Tharamina had the right to restart to work. It was known to be the best fisherwoman of the bay because of its size. Indeed, being the biggest cetacean of the city, its enormous mouth served as net at the same time to catch fishes but especially pelagic shellfish (krills, shrimps) which were very used by the noble persons as much in the composition of their cosmetics as food. However, a winter evening, when Seleana was going to celebrate her 1 year, Tharamina and the ship crew of the Black Squid, did not return. Alarik left with the rescue team, leaving his daughter with the care of his sister. After hours of research, they fell on a walking ship which had taken in in its edge the crew of the Black Squid. Alarik rushed on the deck to find his wife. But the captain of the Squid stopped him.

“Mr Slayer, I have to speak to you.” 

“Yes, Grunlek I listen to you.” 

“Here we are, we were surprised by a storm, and thanks to Tharamina we went out all alive.” “Exactly I have to see her.” 

“There was an accident with a ship of the Grace. Their crew lost control because of a magnetic phenomenon, they collided Tharamina who tried to maintain in stream our ship. This ship arrived just in time to teach us its edge while the Squid sank. Tharamina has been examined and according to the doctor she will not spend at night.” On these words, he guided Alarik through the deck up to a small cabin in which his wife was lengthened. In the clairvoyant, she smiles to him 

“I am sorry my love, I did not see it arriving. My ship was going to pour, I thought only of saving them.” 

“Everything is fine I am there now answered” him softly his husband. “Luma waits for us at home with Seleana, everything will go well, she will take care of you” 

“My angel, you must be strong for us two … Promise me to stay up our girl Seleana, to give him weapons to face life and see the world.” 

“You will tell her all this.” 

“Promise me!!”  

“I promise you …”. The young woman smiles weakly to her husband and in a last breath he said 

“I love you, you are my enjoyment”. In tears, he embraced her while she fell asleep for ever.

...

After the death of his wife, Alarik sank into a profound depression. He eventually loses his work because he took more and more risks putting his team in danger and his increasing aggressiveness dissuaded any kind soul to help him. Little by little, all the bars refused to serve him because drunk time, he took his shape of saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) so causing considerable damages. He eventually manages his anger against the high society by holding her responsible of his misfortune. He took the sea during two years and is converted to the piracy. To steal, to kill, to sell the domestics on the black markets, all this raised him no problem. His violence, during the assaults, was worth to him the nickname of the Last Shadow, only the domestics were spared. You should not touch the goods. It meant looking for his daughter 3ans later. Luma chooses to leave with them, because it was the only figure which knew the girl.

From 6 years to his 16 years, Seleana is every day pulled by his father in the fight and in the flight (pickpocket, lock-picking ...). She became fine and hurt, with differentiating dark hair of midnight blue. Luma tried nevertheless to give another education to his niece. In 11ans, the risk concerning the transformase is ruled out. Seleana loved his aunt, it was the only person who spoke to him about the past, about his parents and especially about her mother. The girl began dreaming to leave this life and to leave visiting the world. But since a few months, his aunt behaved strangely and Seleana began following her. His father was regularly going to recruit his sailors in the fights of the low districts. One night, Luma got into the office of his brother, during one of its absences and went out again with a bundle of documents. Seleana was transformed to follow her godmother more discreetly up to the beach. She lives her to undress to be transformed to go on a boat moored behind rocks. She remained hours to be waited until the appearance of several people: her aunt was accompanied by armed men. Of fear Seleana jumps up with its hiding place to help her aunt. Luma just had the time to perceive a necklace in the shape of crescent moon to intervene between her niece and her companions. 

“No, Sele!!! They are with me.” The cat stopped so dry. 

“How's that?” 

“These people are there to stop your father.” 

“I do not understand … Luma why?” 

“Because this man is not any more my brother. He is not more than the shadow of his former self. I went to the barn. Sele it is necessary to stop him now. I promises you that we shall not hurt him.” 

“But why did you go to the barn? It is forbidden and who tell me that they will not kill him they?” 

“They, it is the husbands and the brothers of the women that your father and his pirates keep in the barn to sell them … It became a monster.” 

