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script-a-world · 5 years ago

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(sorry this is long) I'm creating a fantasy matriarchal society that's a combination of like America post WW2 and like the amazons/valkyries crossed with magical girls. I could use some help figuring out the gender dynamics, since part of my goal is to use the swap to highlight some inequalities that still exist in our gender expectations today by flipping them. I'm trying to figure out if it's better to have the men be primary caregivers (1/?)

since there’s no reason to assume that the gender that gives birth has to be the caregivers) or if I should go the “matriarchal society would value childrearing above other jobs” route. Some thoughts I had: Women are the main magic-users in society (magical girl/amazons blessed directly by the god who rules the city with power)and that perhaps all young women are expected to go through military service of some sort before becoming matrons, politicians and doctors. (2/?)

Maybe women are associated with Life and Death and “important duties” that revolve around them, including duties regarding both killing and saving lives. So healing, leading armies, fighting, hunting, childbirth (possibly care?) and politics are feminine jobs, while “lesser duties” that revolve more around menial labor are relegated to men (manual labor, maintenance, ‘uneducated’ jobs, support jobs like scribe and secretary, cooking, cleaning, perhaps some jobs like fashion design or art). (3/?)

Do you think this is a good balance? What are some other ways I could divide gender roles? The world situation is a magical land with about early 20th century level tech (trains and private schools and like phones/radios).Also, what is the best way to objectify men in this society? I was thinking of making it so men are seen as useless/only for the purpose of providing sexual pleasure and siring children to women. (4/?)

They don’t’ actually create children or take the ‘important jobs’ (the poor dears just don’t have the brains for it, they’re too simple and direct, men don’t have the emotional maturity to handle serious issues, they lack empathy, they only want sex anyway so it’s not like you need to worry about their emotional needs, etc). I’d love some suggestions on how a society like this might work or if there are other ways to divide the gender roles, (5/?)

as well as some ways men might experience objectification in society. How would fashion be different, and how would this society put pressure on men to look or act in certain ways (and women as well). Any suggestions? Thanks, and sorry for the long question(6/?)

Mod Miri Note: If you have a question that requires multiple asks, please use the google form! That way there’s no risk of parts of the question being lost.

Tex: “Do you think this is a good balance?” No, I do not. I disagree with the notion that a group of people ought to be objectified, neglected, abused, pigeon-holed, or otherwise mistreated under the guise of inversion as a way to tout a certain prescription of thought. I think this methodology perpetuates stereotypes, and with stereotypes come all the -isms that are used as excuses to treat people poorly just because they’re different from the originating group.

I’m going to be radical and say “none of the above”. There’s a few reasons for my answer, but aside from the brief overview in the previous paragraph, let me go through and try responding to all of your points in a more precise manner.

Let’s start with American culture post WWII - and I’m going to assume that, because of this choice, you’re working from an American perspective. This is important! But I’ll handle that detail in a bit.

Post-WWII culture is heavily influenced by WWII culture. For women, this meant enlistment in the military, as well as filling the gaps in the domestic labor force left by men being shipped off (History.com, The Atlantic). Their service in the military - quite often voluntary - was as critical and crucial as their domestic work (Wikipedia 1, Wikipedia 2, Wikipedia 3). They usually received lower pay than men, true (though interestingly the women in the UK were often treated better; Striking Women), though governments of the time admitted that without women the war effort would have crumpled.

Rosie the Riveter is a popular piece of propaganda (where it was also considered patriotic for women to join the workforce and military service; National Women’s History Museum), but don’t let that dissuade you from thinking that women were not recognized for other types of work during the war. Many women in the US were recognized for their military service (USO), and other women’s histories endure today - Lyudmila Pavlichenko (Wikipedia), Vitka Kempner (Wikipedia), and Virginia Hall (Wikipedia). I’m going to toss in the official synopsis of Queen Elizabeth II’s involvement in her own military to round things out (The Royal Family), complete with a picture of her in uniform (Wikipedia).

Many women after the war went back to strictly domestic duties, and I think that parallels their wartime efforts - both situations are of the “all hands on deck” type, but the play of gender roles here means that the duties of a functioning society are divvied up by different functional spheres - and make no mistake, men and women relied on each other equally as much to cover the gaps, despite the sexism inherent in modern Western society. The difference between war and non-war time cultures was that the latter wasn’t necessarily cultivated by patriotism that could unite the different “factions”. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History gives a thorough examination of this topic.

The following era - typified by the birth of the Baby Boomer generation - saw a marked increase in economic prosperity (Wikipedia). With that came increased social mobility for women (Citation 1), usually catalyzed by the actions of their fathers (Citation 2). This may typically be achieved by consistent, conscientious public policy formation (Citation 3). In short, many cultures - if they haven’t already - are realizing that it’s good for business to let women control how they participate in society and the flow of money.

In the US, this was precipitated by the boom of social development (American History; archived version). Aside from the Truman administration negotiating price fixing to prevent inflation, a significant factor was the passing of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (AKA the G.I. Bill). This primarily benefited the Greatest Generation, though other pertinent legislation by the 79th Congress benefited the Silent Generation onwards: the Fair Deal, Revenue Act of 1948, Taft-Hartley Act, Employment Act of 1946, National School Lunch Act, and Hobbs Act.

It’s debatable how well this impacted long-term economic development, considering the almost immediate rise of McCarthyism in the US in 1947, which was heavily intertwined with the Truman Doctrine that precipitated the Cold War. The results of the war, at least economically, were… mixed (Wikipedia 1, Wikipedia 2). I have no doubt that this impacted the social mobility of women in all affected countries - which is all of them, but I’m sure hairs could be split on this if you wish.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s tackle the Amazons.

The modern, popular interpretation (that is slow to be shaken by archaeological evidence) is mostly mythological (Wikipedia). While some ideas are thrown in the way of a Minoan Crete ancestry to the myth, there are more similarities drawn to the Scythian and Samartian cultures on the Eurasian Steppe (CNET). It’s possible that instead of the equally-extreme pole end of the gender dichotomy that is patriarchy-matriarchy, the Scythians just scandalized the Athenians with a comparatively more fluid society (Smithsonian Magazine).

As for Valkyries… there’s been a revival of them in pop culture, probably as a net-casting to see what’s out there aside from Amazons. TVTropes covers the many, many ways media utilizes them as a trope, to varying degrees of mythological and cultural accuracy. As they state, valkyries are a form of psychopomp, as they decide who among the battlefield’s dead will go to Valhalla (ruled by Odin) or Fólkvangr (ruled by Freya). Freya seems to have assumed the “type” (as opposed to characteristics salient to a particular individual) of a valkyrie, as the female counterpart the warrior archetype. To wit, Freya herself may be a type (Wikipedia).

Here’s where the issue gets thorny - modern popular understanding of valkyries, and by extension Scandinavian women, is skewed through the modern lens.

@fjorn-the-skald has a lovely series called Viking History: Post-by-Post, or An Informal Crash Course & A Historical Guide to the Vikings, that typically focuses on medieval Iceland. In his post “Lesson 13.c - Women in the Viking Age, Part III: Were Women “Vikings”?”, discusses the particular penchant of modern times to romanticize and/or skew history to their own biases - in this instance, how medieval Icelandic women functioned in their culture, as well as how valkyrie myths play into this.

The TL;DR of that is: “viking” women were a societal anomaly, the battlefield was a male domain (and they were expected to die on it), a woman’s prowess of the domestic sphere was highly respected to a level often equivalent to men, and the domestic sphere was the sphere of commerce. Scandinavian culture prized strong women, just as they prized strong men, and their culture rested upon the concept of different genders having their own distinct, complementary, and equal domains.

Fjörn builds upon this history in an ask about gender roles outside the usual dichotomy of male-female. Valkyries, and shield-maidens, may be classed as a third gender in medieval Scandinavian culture, because women were temporarily occupying the male role in their society. While valkyries are of divine origin, shield-maidens are not, though they seem to have taken on a supernatural bent by performing feminine qualities while living in the male sphere (something that they can literally wear, by the donning of their armor).

That probably comes across as distasteful to, especially, a modern American perspective, but many ancient cultures are like that. There’s a footnote on that ask about links to a contemporary perspective of same-sex relationships, as well, to round out that talking point.

With those historical and mythological details discussed, let’s move on to magical girls.

Interestingly, the genre and trope derive from the American TV show Bewitched (Nippon.com). Its evolution reflected Japan’s changing tone about female sexuality, focusing on girls. Magical Girl doesn’t seem to be intended to attract the male gaze in a sexual light - and in fact was generated as a form of female empowerment by by way of growing up (TVTropes), but it seems to happen anyways (TVTropes).

Magical girls, as a genre, originated in the 1960s - the archetypical Sailor Moon encompasses not only magical girls, but also the kawaii aesthetic. Kawaii, incidentally, followed after the magical girl trope, and plays upon women performing as girls in society.

As magical girls are intended for young girls, a demographic known as shōjo, it is considered a subgenre of the target audience. Please note that shōnen'ai (Fanlore) and yaoi (Fanlore) are also subgenres of shōjo.

For some context, the adult female target audience is known as josei, the young adult men is known as shōnen, and adult male audience is known as seinen. Many manga and anime are often misattributed to the wrong category, so it helps to know which is which, and why.

Kumiko Saito argues (through an unfortunately paywalled article that I’m more than willing to disseminate to those without JSTOR access) that magical girls reinforce gender stereotypes as well as fetishize young female bodies. She argues this point more eloquently than I can, so I’ll be quoting a few sections below.

Page 148 (7 of 23 on the PDF):

The 1960s “witch” housewife theme waned quickly in the United States, but various cultural symbolisms of magic smoothly translated into the Japanese climate, leading to Japans four-decade-long obsession with the magical girl. Bewitched incorporated the concept of magic as female power to be renounced after marriage, thereby providing “a discursive site in which feminism (as female power) and femininity has been negotiated” (Moseley 2002, 403) in the dawning of Americas feminist era. Japans magical girls represented a similar impasse of fitting into female domesticity, continued to fascinate Japanese society, and came to define the magical girl genre. In direct contrast to the American heroines Samantha and Jeannie, however, whose strife arose from the antagonism between magic (as power) and the traditional gender role as wife or fiancée, the magical girls dilemma usually lies between female adulthood and the juvenile female stage prior to marriage, called shõjo. In other words, the magical girl narratives often revolve around the magical freedom of adolescence prior to the gendered stage of marriage and motherhood, suggesting the difficulty of imagining elements of power and defiance beyond the point of marriage. In fact, these programs were broadcast exactly when the rate of love-based marriage started to surpass that of miai (arranged marriage),4 which implies that the magical girl anime, founded on the strict ideological division between shõjo and wife/mother, may have been an anxious reaction to the emergent phase of romance.

