#i might not even do character analysis i might do a narrative and media presentation analysis 🤔

[ungodlysaltyinfrastructure]

Tripping and falling

ep 18

Siiiiogghhhhhhhh. I just woke up to this, and the only thing I gotta say, is Alux is so autistic about that firebird.

I was right in saying that he loves fantasy creatures >:]

But everything else is just character and world building. Nice and cozy, like the tavern. But story progression wise, it doesn't give us *a lot*. It does give us some things, like adding character to deer and rocky (because they've been pretty neglected since introduction), and there is that one snippet of the Wisp and petro at the beginning. But like, the title of the episode seems off. Like the presentation first hand, and then the actual content don't line up, so I can only assume that the title and thumbnail are meant to foreshadow something bigger in ep 19 or 20.

My best prediction is that 19 is going to be Petro centric. And 20 is going to be the season finale with the honeybee festival, and some goes horribly wrong because of some sort of butterfly affect by Petro, kicking off season 2 with Alux having to now find out what's going on in cozen. (And of course the gang going along with him.)

[katyspersonal]

Honestly, thank you for calling Messmer a fascist I feel like so much of the fandom just ignore the way he is written for the sake of a more simplified and commodified character they can lust over. Not only is it weird to completely deny such an important part of his character that affects the wider narrative (not even getting into real world implications) it just makes him more boring! This is a Fromsoft game where very few characters are ever even close to morally pure. And yes, Messmer isn’t as pure evil as he was presented in the trailers, that doesn’t mean he’s a good person. A lot of people take away the main twist of the storyline as “the Hornsent were the bad guys the whole time and Messmer was completely in the right” when that’s just not the case. Sorry for ranting in your ask box I just thought you might like to hear out my case lol x)

First not going to lie, frien, I start to have some personal concern because of the messages like this. 😔 I am getting the type of messages like "thank you for doing this Elden Ring thing when everyone else does that Elden Ring thing" + followed by jab at the fandom for not paying enough attention or variants! There was "thank you for actually having positive reading of Nanaya when people portray her as agent of chaos", then "thank you for writing Rellana with her own ideology when people portray her as just Golden Order simp", then "thank you for writing Messmer and Marika as fucked up when people make them wholesome mother-son bond"... now this too

I want to say that I do not blame you, or anyone who sent previous messages I mentioned! And I am glad that you find enjoyment and understanding in how I analyse and write Elden Ring things! Like, yes, I am happy that it resonated with you when by your own admission, it is not something you see often! ...that being said, I really do not fit to be the "face of opposition" if you can even call it that! xD I am very meticulous in my analysis (against my will, autism is just like this) and try to not have any bias but instead fixate on what the writer really wants to say, but I should be more critical with compliments that I accept! Don't want to get my ego bloated with comparisons fshhddhsf I accept the compliments for my posts! Just not the '...unlike the rest of the fandom' part if this can be helped!

^^^ On the subject, Messmer said this phrase even in the first, gameplay trailer, and it already made me raise my eyebrow! Saying that "impure" creatures do not deserve to live is really wild, however, it didn't look to be Miyazaki's average jab at religious crusades... yet xD

^^^ Then THIS stuff in the second trailer. Basically, I was already labelling him fascist before the DLC dropped 🙄

I was actually really... delighted to find out that Fromsoft touched such a huge topic? Even though it is called 'Crusade', Miyazaki's jab at religion leaned more towards Inquisitors of Hornsent! Messmer lived up to my expectations from his character and MORE! He is not even wiser than burning all traces of history and culture, had it not been for his Knights beings better than this! Honestly, Fromsoft raising the topics of fashism and genocide is one of their biggest Ws so far, and something I will always love SOTE for!

Above all I agree that even if you ditch everything about 'subtext', 'media literacy' and 'obvious implications', the story about "justified genocide" doesn't really offer anything interesting narratively! Making a whole nation/race/whatever 'inherently evil' and their genocide as heroic act....? It doesn't offer anything: no meaning, no fuel for self-reflection as society, no awareness of real world parallels, no philosophical debate about horrors of revenge cycle...

Doesn't offer anything interesting, except for.... yeah, making Messmer more approachable to simp for. Well, everyone knows what I think of such characters:

Debate about media literacy and subtexts in Elden Ring is very tricky, and I've learned the hard way when Mohg beaten the allegations! (my confidence was shattered that day fhddhsf) It is hard to draw the line where 'obvious implication' ends and 'but they did not DIRECTLY say it...' starts! So yeah, when logic and reading deep ends, I think feelings can help. Messmer is a horrible, horrible person, and genocide is the worst thing humanity can fall into. Is making one character (maybe two, as Marika is connected) more "likeable" worth larger story with meaning, rising such significant topics? I don't think so!

As for Hornsent........ sighhhh...

[trrenchertrash]

Hi, sorry ik this is really random you don’t know me and all. But I have a question, if you don’t mind.

It’s been a really really long time since I’ve consumed media like arcane. Actually, I don’t think I have ever before. Maybe in books, but it’s been a while since I’ve read a proper book due to personal reasons. Naturally my media literacy has dwindled over time. Now, I know that word is overused but I mean it in a literal sense. It’s not gone but like very weak iygwim.

I was wondering if you could recommend media like that that also doesn’t spoon-feed it’s audience like arcane. I love the series and that love will never go away, but there were so many things that crushed me when I watched S2. So many things I didn’t understand and still don’t. And yes, I do believe that it’s important that your audience understands what you’re trying to say as a creator, not too much metaphors and all that. But that just comes from a personal dislike of indirect communication. I want to modify that belief.

It’s not like I see you as some kind of expert, I don’t want to burden you. But yk, just reading through the tags of some posts I saw yours and wandered if you had any recommendations for media that helped you to see and understand the show as what they were trying to show the audience without explaining.

Hi! So first of all I want to say that I honestly don't think I've ever watched anything that's on the level of Arcane either, and that's because there just isn't much that isn't being incredibly oversimplified in order to reach the largest audience possible in a world where media literacy (as overused a word as it might be) is absolutely on the decline. And admittedly I also just don't consume that much media, and a large part of that is due to frustration in having to parse through so much content where the quality just isn't there.

So unfortunately I don't really have any recent recommendations for you, but I can tell you that foundationally, what allows me to engage with media like Arcane the way that I do is simply the literary analysis that I learned in high school, lol. (I do also have a background in narrative art and visual storytelling, but that's not necessary to understand what's going on, even if it does sharpen my eye.) I learned with classic novels, but I know they can be hard for some people to get into so what I think will actually help more is just learning the conventions of story structure and literary elements; familiarizing yourself with concepts like symbolism, theme, and metaphor, because once you can recognize those things and understand how a story comes together, you'll start to notice them while you're watching or reading, and that's what will help you pick up on whatever the narrative is trying to communicate to you. Ultimately media that trusts its audience relies on you being able to read between the lines and understand the implications of what you're being shown or told so that you can make inferences. The more you practice analysis, the more fluent you'll become.

With something like Arcane, so much of the story is communicated through visuals, so you have to really pay attention to what you're being shown. But even beyond that, most of the dialogue in the show is applicable to more than one plot line or character arc, so you have to be able to apply the ideas being presented in more than just the context they're presented in. Nothing in the show is superfluous, so if you blink, you'll miss something important. That's why I always rewatch multiple times as well, and every time I do I notice something that strengthens the storytelling even more. If you want to talk about any of the things you felt like you didn't understand, I'd be happy to talk about them with you!

And, if anyone who sees this has recommendations for quality media that trusts its audience, please let us know!

[piracytheorist]

What's your hot take opinion on Sxf ?

Oh boi this is probably gonna upset a lot of people and even some mutuals but. I don't think Damιanya will be canon.

And look, this comes from how I view fiction. I adore looking for Author's Intent, and that can include both positive and critical analysis. By that I mean, I like taking a work of fiction and analyse characters and scenes and gestures etc., but also, if you give me a work of fiction that is written from a bigoted point of view, I can spend hours looking into all the ways the author inserted their bias and political views into it.