“You lie!!” 

“Come with us. You go to see by yourself.” without more speech the young woman turned heels and left in the direction of the barn Seleana behind her. When the barn is opened, Seleana had a top the heart by discovering the scene. Women of any age were chained. Some had bruises or cuts on the body. Behind them, there were children. All were lacking water and food. Against the wall of the bottom was a heap of boxes. By approaching it, she lives that it was about rare objects: teeth, horns, leather … In front of all this horror, she began vomiting. Luma embraced her and hid her the scene. 

“You should not have seen that. I apologize for it.” 

“No, one needed, I am going to help you, and nobody should undergo this fate.” 

“You are on.” 

“Yes … I want to run away from here. Live far from him and from his horrors. Mom… Mom has to be ashamed from there where she is…” 

“Of your father certainly, but not you. You always have was her light. If you help us this evening you will be her pride.” Seleana transformed and without cared about her nudity began helping the women. She picked the locks thanks to the equipment which were in the barn. Within 2 hours all the women were evacuated up to the beach, where rowboats waited for them. Seleana saw while there were 3 ships and not one as she believed it. Once all the women and the children on board, the men left last time to look for boxes, but on the return they heard(understood) an explosion while a group of young men found them: 

“There was a too fast succession … Jacques is remained on-the-spot to allow us to run away he needs to make fast.” Without more speech everybody rushed towards rowboats. Some of the men had their animal forms to allow them to take the maximum of boxes. Seleana jumped into the last rowboat. Her aunt had just arrived to the beach when Alarik threw himself on her. At this moment, the rowboat cleared off.

So Seleana found to fight against the piracy and the injustices made for the people by the aristocrats, within one guide (guide of the Shades). She rented her services when the cause pass her noble (to fly from object, infiltration to obtain information), if the person was rich, she charged him her services. She met Anario by getting back a valuable item belonging to her best friend, object which had been taken by the young sister of Anario because she considered that this jewel was not made for a domestic. The young man fell under the spell of the courage of the ready for anything young woman to help her friend. Little by little, he began following her and left by chance by her side to help those who to ask to help him. He eventually falls in love with Seleana, which to take advantage sometimes of this feeling to get her own way.

[sammyj-me-blog]

My computer notes for my class presentation

Summary of the reading:

·         Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the ghost gum (https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/snugglepot-and-cuddlepie-in-the-ghost-gum-evelyn-araluen/ )has multiple narratives over the 10 pages. Overall, it feels like it is a personal account of the author about her Indigenous culture, land, memory, and Australia’s cruel treatment of the Indigenous through history.

·         The first part, the ghost gum sequence, has the character travelling the land via roads to Sydney. It goes into detail the characters connection and consideration to the land. It very quickly takes a turn into the government’s control of the land, where they ‘close off every path to leave without paying’ (p. 2), and then into the Stolen Generation, where ‘Governor Macquarie gathered up the precious children … to teach them God and Civilisation’ (p. 2).

·         There’s a very succinct passage that demonstrates how the Indigenous and white Australians see the land very differently. ‘Why don’t they build something there, a sunset profile picture asks on the community Facebook where we gather to buy and sell and complain. There’s nothing in that field but a tree’ (p. 2).

·         Afterwards, she touches on memory and childhood, through the characters from the childhood book Snugglepot and cuddlepie. She then considers, ‘they want me to write about them—or maybe they don’t, and they just want to be left where they are’ (p. 2). This line almost speaks to me to say that she wasn’t sure if she should write about this content.

·         The last paragraphs touches on the history of Australia. “The Cumberland Plains of Blacktown and the Hawkesbury are drenched in a history of settler violence and forgetting that goes unspoken when we squabble over heritage”. But despite this, without having to be taught, they know the land. “In the way I know all times are capable of being, Tench’s gaze is still there – but so is ours, staring back”

A nest of auspoes:

·         She appears to be telling a metaphorical story from the point of view of animals. The Auspoes are white Australians who are ‘an invasive species’ that ‘suffocate the native species’ (2019, p. 2). The entire paragraph points to this conclusion, but it is through reading the previous paragraph where the themes were introduced, that allows us to think this way. As Walker states about the braided essay: it ‘lets [her] pop in and out of different realties—not so much manipulating the facts but instead to pace them out, allowing [her] to digest reality in drops’ (2017, p. 3). And I think that’s what the rest of the other piece is doing by separating them into sections. It’s like everything is too much to deal with all at once, so separating them helps.

