#having so many debates w myself if I want this to be a status quo fic or the breakdown pete needs fic

[foolsocracy]

never write a directionless fic. cause why is pete having a breakdown over the shop that gave him cheap ass egg foo young closing . How’d we get here

[faelapis]

@babybeetlebongos asked me whether i thought more “forgiving media” like SU will not be looked fondly upon by history because it’s not as “violent” as your spops or your gravity falls, and i had a lot of thoughts about that. tw for discussion of real-life politics, hopefully with enough sensitivity to explain where i’m coming from without being extremely tacky. i’ll probably fail, and i’m very open to criticism here, but i’ll try.

many people conflate healing with violence, and change with punishment. i don’t think they’re right about that, i think some people mischaracterize where SU would fall within “the politics of the moment” in the short term, even though SU takes the much more long-term, “cultures actually need to change over time, and there’s reasons people are the way they are that are bigger than the individual, and nobody will change if you don’t give them reasons to think that the future includes them rather than punishes them for sociological phenomenon outside any individual’s control”.

because the thing is, systemic change and “punishing the bad guys” aren’t actually the same thing. they’re sometimes related, but they don’t have to be. i think the “peaceful vs violent protest” debate has obscured another debate altogether - which is individualism vs structuralism.

individualism posits that, infamously, there’s “no such thing as society”, we are all individuals and we are all accountable for our actions. we have perfectly free will, so therefore, anything we do can and should be used against us. 

structuralism posits that actually, we Do live in a society, and what we can and cannot do is extremely limited to our environments. everyone are shaped by their upbringings, socioeconomic status, culture, social norms, et cetera, and therefore, it’s more important to change society than to punish/reward individuals. our responsibility is collective, not just to ourselves. the point isn’t who is “bad”, the point is that society is the reason why many internalize bad beliefs, and that’s what we need to work on - it’s a collective failing that we haven’t, and we all need to take responsibility for *each other*.

and i think a lot of people who pretend to be for systemic change would settle for punishing their abusers, when it should really be the other way around. i really hate “individualistic leftism”, as a structural leftist myself.

to take the current political example, which, yes, i know is tacky and not the point, but it was what prompted the discussion so i think i have no choice but to address what the discussion actually became - defund the police is more important, imo, than punishing individual officers. one is transformational change on a large scale that actually makes life better for people. the other... is really just venting / individualizing things, as if it would fix anything. to me, the fix is not about punishing the bad guys, it’s changing the system as a whole.

i understand the idea of "why not both", i'm not against that, but i try to be consistently against individualistic framing. thinking punishing individuals fixes systems is equally a shitty liberal mindset as thinking that things will go “back to normal” once trump is out of office. it just has an edgier, more violent spin. 

and that’s what bothers me about the framing of media like spop or gravity falls as the “good, revolutionary” media to SU’s “bad, reformist :(” media lens. it’s really reductive, and it makes that key prioritization that “punishment > change”, which is a very conservative mindset. 

SU actually changes the system. the diamonds are no longer in power, and there is no hierarchy. everyone are slowly changing to find themselves in a world where everyone equally has the chance to do so. gravity falls and spop gets rid of the bad guy on top and thinks that fixes everything. to those latter shows, the status quo was actually fine, we just needed to get rid of the bad people. to SU, it’s the opposite - we can’t expect getting rid of the “bad guys” to “fix everything” (that’s what rose tried to do w/pink), because the sociological cultural norms of gemkind means that they’re taught to love the diamonds. so if you just kill them, you become their bad guys (the way everyone reacted to “killing” pink). you have to have the compassion to understand that to these people, this idolization is normal, and dismantle that normal without condemning the people as a whole. 

but that’s not as sexy as “valid to kill anyone who does The Bad Things. having revenge fantasies about punishing your abusers = good leftist praxis. we fix things by punishing individuals for social issues beyond their control”.

and what’s sad about that mindset is that it often, actually, doesn’t think things can truly get better. nothing that happened in spop stops more shadow weavers from popping up, because the sociological conditions that lead to abuse haven’t been dealt with. it doesn’t seem to think it CAN be proactively prevented, only punished once the children are already scarred.

SU is a lot more... hopeful yet deterministic, in a way? as in, it thinks about (and cares about) how we are influenced by each other. it wants to achieve social equality so that those power relationships don’t exist to influence us in negative ways anymore. with the understanding that nobody is above those influences (not even the “good” privileged people like steven*). whereas spop - and gravity falls - are very much not that. they are individualistic. you kill the bad guys on top and that solves eeeeverything. no cultures need to change. they just need to be intimidated into knowing the “good” people are on top now and obeying them.