That is to say, most of the time I'm not into "fixing" stuff or imagining ways a work of fiction can go according to how I would like it to go. Hence why most of the fanfic I write is mostly character and dynamic exploration rather than AUs and canon divergence that ignores canon stuff I didn't like. Not that I find it wrong to do that, everyone enjoys fiction and creates derivatives of that in their own way. But to make sense of my post here, I needed to present how I work when I consume media.

So. I am asexual, most possibly also aromantic, I can count on one hand the times I shipped a fictional couple, and I cringe every time a film or show that's not in the romance genre has the male and female lead become a couple, cause god forbid they go through an Experience™ together and keep things platonic.

Anyway, people are free to ship what they want to ship, and I'm in no way an impartial judge or the ultimate analyst, but I don't believe Anya and Damian will become a couple, even if they're aged up. Part of that comes from the fact that in well-written fiction everything happens for a reason. The reason I believe Twiyor will be canon is because it will give Twilight the experience of a real romantic relationship after having to fake those for his missions, and it can give Yor confidence in a relationship whether she's openly intimate or not.

If Anya is paired with Damian, I can see how it can help Damian have narrative development, but how will it help Anya? What is her character missing that a romantic relationship with him can provide? And if the relationship only provides development for him, then it will be unbalanced and maybe even one-sided as far as the narrative is concerned. And Anya deserves better than that. Her dynamic lies with her parents (especially when it comes to identity reveals), Bond (with her ability to see the future through him and her becoming more responsible through taking care of him), Becky (a friend that makes her feel confident to be herself and whom Anya can help open up), and whenever Endo decides to take it there at some point, the scientists who practically created her and her powers.

I'm not saying Damian will only be a hurdle and a burden to her. But honestly, she has way more dynamics and stuff going on about her for the story to force her into an "I can fix him" narrative with her bully.

And when it comes to Damian... I honestly think he has more to earn if they DON'T become a couple especially after Anya finds out about his feelings for her. Damian is growing up rich, privileged, and neglected, so he's turned into a brat and a bully who thinks is above everyone and everything. He needs (and deserves) physical affection and compassion, but he also needs to know he can grow from his toxic behavior. Fixing him of that and immediately throwing him into the relationship he craves is, frankly, an easy pass. It's not a romantic relationship, or even close friendship he needs. It's familial affection and connection. The former might help but it won't fix the issue. Again, that's very biased of me because I was bullied by kids like Damian when I was little, so the thought of me becoming interested in them after all the abuse because "they got fixed" is... unwelcome, to say the least :)

And all that's putting aside the fact that they're fucking six years old. Anya probably younger than that. But even if they're older and suitable for a romantic relationship, it's still not something that can, narratively, bring them what they need.

In my view, making Damian have a crush on her is not to lead them into a romantic relationship (at a later point because again, they're SIX) but it's to give him depth and a layered dynamic with Anya besides Anya wanting to approach him for the sake of Operation Strix. Endo made things so Anya has a lot of hurdles on her way towards that, and a spoiled bully who is fighting his own feelings for her out of spite and ends up bullying harder is only part of those hurdles.

Eventually, how I think their dynamic will go is Anya finding out about his feelings, going like "Oh that makes sense but I don't see you that way" and Damian accepting that, while he grew into a more respecting person who doesn't burst out his frustrations on innocent peers, his reward for that won't be the romantic relationship he wants, because hey, there shouldn't be a "reward" for actually becoming a decent human being :) And they stay friends who support each other.

Ending this by saying everyone is free to ship what they want to ship and that this is only my view that is influenced by my lack of interest in romantic stories and my still-prominent scars from having been a bully victim for years. I only watch the anime, but the setup I've seen in the story is enough for me to consider that this is where their dynamic will go. You might disagree and that's okay, the cool thing in fandoms is people being able to offer different points of view, but please don't reblog this just to have pointless fandom fights with me.

[navree]

Do you think that the showrunners were biased against the greens , esp Aegon ii ans Larys?

I can't really speak to bias, just because I do not know these people personally and as such I don't have any insight into what they actually think or feel. But it's clear that, from a writing perspective, they seemed to have prioritized Rhaenyra (and to a lesser extent, Daemon) over the Green main characters, and viewed them as largely more sympathetic and tailored some of the writing accordingly. And I do believe there was a vested interest in making Aegon kinda look as bad as possible, though they've still given him a fair amount of qualities worthy of analysis and development. With regard to Larys, that's the one thing where I can confidently say that yes, there was some sort of bias clearly at play. The concept of the evil disabled villain is not new, the concept of the guy with some kind of deformity who fetishes a non-deformed body, the concept of the guy who signals his depravity through not just his physical limitations but sexual perversions, these are not new concepts in media, and these are concepts unique to show!Larys. And it's a shame, because they could have done something interesting with Larys, in his relationship with his disability and with masculinity and with his family and certainly with Alicent. But because ours is, by and large, an ableist society that does have a tendency to present "deformity" and disability and subpar physical appearance as a mark of who a character is as a person, the writers just decided to fall into those lazy tropes and stereotypes, without examining the internal biases that might have led them to write Larys that way even at the expense of an interesting character.

With all that being said, I do think the showrunners also had a vested interest in developing the Greens far more than they did the Blacks. The Blacks do appear to be framed as more sympathetic in the narrative, yes, but they're also incredibly two dimensional. There has been a lot of effort put into making nearly all of the major Greens varied and complex. Aegon's many things, but he's certainly not one dimensional, and there's a lot to talk about him. Alicent and Aemond and Otto and Criston are all explicitly written to contain multitudes in terms of their personalities, that there are both good and bad qualities within them that are explored within the text and their arcs thus far. Helaena is very two dimensional but that's just more laziness in general than any sort of bias. And when you contrast that to Baela and Rhaena who are so interchangeable I still can't quite entirely pick out which is meant to be which half the time, Jace and Luke who are such wooden planks of characters that I dare anyone to name three distinct characteristics of each, Rhaenys and Corlys who have such schizophrenic writing half the time and have like an hour of screentime combined, it becomes very noticeable. The Greens got a lot more character and a lot more time devoting to fleshing them out as people, not just as a whole team but also as individuals specifically. In contrast, the only Blacks who have any fleshed out characters are Daemon and Rhaenyra (and maybe Rhaenys and Corlys but again, incredibly disjointed writing that makes it hard to feel like they're real people with firm personality traits half the time). Everyone else is just basically there to be background extras and eventual cannon fodder. I'm being serious, is there anyone who's sad about Luke's death because of the fact that he will now be absent from the narrative and you'll miss the contributions his character and his arc could have given the story as a whole? Is there anyone who was sad about his death period for any reason that wasn't "he's young" and "I'm sad for Rhaenyra about it"? No because the kid was a blank slate that's why his only significant character moments were in the same episode as when he died because the writers realized we're supposed to feel things when Vhagar eats him instead of either cheering Vhagar on or feeling sad for Aemond's emotions.

Despite the fact that there's a clear vision to make Team Black more sympathetic, there's also a clear and concerted effort to make Team Green much more fleshed out and multi dimensional that's coming at the direct expense of the characters on Team Black.

[erinthesails]

Some of the justifications for this this weird Izzy stuff seem to stem from, obviously racism, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of useful forms of transformative fandom and basic media analysis. like yes, obviously, you can do whatever you want forever, and there's nothing inherently wrong with reinterpreting a character to explore different possible dynamics, but that doesn't change the fact that, in order to say anything compelling about a story, you have to think about it on its own terms.

I think people think of transformative fandom as meaning "apply whatever meaning you want onto anything and everything in order to make a collage of character interactions that please you personally." Okay sure fine. Do that if you want. But if you're going to be out here claiming that an interpretation that goes obviously against the intentions of the text is just as valid as other interpretations, what's the point if that interpretation doesn't actually speak to any of the goals of the text itself.