·         And another link to do with this paragraph, is that she talks about the children’s book snugglpot and cuddelpie. And maybe, for some reason, she is taking the approach as if writing a story for kids.

Playing in the pastorals:

·         This paragraph talks about peoples view of the Australian bush from what seems is a bit more academic approach.

·         “The environmental conditions of the land being incompatible with European modes of agricultural practice, nineteenth-century poets such as Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall necessarily emphasised Gothic-Romantic themes of hostility and hardship in early Australian pastoral poetics, while Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton staged forbidding prose tales of estrangement and annihilation against the backdrop of a land fundamentally opposed to humanity and civilisation”

·         “Hodge and Mishra have explored this double premise as the ‘Aboriginal archipelago’ of simultaneously refusing to acknowledge Aboriginal presence in social space while conjuring up emblematic tropes of Aboriginal spiritual presence in disembodied forms”

·         She also touches on how the eucalyptus was misused in settler text; how settlers wrote about it however they saw fit. These all highlight how settlers had no connection to the land and used and abused it along with the Indigenous people.

·         About children’s literature. “Affrica Taylor extends this notion in her argument that for the white children of this literature, native animals functioned as guides or mentors through their ‘journey towards indigenisation’, naturalising their claim to the land as both entitlement and inheritance”

·         She talks about a native/settler binary towards children is that they are only ever safe at the homestead. And that the books cast out Aboriginal people through negative representation.

To the poets

·         This section is different yet again. It seems more emotional and passionate. Summing up, the narrator talks to the white settlers; about the differences between them and the Indigenous. How they are “puppeting your hands through ancestors, through relations”

·         “But I want to know what it means to lose the world you’re still standing in.”

To the parents

·         Is more of a straight talk about settler views and control of the land. As well as the influence of children’s literature depicting Australian lands.

·         It changes back to the first narrative where it seems like it’s present day narrator. They talk about land and animals and we can feel their connection. They ‘write poetry here, and about here’

·         “I can name the colonial complexes and impulses which structure these texts but it doesn’t change the fact that I was raised on these books too. They tell me they never chose them to hurt us, and I never thought they did. They both grew up surrounded by the bush in country New South Wales towns”. They can’t change the fact that they’re part of the ‘new’ world as well.

·         Shen then talks about her parents and how hard they worked to just afford books to read.

·         Her dad however read to them with “salt grains and disputations”. To say to scrutinise everything, don’t just believe off the bat. He told his own stories, but let them join in too.

·         She then describes that it was too easy to see Indigenous Australians as victims, but this disregards all their hard work and effort.

·         To finish that paragraph, she arrives home, where everything belongs.

The dropbears poetic

This appears to be a narrative that combines all of the settler myths that were mentioned throughout the story.

Why did you choose it?

·         Besides it being one of the last ones to choose from. But because the structure of the piece was different, and after having read it, I just found it very interesting. It’s hard though.

Discuss what practical applications this reading had--what did you gain from reading it that will inform your writing practice going forward? What do you disagree with, and why?

·         I’m looking at this piece in a braided essay lens. By switching between different narratives that detail the same story, it lets you look at it from different angles. The writer uses a few different narratives. Like through the personal, through the influence of children’s literature, in a metaphorical sense, through a parent generation. However by including so many different perspectives, I lose the sense of the specific thing she is talking about. I feel that there are so many elements that I get a little lost. Although I feel I got the bigger picture, I lost the nuances she was telling.

Question: Do you think that the use of subheadings and separate sections added additional meaning? Or perhaps do you think it is too much? They lose the sense of what’s happening? Has anyone does something like this before?