Page 150 (9 of 23 on the PDF):

The combination of magical empowerment and shõjo-ness framed by the doomed nature of transient girlhood naturally created ambivalent, messages in Akko-chan as well. In the societal milieu in which Japan was undergoing the politically turbulent era of Marxist student movements at the largest scale in the postwar era, Akko-chan’s super- human ability to transform into anyone (or anything) is quite revolutionary, implying a sense of women’s liberation. Despite this potential, her metamorphic ability never threatens gender models, as she typically dreams of becoming a princess, a bride, or a female teacher she respects. The use of magic is also largely limited to humanitarian community services in town. Akko-chan’s symbolic task throughout the series focuses on how to steer her power to serve her friends and family, leading to the final episode in which she relinquishes magic to save her father. Akko-chan embraces the cross-generic mismatch between the radical idea of empowering a girl with superhuman ability and the hahamono [mother genre] sentimentalism idealizing women’s self-sacrifice. All in all, the new setting adopted in this series, that a mediocre girl accidentally gains magic, became a useful mechanism for the underlying theme that the heroine is foredoomed to say farewell to magic in the end. This rhetorical device transforms latent power of the amorphous girl into the reappreciation of traditional gender norms by equating magic with shõjo-hood to be given up at a certain stage.

Saito discusses the thematic shifts in the magical girl subgenre in the 1980s to a more sexualized view, and the according rise of both an older audience and otaku fans, the latter of whom, she clarifies, make a habit of recontextualizing canon to categorize characters into stereotypes that are stripped of the majority of their original context.

On pages 153-154 (12-13 of 23 on the PDF):

The conventions of the magical girl genre transformed significantly against this paradigm shift. Both Minky Momo and Creamy Mami originally targeted children, recording a decent outcome in business and eventually leading to the revival of the genre. Because the plots are directly built on the genre clichés, however, the jokes and sarcasm of many episodes appear comprehensible only to adult viewers equipped with the knowledge of the Töei magical girls. The intrigue of these programs largely lies in the way they parody and mock the established genre conventions, especially the restrictive function of magic and the meaning of transformation. The genre is now founded on the expectation that the adult viewer has acquired a diachronic fan perspective to fetishize both the characters and the text’s meanings.

Creamy Mami presents the story of fourth-grader Yū, who gains magical power that enables her to turn into a sixteen-year-old girl. Yū’s magical power is more restrictive than Momo’s, for her superhuman capacity simply means metamorphosis into her adult form, who happens to become an idol singer called Mami. Given that the magic’s ability is self-oriented cosmetic effect and bodily maturation, the heroine’s ultimate goal by means of magic is to grow old enough to attract her male friend Toshio, who neglects Yū’s latent charm but falls in love with the idol Mami. The series concludes when Yū loses her magic, which correlates to Toshio’s realization that Yū is his real love. Mami’s thematic messages teach the idea that magic does not bring much advantage or power after all, or rather, magic serves as an obstacle for the appreciation of the truly magical period called shõjo. The heroine gains magic to prove, although retroactively, the importance of adolescence preceding the possession of “magic” that enables (and forces) female maturation.

It’s noted in the article that the 1990s-2000s period received criticism for showing a physical maturation of girls, so codified euphemisms via garment changes such as additional frills and curled hair were used instead. This “third-wave” magical girl challenged standing norms of its predecessors by doing things such as likening adult responsibilities (“childrearing and job training”) as a sort of game, as well as the transformation implying that the character’s power is in being herself, something that juxtaposes previous norms.

Due to shifting power dynamics and other changes in Japan’s culture, it became more common for boys to become magical girls as well, further separating the magical girl concept from a strict reflection of gender roles. As such, Japanese culture - insofar as my English-based research can guide me - no longer immediately implies a direct and distinct correlation between magical girls and the female gender.

An analysis of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (PMMM) by Tate James (2017; PDF) discusses an additional dimension of the magical girl genre. Two pertinent points of the piece is that 1.) PMMM dismantles archetypes pitting women against girls, and 2.) PMMM reinforces the gender stereotype that the best type of girl is a passive girl.

Now for the issue you’ve raised about who ought to be the primary caregiver of children.

Consistent, immediate, and continuous interaction between a mother and her child benefits both of them (Citation 4, Scientific American 1, Live Science, Citation 5, Scientific American 2, UNICEF, WHO). Mothers have a distinct neurobiological makeup that predisposes them toward caring for infants (Citation 6), and likewise infants have a predisposed preference to their mother’s voice and heartbeat (Citation 7). I would like to think that is sufficient evidence as to why nearly all cultures encourage mothers as the primary caregivers.

This said, cultivation of a father-child dyad is immensely beneficial to the child (Citation 8, Citation 9), and can alleviate the effect of maternal depression on the child (ScienceDaily). Partnered men residing with children have lower levels of testosterone but a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and adiposity (Citation 10). It’s interesting to note that higher prolactin levels in the mother’s breastmilk has a correspondingly higher level of sociosexual activity with their partner in cotton-top tamarins, which stimulates pair bonding (Citation 11), as well as in other species (Citation 12).

Paternal postpartum depression is recently recognized in fathers, to severe and reverberating deleterious effects on themselves and their family (Citation 13). Screening tools for detecting depression in Swedish fathers is not sufficiently developed, and many men may be passed over despite reaching cut-off suggestions in other criteria for depression (Citation 14).

It has been observed that while human mother and fathers have the similar oxytocin pathways, the exhibit different parenting behaviours when exposed to elevated levels of oxytocin - primarily that fathers will react with high stimulatory behaviour and exploratory play (Wikipedia).

Men being socialized in a culture of stoicism and an encouraged reaction pattern to violence have poor mental health that can culminate into death and other long-term effects (Citation 15). Suicide in the US is currently the leading cause of death at time of posting this response, that the total suicide rate increased 31% from 2001-2017, and in 2017 male rates were nearly four times higher than females (NIMH).

On the topic of magical culture: it’s incredibly difficult to research because it’s a component of overall culture, and one that’s not typically available to strangers/foreigners/the uninitiated. As such, a lot of authors default to what they already know. It’s not a bad thing, but if someone wants to reach outside their comfort zone, they’re going to have some trouble.

I’m going to go off the three, four-ish, cultures you’ve already come to us with: American, Scandinavian, Scythian/Samartian, and Japanese just to round things out.

For a very, very rough overview of America, we have:

Native Americans of the contiguous US

Hawai’i

Alaska

Whatever the colonizing peoples brought over (including, but not limited to, English, Scottish, Irish, Norwegian, German, and Italian)

Whatever the myriad cultures of Africa brought over as slaves

Hispanic

NB: I’ve put Hawai’i and Alaska as separate items because they’re not part of the contiguous US.

European settlers were of a few groups:

The merchants working on charters

Indentured servants from the merchants’ homelands

Slavs

Immigrants in post-colonial eras

This is an important distinction because 1.) contemporary culture matters a lot politically, 2.) how people came to the US determined how they and their family were treated, and 3.) the contemporary job culture determined their social class.

(Slavs, as a note, are the origin of the English word “slave”, something that Western Europeans historically liked to propagate.)

I’m not going to go into the details of everything the US has to offer in terms of cultural diversity aside from a nudge in the direction of Santería. What you pick up to research is up to you.

Scandinavian folk magic is known as “trolldom” (Swedish-language Wikipedia), and the region was known for their cunningfolk. Please note that klok/-a, klog/-e, and related words relates to the English word cloak, and these people are so named because wearing one was an integral part of how they interacted with the supernatural.

The InternetArchive has a book (albeit in Swedish) about the history of magic in Sweden, which is available in multiple formats. If you’d prefer to have something in English, you can either buy this book, or inform your library you’d like to them to buy it for you.

I’m a little surprised you hadn’t mentioned either the völva (Swedish Wikipedia, English Wikipedia) or seiðr (Wikipedia), as they’re quite a well-known part of Scandinavian folk culture. Fjörn, as always, is my first stop for this area of research, with the post “Lesson 7 - Viking Spirituality”, the Víkingabók Database, the tag of Old Norse words, and the post “Norðurbók: A List of the Tales and Sagas of Icelanders” as incredibly good starting points. I encourage you to peruse them, especially because the words you learn will help you be more precise during research.

The Scythian culture is quite far reaching, as they had occupied most of the Eurasian Steppe during the Iron Age, and much of this area can be found in modern-day countries such as Russia, Iran, and China, among others. Because of how far their peoples spread out, the Scythians intermixed with their neighbors, and as such there are sub-groups to the culture.

The Sarmatians were more Russian, as that’s where a large amount of their territory laid, and were absorbed into early Slavic culture. Both their and the overall Scythian language group is eastern Iranian.

In order to help you orient yourself, here’s a map from Wikipedia:

Description: Historical spread of Iranian peoples/languages: Scythia, Sarmatia, Bactria and the Parthian Empire in about 170 BC (evidently before the Yuezhi invaded Bactria). Modern political boundaries are shown to facilitate orientation.

Japanese magical culture is intrinsically tied to their religion, and as such it would be beneficial to read about Shintoism and Japanese Buddhism. The wiki for Japanese mythology is a thorough primer, though if you get stuck, then I’m sure @scriptmyth would be glad to help you on not only this culture, but others.

As for the jobs you’ve proposed - I’m going to jump right into scribes because the irony of that is it’s historically a male-dominated job, and is the progenitor of jobs such as “public servants, journalists, accountants, bookkeepers, typists, and lawyers”. It is, with even greater irony, European women that are noted in Wikipedia, and that medieval women are increasingly thought to have played an integral part in manuscript writing (New Scientist, Science Advances).

I’m not the best person to ask for medieval culture, unfortunately, so you’ll need someone more knowledgeable than me on the subject to direct you to the finer points.

The wiki for women in war links to a lot of lists, so I would suggest poking around for historical references by era (that will likely lead to by culture) to orient yourself on how women have participated in war in the past. There’s quite a bit of mythology to be found there, as well, so if you pick up some specific goddesses you get stuck on, then pop over to @scriptmyth.

Likewise, the wiki for women in government is an interesting read, as is women in positions of power. Since both are primarily modern-times oriented, I would suggest looking at the list of queens regnant for a more historical perspective. I would have difficulty giving you more than that, as you would need to pinpoint your reference cultures first.

As history often neglects women’s contributions to society if they weren’t a ruler or similarly powerful ruler - and, frankly, that frequently applied to men as well the further back you go - I’m going to toss a couple of starting points at you for the area of medicine:

Women in medicine § Ancient medicine - Wikipedia

Women in medicine - Science Museum: History of Medicine

One thing to keep in mind is that as goalposts changed for medicine - the standardization of knowledge and the need to attend a medical school to be legally allowed to perform medicine - the availability of women to participate went down.