I'll use an example of another popular interpretation that I love but don't necessarily think is the canon intent of the story: Ed as transfemme. I'm not recapping all the many thoughtful posts on the topic here (tho go read up on posts by weirdgirlcore and eluciferate if you're interested), but essentially, the idea comes from a few moments and symbolic juxtapositions in the text that open up the possibility of that reading. Do I think that the writers necessarily intended for "be careful what you ask your god for, she might just answer" to be an oblique reference to Ed using sher/her pronouns? Probably not, honestly. But in a story about finding yourself and learning to be who you are outside of constructions of normalcy, AND in a story that canonically contains trans and gay characters, the reading is a compelling one that offers new insights about the forces that Ed is working against. It's a reading you don't have to agree with, but it's one that speaks to the larger themes of the text, and opens up alternate ways of situating these characters within and against narrative conflicts, giving us more capacious ways of thinking about the show

Compare that to a reading of Izzy that places him as earnestly supportive of Ed, and as valid in his desire to maintain the status quo as Ed is in wanting to break out of it. This is a story ultimately about masking and the ways we're made to play certain roles by systems larger than we are: be it heteronormativity, colonialism, neurotypicality, capitalism, even family. It's about the ways we're denied the possibility of questioning those roles, and then choosing a path that allows us to be something Else. So what does it add to the story if, despite the evidence to the contrary presented in episode 4, Izzy IS a long suffering, devoutly loyal first mate and possibly lover to an oblivious, mentally ill mess of a captain? Well. Nothing. Besides the excitement of exploring a dynamic that you personally like. And sure fine that can be fun, but it's a reading that's implicitly supportive of maintaining the status quo!! The thing that the entire show is trying to break!!!

How does it expand our understanding of the show if, of the two main white guys, one is trying to shed the norms that give him power and one is trying to retain his power through threats of violence against a man of color and the romantic lead, and we're supposed to understand these as equally valid and valuable points of view? They're just not!! You want to imagine Izzy as being as sympathetic as the other characters, that's fine, but call it what it is: an AU, and one that's more interested in fun and imagination than with exploring any kind of real characteristics that Izzy displays in the narrative. It just baffles me, the lack of basic media literacy in these readings. You can like Izzy!! It's fine to like Izzy, he's a fun character! But WHAT is the point of taking these characters and saying "well. What if they were entirely different in ways that I like better." Just make him an OC, damn!

[kkevnguyen]

Background Information on Oni WEEK 11

Oni are a type of yōkai, or demon, in Japanese folklore. They are often depicted as large, fearsome creatures with red or blue skin, wild hair, and two or more horns. Oni are traditionally portrayed as evil, malevolent beings who spread chaos and destruction, though some stories also feature oni who protect people or serve as guardians.

Origins and Cultural Significance: The concept of oni has roots in ancient Japanese religion and mythology, blending elements from Shinto, Buddhism, and local folklore. Oni are often associated with the underworld and are said to be the spirits of wicked people transformed into demons after death. They also appear in Buddhist hells, where they punish sinners.

Physical Appearance and Characteristics: Oni are typically depicted with a fearsome appearance, including sharp claws, tusks, and sometimes extra eyes or limbs. They often wear loincloths made of tiger pelt and carry large clubs called kanabō, which symbolize their immense strength. Despite their terrifying visage, oni are sometimes depicted with humorous or even foolish traits in popular culture.

Pop Culture/Media References

1. "Onimusha" Video Game Series: The "Onimusha" series is a popular action-adventure game that features oni as central antagonists. The player battles these demons, drawing on the rich tapestry of Japanese mythology to enhance the game's narrative and atmosphere.

2. "Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan" (Manga/Anime): This series presents oni as part of a larger pantheon of yōkai. Characters like Aotabo and Kubinashi are depicted as oni with complex personalities, adding depth to the traditional image of these creatures.

3. "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba" (Manga/Anime): While the primary antagonists in "Demon Slayer" are more commonly referred to as demons (or "oni" in Japanese), the series draws heavily on the traditional imagery and folklore of oni. The fearsome power and regenerative abilities of these demons are reminiscent of classical oni characteristics.

4. "Spirited Away" (Film by Studio Ghibli): In "Spirited Away," various spirits and creatures are featured, some of which bear resemblance to traditional oni in their form and function within the spirit world. The film’s rich tapestry of supernatural beings is a nod to the extensive folklore surrounding yōkai, including oni.

Analysis and Theories

Rational Explanations: Some scholars believe that the stories of oni might be rooted in real historical events or social phenomena. For example, oni could represent the physical manifestations of fears and anxieties within Japanese society. They might symbolize natural disasters, diseases, or invading armies, all of which would be perceived as monstrous and evil.

Psychological Perspective: From a psychological standpoint, oni could be seen as projections of human emotions and fears. The transformation of a wicked person into an oni after death could symbolize the deep-seated fear of evil and the consequences of immoral behavior. They also embody the archetype of the "shadow," representing the darker aspects of the human psyche.

Folkloric and Mythological Interpretation: Oni serve a critical role in Japanese folklore, acting as cautionary figures that enforce moral behavior. They are often used in tales to teach lessons about virtue, justice, and the consequences of one's actions. Their fearsome appearance and actions serve to underscore the severity of these moral lessons.

Personal Belief: Do I think oni are real? In the literal sense, no. Oni, like many mythological creatures, are symbolic representations rather than physical beings. However, the impact they have on culture, art, and societal norms is very real. They embody the fears, values, and imaginative storytelling of Japanese culture, making them an integral part of the cultural heritage.

In conclusion, whether viewed as mythological creatures or symbolic representations of human fears, oni continue to captivate and inspire through their rich history and presence in popular culture.

[fragilefirstchance]

I actually have thoughts about this! I think Ford is a specific type of character.

First of all: Let's talk about fanon!

Something I think that a lot of us forget when we're doing fan analysis is just how caricaturized all blorbos are in canon. This is true of any work of media: the characters aren't real people, they're figments who only exist as we see them on-screen.

Fanon is kind of like those AI image sharpeners that take a blurred photo and make it look like a person's face: yeah, technically that is an accurate way you can interpret the blur, but there are hundreds of faces that would be just as accurate, and not only are they all very different from each other, they don't even agree on the most basic and obvious traits. The same blurry headshot could be a scowling white woman with a square jaw or a smiling black man with sharp features. In a similar way, when we see a character become stressed because they just saw a mouse in a cage, we could say they're scared of mice, or morally opposed to pets, or that they have cage-based trauma - any option that works is plausible.

I think that there are characters who are good characters, characters who are uniquely good subjects for fanon, and a ven diagram between the two. For example, a lot of kids' shows from the nineties are bad, but they managed to produce a really fun and rich fandom. Meanwhile, some really beautiful and culturally important stories don't leave a lot of room for fan works because they've already said what they need to say. I think the absolute best works for fandom are the ones that are objectively good stories, but have really simplified characters: Undertale might be the best example of this, because every single character suggests a rich and beautiful personality while only being on screen for a relatively short time.

So that leads me to part two: Ford!

I think Ford fills a particular fandom niche that was empty for a lot of us.

He's extremely traumatized, and the more we learn about him, the more traumatized he is. He's kind of pushing the limits of what's acceptable from a kids' show, to be honest.

He canonically has a lot of difficulty making friends; this is partly because he's quirky and seemingly neurodivergent, but partly because he has poor social skills. He's not a cartoony, Eeyore-style "has trouble making friends but we love him anyway" character, either; there are tangible, in-story examples of him failing to make friends.

He behaves badly sometimes. This is actually my favorite trait of his - anyone who reads my fanfiction knows how much I love giving people with real flaws a chance to find love and be treated with respect. Most characters have a flaw to overcome, but in his worst moments, Ford actually lashes out and hurts others in a tangible way and not just a child-friendly way. Showrunners don't always like to show that sort of thing.

It is very, very easy to read some severe mental health symptoms into his behavior. Bill is a literal character, but he's also a pretty good metaphor: you can use him to explain hallucinations, dissociative fugues, sudden mood swings, manic episodes, severe depression, paranoia - the list goes on and on.

(That last one is really important. There's a pretty damn big difference between a good metaphor for mental illness and a thoughtful portrayal of that mental illness in a story. It's kind of like how many of us were so starved for queer representation growing up that we read queer metaphors into everything. Well, there still isn't good mental illness representation in most media, so we'll take the metaphors we can get. Ford is a really good metaphor even as he's presented, and there are a lot of holes in his narrative where personality disorder symptoms, manic episodes, delusions, etc. can slot in easily.)

None of those traits make a good Disney character. They only really work because he spends so little time on-screen; the books were only possible because of Gravity Falls's massive commercial success. So, he's a very rare example of a character who's from a light-hearted, positive, optimistic show aimed at children, but who has all of the template features necessary for us to read him as deeply broken in some ways that aren't sanitized or socially acceptable.