 Discuss the reading in relation to the piece/s of writing you have chosen from the ‘Community of Practice’ folder--why did you choose to discuss these pieces together? Do these pieces demonstrate lessons that the piece of theory has to offer?

https://www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/2019/2/28/blossom-by-leah-jing?rq=leah%20jing

·         I’m looking at Blossom from a braided essay lens, as well. I found Blossom was easier to understand because it just uses two narratives and it’s clear what she is talking about. They both write about personal narratives overarched with a wider concern.

·         jing switches between concern for writers of colour and how their bodies are perceived, then abruptly to a personal love story between her and H. She flips between these two narratives, yet it is still about bodies. Her body and how her lover treats it, and as a wider concern, bodies of coloured people, particularly how people view hers, and how she views it herself. By having two different narratives of the body, adds a deeper meaning when the reader is engaged in the text.

·         Although they both look very different in structure they both have an interweaved narrative that lets us see multiple sides of the writer.

Last question:

·         I’ve been looking at this from a braided essay point of view. Is this a limiting view? Or perhaps not a quite right way to look at it? How did other’s read it?

[ahouseoflies]

The Best Films of 2016, Part I

Rodrigo Perez of The Playlist posted his best-of list on January 15 and spent the introduction whipping himself for it being too late to be relevant. That was over two weeks ago, and here I am. But who can feel caught up if an actual critic doesn’t? Even now, at a point when I have to turn the page, I haven’t seen Toni Erdmann, Paterson, Things to Come, or Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Aside from pretending that my thoughts on movies are worth something to other people, I’m just a regular guy living in a film market that is not L.A. or New York, and the system for movie release schedules is broken for all of us. Most of the year is trash if we can’t go to festivals. Then we hear about interesting stuff from the critics’ top ten lists that bubble up in early December. Because the press machine follows an old model, interviews and commercials and dates on posters are timed to promote a film while it is technically on about six screens. In the case of, say, 20th Century Women, it opens in my area on January 20th. By that time it has already been judged a failure because it had to share the airspace with dozens of other pictures released in a one-month window. And Hollywood wonders why a) they lose $75 million on Live by Night or b) regular people pirate the product. Forgive those hicks for wanting to see the thing you’re selling. This pattern repeats every year, and no one learns anything because exactly two movies end up being financial successes. I hate movies. Because I hate movies, I watched 124 of them in 2016, which is a 3% decline from my viewing last year. (In consolation, my balance between classic films and contemporary ones was better.) As usual, I have ranked all 124 and divided them into the tiers of Garbage, Admirable Failures, Endearing Curiosities with Big Flaws, Pretty Good Movies, Good Movies, Great Movies, and Instant Classics. As Isabelle Huppert probably said in Things to Come, “Allons-y!” GARBAGE 124. The Bronze (Bryan Buckley) I'm reading an hour and forty minutes as the running time on imdb, but I could have sworn this laborious movie was at least five hours. The main problem here, besides profanity being a joke in and of itself, is that the film is never sure how much empathy it has toward its characters. It judges them for cheap laughs, then turns right back around and tries to wring emotion by taking them seriously. Juggling both of those modes isn't impossible, but The Bronze proves how difficult it is. I rented this on a weekend when my baby had diarrhea, which really took the viewing experience up a notch. 123. Equals (Drake Doremus) What a snoozefest of a perfume ad this is. I liked Doremus's Like Crazy a lot, but I found little nuance or invention in his world-building here, for a setting that needed something new to separate it from the emotionless dystopias we've seen before. Kristen Stewart is at watch-everything-she's-in status for me, but even her whispery performance is paint-by-numbers.