Another is that medicine, historically, relied upon herbal medicine, and Wikipedia itself notes that there’s a heavy overlap with food history - something that’s traditionally a domain of women. This abstract by Marcia Ramos‐e‐Silva MD, PhD, talks about Saint Hildegard von Bingen, and the first page available tells you that medieval women were in charge of quite a lot despite not being allowed to participate in the male-dominated sphere of war. The Herbal Academy dips briefly into not only the saint, but other historical aspects of herbalism that might interest you.

The wiki of women in the Middle Ages, along with that of Hildegard of Bingen, nicely rounds out this particular topic.

I need to bring out the fact that Ancient Egypt was and is well-known for the equality and respect afforded to their women - in the interest of staying on subject, particularly in the field of medicine (Ancient History Encyclopedia). Isis was well-known as a goddess of healing (Wikipedia), an aspect she has in common with goddesses in many other cultures (Wikipedia). As an added side-note, Merit Ptah in her popularly-known context has been concluded to be an inflated misunderstanding - and misconstrued interpretation - of a historical figure with significant fabrication (LiveScience, Oxford).

The presence of women in medicine fluctuated in every culture, an in ancient times often shared some correlation with the use of magic (Citation 16). Healing, historically, has a high correlation with the supernatural - and if you care to look, women are usually responsible for the domain of the supernatural. (Or at least the feminine part, which was complementary and complemented by the masculine part.)

I’m going to hop back to politics real quick to bring up abbesses, particularly the social power they exercised as women heading religious orders. An article by Alixe Bovey for the British Library gives the TL;DR of medieval women and abbeys, though if you’d like something with a bit more detail, Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 by Eileen Edna Power is also available.

Abbeys, with their rise and fall, are important to modern American culture. Midwives, to be even more particular, have the most direct impact. In Western Europe, a midwife may under certain circumstances perform baptisms. This was a debated topic of its time, as baptisms were rituals of the Church, and the Church had strict regulations allowing only men to perform their rituals.

During the 1500s - and up to the 1800s, in some cases - midwives were defamed to be witches. You’ll notice that this corresponds to a standardization of medical knowledge, with its corresponding legal restrictions on who may practice medicine. For the Church, the politics playing behind the scenes of midwifery and female physicians fluctuated with their observations about women’s power relative to their own (Citation 16).

Malta is an excellent case study of this phenomenon (Citation 17), and encapsulates the movement of witchcraft accusations that took place throughout this period - something historians noted as corresponding to the rise of Protestantism (ThoughtCo). There’s some debate that the increasing orientation to wages in contemporary economy facilitated this adverse behaviour against women, as well as various other social pressures as politically mitigated by the Catholic Church (Wikipedia).

As the practice of medicine was segregated according to sex - male patients to male physicians, female patients to female physicians - there were proportionally fewer men in trades such as midwifery than women despite the medieval shift toward male encroachment of territory (Wikipedia). This corresponding money- and thus male-oriented intrusion into the female sphere of medicine can be seen with the invention of the obstetric forceps (JSTOR). The rising culture of appropriation constituted the witchcraft trials that, incidentally, influenced American culture during their colonization years.

A pertinent name to remember for American history of the witchcraft trials is Margaret Jones, a Puritan midwife and the first person to be accused of witchcraft in the trails taking place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Wikipedia).

The Salem Witch Trials, as an offhand note, could well be an anomaly due to ergotism (Citation 18).

One thing I’m willing to bend on - a little bit - is manual labor, but mostly because you’re describing something very similar to what’s already been invented: corvée labor. There’s plenty of other forms depending on what culture you’re going for, though unlike what you’re proposing, does not necessarily imply the direct and permanent subjugation of people.

I will absolutely quibble with the idea of “uneducated” labor equating to “less valuable” labor - universities offer non-vocational degrees, typically in the areas of research and/or religion, and guilds were created as a means of quality control (that unfortunately got out of hand and committed crimes such as rent-seeking). Women in guilds were a thing, vulnerable to the same fluctuations as their other occupations outside the house.

If we are defining “uneducated” labour as “menial” labour, then this set of occupations inherently varies by culture, as does its relative weight of importance. One example of this would be writing; it may be menial but important, whereas holding negotiations could be a “major” role but wouldn’t exist without the support of workers “less than” them.

Correspondingly, gender divisions may not necessarily mean an assignation of “lesser” or “greater” when compared against each other. In medieval Europe, at least, the creation of textiles was split along the general lines of spinning and weaving. Women held the former (hence “spinster”), and men held the latter. Spinning was often not formalized into guilds then, but it was an important cornerstone of the economy that could support entire families. A guest post on The Freelance History Writer’s blog seems to indicate that this gender division was due to influence by the Bible, which seems to corroborate with the history of both professions as detailed on Wikipedia - the further back we go, and also the less connected to Christianity, the more textile work women presided over. This granted them greater control over their presence in society, since the selling of textiles was useful leverage to support themselves and others.

A similar discrepancy can be found with agriculture. Hamer women in Ethiopia are traditionally the one to cultivate sorghum, a cornerstone crop to their diet, and they exhibit preferences in which varieties they grow according to criteria such as which is easiest to grind and long-term storage feasibility (Citation 19). Accordingly, there’s been an increasing orientation around the growing of crops rather than the pastoralist habits of their men, with trading standards occuring at one goat for one Dore (“pile of maize or sorghum”) (Citation 19).

A study examining the male sphere of hunting within a society discusses the various cultural implications of defendable vs non-defendable meat sharing, with respect to how the meat is distributed and its corresponding social range (e.g. immediate social circle vs entire community), something I find interesting given that the kilocalories obtained from meat is roughly equal to that of the female sphere-acquired agriculture/gathering (Citation 20). The division of labour along gender lines when it comes to food flow in a community seems, historically, to be both comparable and compatible to each other - a recurring theme with many of the topics I’ve already covered.

Gender roles in their historical perspective - especially the further back you go - are often complimentary to each other, and are an economical way to divide up the burden of maintaining a society to a functional level. There are plenty of exceptions to this (see: third genders), as well, and many cultures exhibit the idea that a productive person is good for society; their roles may look a little different from the person next to them, and not only is the work considered equal in terms of importance, but also with a bit of poking around, you’ll find that few cultures have harsh punishments for anyone “stepping outside” their predicted roles.

Men are already objectified plenty. That their treatment by society looks different than women’s, or other genders, is by no means an excuse to sweep things under the room and pretend that they have it best - or worse, purposefully ostracize them in a fictional work to further mock, ridicule, and isolate them. This contributes to the societal issues in your culture that you wish to address, and stems from a uniquely pervasive perspective from modern American culture that differs from many other cultures in the world.

TL;DR - The way you wish to objectify men is already being done, especially in American culture. It is harmful, and will have an impact that will reach further than you might anticipate. This approach is counterproductive to your goals, and the cultures/media you cite either directly contradict your beliefs of said sources or otherwise undermine your beliefs. It is vastly more productive to take a deeper look at the origins of the issues you wish to address in your writing, as well as the reference material that you wish to use. Learning perspectives outside your native culture will benefit you immensely, and the results could surprise you.

Citations

Citation 1 - PDF - Doepke, M., Tertilt, M., Voena, A.. (2012). “The Economics and Politics of Women’s Rights,” Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 4(1), pages 339-372, 07.

Citation 2 - PDF - Fernández, R.. (2014). “Women’s rights and development,” Journal of Economic Growth, vol 19(1), pages 37-80.

Citation 3 - PDF - Duflo, E. (2012). “Women’s Empowerment and Economic Development”, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 50, No. 4: 1051-79.

Citation 4 - PDF - Crenshaw J. T. (2014). “Healthy Birth Practice #6: Keep Mother and Baby Together- It’s Best for Mother, Baby, and Breastfeeding.” The Journal of perinatal education, 23(4), 211–217. doi:10.1891/1058-1243.23.4.211

Citation 5 - Faisal-Cury, A., Bertazzi Levy, R., Kontos, A., Tabb, K., & Matijasevich, A. (2019). “Postpartum bonding at the beginning of the second year of child’s life: the role of postpartum depression and early bonding impairment.” Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynecology, 1-7.

Citation 6 - PDF - Bornstein, M. H., Putnick, D. L., Rigo, P., Esposito, G., Swain, J. E., Suwalsky, J. T., … & De Pisapia, N. (2017). “Neurobiology of culturally common maternal responses to infant cry.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(45), E9465-E9473.

Citation 7 - PDF - Webb, A. R., Heller, H. T., Benson, C. B., & Lahav, A. (2015). “Mother’s voice and heartbeat sounds elicit auditory plasticity in the human brain before full gestation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(10), 3152-3157.

Citation 8 - PDF - Pan, Y., Zhang, D., Liu, Y., Ran, G., & Teng, Z. (2016). “Different effects of paternal and maternal attachment on psychological health among Chinese secondary school students.” Journal of Child and Family Studies, 25(10), 2998-3008.

Citation 9 - PDF - Brown, G. L., Mangelsdorf, S. C., & Neff, C. (2012). “Father involvement, paternal sensitivity, and father-child attachment security in the first 3 years.” Journal of family psychology : JFP : journal of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association (Division 43), 26(3), 421–430. doi:10.1037/a0027836

Citation 10 - PDF - Lee T Gettler, Mallika S Sarma, Rieti G Gengo, Rahul C Oka, James J McKenna, Adiposity, CVD risk factors and testosterone: Variation by partnering status and residence with children in US men, Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Volume 2017, Issue 1, January 2017, Pages 67–80, https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eox005

Citation 11 - PDF - Snowdon, C. T., & Ziegler, T. E. (2015). “Variation in prolactin is related to variation in sexual behavior and contact affiliation.” PloS one, 10(3), e0120650.

Citation 12 - Hashemian, F., Shafigh, F., & Roohi, E. (2016). “Regulatory role of prolactin in paternal behavior in male parents: A narrative review.” Journal of postgraduate medicine, 62(3), 182–187. doi:10.4103/0022-3859.186389

Citation 13 - PDF - Eddy, B., Poll, V., Whiting, J., & Clevesy, M. (2019). “Forgotten Fathers: Postpartum Depression in Men.” Journal of Family Issues, 40(8), 1001-1017.

Citation 14 - PDF - Psouni, E., Agebjörn, J., & Linder, H. (2017). “Symptoms of depression in Swedish fathers in the postnatal period and development of a screening tool.” Scandinavian journal of psychology, 58(6), 485-496.

Citation 15 - Pappas, S. (2018, January). “APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys.” Monitor on Psychology, 50(1).

Citation 16 - PDF - Kontoyannis, M., & Katsetos, C. (2011). “Midwives in early modern Europe (1400-1800).” Health Science Journal, 5(1), 31.