So, there are dozens and dozens of Ford AUs in which we project very specific experiences, traumas, and symptom sets into this one man.

How many Ford AUs out there are reflections of our own insecurities, traumas, and just general unresolved issues? Is that, like, his whole purpose in the wider multiverse of alternate Gravity Falls characters? 'Cause I KNOW it isn't just me

[qqueenofhades]

The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it �� but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

[thatswhatsushesaid]

So I'm ngl I followed you because my partner really likes jiggy and I am trying desperately to like. Care more about him and enjoy him because of this. I didn't read through the whole post about life debts and nmj (who for the record I think is an asshole, but an interesting one, given his complete inability to see in shades of grey morality), but I did read the reblog you added comparing some of jiggy's actions to wwx's, which I actually found really interesting. Since wwx is my poor little meow meow, I'm wondering if approaching jiggy through the lens of their similarities etc might help nudge my brain more into liking him, so I was curious if you had any recommendations for like, good meta posts or gifsets or fics that get into this more?

I suspect that part of my problem is the novel is just my least favorite adaptation even though I dislike a lot of the plot changes that cql and the donghua did, because it's hard for me to read through, but I can overcome that. Probably.

hi hello!! I know we have chatted a bit already via messages, but I am so, so, so happy any time someone expresses any interest in developing a more comprehensive understanding of jgy's character.

user meta

in terms of linking you to specific bits of meta about parallels between jgy and wwx, it might be easier for me to just direct you to specific users who have written extensively on narrative parallels in mdzs in general: @xiyao-feels has written meta based on several close readings of the text and often highlights the importance of where jgy-specific events are situated, and this often includes callbacks to things that wwx has done, too. if you're keen on deep dives into what makes jgy tick and text-based explanations for why he does the things he does (and why his options are extremely limited), you should also check out @fincalinde's meta. fincalinde and xiyao-feels both ground their analysis of jgy (and xiyao lol but you don't have to read the xiyao meta if you aren't keen on it) in what we're presented in the text, so if you're worried about reading analysis that relies too much upon 'fanon,' that won't be a concern here. @confusion-and-more is another user who writes similar text-based meta along similar lines.

fan media

I tend not to look for good parallels in gifsets, but this one by @henshengs probably draws the most powerful, bittersweet parallels between wangxian, xiyao, and the relationship between lan wangji and lan xichen's parents. it's from the donghua rather than the drama, idk if you have a preference on that front.

the fic series it's worth it every time by @fincalinde (roquen on AO3) is by far the best series imo for digging into jgy's core motivations for doing the things that he does, and it also has the benefit of hewing extremely close to events as they unfold in canon. again, it's xiyao, which may not be your thing, but imo understanding the xiyao dynamic is pretty crucial to understanding jgy, too.

...okay!! I think this is a good place to get started? I will see what else I can dig up for you, and like I said, I have a few other bits of meta in my drafts atm that are focused specifically on wwx-jgy parallels and comparisons, so once I finish and publish those, I'll ping you about it. 👍

edit: ooh, editing my post to add a link to these two pieces of wangxian and xiyao fanart by @hawberries which are intended to be viewed side by side for maximum heartbreak.

[cherrymoonvol6]

some videos i watched in 2022

Harry Potter (Shaun)

if you are familiar with shaun you’ll know he’s more about that breadtube pipeline compared to those who stick to critiques and essays about media, but this video works as a blend between these two. it’s not necessarily focused on the narrative thread of the story, but things will pop up about it every now and then, and having read the books back when i was a teen it was interesting to hear his thoughts and how he breaks down the story. what i find great about this video (and what i would say sets it apart from other dissections of this franchise) is the focus on the characters and story-beats from the context of who is writing it. this includes discussions of other book she’s written and some context about her real life, so if you’re tired of the discourse surrounding this woman, then i would suggest you don’t watch it. otherwise, this is a nicely paced, calmly delivered exploration of some of the most controversial aspects of this book saga.

viewing recommendation: it serves pretty well as a podcast, although there are some visual elements that pop out here and there that you might want to look at. since shaun’s voice is pretty slow and steady, 1.25x speed works just fine.

Elden Ring - A Shattered Masterpiece (Joseph Anderson)

i discovered joe this year through his odyssey video (also pretty good!), and having gotten into a lot of gaming content in 2020 i felt like my hunger for critiques and video essays about games was finally being satiated. that said, joe’s video on elden ring doesn’t necessarily focus on the narrative: the meat of it is on the gameplay and how the game fails to live up to his own hype as you approach its final stretch. having experienced the release of this game through the eyes of other content creators, i was under the impression that this game was universally loved and admired (and even won Game of The Year), so this perspective was incredibly intriguing to me. i do recommend watching this if you’ve ever had any sort of experience with dark souls/bloodborne/sekiro, be it even just being aware of what they’re about and what they’re known for. otherwise i don’t think you’d get that much from this video, as there’s not really a narrative analysis to get a hold of the plot and story of the game. it’s not like joe doesn’t explain most of it (he has to justify that 1.5 hour runtime), so give it a try nonetheless.

viewing recommendation: there are some sections that flow better as a podcast and others where you’ll want to see what joe is talking about, so judge for yourself. joe is also a slow speaker, so 1.25x will do the job.

Why Stranger Things 5 (Probably) Won't Be Good | Story Analysis (Local)

while this is a relatively new channel, the quality of the production and the structure of it is pretty astounding. if you were in tumblr at any point this year you MUST have heard about this season so maybe this will satisfy your curiosity about the series - that, if you haven’t watched it. to everyone else, well, go feast my children. what i really appreciate about this video is that 1) although i am biased towards longer videos (this is the shortest of this list, at ten minutes) not a single moment of this video feels wasted, and 2) the clear focus on the show as a narrative device, and treating characters as what they are: inventions meant to serve the story. while this is not necessarily a fresh perspective, i do feel people sometimes forget that characters don’t have a life beyond what’s presented in canon, and it’s good to reel that in. i also recommend checking this channel in general: there are few videos, but maybe you’ll find some other media he’s analyzed that you’ll vibe with.

viewing recommendation: it’s just ten minutes long... just sit and watch all of it. i’m a big believer of SPEED in my youtube videos, but this one feels too fast in anything above 1x speed.

The Forgotten Disaster of the SS Eastland (Ask a Mortician)

i came to know about this video through the “controversy” surrounding it - fret not, as it was simply about youtube’s flawed policy around age restriction, which another famous youtube channel (SummoningSalt) had also talked about around that time. while i’ve never had any interest in the channel, i decided to take a look at the offending video out of spite for youtube being a cunt and i ended up loving it. it’s a really well put together investigation about, well, the disaster of the ss eastland, presented in a documentary form. i’ll say right now that i’ve never been fond of documentaries because i feel like they explore every subject extremely superficially and i hate not getting answers to my questions, but this video delves into every topic it presents all while still having great pacing. more than anything, you can feel the love put into every part of this video: the images used, the testimonies, the people interviewed, the care in which it treats this tragedy. it’s a great viewing experience and i cannot state how glad i am that my time wasn’t wasted, at all.

viewing recommendation: since it’s pretty much a documentary, i’d say just watch the entire thing. i’m a 1.25x speed addict, as you sure have noticed by now, but i guess anything between 1x and 1.25x is fine.

Why WandaVision Is Bad At Mysteries (James Woodall)

another show i expect you to at least know half a thing about. of course, as the average hater™ i love to see criticism of popular media, but james goes the extra mile by analyzing the show by the standards of every story involving a mystery. it’s a well researched video and very fun to watch, and what felt missing from other people talking about this show.

viewing recommendation: the video has a pretty high production value, so i had the most fun actually watching it. 1.25x speed works fine too.