(*future is basically saying there’s no good diamond to replace the bad ones, and nobody should be "on top”. it hurts everyone - the same way the expectations of patriarchy hurts everyone. we’ve molded the ones on top into thinking they must and should take responsibility for everything, when that is neither good nor realistic. we’re all, collectively, responsible for healing the traumatized & creating equal relationships. and we can’t do that by individual reward & punishment. as much as that would validate some people’s anger.)

and those people? they’re ultimately just venting their feelings. which is fine. many have been told that their personal anger is something to be demonized, so they vent by engaging in these validation circle-jerks about how good and important it is to be angry. and then many think they’re woke leftists FOR being angry, rather than anger being a personal emotion without inherent good or evil.

many of them have people who’ve hurt them personally that they want to hurt back, or they just wanna make sure to condemn the Bad People so nobody will think they side with or excuse the bad people. the idea is that somebody needs to hurt. so we just gotta make sure it’s the “right” people.

maybe one day, they will realize that actually, social issues are bigger than individuals - and this goes both ways. it can’t just mean “and so we can’t blame the poor, disadvantaged for not being A+ students”, it must also mean “and so dismantling cishet privilege is more important than punishing individual, ignorant cishet people”. that’s the only way to be consistently sociological in your framing.

we don’t decide our upbringings, social norms, who are demonized/deified by society, or who has unjust amounts of power. we’re shaped by our environments, and so, it’s more important to change those environments (and undo those power structures) than to kill individuals we consider particularly heinous. punishing those individuals will not lead to social change. it never has. people generally don’t think they have to change because others were made “examples” of. they revel in being in a “battle”. people like having a fixed bad guy to fight. cops like the power & sympathy it gives them.

the current protests... aren’t even “violent”, in the spop or gravity falls sense. they’re just... property damage and collective direct action, which is much more targeted at dismantling the system than to punish individuals. they’re not really violent. people aren’t killing individual cops, they’re demanding that THE SYSTEM AS A WHOLE change. its cop culture that’s bad, it doesn’t matter if the individual cop is good or bad. ACAB because the system sucks. even if you try to be a “good” cop, you’re likely to be fired for speaking up, because the whole culture is awful.

this is kinda similar to something SU is saying - changing the system is more important than figuring out who “the bad people” are and killing them. people think they’re doing the right thing, but ultimately, the structures around them are making them think the hierarchies they’re in are just. it’s the whole of cop culture that needs to change, and maybe the idea of cops in general is a bad one. the system is the problem, and it’s bigger than any individual... which in turn means, or SHOULD mean, that the system can be destroyed and the individuals within it can change, because they’re not really “the problem”. the idea of putting the individual responsible offers behind bars is a fine one, but... it’s more symbolic than truly transformational. the true transformation would be to defund the police. 

i know these media comparisons are inherently tacky. they are. anyone who thinks that is more important than what’s going on irl is being shitty about it. you should be donating, protesting, doing a million more important irl things.

but these tacky comparisons ARE happening, and some people do think “liking the right media” is praxis, so... if you really wanna fit gravity falls or spop into this, the analogy would be more akin to like. defeating the biggest, scariest cop, and thinking that’s somehow gonna change policing as an institution. or thinking that someone killing trump will make all the police & right-wingers go away.

basically, it’s conflating your vengeance with true change. it’s spitting on the leftist value of universal compassion in the face of the sociological nature of reality, in which Everyone are influenced by their privileges and lack thereof in ways that are bigger than individual circumstances (and thus can’t be undone by individual punishment), and so we’re all responsible. but you’d rather not be - because you’d rather see the right people burn than focus your anger at the world and at challenging yourself and your own privileges. 

[recentanimenews]

We Will Never Escape Neon Genesis Evangelion

I loved Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance. The bombastic fight scenes. Shiro Sagisu’s epic choirs. The careful game of hot and cold the film plays with viewers, teasing you with happy endings only to spit in your face. Most of all, I was excited to be seeing Neon Genesis Evangelion’s final form. After the compromises of TV Evangelion and its follow-ups, after Anno’s years of depression and anxiety, here at last (I thought) was the beginning of the end of a story that had haunted so many people’s lives.

  Years later, I watched 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo with a friend. I was crushed. This was not the Evangelion I knew. Every character but Shinji had transformed into hateful, incommunicative ciphers — except for Kaworu, whose death at the end of this film is arguably even more shocking and graphic than in the original TV series. The fights had become overblown, weightless parodies of Evangelion’s excess. What struck me most of all, though, was how much of the film’s world contradicted the previous movie’s set-up. I was expecting that Shinji’s actions of at the end of 2.0 would have dire consequences, but not that it would create an entirely new universe of lore, weirdness, and unsolved questions that made Evangelion’s earlier status quo irrelevant.