Citation 17 - PDF - Savona-Ventura, C. (1995). “The influence of the Roman Catholic Church on midwifery practice in Malta.” Medical history, 39(1), 18-34.

Citation 18 - PDF - Woolf, Alan. (2000). “Witchcraft or Mycotoxin? The Salem Witch Trials. Journal of toxicology.” Clinical toxicology. 38. 457-60. 10.1081/CLT-100100958.

Citation 19 - PDF - Samuel, T. (2013). “From cattle herding to sedentary agriculture: the role of hamer women in the transition.” African Study Monographs, Suppl. 46: 121–133. [Alternate PDF link]

Citation 20 - PDF - Gurven, Michael & Hill, Kim. (2009). “Why Do Men Hunt?.” Current Anthropology. 50. 51-74. 10.1086/595620.

Further Reading

Harry S Truman § Domestic Affairs - Wikipedia

Marshall Plan - Wikipedia

Interstate Highway System - Wikipedia

Medieval Icelandic Law (The Grágás) – Women’s Rights: On Reclaiming Property during Separation. By @fjorn-the-skald

Fjörn’s Library

“Notes on Valkyries and the like?” by @fjorn-the-skald

Fjörn’s chronological tag on women

Epigenetic correlates of neonatal contact in humans - Development and Psychopathology

Feral: So, obviously, everything Tex just said- round of effing applause!

I do want to hone in on one specific part of your ask, “since part of my goal is to use the swap to highlight some inequalities that still exist in our gender expectations today by flipping them” and direct you to this blog post on Mythcreants specifically addressing the Persecution Flip Story and why it’s not a great idea from a social justice perspective.

Happy reading!

#pylons #matriarchal society #gender dynamics #deseretgear

47 notes · View notes

thewadapan · 5 years ago

Photo

in the grim darkness of the far future there is only cred

(This is a complete archive of the @Ask_Triton Twitter account created for April Fools’ Day 2020, based on my previous comics “PASS” and “The Beast Within (My Pants)”. A behind-the-scenes commentary is included at the end of the post.)

triton ebooks

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

autobot code sparknotes

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

wikihow cred acquisition

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

toyhax insignia stickerfixer

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

wait *hit i thought this was google

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

hi. my names triton. and the great war was the best thing to ever happen to me

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

rodimus finally convinced springer to let me join the rockers. rock and roll

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

springer is giving each of us a special nickname. were supposed to call him springax 219.31 alpha. apparently im now tritus 717.25 beta. wonder what he meant by that

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

shut the *uck up road buster

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

roadbuster be quiet challenge

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

triton can have little a cred. as a treat

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

hey whirl do you wanna play im a spy? wait *hit

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

if anyone ever finds out im a decepticon im gonna get *ucking shot. thats cancel culture baby

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

no cred? no thanks

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

boy am i glad impactor ate *hit and died. that guy was not *ucking around

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

YEAH uh huh YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS green and yellow green and yellow green and yellow green and yellow

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

no whirl this is not a poncho you *ucking cyclops

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

starting to think the special rockers assignment springer gave me and whirl was just a clever ruse to get rid of us. like theres no way all of the empties we just shot were decepticon moles

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

when you triton your best but you don't succeed

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

whirl no offense but theres absolutely no way im hitching a ride with you back to autobase. no its not because my arms are too weak to hang onto your landing skids for that long. no see this is your problem youre just *ucking annoying end of story

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

got that sinking feeling again lads. wait no i just forgot to transform before jumping into the sea

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

sky of blue im a green / and a yellow submarine

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

10,000 hics under the sea

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

sometimes underwater. always undercover

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

yeah springer can drive and he can fly but he sure can't bob around the sewers like a piece of *hit can he

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 1, 2020

felt cred might delete later picture cred: @ikkadkarf pic.twitter.com/cQKer3asaW

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 2, 2020

ultra magnus just held a door open for me. his magnusnimity knows no bounds

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

if you think you know where im going with this tweet your wrong but what you were thinking of is probably more good

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

3000 kilograms? yeah thats me. triton

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

you wear a mouthplate just to hide your face and you wear it because you think your cooler than me

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

met scattorshot in the hallway. he was like "i never heard of an autobot who was a submarine" and i said "im not" and he said "what" and i said "a submarine". clutch save

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

springer just got back from patrol and says hes finally killed all the decepticons. good thing he doesnt remember that time we got absolutely spannered at maccadams and i got up on a table and start shouting im a decepticon

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

yeah weve all heard of the last autobot but what about the last decepticon. just something to think about

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

actually this reminds me of a funny story about how the word spannered came about. it all started when straxus decided he wanted to cross this body of water. i said id carry him but he just gave me this weird look and said he had a better idea

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

thinking of getting a massive flame painted on my chest. just kidding who do you think i am clodimus prime

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

not MY prime

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 3, 2020

stop talking about me behind my back. im not talking to anyone in particular. dreadwind

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

yeah im going through a bit of a phase right now. phase six

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

its hard being a double agent. its hard and nobody understands

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

sometimes i wish i was a car robot

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

just got tackled by sandstorm. had to scream at him to get him to move his rotor away from my throat. thought it was a funny hat not a deadly weapon. most terrifying experience of my life aside from when computron stepped on me

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

im horny

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

bots with no rights: horny people and decepticons. lucky for me two no rights makes a right

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

i have discovered the secret of combiner technology. step one. stand up straight with your shoulders back

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

why wont afterburner combine with me

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 4, 2020

springer is *ucking ugly. who even paints themselves green and yellow. piss off

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

im like dropping hints that im a double agent

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

TR-8N

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

inside you there are two faction symbols. one is an autobot the other is a decepticon. you are triton

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

not faction-swapper! dont like that term. freelance double agent. for certain social remuneration of course

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

hnng megatron im trying to sneak around but the clank of my *ss cheeks keeps alerting springer

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

you think cred is your ally? i was born in cred. molded by it

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

springer put me in the inhibitor harness again

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

sick of being a loser nobody. wish my life could have an issue 0 where i was actually the man of iron all along

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

it isnt easy being green

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

this planet isnt relevant to my interests anymore

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

better dead than no cred

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

just called roadbuster an idiot. back on top

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

im springers oldest enemy but he hates roadbuster more

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

Yo waspinator, is everything allrignt??

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

its like people dont even remember my name

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

sometimes its hard to reconcile the continuity error of my life with the established canon of me being a huge *ucking ledge

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 5, 2020

im the first in a new generation of transformers. introducing the credacons

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

tritons in disguise

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

more ton meets the tri

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

if i hit broadside on the back of the neck hard enough either hell turn back into a boat or just *ucking die. either way i win

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

join the TCC today. Triton's Cred Club

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

got cred?

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

just found out about the beast. damn that *hit sucks

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

if i was there with the beast i wouldve stopped it. rip to megatron but im different

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

lol i remember telling megatron i wouldnt go native but look at me now not a single capital letter in sight

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

pictured: me and the other great decepticon leaders beat the *hit out of rodimus prime pic.twitter.com/6ShZrPgV8l

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 6, 2020

for *ucks sake lightspeed stop trying to correct my grammar you mechanical throwback. i know how to use *ucking apostrophe's

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

mucho cred

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

mucho mucho man

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

nosecone keeps asking me to follow his account. at drill or something. what a plonker

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

desperately trying to think of a funny joke to make ultra magnus and the rest of the gang laugh

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

Leader Class Triton With Triton Master Triton

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

excuse me roadbuster who said youre allowed to laugh at my jokes

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

hate how i always have to be triton. sometimes i want to be tritoff

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

topspin and twin twist should legally change their names to blue and white. wait *hit theyre both blue and white *uck *hit i didnt think this through

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

richard starkings stop sending me to voicemail

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 7, 2020

i am triton. the last living decepticon and incognito espionage specialist amongst the autobots. ask me anything

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

Anything?

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

pass

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

hey nosecone ive got a favour to ask. so ive been thinking of getting an upgrade lately. basically what i want is to be able to fly away from this place by means of large quantities of gas expelled at high velocity from my rear. now allow me to explain how you fit into all this https://t.co/Mt9ELmLNLU

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

we get it. you strafe

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 8, 2020

had the nightmare again. the one where springer figures out im a decepticon. i try to use the waterways as an escape route but when i get there broadsides fat *ss is blocking the estuary pic.twitter.com/XMZbkZsYs0

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

squad goals pic.twitter.com/PkI92HCHCn

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

in my dreams im always fighting my new friends. everyones super ripped. oh and impactor is there for no reason pic.twitter.com/Uzl9asiZCY

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

when im staring down the barrel of the gun im *hitting myself and i always thought that was stupid because if you die in the dream then you dont die in real life you just wake up. but now im wondering if thats what im afraid of. having to go back to pretending pic.twitter.com/fEZbfu81nf

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

primus forgive me but its time to go back to the old me pic.twitter.com/hh1vXZO5WS

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 9, 2020

Triton: A Transformers Story

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

few can remember how the war started. fewer still can now make the distinction between good and evil. but everyone will remember this particular day. because this is the day the war ended

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

are you tired of being nice. dont you just want to go *hit

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

all I wanna do is BANG BANG BANG BANG and a *transformation noises* and BRAAAAP

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

first you fard. then you *hid. then

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

cybertronian vandal

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

uh oh! stinky!

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

just saw blurr speedwalking to rodimus primes office at mach 2

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

you are about to enter the courtroom of judge rodimus prime. the bots are real. the cases are real. the rulings are final. this is judge roddy

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

Autobot Leader Gives Road Buster 11,453 Stern Looks

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

first one to talk gets to stay on my planet

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

getting flashbacks to that time unicron attacked. he picked me up between his fingers and vored me. i barely escaped with my cred

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

not on your life. its a fake. total fiction. it didnt happen. not fact. im innocent

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

it could be you. it could be me. it could eVEN BE

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

GHAA!

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

my Rash Action has led to a Fatal Consequence

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

i used to think that my life was a tragic. but now i realise. its a comic

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

now i understand. he who smelt it dealt it. i have been a smelting fool

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

ultra magnus i dont feel so good

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

dont reveal the shield. i said dont

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

the decepticon high command on cybertron have judged this account to be anti-decepticon and the firecons have been despatched to Earth to incinerate all copies. in order to thwart the firecons make sure you fill out your credit card details below

— Ask_Triton (@Ask_Triton)

April 10, 2020

Notes

The Ask Triton tagline, “in the grim darkness of the far future there is only cred”, is the tagline of Warhammer 40,000 except it replaces the word “war” with “cred”.