122. Dirty Grandpa (Dan Mazer) I'm mostly angry with myself because I thought I had gotten trash like this out of my system. You can learn a lot from bad movies, but I learned all I could by seeing whatever two movies were playing every Friday of high school. I had been making such better choices. I hope, at the very least, that one of Robert De Niro's failing TriBeCa restaurants was able to hire additional bartenders as a result of this. The experience is a bit like spending time with a child who has just learned how to use the F-word, but also if that child had a deeply-ingrained sense of misogyny? God bless Jason Mantzoukas for at least trying in all of these red-band write-offs. By the way, same diarrhea weekend. 121. Sausage Party (Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernen) Up until now, the Rogen-Goldberg aesthetic has been "genre/premise...but it's filthy." Sausage Party, more of a brand management lark than anything else, seems to stretch the high concept side and the filthy side until the whole thing breaks. The atheism allegory stalls halfway through. (So there is a God, but that God is evil? Is death being expired or is death being taken home? How can the device be so heavy-handed and so muddy at the same time?) The villain (a literal douche) is adequately motivated, but the screenplay drops him for a huge stretch of time. In the end, I needed more than hot dogs cursing. I wouldn't recommend this movie, but I would recommend the three following things in it: 1. Tha god Edward Norton as Sammy Bagel Jr. 2. The epilogue is clever! Where was that kind of thinking the whole time? 3. The one joke that I liked, then felt dumb for liking: A lavash lamenting that he won't get thirty-seven extra virgin olive oils. 120. The BFG (Steven Spielberg) If you drink every time you hear "Bee-Eff-GeeeeEEEE," then you'll die. And you might be better off than a person asking "who cares?" to the ether for almost two hours.Now that his style is so solidified, a brand of its own even thirty years ago, Spielberg has trouble merging his voice with anyone else's. You could argue that he did it with The Color Purple or Empire of the Sun, but Minority Report feels nothing like a Philip K. Dick work by the end as Anderton rubs the pregnant belly of the wife he's back together with. In Jurassic Park he casts a literal cartoon to yada-yada the science that Michael Crichton was fascinated with. And here he tries to wrap himself around Roald Dahl, a man who was simultaneously way sillier and way more cynical than Spielberg. Here's something that happens about a dozen times: The BFG doesn't speak English well, despite hearing all the whispers of the world and being alive since the beginning of time. So Dahl creates malapropisms and nonsense words for him. He calls someone "a human bean," and the girl corrects him  with "Bee-Eff-GeeeEEEE, it's human BEING." And that's the film in a nutshell: Someone toying with the wacky only to yoke himself back to this boring world. 119. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (Nicholas Stoller) Compared to the first movie--not a masterpiece by any stretch--this one has no stakes at all. It's always a bad sign when characters have to keep repeating what their short-term goals are as the film goes on. If (when) you look really closely at Efron's abs, you can almost make out the "lol nothing matters" gif. 118. Wiener Dog (Todd Solondz) Todd Solondz hasn't made a good movie since the first half of Storytelling, and he hasn't made a financially successful movie ever. Yet here he is in 2016, getting more chances to spray the same pointless contempt. All of his movies are mean, but they're also weirdly toothless. My mistake that I thought the people who deserved scorn were venal billionaires and hypocritical authority figures. It's actually slightly materialistic middle-class people and college kids who need to be taken down a peg. Go get 'em, Todd! Danny DeVito comes close to saving his misshapen segment, injecting pathos into a character who is a self-loathing mouthpiece for Solondz. Fewer people fit the bill of "sad-sack" more than DeVito, and he wears his character's anxiety on his slumped shoulders. I had almost forgotten about this observant, reserved side of DeVito, and he takes over until the film shuffles along to another half-scene--you know, before we, God forbid, get attached to someone.There's a reason that Solondz's best scenes take place in schools, and there's a reason why he keeps returning to his younger stand-in Dawn Weiner, his only character that rises above a type. It's because Todd Solondz is still the weird kid in the back of the classroom giggling to himself. Then, when the teacher asks what he's laughing at, he looks down and says, "Nothing."