  “What will become of Evangelion now?” I cried to myself.

  I was a fool.

    In the Summer of 2019, Netflix put Neon Genesis Evangelion up for streaming for the first time. This was a huge deal, as Evangelion up to that point had been one of the most important and influential anime series you could only really watch through piracy or via expensive DVDs. Friends across Twitter celebrated. Online journalists wrote lengthy pieces praising the series and how it changed their lives forever. It didn’t matter if you had never heard of Evangelion, or if you were an Evangelion obsessive (or naysayer), everyone was thrilled to rediscover it together.

  Then the bonhomie disappeared in an instant. There were excellent aspects of the new release — particularly Casey Mingillo’s work as Shinji in the new dub. But other bits seemed off. Why was Shinji referred to as the “Third Children” rather than the more natural “Third Child?” Couldn’t Netflix bothered to have brought back Tiffany Grant to voice Asuka? Most annoyingly of all, an exchange between Shinji and Kaworu was changed in such a way that removed valuable subtext. Rather than say “I love you” to Shinji, Kaworu says “you are worthy of my grace.” For a series known for its complications and thorny character relationships, I found it bizarre that the team handling the series would choose to remove that bit of nuance.

  Anime fans argued back and forth for days over why these decisions were made. In the end, the answer seemed to be: Anno and his friends at Khara believed the earlier subtitles were not faithful enough to the original script, and so they insisted on accuracy at the expense of flow. The original ADV release continues to exist on expensive DVDs. The Netflix version is closer to the true vision of Evangelion, but perhaps farther from ours. Could Anno’s vision of Evangelion be inferior to the one his fans had obsessively crafted over years of urban legends, fan theories, and obsessive study? As people grasped in vain for the promised land of Eva, I couldn’t help but think: once more, we’d fallen into the trap.

    When people talk about Neon Genesis Evangelion, there are certain lines repeated so many times they become clichés. “None of the religious symbolism means anything.” “Why won’t Shinji get in the robot?” “The characters are all so unlikeable and weird.” “The ending is such a disappointment.” “Compared to the TV ending, End of Evangelion is a monstrosity.” “Compared to the TV series and the film, the Rebuild films are pared-down and too market-tested.” There’s one theme that ties these disparate statements together: Evangelion is a mess. And it absolutely is. In fact, there are countless other anime from the '90s you could argue are even better than Evangelion. Cowboy Bebop has great music. Serial Experiments Lain is a weird horror classic. Heck, if you want a series with meaningful symbolism, great visuals, and a rollercoaster of a story, Revolutionary Girl Utena is right there!

  But there’s something about Evangelion that keeps pulling people back. There’s a reason fans were excited when it was announced Evangelion was coming to Netflix. There’s a reason that people continue to debate aspects of the series to this day. There’s a reason Hideaki Anno himself keeps coming back to the well, again and again, grappling with the story that made his name on the world stage and that he still can’t escape from. Everyone who knows and loves Evangelion, from forum lurkers to aspiring animators to the creators of Evangelion themselves, are caught in the show’s gravitational pull as much as they know that pull can be harmful. I’m caught in it too. We go around and around, and ask ourselves, “What is Evangelion about?” Does Anno know the answer?

  Here’s what I think Evangelion is about: Evangelion is a trap. It’s a loose end. There is no final, comprehensive answer. The story will always be unresolved. I was wrong to think Rebuild would or should give me the answers I wanted. Your favorite Evangelion fanfiction will never be definite. Hideaki Anno and his staff may never be satisfied. The story of Evangelion is the story of Charlie Brown endlessly running at Lucy’s football. It’s both Ultraman and Devilman. And that is why Evangelion is as popular as it is. To engage in some pop psychology, as Evangelion itself loves to do: The world we live in is full of things that seem incomprehensible to us. Whether intended or not, the universe of Evangelion is full of those loose ends. So we worry at them like we’re trying to dislodge a tooth. It’s painful, but something in you wants to get it done. To know the taste of blood.

    Sometime soon, the final Rebuild of Evangelion movie will be released. Perhaps it will give us an ending. More likely, it will raise more questions. Some of my friends will be upset. Right now, though, I’m at peace. Evangelion will never make me happy. But my friends and I will be arguing about the show until we are dead. Maybe that’s enough.

  What do you think of the Rebuild movies? What do you think about Evangelion? Will we ever stop thinking about Evangelion? Let us know in the comments!

  Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he is not watching this video, he sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn't it Electrifying? You can follow him on Twitter at: @wendeego

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[jurgan]

John McCain, Health Care, and Republican Radicalism

             I am a solid millennial.  I grew up watching Nickelodeon and can pass most of Buzzfeed’s “90’s kids” quizzes.  I became politically aware in the mid-90’s, and followed the 2000 election closely despite being a few months too young to vote in it.  So John McCain has been a central political figure throughout most of my adult life.  He has long been known as a “maverick,” willing to stand up to corruption and extremism in both parties, and maybe he deserved that at one point.  For example, in 2000, he denounced Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance.”  Such heresies, combined with the vile Karl Rove’s smear campaign hinting that he had a mixed race bastard child, likely led to his losing the primary, and likely the presidency, to George W. Bush.  While I doubtless would have had problems with President McCain, I believe the country would be a markedly better place if he had been leading the Republican party in the early 2000’s.  McCain is largely defined by trauma.  The trauma of his POW years is a foundational part of his narrative, and the political trauma of the Keating Five corruption scandal led him to become a champion of campaign finance reform in an act of repentance.  I think the trauma of losing to Bush broke him, and he decided that he’d never be outflanked on the right again.

             Since the 2000 election, McCain’s career has been about claiming to boldly stand up for principles while doing little in practice to promote them.  There are exceptions, of course.  He was a strident opponent of the Bush administration’s torture policies, though I’m not sure how much direct action he took against them.  McCain’s political decline really began in 2007 when he decided to run for president again.  I found it odd that many on the right considered McCain a traitor to conservatism despite his very conservative record (Ann Coulter went so far as to say she would vote for Hillary Clinton over McCain because Clinton was more conservative).  The fact that his occasional reaches across the aisle should mark him as a RINO was an early sign of how radical the Republican Party would soon become. Regardless, McCain moved to the far right in ’07 and ’08.  His sudden change of positions strikes me as political cowardice.  I’ve heard that it’s wrong to call someone who was tortured a coward, but that’s a non-sequitur.  Personal courage and political courage are two different things. No one can deny that McCain heroically refused to be released early in order to protect his squadmates (the only person I know of to seriously argue that point now sits in the White House), but that doesn’t mean he’s free from criticism over his craven political decisions (related reading: http://www.theroot.com/stop-calling-john-mccain-a-hero-for-flying-to-d-c-to-k-1797233267).  The man frequently moved which way the wind blew, and that was never more evident than in 2008.

             McCain’s most consequential pander was picking an unqualified far right governor to be his running mate.  Sarah Palin quickly distinguished herself by throwing red meat to the fringe elements of the Republican electorate, bringing them into the mainstream discourse.  She accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists” and helped propagate the “secret Muslim” and “birther” conspiracies (I know Trump claims Hillary Clinton started the latter, but that’s false- someone who claimed to be a Clinton supporter may have started it, but Clinton herself had nothing to do with it).  In one memorable exchange in 2008, a woman at a rally told McCain Obama was “an Arab,” and McCain said that was wrong. He got a lot of praise from the media for that, but he didn’t do much to stop the rumors his own surrogates propagated. McCain profited politically from the racism of the fringe while trying to stay above it personally.  This classic cartoon (NSFW: STRONG LANGUAGE) captured the dynamic well: http://wheany.tumblr.com/image/31117673161  

             On January 20, 2009, another Mc, Mitch McConnell launched an unheard of strategy of radical obstruction.  He stated that his primary goal was to deny Obama a second term, and by denying him any bipartisan cover for his legislation he could keep the Republican base constantly riled up against the Democratic president.  The strategy didn’t work in its primary goal, but it did allow the Republicans to take Congress in wave elections.  The centerpiece of McConnell’s strategy was non-stop filibusters by the united Republican caucus.  In doing so, McConnell broke the Senate.  When forty percent of the chamber refuses to even consider the opposition’s proposals, it can no longer be called the world’s greatest deliberative body.  It only would have taken one defection to make the strategy collapse, though.  McCain had a unique opportunity- he had a bigger platform than just about any other Republican at that time.  He could have voted for cloture on some of the Democratic proposals, and probably brought some other senators with him.  This would have been in line with regular order and ended McConnell’s cynical strategy of party over country.  It also would have weakened the right-wing claim that Obama was not a legitimate president, with its clear throughline to birtherism and finally Trumpism. McCain didn’t do that.  He joined the opposition against cap-and-trade (a policy he and many other Republican senators previously supported), which may yet doom the human race.  So my question is: when it counts, does McCain deserve his maverick reputation?