I’ve got no idea when I started working on this project, except that it was many months ago. I opened a note on my phone and wrote the words “triton ebooks”, and thereafter whenever I thought of a Funny Joke™ I’d crack that bad boy open and slap it in there. I wasn’t entirely sure when or how I’d ever release the material; I could copy my direct inspiration for the account, @prowl_ebooks (and its own ancestor, @Horse_ebooks), by making a bot that’d periodically post a random tweet, but felt like there was some degree of serialisation in what I was writing. Despite the content of its tweets frequently being utterly absurd, and completely at odds with its source material, the genius of prowl_ebooks is that it manages to paint a picture that somehow feels like an accurate reflection of IDW Prowl’s canon self. Seriously, I’ve seen many of the tweets this bot pumps out countless times, and they still crack me up. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live up to that, but I had other tricks up my sleeves.

The Autobot Code originated in Simon Furman’s comics for Marvel UK and featured more prominently in James Roberts’ stories for IDW Publishing, where it was presented as a laborious tome of rules. SparkNotes, meanwhile, is a well-known site hosting CliffsNotes-like study guides used by students primarily to avoid having to read assigned literature in full.

wikiHow is an infamous encyclopedia devoted to tutorials, which often feature illustrations using a distinct style and deliver questionable advice.

Toyhax is the company that produces “Reprolabels”, effectively stickers for Transformers figures designed to replace vintage labels or to enhance newer figures (though I personally find the results to be pretty questionable). At one point they sold a product called a “Stickerfixer”, which I think was basically just a pen of glue? Anyway, Triton presumably wants one to (re)apply his fake Autobot insignia.

Google is a popular search engine for the world wide web. Its inclusion on the account was last-minute, and I was uncertain that Triton would actually have any understanding of what Google was, but figured if he was already using Twitter I could stand to show exactly how far I was planning to stretch disbelief from the outset, and that it’d work to explicitly tie together the intent behind the opening salvo of tweets.

Though I couldn’t be bothered tracking down an exact quote, “hi. my names triton. and the great war was the best thing to ever happen to me” was a reference to narration from Netflix’s Daybreak zombie-apocalypse series. I wrote a single paragraph about that series, specifically focused on that line, in an article which probably requires far more context than I’m able to give here. Of course, the general phrasing there is a common enough trope that this probably serves as a reference to any number of things. The halting style of dialogue used in Ask Triton, where full stops are the only form of punctuation, was a product of necessity, but it’s significantly at odds with the run-on-sentences used in the original comic. By my count, this is the fourth piece of media set in the “PASS” universe, but there’s no singular consistent presentation of that canon; every time I’ve revisited it, I’ve extrapolated and reinterpreted aspects of what has come before in ways which simply don’t match the original intent of the work. It’s kinda like the Star Wars expanded universe, where throwaway beats of the source material spin out into entire stories, ones that obviously don’t match the intent of what those beats were implying in the first place.

The Wreckers’ catchphrase is “wreck and rule”. I can’t find the exact tweet, but somebody recently realised that it’s supposed to be a play on “rock and roll”, which blew the minds of me and a whole bunch of other people. Hence, “the rockers”.

Ask Vector Prime explored the concept of “universal streams”, categorised by the multiverse-observing TransTechs using arcane identifiers. Springer’s nicknames are plays on these, substituting “Primax” for “Springax” and “Malgus”/”Iocus” for “Tritus” and encoding the dates 25/07/2017 (the original release date for “PASS” on Summer Meme Sundae) and 31/02/2019 (the date of its rerelease here) as 717.25 and 219.31. Springer uses the last part of the identifier, a Greek letter, to label himself as an “alpha” and Triton as a “beta”.

I’m not sure where it originated, but “x be quiet challenge” is a phrase which people sometimes use on Twitter when they effectively want someone to stop posting for once. I think I was probably introduced to the phrase when someone addressed it to Makin, then-owner of the Homestuck Discord server? Suffice to say, that probably informed its usage against Roadbuster.

“Cats Can Have Little a Salami [...] as a treat” was a Google preview of the article “Can My Cat Eat Salami?”, which became a snowclone on Discord and Twitter.

“I spy” is a famous guessing game where someone picks an object they can see and answers yes/no questions about it until another person is able to identify it. I have not played this game in a very long time.

“Cancel Culture” is a phrase used unironically mostly by assholes, in reference to the practice of “cancelling” problematic individuals in the court of public opinion on social media. I wish somebody had cancelled Triton.

For the life of me I cannot discern what “no cred? no thanks” is a specific reference to - there are probably many words you can substitute “cred” for in order to obtain an existing joke.

The phrase “eat shit and die” is one I enjoy using way too much, mostly in contexts where it’s absolutely unwarranted. What’s that? Someone said hi to me in the street and I didn’t say hi back in time? Well, guess I’ll eat shit and die then.

“YEAH uh huh YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS green and yellow green and yellow green and yellow green and yellow” is just Wiz Khalifa’s “Black And Yellow” only with green instead of black. Somehow I mostly associate this song with its usage in The Lego Batman Movie.

A poncho is a loose bit of fabric worn over the torso. Speaking of Lego, I was probably thinking of the poncho worn by this Mariachi minifigure, which resembles the triangular shape of Triton’s armour more closely than an actual real-world poncho. A cyclops is a one-eyed giant from Greek myth. Look, I know I don’t need to tell you all these things, but I wanted to really drive home just how pointless this venture is.

The “special rockers assignment” was a last-minute addition to the account; the tweets were posted in a completely different order to the one I’d written them in, with many thematically-related tweets collected into threads, and I needed a way to tie together several of the early ones into a clear narrative throughline. The Empties are fuel-starved unaligned Cybertronians from the Marvel comics. I considered having Springer’s ruse claim that they were all Robosmashed, but figured the cartoon reference was kind of at odds with the canon’s source material, and that it’s somehow funnier if Triton legitimately believes all of these robots are incognito like he is for just long enough to murder them all.

I think the goof of Triton substituting his name for vaguely-similar-sounding words references a habit developed by Chang in Community. “When you try your best but you don’t succeed” is the much-memed opening line to Coldplay’s “Fix You”. When I went to get that link, I realised that I do actually quite unironically like that song. Could it be wooorse...

Again, I wanted to make explicit that Triton was returning to Autobase, where the rest of the story would unfold, so Triton refuses Whirl’s help and uses his submarine mode to return home.

Triton’s alt-mode was suggested to be a submarine by Dreadwind in the letters’ pages of the Marvel UK comic. Triton reacts to this piece of Word of God in a later tweet.

“sky of blue im a green / and a yellow submarine” is a rewrite of the lyric “sky of blue sea of green / in our yellow submarine”, from The Beatles’ famous song “Yellow Submarine”.

I substituted the Cybertronian unit of length “hics” (roughly kilometers) into the title of Jules Vernes’ story 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which I only now realise took place 20,000 leagues under the sea, and not 10,000. Perhaps if it wasn’t for my crippling fear of sea monsters, I would be better acquainted with this story. Wait, shit, I told myself I was going to break my crippling tendency to mention my crippling fear of sea monsters!

A common simile used in Homestuck is “like a piece of shit”, hence its inclusion.

The profile picture of the account was cropped from a piece of artwork drawn by my friend Ikkad, who also created the artwork that inspired/was-inspired-by my short story Dendrochronology. He posted it in the TFWiki Discord server on 07/03/2020, and it immediately galvanised me to prepare to launch Ask Triton, but the subsequent mass outbreak of Coronavirus led me to decide to delay the launch until April Fools’ Day. I coloured Ikkad’s lineart using colours taken directly from the scans of the comic, which didn’t result in a perfect match to how it looks in print but is close enough. At Ikkad’s suggestion, I replaced my first attempt using flat shading with a softer paint-like style that better matched the tone of the original comic. For the profile picture, I flipped the image so Triton faces the text of the tweets; I used a version with a blue background (flipped again to accommodate a status indicator) on Discord as a way of promoting the account. I’ve yet to decide whether I want to keep it on a more permanent basis. “felt cute might delete later” (the exact wording varies but I like this one best) is a snowclone usually posted alongside terrible selfies, or alongside bad pictures of fictional characters. Naturally, the tweet including the full artwork wasn’t planned in advance.

Substituting Ultra Magnus’ name into “magnanimity” is another terrible Chang-esque name pun. Ultra Magnus’ old AtoZ profile describes him using the phrase “top-notch geezer”, which was prominently used in a sketch show made by a friend of mine.

The line “if you think you know where im going with this tweet your wrong but what you were thinking of is probably more good” is a rewrite of the final narration box from “PASS”, which reads “believe me if you think you know where im going with this your wrong but what you were thinking of is probably better”. The joke is that you expect the tweet to end with “better”, and not “more good”, except I’m sure literally nobody who saw it remembered the narration box, because why would they? See, the thing about Ask Triton - arguably the crux of the whole thing - is that it exists in a fictional world where "PASS” and its related materials form the whole basis of an entire fandom, one which presumably documents its deep lore in the same exacting detail as we do, and for which the account’s jokes are actually funny.

A “ton” is a unit of weight which varies somewhat but can be basically used as a shorthand for 1,000 kilograms. Hence a “triton” is 3,000 kg. I am very smort.

“you wear a mouthplate just to hide your face and you wear it because you think your cooler than me“ is a minor rewrite of the lines “You got designer shades / Just to hide your face / And you wear them around like you're cooler than me” from Mike Posner’s “Cooler Than Me”. As you can tell, I mixed up the words slightly, moving “wear” forward and using bits of the line “And it's probably 'cause you think you're cooler than me.” from later in the verse. On the one hand, this goes to show that I should’ve done more research (indeed, there were a fair few other misquote flubs like this which I did correct in time for publication), but at the same time for crying out loud why is this paragraph not over yet.

Triton’s implied to be afraid of Scattorshot, whose AtoZ profile described him as the kind of person that says hi by sneaking up behind you and putting you in a headlock - if you’re thinking that’s a little specific, yes, I have had not one, but two friends like this. The word “clutch” is used by Gamers when they pull off something precise; a “clutch save” is usually a difficult last-second move made to win a game.

Maccadam’s Old Oil House, or just Maccadam’s, is the name of a bar on Cybertron which first appeared in Furman’s “Target: 2006″ Marvel UK comic storyline, which introduced the Wreckers. It’s risen to prominence in the 2000s, appearing in multiple stories, with Maccadam himself recently being explicitly revealed to be one of the legendary “thirteen original Transformers”. The tweet which mentions it was sort of a spur-of-the-moment thing I wrote to better set up the one which follows it in the thread.