117. The Neon Demon (Nicolas Winding Refn) Bukowski wrote: "An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way." Of course, he didn't live to see any of Nicolas Winding Refn's movies, which challenge that notion. It's hard for me to reject something crafted so meticulously--I won't be able to unsee some of these shots--but I suspect that Refn dresses these things up so luridly because he isn't saying much. (Shout-out to your best movie being the only one you didn't write.) And he falls back on provocation because he doesn't have as much confidence in us as he has in himself. That's reductive I guess. "There's no difference between text and subtext" might be closer than "not saying much." Take the bathroom scene, for example, where the labored rhythm of the dialogue really takes hold. The Jena Malone character says that lipsticks have names that conjure images of food or sex, and she asks the Elle Fanning character what her lipstick name would be. In other words, "Are you food, something devoured by others, or sex, something you are active in for your own pleasure?" Luckily, the character doesn't answer her, but the movie spends another hour and a half clinging to the line between predator and prey. (Unless it's literally placing a predator into the character's motel room to force the issue, a moment as magical as it is didactic.) Beauty is something as pure as it is ephemeral. So if beauty becomes a currency, and one is forced to use her beauty as a transaction, can it ever really survive? Is its innocence lost then? Alternately, if a truly beautiful thing enters a realm of ugliness, doesn't it become a poisoning element that corrupts that environment? Isn't beauty, in that sense.../puffs joint/...ugliness? I think I'm pretty close, but you be the judge. The Neon Demon reminded me of Under the Skin, another film I did not like, because they both spell out obvious ideas, thinking that the genuinely artful visuals will complicate that text. (And the camera loves Elle Fanning as much as it does Scarlett Johansson. None of this is her fault.) Both films could probably be played at double-speed without missing much, but then they wouldn't be fables or dreams or other things I don't like. I feel as if I get what both of them are saying but...so? Both films suggest something blinding and poetic on the margins just beyond our view, but there's nothing there. Their beauty is empty. 116. Mascots (Christopher Guest) "Hi, I'm Laci." "What's your name?" "Laci." That's the time I laughed. I could have used maybe ten fewer characters--though please keep Parker Posey and her heretofore unseen physical comedy. Eerily reminiscent of the Netflix season of Arrested Development in which none of the stars were in the same room at the same time. Do I have to go back now and make sure those other Christopher Guest movies are actually good? 115. Zoolander 2 (Ben Stiller) The first Zoolander was silly fun, and I didn't expect much more from the follow-up. But man, Zoolander 2, separated by fifteen years from its predecessor, feels stale. And it isn't tonally desperate in the way that many of these belated follow-ups are; it's just an idea that culture has zipped past, more of a satire of the fashion world of the first film than anything relevant now. I laughed a scattered handful of times, but the final third is rough. My biggest takeaway: Will Ferrell must be a loyal friend to have signed back up. ADMIRABLE FAILURES 114. Tale of Tales (Matteo Garrone) I appreciate Garrone's visual ambition: There's a shot that is manicured to look exactly like John William Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott. No two films of his look the same either. But I paused this movie to go to the bathroom, and I got really upset when I saw that there were forty-five minutes left. Most of the stories of this fractured fairy tale collection start off interestingly enough, but they all become bloody, sometimes unresolved messes that assert, well, I have no idea what I was supposed to take away actually. Violence makes the world go round? 113. Swiss Army Man (Daniels) Most reviews of Swiss Army Man start with the "what"--desperate castaway finds flatulent dead body and pals around with him--and move on to the "how"--it's actually about friendship and living life to the fullest and so forth. I'm going to flip that. I'll buy the "why," the semi-animated corpse as a device. I appreciated that it served to highlight a type of person we don't normally see on screen: sort of educated but rides the bus, social problems but resists being emo, family problems but has worked through them enough. No, the "what" is the problem. It was clear where the line between fantasy and reality was, but the filmmakers were inconsistent with that logic once the action moved into the real world. I feel as if I gave the movie the benefit of the doubt for its entire tedious second act, then it repaid me with, well, not much. 112. Elvis & Nixon (Liza Johnson) Team Shannon 4-Ever, but I think this worked better as a photograph. 111. Ghostbusters (Paul Feig) I would say that Ghostbusters was a mess, but the word "mess" implies risk-taking that went wrong. A much rarer breed, this remake is actually a safe mess. It hews closely to the original, slavishly incorporating cameos from the original cast and hitting all of the same beats. But it's also uniquely incoherent. For example, when the ghosts are released into Times Square, the lady busters can't shoot at the car Slimer is driving because "it would be like a nuclear reactor." So that problem disappears, and now the problem is that the ghosts have taken the form of a Thanksgiving Day parade? But our heroes extinguish that threat, so now everyone is possessed by the garbage villain into disco dancing? And now the ghosts are all huge again? By trying to up the stakes, the film can't even decide on what the obstacle for the characters should be. That sort of muddiness would be understandable if the film felt edited to shreds, but I watched the two hour and fourteen minute extended cut, and it still felt like that. Most of the cast is game, but Kate McKinnon is the standout, injecting weirdness (and, separately, queerness) wherever she can. It seems as if Holtzmann is the only member of the team who actually sciences, and McKinnon's mugging is just as indispensable to the team. The few shots that the film takes at protective nerds are funny, so I wish that the script had more of that bitterness. Or any tone of its own at all.