(looks like i can’t embed more than 5 videos, gosh darn it, so i’ll get creative for the rest)

I Debunked Every "Body Language Expert" on Youtube (münecat)

i’ve been starving for a good video that covered this topic and this one does the job pretty well. granted, it’s presented in a humorous way you might not like (i’d say just skip those sections), the audio quality is surprisingly not good (maybe watching it not on headphones could help?), and the person who talks is british (i can’t do anything about that, sorry), but it’s very well researched and worth it for the information it presents alone. i’d even say it’s a must watch if you’re in any way keeping up with celebrity “drama”, since we both know you won’t read any of the papers münecat presents in her video.

viewing recommendation: i have a short attention span when watching long videos like these, so i did it while doing mindless stuff on the side and switching back to the video whenever i deemed it appropriate. 1.25x could be a little overwhelming in certain sections.

The Lesbian Gaze (verilybitchie)

i’ve taken a likening to verilybitchie’s videos because, although i do not always agree with her opinions, i can always appreciate how they bring a fresh perspective to different media and historical events. i cannot tell you how BORED i am of 15 minute videos about topics that have about the same substance as me searching said topic on twitter and reading the top 10 tweets about it. i really like how the video uses this interesting premise to actually say really interesting things about the male gaze and movies about queer women. and i would say, don’t stop there: maybe verity’s already talked about some other topic or media you’re interested about, and whatever her takes are, they’re never boring.

viewing recommendation: gaze is in the title, so watching the video is actually crucial to its content. however, the video is heavily censored for very obvious reasons. they do have a non-censored version available, although you’d have to sign to their patreon to get it.

from my fair lady to he's all garbage (julia cudney)

i can say julia’s content has aged as she has: while her first videos were very nitpicky, cinemasins style of rapid-fire vapid criticism, now she’s put on the work to have a really interesting video analyzing the media that inspired “she’s all that” and its very recent gender-bent remake. you can be a hater™ while also learning about other works that are crucial in understanding the trope “she’s all that” borrows from. we all win.

viewing recommendation: i am very fond of julia’s editing. maybe it’s because she just strikes the zillennial style that caters specifically to Me, but i do recommend watching the video to get the most out of it. and as usual, 1.25x speed is a welcome tool.

YMS: The Lion King (Part 1) (YourMovieSucksDOTorg)

if you have ever encountered adam’s channel before it’s probably because you can’t resist to the innate clickbaitery of his channel name, and i’ll admit i’m not fond of some of his content. i don’t like to waste time with people that think movies are trash because they have a few plot holes or some other bazillion nitpicks you can poke through it. it’s the same reason why i tend to avoid discussions on one piece of media above 4 hours: to me, a video that long has long lost its value and only wants the credits to say “hey, i once made a 5 hour long video essay :D”. some of adam’s YMS videos fall on that trap and it infuriates me, as i feel like my time has been lost. but his video on the lion king 2019 remake is a genuine, loving exploration of how great the original work is - and how it remains one of the best animated movies of all time - all while tearing its cash-grabbing remake to shreds for not understanding what made the movie great in the first place. a MUST watch if you also hate these soulless “live-action” remakes.

viewing recommendation: there’s a lot of value in what’s shown on screen (especially considering how lifeless the remake looks), but some sections make use of the editing and production better than others. you be the judge of that. and 1.25x speed is a good tool to keep the pacing bearable.

[cesiousblue]

This reads like a cool rational point of view, but it's a dangerous idea that art cannot change you as a person. Ideas like this encourage willful anti-intellectualism.

"a better person" is also a pretty loaded phrase. I think you're defining "better" as morally better?

Not all art has a lesson to tell and I don't think it needs to, but different art is good at teaching different things.

As far as I know, Tolkien wasn't trying to teach anyone about racism with Lord of the Rings. He wrote it with inbuilt biases. What he was doing was writing a book about a man experiencing trauma and coming home again changed, because that was his experience of going to war and returning home. Whether that was an intentional lesson from him or not, through reading and engaging with Lord of the Rings, you are gaining an empathetic understanding of that feeling. This might have an effect or your attitude towards things like trauma and war.

Art, more than anything, is a way to engage with the experiences of others. It is an empathy generator.

Look at the idea of Inoculation Theory - the idea is that when given a weak argument, people tend to double down on already held beliefs. So when wanting to change the ideas of others, it is best to either offer strong engaging information to change the belief OR offer information earlier that gives them the tools to combat the belief when it is presented to them the first time.

so, for example: it is easier to give someone information about how trans women are normal people just struggling like the rest of us BEFORE they have latched onto transphobic beliefs. Afterwards, they need consistent and strong arguments to change that belief.

Art is good at both of those things, but especially the confronting people with a diverse variety of ideas. This is why representation in media is such an huge issue. This is why books get banned. Because if you remove the art and experiences of a group of people, its easier to dehumanize them or create false narratives. Racist parents want books about black people removed from schools because they don't want their children to encounter the history and perspectives of black people in a way that promotes empathy and understanding.

On a basic level, that empathy and resonance is what people are gaining from art. I would argue that a person with more empathy is a morally better person.

(Art can also unlock vocabulary that effects change- see: a child reading about sexual abuse finally being able to put words to their experiences to another adult. or what i experienced as a teen: growing up in a very conservative area, reading a book that included a bi character, and realizing that was me)

I agree that being taught critical thinking skills can be an important addition to this- people that know about logical fallacies are less likely to fall for them, and being able to analyze literature and art can give you insight that you might not otherwise receive.

Reading theory and analysis can change the way you look at the world and your moral attitude towards those around you. It can expose you to entirely new systems of belief that you had never considered before, and that's valuable. But those transformative ideas can also grow naturally from the consumption of art that is engaging with those same ideas.

I think what you may have been trying to say in your post was essentially 'being able to analyze the racist content of Lord of the Rings doesn't make me a better person than someone who can't' but I think you're simplifying this idea too much and tossing aside the idea that art can be transformative even without a critical reading.

one thing i will say is that consuming art cannot make you a better person. it can only make you more interesting at parties

[travoltacustom]

The Presentation of Hifumi’s Trauma

I’ve been thinking on how Hifumi’s trauma has been presented for years now, and with the release of Bad Ass Temple VS Matenro, I feel like now’s as good a time as any to give my thoughts on this.

Note: This is in no way a defense of KR for the presentation of Hifumi’s trauma, but it is an analysis of such. I’m open to discussion on this and you’re free to disagree with me at any point on this. Most of this was also written BEFORE the release of the album, save for the last section.

CW: Mentions of abuse, trauma and rape + spoilers of the MTR dramatrack

I hear a lot that the presentation of Hifumi’s trauma is a ‘poor attempt at humour’, but I don’t exactly think it’s that simple. It is still a presentation of trauma, but it’s not portrayed as humorous in comparison to the rest of the humour of the series.

NARRATIVE

Hifumi panics when he sees women. He is unable to do anything until women are removed from the scene - but these instances are hardly ever the focus of the scene. It’s mostly used as a scene cutter to progress the story. When Chuo enters, Hifumi’s panic cuts off the situation and the focus shifts straight to the women. When the women find Hifumi, Doppo, Gentaro and Dice, Hifumi’s jacket is taken away to shift focus off of the women and to have Gentaro and Dice speak. Rather, Hifumi’s panic at these times are plot movers and not the focal point of the scene. Sadly, they can be seen as plot devices, but it’s not supposed to be seen as humour.

In addition to this, the ‘hysterical’ screaming (for lack of a better word) in the presence of women is limited to the dramatracks. In the manga and the anime, Hifumi runs away/removes himself from the presence of women. The purpose of Hifumi’s hysteria in the dramatracks is for visualisation purposes as there’s no visual aids - the reactions to women are toned down in the anime and manga. With this, it’s easier to believe that the anime and manga is the ‘intended’ portrayal of his reactions as the dramatrack has to make up for what isn’t seen.

PRESENTATION

The narrative is very aware that Hifumi’s trauma affects him badly. It’s a panic response. But it’s not the same as a panic attack. We know how awful the presentation of such can be, and it’s definitely something triggering for a lot of people. Personally, I would feel horrible to see him have a panic attack every time he saw a woman. KR doesn’t want to make his discomfort the focus of the scene either. Simply put, I think his trauma response is a part of the scene, but has less plot purpose than what is going on around it. 