“The Last Autobot” is another some-time member of the Thirteen, introduced by Furman towards the back end of his Marvel run. The phrase “the last Decepticon” crops up multiple times in the original text of “Peace”. The phrase “just something to think about” comes from SCP-2293, which I know entirely due to the fact that my friend jenny in the TFWiki Discord quotes it incessantly. She was the one who asked me to make this commentary, which absolves me of responsibility entirely, because I totally wasn’t already planning on writing it. The form of this very commentary is inspired by her annotations for Ask Vector Prime and TFWiki’s notes sections, which I think plays nicely into the idea of an alternate universe where “PASS” is an official piece of source material and Ask Triton is funny. I also like being able to mix these kinds of thematic tangents into banal observations about bad memes with wild abandon.

Again on a whim, I chose to make explicit the inspiration behind my use of the word “spannered”, an oblique reference to the US comic “The Bridge to Nowhere!”, which revealed that Decepticon Lord High Governor Straxus’ new space bridge was in fact constructed using the still-living body of the unaligned scientist Spanner. This was probably the closest the account ever got to genuine stream-of-consciousness.

Rodimus Prime expresses some level of indecision over his paint job in PASS, which Triton mocks by pretending he’s considering getting a flame painted on his chest. There’s a line in Rodimus Prime’s AtoZ profile which is interesting in light of what we learn in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, where he’s described as “the oldest AUTOBOT”. I guess he’s the oldest in terms of age, but Optimus Prime’s the real leader? Weird.

#NotMyPresident was a hashtag that got circulated on social media following the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Wow, I regret this sentence. Wow, I regret this project.

Speaking of problematic jokes, the line “yeah im going through a bit of a phase right now” refers to “It’s not a phase mom”, a phrase used to mock kids making life choices perceived as questionable. It’s combined with a reference to Furman’s six-phase “infiltration protocol” from his IDW comics; Phase Six sees the complete annihilation of whatever planet the Decepticons are sneaking around on.

“its hard / being a kid and growwing up / its hard and nobody understands” is a line from Homestuck spoken by Eridan to Kanaya, which gets called back to multiple times later in the comic. This is another case of me misremembering a quote, as I forgot the “and growing up” part. I previously namedropped Eridan in the commentary for “The Beast Within (My Pants)” as the inspiration for my version of Skids, but I think it’s safe to say that he informed my versions of Triton and Grimlock to some subconscious extent.

Car Robots was the Japanese name for the 2001 series Robots in Disguise. The phrase “car robots” itself was used in the opening narration for “PASS”, hence its inclusion.

Triton describes Sandstorm’s propeller as a “funny hat”, in reference to propeller hats. Sandstorm’s characterisation in his AtoZ bio was a play on his The Punisher-like murder spree in IDW’s comics. The incident Triton recalls about getting stepped on by Computron is phrased in reference to this I-guess-meme (the lines between sincerity and insincerity increasingly blurrr) where people say they want their crush to “step on” them. The crude mapping between combiners and relationships began in “The Beast Within (My Pants)”, which slotted surprisingly well into the “restraining order” gag from Computeron’s AtoZ bio (written to make up the numbers for a neat grid of sixteen), and I flipflop between thinking it’s the funniest shit or just thinking it’s legitimately fucking awful, but canon is canon.

Sadly, this theme doesn’t stop there. “im horny” is a terrible innuendo referring to Triton’s horned helmet.

Triton tortures the “two wrongs make a right” fallacy by mixing it with the common refrain “horny people have no rights” (which perhaps originated in this tweet but for fuck’s sake I’m not wasting any more time looking this up).

This continues when Triton claims to have “discovered the secret of combiner technology”, which is a phrase that seems to crop up in various places in 21st-century Transformers comics. It turns out that Triton’s solution is the first of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” (ugh, thanks, Spotify Discover Weekly). Jordan Peterson’s this asshole with a rabid following of straight white guys; my impression is that he uses a lot of overwrought pseudoscience to justify his ideology, but I personally think his twelve rules are actually pretty solid, which seems to be a perfect example of wrong-working-right-answer.

Afterburner’s AtoZ profile written as backmatter to “PASS” described him as “Cybertron’s bicycle”; Triton wonders why he refuses to combine with him and god this is fucking stupid.

“I’m like dropping hints that I’m single / I’m single” is a pair of screenshots from one of Kim Kardashian’s shows, which frequently see the word “single” substituted for various other things.

“TR-8R” was a nickname given to a Stormtrooper that appeared in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, famous for his funny weapon and his loud accusation that one of the protagonists, Finn, is a “traitor!”

“Inside You There Are Two Wolves / One Is Gay / The Other Is Gay / You Are Gay” (the exact wording and concepts used vary) is a snowclone most commonly associated with various images of a black wolf and a white wolf.

“Not bounty-hunter, yes? Don’t like that term, understand? Freelance peacekeeping agent, yes? For certain financial remuneration, of course” is dialogue spoken by Simon Furman’s character Death’s Head in his sort-of-debut appearance in issue #113 of the Marvel UK comics.

“Hrrrrnnggh Colonel, I’m trying to sneak around but I’m dummy thicc and the clap from my ass cheeks keeps alerting the guards” was a tweet written from the perspective of Metal Gear character Solid Snake which turned into a snowclone and got so big that the actual voice actor for the character did a dramatic reading of it.

“Oh, you think darkness is your ally. You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, moulded by it” is famous dialogue from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.

The “inhibitor harness” is a piece of technology namedropped in Nick Roche’s Last Stand of the Wreckers, used to restrain Triton and the rest of Squadron X. It was itself a reference to the inhibitor claw and inhibitor band from Furman’s Marvel UK comics; I chose “harness” both because of its explicit connection to Triton and because it’s a funnier word.

In Simon Furman’s Transformers ‘84 issue #0, a prequel to the Marvel comics, he made a number of retcons, one of which revealed the identity of iconic Marvel UK character “the man of iron” to really have been the character Fastlane, who wasn’t conceptualised until 1987.

“It’s not easy being green” is a famous song sung by Kermit the Frog.

“This chat isn't relevant to my interests any more.” is the rare quote used in Ask Triton which comes from a completely arcane source, being the punchline to an anecdote someone told in the Worth the Candle Discord server. The channel where it was told is currently archived and inaccessible, but it centered around somebody leaving a group chat of friends in spectacular fashion, something I thought was apt considering the events of “PASS”. Anyway, I guess this is my excuse to tell you to go read Worth the Candle, as is obligatory of me.

“Back on top” is the punchline to a series of Limmy’s Show sketches.

One of the handful of replies received by Ask Triton over the course of its run simply read “Yo waspinator, is everything allrignt??” Suffice to say I was pretty baffled by this, as I’ve legitimately got no idea at what point my own profile picture got presented to that person, or whether they just genuinely mistook Triton for him.

The Maximals and Predacons of Beast Wars have occasionally been described as a “new generation” of Transformers, though I didn’t track down any kind of exact quote.

Robots in Disguise and More than Meets the Eye were the two famous ongoings launched by IDW Publishing in 2012, written by John Barber and James Roberts respectively.

One minor plot beat in More than Meets the Eye revolved around the notion that if you hit a Cybertronian in a certain spot, they’ll transform involuntarily. Broadside was noted in his “PASS” AtoZ profile to have transformed very rarely, causing great inconvenience in the process.

“TCC” is an acronym for “Transformers Collectors’ Club”, a fan club run by Fun Publications from 2005-2016, the logo for which was frequently placed on Transformers packaging.

“Just found out about racism...damn that shit sucks...” was a Tweet that turned into a snowclone.

The same goes for “if i was at chernobyl i wouldv stopped it / rip to ur gradma but im different”.

The Decepticons (and Roadbuster (hmm)) all speak with proper punctuation and capital letters; a minor retcon implies that Triton used to speak this way but lost his “accent” over time.

The image of the Decepticons surrounding Highbrow and Rodimus Prime is Dan Reed and John Burns’ inside cover artwork for the 1989 Annual which included Peace; the characters in the image are drawn from that book’s comic strips. I like the way Triton implies that frikkin’ Apeface, Snapdragon and Mindwipe are “great Decepticon leaders”.

Lightspeed's AtoZ bio (like Nosecone’s) is based around an inversion of the Technobots’ typical characterisation as being generally intelligent, claiming “A broken clock is right twice a day. LIGHTSPEED wishes he could be that clock.” This implies that he’s wrong about everything, but I thought it’d be funny if the one time we hear about him doing anything he’s actually right, i.e. he’s right once a day.

As mentioned in the commentary for “PASS”, “mucho cred” is a meme phrase amongst readers of the superhero web serial Worm, which I strongly recommend but not as much as Worth the Candle.

“Macho macho man” is a phrase from “Macho Man” by Village People, which I only now realise actually already included the phrase “mucho” a bunch. I only wrote the tweet referencing it off-the-cuff, thinking the phrase “mucho cred” wasn’t quite funny enough in a vacuum.

At a certain point, I decided I wanted to namedrop every single character that appeared in “PASS”, so in a Man-of-Iron-like twist, noted idiot Nosecone is implied to be behind the famous twitter account @dril.

The line “desperately trying to think of a funny joke to make ultra magnus and the rest of the gang laugh” came to me at some point while I was sitting staring at the note on my phone. In a way, it’s a mission statement for Ask Triton. I don’t think “PASS” was ever written with the metaphor of social media in mind - it was instead a story about pointless tragedy, and of giving up too much in pursuit of some fantasy ideal of social standing. In retrospect, I most strongly see it as a story about... falling out with people, of the disconnect between the things people say and the things people think, and the breaking points where people start saying “actually, I’ve always hated you.” At the same time, however, it’s kinda just a funny joke comic, one that didn’t have a complete clarity of purpose at the point of its creation, so sometimes I wonder if by talking about it in these terms I’m acting against the spirit of the thing. Regardless, Triton is the perfect character for telling a story on social media, as he’s all about facades and the hit of dopamine that comes when someone smashes the mfing cred button.

“Leader Class Triton With Triton Master Triton” is written like the kinds of online solicits we got for Titans Return, where each figure included a “Titan Master”.

I’m not sure this entirely needs explaining, as it’s not really a reference, but the idea of a person being “always on” usually implies that they’re putting on a persona of some kind, most often by trying too hard to make everything they say funny.

The interchangeability of Topspin and Twin Twist formed the basis of their shared AtoZ profile. Seriously, the name “Topspin” is so dumb, he’s not a frikkin’ helicopter!

Richard Starkings wrote “Peace” under the pseudonym “Richard Alan”. He’s most famous for founding Comicraft, the first major computer-lettering company. I have not attempted to contact Richard Starkings in any capacity. Please do not tell him I exist.