110. A Hologram for the King (Tom Tykwer) Spoiler: Tom Hanks gets wi-fi for his team. There isn't much "there" there in yet another low stakes tale of a White guy lolwutting a foreign culture. To be fair, Tykwer doesn't other the Saudis as much as most films of this type, but even with that respect, this feels like a movie we've seen before. Without Tykwer's surreal touches and without an actor that has built up so much goodwill, the film wouldn't have worked at all. 109. Amanda Knox (Brian McGinn, Rod Blackhurst) The recent true crime works that prompted Netflix to snatch up this one have been objective and gripping, reaching past their tawdry roots to reveal something about our own prurient interest in the subjects. Amanda Knox, on the other hand, can't get past tawdry. It exhibits just as much sensationalism as it decries in others. It is nice to hear Foxy Knoxy in her own words for once though. (For the record, I would have had enough reasonable doubt to acquit her.) 108. Jason Bourne (Paul Greengrass) Even the title makes it seem as if there's no reason for this movie to exist, so the least I can do is provide alternate titles: 1. The Bourne Pickpocket 2. Bourne: Folder Labeled "Black Ops" 3. Bourne: Last of the Jump Drives 4. The Bourne Cable-Knit Sweater 5. The Bourne Daddy (That one is accurate and true to the The Bourne ____ structure, plus you get a millenial hashtag.) I think Greengrass knew what he had with that trill car chase at the end, so everything else could be rote. Jason Bourne felt like returning to the house you grew up in and going, "Oh, they turned my bedroom into an office."  107. Money Monster (Jodie Foster) Dumb in small ways--a billionaire didn't hear about a national news story involving his company because he was on a plane?--and fairly big ways--dropping threads left and right and failing to give resolution to one of its main characters. Films involving finance are often too complex, but Money Monster isn't complex enough; it's missing a B story. If you think about the best possible version of a movie like this, it's probably Dog Day Afternoon. That film works because we care about Sonny just as much as we do about the boyfriend on the other end of the phone. There's no equivalent for Money Monster, though it could have been the cop, it could have been the girlfriend, it could have been the code-writers. There are a few surprises, good intentions, and Foster has a deft hand for the pacing. But any time the script asked me to care about these characters as people, I felt like it was faking. Maybe the smartest, most modern touch is the suggestion that becoming a meme on Vine is a deeper indignity that going on trial for breaking international law. 106. Jane Got a Gun (Gavin O’Connor) Jane Got a Gun makes sense as a vanity project for Natalie Portman because it allows her to play a lot of qualities she never has: steely, street-smart, matronly. The problem is that she doesn't play any of those particularly well, and the title character is not the most interesting or active one in the piece.That designation would go to Joel Edgerton's Dan Frost (not the woefully miscast Ewan McGregor). When the movie works, it's because he's selling the doomed nature of the Dan-Jane love affair, tugging at his own pride. But just as the film is cresting to an elegiac place, it pulls into the final shootout station. All of these movies end with the same twenty minutes, and if you aren't invested in the characters, that last leg can go on forever. 105. April and the Extraordinary World (Franck Ekinci, Christian Desmares) Like anything steampunk, April and the Extraordinary World has at least one dumb thing for each cool thing. I think the problem is that it can't decide how much of a mystery it wants to be; that is, which elements are unexplained to engage the viewer and which elements are unexplained because the filmmakers don't feel like explaining them. The art direction has so many tiny ingenious touches that define this alternate past in Paris, so of course the movie leaves Paris for a fake jungle created by sentient lizards. The animation does have some cell-shaded, Ghibli charm though. I almost forgot how water splashing looked for ninety years. 104. Florence Foster Jenkins (Stephen Frears) Meryl Streep is in this, I guess, so feel free to throw any awards you want its way. It would be impossible for Stephen Frears, Streep, and Grant to turn in something less than competent, but, other than normalizing adultery, I don't know what Florence Foster Jenkins is doing that is novel or unsafe. Here's something: Has any review mentioned that at least fifteen minutes of running time is made up of someone singing poorly? Not a starting-to-sing and we cut away after a few reaction shots. We're riding out full performances that are--such is the premise of the film--supposed to be unlistenable. Customize your back speakers to really steer into that piercing quality on minute eight of the Carnegie Hall performance. We got the point in the first half-hour, but let's really make it unpleasant. If you like this movie, it probably reminds you of splashy, unchallenging pictures that used to get made for adults. But, as a story about a person of privilege who is coddled to absurd, harmful degrees to hide her from an undeniable objective truth, it might be the most 2016 film I saw all year. 103. Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) If you say so. I still don't really get this guy. Part of the point is that these mystical things are happening all around us: goddesses chopping it up at picnic tables, intermediaries taking over dead bodies and going on dream walks. And all of that is written with deadpan certainty. But if the supernatural is always presented in that nonchalant way, then is it noteworthy? At the risk of sounding like an ugly American, what else is there if the film is about a bizarre sleeping illness, but we aren't meant to believe that the condition is bizarre or an illness at all? From a directing standpoint, other than a graceful dissolve at the halfway point (and who can't do graceful dissolves?), it's just full two-shots for the length of scenes--even simpler than the composition of Uncle Boonme Can Recall His Past Lives. The last five minutes play out like an observational music video, and I think I would prefer a music video from Weerasethakul to another film.