Trauma can be presented in different ways, but it’s more controlled to see only a glimpse of how trauma has affected Hifumi. There are other ways of showing this trauma and how it’s affected Hifumi that HPMI has already covered: Hifumi being unable to take off his suit jacket, behavioural change when wearing the jacket, his extremely warped perception of danger when his life is threatened etc. He’s spent 10 years adapting to the trauma and is in a stage of recovery as he’s going to confront his said abuser. If we were compounding this plot point with an idea of a Hifumi that is always having panic attacks, then we would have a Hifumi that is clearly not ready to deal with what he wants.

COMPARISON

We know the writers can portray trauma as such from Jyushi’s backstory. If we remember the fandom response, there were people who were legitimately triggered to varying degrees by what happened to Jyushi’s grandmother and the severe bullying he suffered. Really, I believe that Hifumi’s trauma hasn’t been the forefront of scenes because narratively it’s not the time for this to happen yet.

There seems to be a ‘trauma-porn’ narrative around the need to have Hifumi’s trauma played out ‘correctly. Trauma porn is media that showcases a group’s pain and trauma in excessive amounts for the sake of entertainment. There’s no need right now to show the extent of how badly Hifumi has been affected, because his trauma isn’t the focal point of the story or his character. His past is about to be shown, but it shouldn’t be what defines Hifumi as a character. And even more importantly so, there’s no ‘right’ version of trauma to portray.

HONOBONO

[ This section is written post Bad Ass Temple VS Matenro’s dramatrack.]

There are no redeeming qualities to Honobono, the source of Hifumi’s trauma. She’s despised by Chuohku and kept around for her ‘usefulness’, and Doppo was unsure of Hifumi going to confront his own abuser. However, in the recent dramatrack, Hifumi’s power is taken away from him in Honobono forcing herself into his space. This is the first time we’ve ever seen Hifumi have an explosion of emotions; ‘a typical image of a panic attack’. It is an audibly uncomfortable scene, just as Jyushi’s backstory was to read. There are different levels to trauma responses that HPMI has shown us with the 1st season’s Hifumi with short moments, but this instance is long and drawn out with guttural screaming.

HPMI was always perfectly capable of showing trauma, but for a listener, to hear this sort of occurrence every time around a woman would be potentially harmful. At this moment, Hifumi was nearly completely paralysed, suffering a breakdown of his identity by switching pronouns and screaming (similar to Gentaro’s breakdown at the insult of his clothes). It is difficult to listen to this. I don’t believe you would’ve wanted to hear this every time Hifumi was reminded of Honobono. We’ve even learned that the abuse might not have been dealt directly to Hifumi but to his family - we see Hifumi’s love for his family here in being so torn by her actions, and how trauma does not have to deal with someone directly either.  However, the first instances of Hifumi’s trauma were more ‘digestible’ for a viewer, and they set us up for this moment. It was good that Hifumi’s panic responses were less heavy than the blow we’ve been dealt with this dramatrack.

In meeting Hifumi, Honobono greets her with “Hi-Fu-Mi”, just like how Hifumi says his own name in songs. It is most likely that Honobono said his name like this when they were in highschool; for Hifumi to use it in his songs now can be seen as a reclamation of his identity, as now Honobono can’t use his own name against him. Hifumi has spent years recovering from her, and seeing small hints of how he’s trying to move on from that time is a legitimately good way to understand the recovery from trauma.

WHAT IS IT?

The HPMI fandom seemed to have an ‘obsession’ with what exactly traumatised Hifumi up until this point. Most believed that it would have been sexual abuse/rape, given that he fears the opposite gender, and it wouldn’t have been the first time sexual themes have appeared in HPMI (the trafficked women at the start of BB/MTC’s manga). However, to think that ‘there is only one sort of trauma that can cause Hifumi’s pain’ is a dangerous idea. Almost anything can be traumatising, and almost anything can be a trigger. 

There’s no need to theorise ‘what is good enough’ to be a trauma for him. To fear women, it can simply be that a woman has done something bad to him - which we see is Honobono. When we hear women fearing men because a man did something bad to them, we don’t theorise what exactly happened to her. There’s the automatic assumption that gendered fear is the result of sexual abuse, when in reality, it can be any manner of abuse that has caused this.

OPINIONS

So I don’t think KR is portraying Hifumi’s trauma as humorous. It’s definitely awkward, but the narrative has constantly made it clear that he’s in a state of discomfort that stems from trauma and Doppo and Jakurai always do their best to move him out of those situations without drawing too much attention. Nobody in the story laughs at him, save for Asunaro, who’s an ill-mannered child without sensitivity towards both Doppo and Hifumi, and Honobono, the source of his trauma. Those who don’t understand Hifumi in the adult cast however only find confusion in him. 

There’s no ‘best’ portrayal of trauma in any media. But it’s clear that HPMI isn’t trying to be malicious or poke fun at any sort of trauma at all. If anything, I think the portrayal of it so far has been relatively ‘easy’ on common audiences that don’t explore such media, helping people to realise how trauma can manifest without forcing others who do have trauma to realise their pained experience in this media. Hifumi has been painted as someone relatable to those with trauma because he’s still a man who’s capable of doing his best while still stumbling along his way to recovery. Traumatised shouldn’t be the descriptor of Hifumi, but he is a character that has been traumatised.

While Honobono and her abuse is an integral part of Hifumi’s backstory, she does not define him as a person. To portray Hifumi as a strong character, despite moments of trauma responses, was a suitable choice in treating him respectably. 

[flufffysocks]

let's talk about andi mack's worldbuilding

sorry this took forever to make! i've been pretty busy with school stuff and i kind of lost my inspiration for a bit, but i ultimately really enjoyed writing it! i wish i could've included more pics (tumblr has a max of 10 per post), and it kinda turned from less of a mini analysis to more of an extremely long rant... but i hope it's still a fun read!

i've been rewatching the show over the past few weeks (thanks again to @disneymack for the link!), and i’ve been noticing a lot that i never did the first time around. this is really the first time i’ve watched the show from start to finish since it aired, and it honestly feels so different this time - probably a combination of the fact that i’m not as focused on plot and can appreciate the show as a whole, and also that the fandom is much, much smaller now, so there’s a lot less noise. so the way i’m consuming this show feels super different than it did the first time, but the show itself doesn’t - it’s just as warm and comforting to me as it was the first time around, if not more so.

i think a lot of that can be attributed to andi mack’s “worldbuilding”. i’m not quite sure that this is the right word in this context, to be honest, because i mostly see it used in reference to fantasy and sci-fi universes, but it just sort of feels right to me for andi mack, because you can really tell how much love and care went into constructing this universe. for clarity, worldbuilding is “the process of creating an imaginary world” in its simplest sense. there’s two main types: hard worldbuilding, which involves inventing entire universes, languages, people, cultures, places, foods, etc. from scratch (think “lord of the rings” or “dune”), and soft worldbuilding, in which the creators don’t explicitly state or explain much about the fictional universe, but rather let it’s nature reveal itself as the story progresses (think studio ghibli films). andi mack to me falls in the soft worldbuilding category. even though it takes place in a realistic fiction universe, there’s a lot of aspects to it that are inexplicably novel in really subtle ways.

so watching the show now, i’ve noticed that the worldbuilding comes primarily from two things - setting and props, and oftentimes the both of them in tandem (because a big part of setting in filmmaking does depend on the props placed in it!).

one of the most obvious examples is the spoon. it really is a sort of quintessential, tropic setting in that it's the main gang's "spot", which automatically gives it a warm and homey feel to it. and its set design only amplifies this:

the choice to make it a very traditional 50s-style diner creates a very nostalgic, retro feel to it, which is something that's really consistent throughout the show, as you'll see. from the round stools at the bar, to the booths, to the staff uniforms, this is very obvious. the thing that i found especially interesting about it though is the choice of color. the typical 50s diner is outfitted with metallic surfaces and red accented furnishings, but the spoon is very distinctly not this.

instead, it's dressed in vibrant teal and orange, giving it a very fresh and modern take on a classic look. so it still maintains that feeling of being funky and retro, but that doesn't retract from the fact that the show is set distinctly in modern times.

of course, this could just be a one-off quirky set piece, but this idea of modernizing and novelizing "retro" things is a really common motif throughout the show. take red rooster records. i mean, it's a record shop - need i say more? it's obviously a very prominent store in shadyside, at least for the main characters, but there's no apparent reason why it is (until season 2 when bowie starts working there, and jonah starts performing there). a lot of the time, though, it functions solely as a record shop. vinyl obviously isn't the most practical or convenient way of listening to music, but it's had its resurgence in pop culture even in the real world, mostly due to its aesthetic value, so it's safe to say that it serves the same purpose in the andi mack universe.