             Since November, I’ve been living in fear of losing the ACA.  My wife relies heavily on it- for instance, the medication that prevents them from developing diabetes would cost thousands without it.  I worry I mention that too much, but I can’t help but take the issue personally.  There’s a real possibility that losing protections against pre-existing conditions and Medicaid coverage would be lethal.  Living under the cloud of a death sentence for someone you love takes a toll.  So when McCain did his Caesar Rodney act the other day*, I was terrified.  Then he voted for the motion to proceed, opening the door to tens of millions of people losing health coverage, and I said anyone who voted for that was a monster.  I was then told that that was unfair because McCain gave a speech where he said he was voting to proceed in order to make a point and he wouldn’t vote for the bill itself.  Fair enough, he did keep his word.  Of course, voting to proceed made it much more likely that the death sentence on thousands of people is passed, but he did the right thing in the final vote.  So I take it back, it wasn’t a monstrous thing to do.  Except I still don’t understand something, and I would sincerely like anyone to explain it (this is not an invitation for liberal snark; I can supply that myself.).

             Why did McCain need to vote for the motion to proceed in order to make a point about how the Senate is broken?  There may actually be a reason for this.  Senate rules can be bizarre; for example, the majority leader often has to vote against his own proposals in order to bring them up again later.  It seems to me, though, that instead of giving a fifteen minute speech, McCain could have registered much stronger objections with one word: “no.”  Had he voted down the motion, the corrupt process would have collapsed and McConnell would have to seriously reevaluate his methods. Instead, the message I got was that if McConnell pursues a radical strategy, he might hear some angry speeches from people who ultimately do what he wants.  I don’t see how a bad tree can bear good fruit.  If the process got this far by ignoring the rules, how does letting it continue restore the old rules?  Furthermore, while I’m not in principle opposed to debating how to proceed, when the most generous version of this bill takes health insurance from an estimated sixteen million people, how could it possibly grow into something good? Here’s why I say the radicalization of the parties is asymmetrical: Democrats openly admit the ACA has flaws and have offered to work with Republicans to improve it.  Republicans refuse to admit the ACA has virtues and only see it as something to be destroyed.

             I’m also skeptical of McCain’s sincerity, since in the middle of his plea for bipartisan cooperation he flagrantly lied about the other party.  This quote is important: “Hold hearings, try to report a bill out of committee with contributions from both sides.  Something that my dear friends on the other side of the aisle didn’t allow to happen nine years ago.”  This is just false.  The ACA was passed through normal order after almost a year of open debate.  Dozens of hearing were held.  President Obama practically begged the Republicans to go along. Republican amendments were added. The whole thing was based on a Heritage Foundation idea that was implemented by Mitt Romney.  Single payer wasn’t even considered.  There is no comparison between the way 2009 Democrats acted and the opaque, hyper-partisan strategy being pursued today.  Obama and the Democratic caucus started from a position of compromise, while McConnell said "Either Republicans will agree and change the status quo or the markets will continue to collapse and we'll have to sit down with Senator Schumer."  Obama asked his party members to compromise with the opposition, while McConnell uses cooperation as a threat.  In hindsight, Obama might as well have governed as a far left radical who ignored the opposition; since he was accused of that anyway, all his attempts to compromise accomplished was annoying his base.  Ironically, the GOP’s intransigence has made it much more likely that the next Democratic president will ignore their input.

             The point of this too long essay is simply that I have trouble trusting any of the GOP to do the right thing.  Collins and Murkowski get my applause, and I’m grateful to the half dozen others who voted against the actual bills, but I have trouble seeing how this ends anywhere good.  Why do Republicans want this?  Do they really prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy over the health of millions?  I guess they do, since that’s what their actions say.  That’s the bottom line of this whole spiel: actions speak louder than words.  Any one of the forty-plus senators who voted to repeal the ACA this week is a monster.  As for those who voted to proceed but then against the bills, someone please help me understand what they’re thinking, because I just don’t get it.  As for my Republican friends who think this goes too far, you have a lot more chance to stop it than I do.  McConnell is pursuing his partisan strategy because it worked electorally in 2010 and 2014, and Trump was the natural outgrowth of all of it. I beg you to let your Republican representatives know that, even if you agree with them ideologically, you want them to return to a posture of compromise and cooperation.  The Democratic leadership has offered to work together on improving the ACA and other laws provided you don’t destroy all the gains we’ve made over the last eight years.  You may not believe them, but there’s only one way to find out.

 *Caesar Rodney wasn’t actually dying when he rode to Philadelphia to vote for independence, but I’ve seen 1776 over a hundred times, so that’s the version that sticks in my head.