I knew going into Ask Triton that it needed something else going for it, as it was both derivative of prowl_ebooks and less funny than it, and so drew inspiration from the one bit of official Transformers fiction to significantly use social media: namely, Ask Vector Prime. I predicted that I wouldn’t get much in the way of interaction, because I never do, but figured I could pitch Ask Triton directly down the middle and lean more towards “roleplay ask blog” or “shitpost bot”, depending on which way the wind blew. My friend gearshift observed towards the end of its run that “if it was meant to involve external engagement like AVP like the name suggests rather than just being something fun to look at, the format of him rattling off to himself 99% of the time makes it a little difficult to know where to step in and interact”, which I think was spot on. As one last-ditch attempt to solicit interaction before heading into the story’s finale, Triton reintroduces himself by saying “ask me anything” in a way that’s probably most famous nowadays via the r/IAmA subreddit. I took quiet pleasure in drawing a comparison between those threads and Ask Vector Prime.

Sure enough, only one question came in, simply asking “Anything?”. This was brushed off with the reply “pass”, in reference to the title of the comic, a goof that became even funnier to me as it became clear that no more questions were incoming.

To my surprise, gearshift sent me something that completely blew me away - a digibash of Earthrise Blast Master as Triton. To hear her tell it, she’d just picked out a recent figure that was “adjacent” to a submarine, but I immediately drew more connections that formed the basis of the eventual tweet. She sent me four different variations on the colour scheme: one “perfect” deco to match Triton’s colours in the comics, two different decos that’d require about the level of paint complexity of Siege Rung (above average for a retail toy), and finally one deco that seemed realistic for what could be achieved on a retail budget. We agreed that the last one was the best, but I bumped the saturation waaay up on it to better match the inks used in the comic (the digital scans don’t do it justice, the printing in the annual is stupidly saturated).

“We get it, you vape” (perhaps more commonly “We get it, you smoke weed”) is a snowclone posted alongside images containing smoke of any kind. It mostly serves to mock people who are perceived to have no character traits beyond vaping (for an astonishing examination of this archetype, check out the ongoing serial masterpiece Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation). Strafe’s AtoZ profile states that his only character trait is loudly broadcasting the fact that he can fly.

Again in reference to his AtoZ profile, Broadside ends up blocking a route. (In response to the tweet in question, one of my friends who goes by the name Broadside remarked “i do indeed have a”, which made me laugh.) The thread continuing from that tweet was written when I realised I had an opportunity to drill down a little deeper into Triton’s character, and to incorporate the handful of pieces of official art depicting him; the first is Andrew Griffith’s cover to Sins of the Wreckers #2, while the rest are Nick Roche illustrations inked by Griffith. All of these pieces are coloured by Josh Burcham, lending them a nice consistent tone for the dream sequence.

“Squad goals” is a phrase posted alongside images of people that the poster’s group aspires towards. By posting it alongside an image of Squadron X, Triton expresses that he wishes his current friends were more like his old ones.

“You die in the dream/game, you die in real life” is a conceit used across countless stories by this point. The word “pretending” was chosen as an oblique reference to Pretender technology; Triton isn’t a Pretender, but hey ho, I just thought it fit.

“Lord Forgive Me But It’s Time To Go Back To Tha Old Me” is a snowclone mostly posted alongside edgy pictures of cartoon characters. Triton’s referring to his time as a Decepticon, but the accompanying image shows him as a corpse, bluntly foreshadowing his death. Evidently, this thread landed; a friend of mine remarked “Jesus wads that bit about dreams was grim / Poor Triton :(”

I could’ve sworn that Bumblebee was referred to as Bumblebee: A Transformers Story at some point, but I’m probably just mixing it up with the likes of Solo: A Star Wars Story. EDIT: Locoman informs me that the movie was at one point called Transformers Universe: Bumblebee, which is definitely what I was thinking of.

Narration from “Peace” was added last-minute practically verbatim purely as a way of making up the numbers: “few can remember how the war started. fewer still can now make the distinction between good and evil. but everyone will remember this particular day. because this is the day the war ended“. I could probably have changed this into a joke but I figured the melodrama that comes with taking it into this context was enough of a joke as it was. Sue me. (Richard Starkings, please don’t sue me.)

“Are you tired of being Nice? Don’t you just want to go ape shitt” is a famous Yahoo! Answers post. Naturally, Triton’s most interested in the very last part of that sentence. This was another last-minute addition.

“All I wanna do is-*BANG BANG BANG BANG*-and a-*cash register noises*-and take your money” is the chorus line from M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes”. “Brap” is onomatopoeia for a fart, used in shitposts.

I refuse to explain what shidding and farding is. Fuck you. God, this was in such poor fucking taste. What the hell was I thinking.

The second season of American Vandal centered around somebody putting a powerful laxative in a school cafeteria’s lemonade. I actually genuinely recommend this show, it’s got a lot going on.

As proof that I was legitimately getting tired of the poop jokes, the phrase “uh oh! stinky!” was used, referring to this one gross-ass video making fun of the style of humour.

Blurr’s AtoZ profile was the hardest to write, because he’s got a couple of lines in “PASS” (hence I couldn’t invent characterisation whole-cloth) but doesn’t have anything in the way of personality beyond his use of the word “ayy”. In retrospect, I guess his characterisation ended up being based on Gamzee from Homestuck, this creepy stoner. History repeated itself when it came to writing Ask Triton, as I realised I’d namedropped every character except Strafe and him. I was barely able to sneak him in under the wire; I considered having some Shattered Glass-style joke about him being really slow, but ended up deciding that the phrase “speedwalking [...] at mach 2″ (twice the speed of sound) was funny enough to carry a tweet.

The introduction to reality TV show Judge Judy goes “You are about to enter the courtroom of Judge Judith Sheindlin. The people are real. The cases are real. The rulings are final. This is Judge Judy.” Its inclusion was an oblique nod to another time I’ve used it, in a Transformers non-fiction work which might see release soonish, but this is definitely one of the weakest jokes on the account, written for the sake of numbersNUMBERS.

The video which introduced me to YouTube comedian Gus Johnson was titled “Man Gives His Cat 11,453 Stern Looks”. Another late reference which I found by going into my playlist of random videos to use in community streams.

Having forgotten I’d already referenced the movie, “First one to talk gets to stay on my aircraft” is a line from the infamous opening scene to The Dark Knight Rises. I made a comic adaptation of that scene using Marvel’s terrible Create Your Own editor, which is kind of an inversion of “PASS” in that it keeps the text of a story but substitutes the visuals. I’d previously used that editor to create the original Spider-Man comic Everything Is Red Now.

I just saw the word “vored” in here, so it looks like I’m going to have to plead the fifth again. Let’s talk about Unicron instead. Unicron is an Orson-Welles voiced character from The Transformers: The Movie, who appears in Worth the Can- WON’T SOMEBODY MAKE ME STOP?

“Not on your life. It’s a fake. Total fiction. It didn’t happen. Not fact. I’m innocent.” is from the Kevin James/Neil Cicierega video “Beyond Believability: FACT or False”, which parodies the Johnathan Frakes reality show Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction.

“It could be you. It could be me. It could EVEN BE-” is an iconic line (but then again, which of these lines aren’t iconic?) from the Team Fortress 2 short “Meet the Spy”. This foreshadows Triton’s imminent death.

“GHAA!” is Triton’s parting word in both “Peace” and “PASS”, a rare bit of text to go completely unchanged in my version.

In the supplementary material for Nick Roche’s Last Stand of the Wreckers, the Rash Action and Fatal Consequence were two different ships aboard which Triton was second-in-command.

“I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realise it’s a comedy” is a line from the infamous movie JOKER, featured prominently in its teaser trailer.

“He who smelt it dealt it” is a textbook response to somebody calling attention to a fart. “The Smelting Pool!” was the Marvel issue, featuring a torture device of the same name, that led into the aforementioned story “The Bridge to Nowhere!” Like “Peace”, it’s a Marvel story prominently known for introducing and killing a comic-only character.

“Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good” is an iconic line spoken by Peter Parker at the end of Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War.

Reveal the Shield was a subtitle used for a Transformers toyline back in 2010, which referred to the heat-activated rubsign insignias of the toys (the gimmick being that you supposedly wouldn’t know which side the toy was on until you took it out of the package and got your grubby fingers on it).

The first page of the 1989 Annual begins “The Decepticon high command on Cybertron have judged this Annual to be anti-Decepticon, and the Firecons - Sparkstalker, Cindersaur and Flamefeather - have been despatched to Earth to incinerate all copies. In order to thwart the Firecons and protect your Annual, make sure you fill out the special Autobot citizenship card, below, with your name and address. The Firecons will only dare to attack Annuals if they are sure the owner is not under Autobot protection. This card could save your annual...” This page left quite the impression on me as a child, and (to what I can’t decide is my shame or my pride) I did in fact take a pen and fill out the card in my copy.

Towards the end of this project, I realised that there’s a certain symmetry between Ask Triton and the very origins of “PASS”, in an old meme page I once ran. Effectively nobody followed that page, and it was mostly me shouting into the void; like Ask Triton, many of the posts consisted of things which resembled jokes, where all the individual pieces fit together in some logical (if impenetrable) fashion, but when taken in aggregate none of them were really funny. Like Ask Triton, it turned into an attempt to tell a story using a medium utterly unsuited to storytelling. This time around, I think I succeeded, even if the story being told is one that already existed. Ask Triton consisted of 111 tweets. If I ever finish and release the epilogue for my old meme page, it’ll consist of 111 posts.

“PASS” has made the rounds on Twitter twice now, and each time the response has astonished me. On a pure numbers level, it’s nothing, but the people who share it around seem to derive so much joy from it. I made a handful of print versions for the comic to give out at TFNation 2019, and everyone there seemed to love it, so if TFNation 2020 goes ahead (god, I hope it does) I’ll make sure to print off some more. It’s something that’s torn me in two directions, where I want more people to see it, so they can get something out of it, but I also don’t want to run it into the dirt. As such, this ended up being one of the rare projects of mine nowadays not to receive any prereading (aside from a couple of the conventionally-funniest jokes being sent off to close IRL friends, to their amusement/bemusement), in the hopes that the whole thing would be a pleasant surprise rather than an uncertain slog, and I think that decision paid off.

In the TFWiki server, phrases like “shot on the spot for being a don” crop up frequently, with a handful of emoji cropped from the comic seeing a lot of use. It’s weird to be confronted with your own work so often, especially when that work was something that you threw together in an afternoon back in 2017, before you’d even started interacting properly with online Transformers fandom. At the same time, it’s nice to feel like one of the things I made genuinely mattered to people, at least ones who don’t know me.

If you’ve made it to the end of this notes section, then I’m sorry, but someone with as much cred as you simply cannot be allowed to live. Report to the TFWiki Discord server for your immediate execution.

#Transformers #Marvel #Ask Triton #PASS #Triton #The Wadapan #10/04/2020

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Release Date, Trailer, Setting, Gameplay, and News

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Ubisoft has revealed this year’s highly-anticipated installment of the Assassin’s Creed series. The game is called Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and moves the action to ninth-century Europe during the Viking Age. The story stars a Viking raider named Eivor, who will travel from Norway to several kingdoms of Medieval England.