the fringe seems to be nostalgic of a different era, specifically the Y2K/early 2000s period (because it's meant to be bex's territory and symbolic of who she used to be, and its later transformation into cloud 10 is representative of her character arc, but that's beside the point). to be honest, exactly what this store was supposed to be always confused me. it was kind of a combination party store/clothing store/makeup store/beauty parlor? i think that's sort of the point of it though, it's supposed to feel very grunge-y and chaotic (within the confines of a relatively mellow-toned show, of course), and it's supposed to act as a sort of treasure chest of little curios that both make the place interesting and allow the characters to interact with it.

and, of course, there's andi shack. this is really the cherry on top of all of andi mack's sets, just because it's so distinctly andi. it serves such amazing narrative purpose for her (ex. the storyline where cece and ham were going to move - i really loved this because it highlights its place in the andi mack universe so well, and i'm a sucker for the paper cranes shot + i'm still salty that sadie's cranes didn't make it into the finale) and it's the perfect reflection of andi's character development because of how dynamic it is (the crafts and art supplies can get moved around or switched out, and there's always new creations visible).

going back to the nostalgia motif though, the "shack" aspect of it always struck me as very treehouse-like. personally, whenever i think of treehouses, there's this very golden sheen of childhood about it, if that makes sense. i've always seen treehouses in media as a sort of shelter for characters' youthful innocence and idealistic memories. for example, the episode "up a tree" from good luck charlie, the episode "treehouse" from modern family, and "to all the boys 2" all use a treehouse setting as a device to explore the character's desire to hold onto their perfect image of their childhood (side note: this exact theme is actually explored in andi mack in the episode "perfect day 2.0"!). andi shack is no exception to this, but it harnesses this childhood idealism in the same way that it captures the nostalgia of the 50s in the spoon, or the early 2000s in the fringe. it's not some image of a distant past being reflected through that setting; it's very present, and very alive, because it reflects andi as she is in the given moment.

some honorable mentions of more one-off settings include the ferris wheel (from "the snorpion"), the alley art gallery (from "a walker to remember"), SAVA, the color factory (from "it's a dilemna"), and my personal favorite, the cake shop (from "that syncing feeling").

[every time i watch this episode i want to eat those cakes so bad]

these settings have less of a distinctly nostalgic feel (especially the color factory, which is a very late 2010s, instagram era setting), but they all definitely have an aura of perfection about them. andi mack is all about bright, colorful visuals, and these settings really play to that, making the andi mack universe seem really fun and inviting, and frankly very instagrammable (literally so, when it comes to the color factory!).

props, on the other hand, are probably a much less obvious tool of worldbuilding. they definitely take up less space in the frame and are generally not as noticeable (i'm sure i'll have missed a bunch that will be great examples, but i'm kind of coming up with all of this off the top of my head), but they really tie everything together.

for example, bex's box, bex's polaroid, and the old tv at the mack apartment (the tv is usually only visible in the periphery of some shots, so you might not catch it at first glance) all complement that very retro aesthetic established through the settings (especially the polaroid and the tv, because there's really no good reason that the characters would otherwise be using these).

besides this, andi's artistic nature provides the perfect excuse for plenty of colorful, crafty props to amplify the visuals and the tone. obviously, as i discussed before, andi shack is the best example of this because it's filled with interesting props. but you also see bits of andi's (and other people's) crafts popping up throughout the show (ex. the tape on the fridge in the mack apartment, andi's and libby's headbands in "the new girls", walker's shoes, andi's phone case, and of course, the bracelet). not only does doing this really solidify this talent as an essential tenet of andi's character, but it also just makes the entirety of shadyside feel like an extension of andi shack. the whole town is a canvas for her crafts (or art, depending on how you want to look at it. i say it's both), and it immensely adds to shadyside's idealism. because who wouldn't want to live in a world made of andi mack's creations?

and, while it's not exactly a prop, the characters' wardrobe is undoubtedly a major influence on the show's worldbuilding. true to it's nature as a disney channel show, all of the characters are always dressed in exceptionally curated outfits of whatever the current trends are, making the show that much more visually appealing. i won't elaborate too much on this, because i could honestly write a whole other analysis on andi mack's fashion (my favorites are andi's and bex's outfits! and kudos to the costume designer(s) for creating such wonderful and in-character wardrobes!). but, i think it's a really really important aspect of how the show's universe is perceived, so it had to be touched upon.

[^ some of my favorite outfits from the show! i am so obsessed with andi's jacket in the finale, and i aspire to be at bex's level of being a leather jacket bisexual]

and lastly, phones. this is a bit of an interesting case (pun intended), because the way they're used fluctuates a bit throughout the show, but i definitely noticed that at least in the first season terri minsky tried to avoid using them altogether. these efforts at distancing from modern tech really grounds the show in it's idealist, nostalgia-heavy roots, so even when the characters start using their phones more later in the show, they don't alter the viewer's impression of the andi mack universe very much.

so, what does all of this have to do with worldbuilding? in andi mack's case, because it's set in a realistic universe and not a fantasy one, a lot of what sets it apart from the real world comes down to tone. because, as much as this world is based on our own, it really does feel separate from it, like an alternate reality that's just slightly more perfect than ours, which makes all the difference. it's the idealism in color and composition in andi mack's settings that makes it so unmistakably andi mack. even the weather is always sunny and perfect (which is incredibly ironic because the town is called shadyside - yes, i am very proud of that observation).

the andi mack universe resides somewhere in this perfect medium that makes it feel like a small town in the middle of nowhere (almost like hill valley in 1955 from "back to the future"), but at the same time like an enclave within a big city (because of its proximity to so many modern, unique, and honestly very classy looking establishments). it is, essentially, an unattainable dream land that tricks you into believing it is attainable because it's just real enough.

all this to say, andi mack does an amazing job of creating of polished, perfect world for its characters. this is pretty common among disney channel and nickelodeon shows, but because most other shows tend to be filmed in a studio with three-wall sets, andi mack is really set apart from them in that it automatically feels more real and tangible. it has its quintessential recurring locations, but it has far more of them (most disney/nick shows usually only have 3-4 recurring settings), and it has a lot more one-off locations. it's also a lot more considerate when it comes to its props, so rather than the show just looking garish and aggressively trendy, it has a distinctive style that's actually appropriate to the characters and the story. overall this creates the effect of expanding the universe, making shadyside feel like it really is a part of a wider world, rather than an artificial bubble. it's idealism is, first and foremost, grounded in reality, and that provides a basis for its brilliant, creative, and relatable storytelling.

tl;dr: andi mack's sets and props give it a very retro and nostalgic tone which makes its whole universe seem super perfect and i want to live there so bad!!

[thefirstknife]

Go off! It's the Cinemasins Effect. There is no literary analysis, just listing of facts like you're reading a Wikipedia summary. Devoid of accounting for personality traits, external influences, basic human (or alien) contradictory nature, unreliable narration (always present in Destiny), multiple points of view that are clashing (because that's how the world works), etc., these facts tell us little about the actual story so it's easy to misinterpret obvious solutions.

A listed fact might say "Eramis endangered her own house by opening the Vex portal on Europa" and then whenever Eramis talks about caring for her people, someone who engages with only the list might think "That makes no sense!" And it does, if we go deeper and account for her desperation and corruption and how much she did not understand what was happening to her. She desperately tried proving that she has agency, but it was the exact opposite; while fleeing from the Traveler claiming not wanting to be its pawn, she was actually the pawn of the Witness. She was used by the Witness to get us, the real target, to be tempted with stasis and the moment she lost (no longer worthy of being a part of the final shape), she was discarded. However, not entirely, because she still had to remain a pawn potentially to be used later when the Witness needs a convenient and desperate soldier to enact its plans under a threat of a total annihilation of her people; because that's what the Witness does. She literally commented on this, how the Witness is "punishing her" by turning her friends into Scorn.