102. Elle (Paul Verhoeven) It's useless to think about what a movie is not, but it would have been interesting to gauge the reception of this film if it didn't have the imprimatur of an interesting director and a truly great actress. Because what we get is tawdry on the level of a Cinemax feature, despite the handheld trappings of art cinema. People who laugh with the film instead of at it might point to Michele's job as a video game designer as layered: She's in the business of devising fantasies publicly, and that's often what drives her privately. But the dialogue in that space--"This is our one chance with Activision," "given your publishing and literary background..."--is too clunky and artificial to seem lived-in. (That’s what happens when a novel is written in French, the screenplay is written in English, the screenplay is translated into French, and French is the director’s third language.) And, at the most basic level, the character just doesn't seem to know what she's doing. There's one specific plot thread that I found ridiculous, but in general the screenplay seems to confuse lots of stuff happening to the character with the character authentically developing. I can see what the filmmakers were trying to do by refusing to make Michele traditionally sympathetic, but I'm out on this. 101. The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer) For a debut film, The Fits is visually decisive and polished, but it's as thin as its 72-minute runtime might suggest. The girls in the movie, for reasons no one can figure out, fall victim to fits, and those seizures become a metaphor for the inexplicable, almost mournful dread of becoming a woman. It's rare that a movie of this type works on the level of metaphor but fails as a slice-of-life thriller--the thriller tropes are kind of the easy part. I liked how locked into the setting we were, but there wasn't enough meat on the bone for me. 100. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards) The first Star Wars film that doesn't feel like an event, Rogue One has one interesting thing (what we learn about the retro-conned nature of something that happens at the end of A New Hope) and one cool thing (Darth Vader smoking some dudes). Ben Mendelsohn avails himself well I guess. But mostly the film feels like bloodless, sexless information in search of any type of humanity. What's weird, considering that A New Hope is one of the most mythologically sound films ever made, is that there isn't a lot of care spent on setting the scene. Can we see a bit more of the type of evil the Deathstar can wreak to build some stakes? Can we stay in one location for more than a few minutes? Can we not have a location named Jedah because it sounds too much like Jedi and makes me confused for a split second every time it's mentioned? I don't think I can say it any better than A.O. Scott, who considers Rogue One "a schoolbook exercise in a course of study that has no useful application and that will never end."