The Viking reveal may not come as a surprise to those who have been following rumors about the next Assassin’s Creed game online. We’ve suspected since 2019 that the new game would be set in the era of Vikings, although the rumor mill claimed the game would be called Assassin’s Creed Ragnarok. Regardless of the title, this new era should allow Ubisoft to highlight the series’ best gameplay mechanics on both land and sea. It’s likely that ship battles will play a big part in this installment, just as they have in the past few entries.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is one of five games Ubisoft plans to release between April 2020 and March 2021. The lineup of upcoming Ubisoft releases also includes open-world techno-thriller Watch Dogs Legion, the fantasy adventure Gods & Monsters, and the first-person shooter Rainbow Six Quarantine. The fifth title is said to be a new entry in the Far Cry series. Splinter Cell fans will have to wait just a bit longer, it seems.

Here’s everything else we know about the game at the moment:

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Release Date

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is set to release for PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia on November 17. The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of Valhalla are still set to release this year, but there is no confirmation regarding their launch date at this time.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Trailer

Ubisoft Forward finally brought us a proper look at Assassin Creed Valhalla’s gameplay. Check out this extensive preview of the upcoming game:

The first cinematic trailer teases a major confrontation between Viking raiders and the land of England. Watch it below:

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Setting

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will cover much of Medieval England, according to director Ashraf Ismail.

“You can actually quite dynamically go back to Norway anytime you want. And Norway is quite breathtaking. We have the four kingdoms within England, Wessex, Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia. It’s quite a large chunk of England,” Ismail told IGN. “There’s other surprises that I won’t spoil, but our ambition has been to deliver the Viking experience, the Viking fantasy within the Assassin’s Creed world.”

Ismail explained that one of the Vikings’ main opponents is King Aelfred of Wessex, who leads the Saxon resistance against the raiders.

As teased in the game’s first trailer, Norse mythology will also play a role in the game.

“The Norse beliefs and the Norse mythology was an everyday part of the culture. And this is the way we’re approaching it, from a sense of the grounded history of the Vikings and the Norse people,” Ismail said. “We’re telling a personal story of Eivor. So Eivor’s perspective of the world, this is sort of what’s hinted at in that trailer, how Eivor will take a sign or see something and put their own spin on it. It’s an important part of Eivor’s journey through this world, but the cue [of Odin in the trailer] was the Norse people, their belief structures, that mythology itself was a part of the everyday life.”

Ubisoft hasn’t confirmed whether Eivor will be able to travel to mythical lands, such as the actual Valhalla from Norse mythology, in the game. Based on what’s come before in Origins and Odyssey, we wouldn’t be surprised if the game goes full fantasy adventure at some point.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Gameplay

The director confirmed that Eivor can be played as a male or female and that players can customize the character’s hair, tattoos, clothing, gear, and more. Eivor will also be able to make choices in the game that affect the story and their standing with different factions.

“There’s customization on the character we’ve never had in the [franchise] before,” Ismail said. “The gear system has been revamped quite a lot to really push a balance between having great gameplay-oriented gear, but also the look that players can really customize the look of that gear. In terms of the grander choices, it comes down to the journey and the settlement, and what do you want to leave behind in the settlement and what kind of impact do you want to have on the people that you’re trying to take care of?”

Ismail also told IGN that the game will feature a Viking settlement that Eivor will be able to customize as the game progresses.

“The settlement is a key feature of the game. It’s quite grand in what we’re trying to achieve with it. We want you to feel that this is your home, that you’re building, that a lot of what you’re doing in the game world is, at the end of the day, going to feed into the settlement so that it can grow, it can flourish. We have a ton of buildings that people can build. Each building comes with its own gameplay purpose,” Ismail said.

“There’s a lot of effort that’s gone into making sure that players can feel like this home that they’re developing is really meaningful to them. It’s meaningful to the journey that they’re on. The people that they invite to their settlement have meaning to them. Lots of events and things happen based on how you decide to kind of grow this place. It’s really core to the experience of the game.”

The game will feature the revamped RPG and combat mechanics that have made the last two installments, Assassin’s Creed Origins and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The game also introduces dual-wielding as a combat option.

We’ll keep you updated as we learn more about Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

The post Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Release Date, Trailer, Setting, Gameplay, and News appeared first on Den of Geek.

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mariemary1 · 7 years ago

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Marketing for Plumbers

Running a successful plumbing business means bringing in positive cash flow from your investments. This holds true whether we are talking about employees or a marketing budget. Marketing for plumbers, having said that, is fairly simple and cost effective. But it doesn’t happen overnight.

Plumber Marketing Ideas To Grow Your Business

The plumbing industry, like most local business niches, can use the web to target customers in their market. A quality lead generation website, professional seo, an active social media network, and Google My Business (GMB) are a few of the big ways to do this. If you are the DIY type, just know that the plumbing niche is not the easiest to target and a professional may be needed to compete.

High Quality Lead Generation Website

It even sounds great right?

Your website can’t still be the same old 2013 cool site that you had made. Today’s web is so different and so are all the mobile devices.

Even if your website was made with great care, it still is too dated to be effective today when it comes to getting plumbing leads for plumbers.

So what makes a great lead gen site?

Today, the best pages have a contact form present above the fold, or before the user scrolls. You also want a couple key reasons why you are the best bet for the user. The final key is to put some social proof right there, in the form of a testimonial.

Gone are the days when a “fancy” slider introduces your company. When is the last time you actually waited to see all 5 slides on a homepage? Even worse, if you do wait, do you ever find what you came looking for?

Beyond that top section of each page, you need awesome content that tells your customers how you can help them. Also ensure that your navigation is simple and the site isn’t cluttered. Finally, use images that are of your business where possible, otherwise purchase quality stock images. Don’t just grab free ones from Google, it looks tacky.

Finally, make sure that your website loads fast for visitors. Nobody wants to wait 6 seconds for the fancy moving images on your page. Keep it simple and clean, a fast site is often the result. And lots of leads for your business.

Search Engine Optimization Gets Your Plumbing Website on Google

Perhaps you have heard the term by now. SEO. But what is it?

SEO, or search engine optimization is the act of attempting to make your web properties more visible in search engines for a given set of terms.

Take for instance, a great looking website in the plumbing niche. If it doesn’t even get seen on search, how many customers could it possibly attract?

Not many, so how do you fix it?

The answer is simple, you perform seo to get the website ranking higher for searches that your potential customers use when they search online.

White Hat vs Black Hat (or Gray)

SEO comes in many forms, but it is often classified between either white or black hat, and now gray hat has emerged as a term.

White hat seo is a term used by the “purists” that cling to every word that comes from the Google propoganda machine. They claim to strictyly adhere to every rule.

The truth is, nobody is abiding by every rule, or they aren’t performing seo.

Black hat seo means the gloves come off. Black hats do whatever is necessary to get the ranking. Often they are seen as lazy, since automation is one of their main weapons of choice.

Somewhere in between those 2 “factions” lies the gray hat seo scene. As you may have guessed, it’s a mix of the two. On the surface and when talking to clients, they claim to be clean (likely). In practice however, they only try to be. If a limit can’t be reached and a site won’t climb, they will stray to the dark side, thus the gray hat.

Whatever side of the color spectrum suits your plumbing business, some certain things need to be done. These are foundational seo tactics that every website should strive to perfect. Of course you know that everything you create needs to be centered around quality keyword research and planning.

on page seo ~ optimize the title, description, headings, images, and text to make sure search engines understand the meaning of your content

interlinking ~ to make your site more searchable, you want to link pages together where it makes sense

citations/directories ~ there are still a few major data aggregators out there that send your data to websites across the world, get on those

One of the often overlooked pieces to seo, is the social media network. Having the popular social media channels locked down for your brand is important and powerful.

Branded Social Media Marketing Network for a Complete Plumber Marketing Package

Don’t make these just to get them online either. Make them being a solid representation of your brand. Your social channels can be a great way to instill trust in potential customers, don’t take that lightly.

I’m referring to the big ones like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and so on. Grab at least those 5 for the plumbing industry.

By now you have probably heard that having an active social media channel is important for business. I can surely tell you that blindly posting will not grow your brand.

However, properly building out these profiles, interlinking them all together and with your website, and syndicating your content is great for seo.

It provides backlinks from high quality websites, and they aren’t spammy links from fake fiverr gigs.

Aside from that, these profiles have the ability to rank. A well built, active and powerful Twitter or Facebook page can easily outrank a competitor’s poor website. You get 2 chances instead of one.

Then there is the obvious fact.

Social sites can generate traffic! Considering traffic is one of the main goals of seo, it just makes sense as a potential candidate in terms of marketing for plumbers.

Perhaps the easiest avenue for traffic in the plumbing industry would be from YouTube. Considering the number of DIY plumbing projects there are that you may not necessarily want a call from, your content options are big.

Fix a leaky faucet and make a step by step video. That could well drive thousands of visitors to your website over time. Will they all be in your local market? No, but the traffic builds the authority of your channel, and consequently the website it links to (yours). Since you do the work anyway, this is a smart marketing strategy.

That brings us to the final point of the plumbing marketing must haves. And it’s another Google product.

Get Your Plumbing Business on The Google Map

GMB is perhaps one of the best marketing channels for a business to generate inexpensive calls that are somewhat predictable and inexpensive.

One of the cool parts about the GMB platform is the Insights. This area tells you the number of calls, how many folks asked for driving directions to your shop, and the number of direct website visits generated by the map listing in the last 30-90 days.

Even Google is realizing the power of the map listing in local search. Consequently, they are testing paid service ads in that area of the search results around the country at times, and in certain niches.

The best part about Google My Business is that the listing itself is a free digital marketing opportunity!

The bad part is that getting your plumbing business listed is tough unless the searcher is in your driveway or you live in a small city.

I’m not trying to say the “average Joe Plumber” couldn’t rank in the map pack, but it’s unlikely. Unless you are a plumbing company in Tinytown, USA, it’s time for an seo specialist.

If you must go it alone, here is a guide that will help you add your business to Google Maps.

The Google Map Listing is one of the most powerful business profiles you can build online. For that reason, make sure you provide quality images and text, as well as completely building the profile.

Get Your Plumber Marketing Plan Together and Running

This is just a handful of plumber marketing tips you will likely need to run a successful campaign, but it is the foundation. Once you have these items together and in place, you are ready for your business to climb the ranks. And of course, if you need help, we perform awesome marketing for plumbers!

The post Marketing for Plumbers appeared first on Cloud Inspector Web Design.

Marketing for Plumbers published first on http://www.cloudinspectorwd.com/

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cloudinspectorwebdesign · 7 years ago