But we never see even a fraction of this kind of analysis in the most popular circles and "lore masters" will always prioritise just listing events and doing "Ending EXPLAINED!" videos with zero character motivations or analysis mentioned. I won't even go into how much of Destiny story is obviously constricted by technical elements and the type of game it is, which is something people forget all the time and expect Destiny to suddenly have a singleplayer RPG level of game design which simply will not happen. A lot of the perceived faults in the narrative are almost always of technical nature and writers themselves have spoken about this. I feel like that has to be included in any analysis worth a damn because Destiny's story is trapped within the confines of the genre of media it is in (first person looter shooter); while the story is a major part of the game's essence, gameplay comes first, always. If the story has to be constrained for gameplay purposes, it will be. If it has to be constrained because there's not enough time or resources to add more dialogues or cutscenes or to expand the scope of every character or to create a more complex narrative, it will be. Given all of this, I think the team has done a great job for Eramis over the years and kept her arc as consistent as possible which made this ending easy to predict and satisfying because the arc has concluded as it was intended.

At the end of the day, I don't even mind if people have a personal reason to think "Actually I would never have forgiven Eramis." I'm sure there are characters in-setting who think that; either because of a lack of knowledge about her (if you're just some random citizen, you don't know the details of her corruption or her internal feelings) or because you were personally victimised by her (a lot of Eliksni fled House Salvation because of what she did on Europa that endangered their lives; they may never be ready to forgive her or accept her). That's completely fine. As a matter of fact, I expect it! It adds depth to the story.

The issue is that these people usually go about it by blaming the writers and saying that the writers told their own story wrong. That this decision was objectively incorrect or somehow bad for the narrative or a retcon or out of character or whatever. And it's just not. We, the players, who have all information and everyone's internal feelings presented in the story and lore books, know that this was the intended character arc for Eramis since the moment she didn't get killed at the end of Beyond Light.

Eramis Executors are up in arms that our favorite, bitter, lesbian crab didn’t receive a bullet to her head to no one’s surprise. What happened to the overarching themes involving forgiveness and mending the wounds of the past to build a better future for everyone resonating with people? Does the Traveler and what it has been representing for 10 years mean nothing when it comes to Eramis? Were we supposed to abandon the power of friendship? Is punishment with no consideration the only way of dealing with those who have committed wrong acts that people know of?

[ladyofthenoodle]

Ramble anon kind of here again - I will try to keep it short and space things out a little this time asdksjhdf but I was reading through all of the analysis threads for Marinette and the different ways ADHD presents itself for her, and I think it did actually help me get a better grasp on her character and how she views situations, which is something that has kept me from attempting to writing fanfic because I was leery on misrepresenting her thought process when I couldn't seem to get it to click in the writing the way I can do for other characters (Alya's very distinctive voice has actually been super fun, and of course Adrien is easiest for me). But one of the comments was about trying to structure friendships and how some attempts on that front could appear 'off-putting' or overly structured and uncanny to neurotypicals, and my mind immediately went to the episode where Kagami was trying to make friends with Marinette and following along an app on friendmaking, and was wondering if that was maybe more of another example of (maybe not ADHD specifically) but someone wanting to reach out and not having the natural skillset for doing so, and doing the best that they knew how with the tools available to them? And once Marinette had learned that was Kagami's situation, she did her best to reach back and understand Kagami, to be her friend and try to help her build that skillset with those tools available to her?

That seems to be what a large portion of the fandom needs to keep in mind for Marinette right now, maybe. That she's doing the best she can with her limited knowledge of the situation and the tools available to her, either mentally or emotionally, (and that when she does gain the knowledge or tools to solve an emotional hurt, she will do her best to resolve it, because she cares about her friends and family, which has been made clear in the show time and time again) and the fandom should maybe be extending the same courtesy to her (and those who see themselves in her and are trying their best, too).

Potentially myself included, as I try and remember what I sent in my previous ramble about Adrien noticing that Marinette launches into fixing things because that's what she knows how to do and is good at, even if that might not be what a situation needs in the moment (on the topic of him considering her as a potential confidant for his secret identity and running down the list of who is available to him) - she's trying her best, and he appreciates the heck out of her for that (a lot of people do, in universe and out), even if it is something that could feed into miscommunication, as they have, or will continue to have, different ways of expressing what they need, and will need to work to meet in the middle on the things that they can work on to resolve any conflicts that may arise because of it, and be understanding of each other when things simply don't align in a way that works for both of them.

There was also a comment that was about how Adrien might not necessarily be presented as autistic, but his situation with his father is similar to a lot of situations of abuse from parents when it comes to neurodivergent children and my brain went YES this is the connection it is in words now and so I just wanted to express my appreciation for the fact that these topics are being brought up and identified and explored and defended (even if it might be exhausting and seem discouraging to have to do so in the first place) and that even though the fandom may be a bit divided over the interpretation of certain characters right now, we have a piece of media that makes these situations part of the narrative and demonstrates the effects they have (both positive and negative) so that in the overarching story, when it finally reaches its conclusion, they can maybe showcase good ways of establishing different methods of emotional communication and the different levels that they can occur at, and ways to reach across any gaps that may form simply by virtue of people having different emotional needs, and not because any one party is purposefully trying to make that communication difficult. Because neither of them are fueling this conflict on purpose; neither of them are intending harm to the other, even if that might be the result due to different factors wildly out of their own control. And when they get the chance to fix it, they definitely will.

Apologies if this is another long ramble needlessly clogging your askbox, but I just wanted to clarify I was trying to look at the character's actions objectively for the last ramble, and I'm sorry if I ended up misconstruing any of Marinette's problem-solver tendencies in a way that could seem negative as inherent to her character as a whole ;-; (and if you just haven't seen it / had time to respond to it yet I'm so sorry for the double ask aslkfhasf I am very patient, I swear)

ramble anon i am definitely going to reply to both your asks and i’m sorry for not getting to it sooner. as you might have gathered from the adhd post i also struggle with it and part of that means looking at a long ask and being like “i will reply to that Very Soon” and then i… don‘t 😂 though yesterday i was at least posting creative content instead of just scrolling through things (this is unrelated to your ask but i’m proud of myself for it)

anyways your previous ask (which i will respond to sometime between an hour and um 11 months) seemed to be mostly an analysis of how adrien is interpreting marinette, so no worries on misconstruing her! adrien, who is also 14 and dealing with his own trauma, is not going to effortlessly understand marinette’s mindset and shouldn’t be expected to any more than she is going to effortlessly understand the effect of his trauma on his psyche. even adults have a hard time understanding people whose brain works differently than theirs or who have very different backgrounds, but we can learn and people should be judged by their effort to understand different viewpoints, especially when it’s one they’ve had to reason to develop an understanding of it before. like marinette, even though i knew about parental abuse in abstract, i didn’t really understand how it affects people until i met (and dated) people who have experienced it. so i might project extremely hard onto the adhd girl with supportive parents who is learning to understand a boy with a very different background and very different coping because i went through that and i’m certain i’ve fucked some things up in the process. and they have interpreted me wrong too!

kagami using the app is a great example of something that might be off putting to a neurotypical person, though you’re right that it’s not adhd in particular. while i don’t have a strong headcanon for kagami the way i do for marinette, she definitely reads as autistic to me in that scene specifically, and i think it’s a surprisingly good example of how two neurotypes might interact. marinette initially does find kagami’s behavior off putting, partially because marinette is already inclined to dislike kagami but also because marinette has had far more time to learn to mask in a way that’s acceptable to peers (who expect you to be fun and casual) while kagami has only learned to mask for adults (whose expectations are more about being well behaved). and so marinette interprets kagami as being rude and fake! but when she sees the app she realizes “oh, this person is Like Me” and is able to very quickly reframe everything kagami has done.

marinette doesn’t seem to use a lot of external tools to manage her relationships yet, partially because she didn’t have a lot of close friendships until recently and partially because most of her friends are in her class so there’s no “out of sight out of mind” thing. kagami is probably the only person she has to go out of her way to maintain a relationship with and i think marinette does make special effort for kagami because kagami needs it (based on mister pigeon 72 anyway). of course now that ladynoir is having issues marinette will eventually realize she needs to make that special effort for chat noir, too. because accommodation goes both ways! because you can’t change your adhd but you can say “this person is important to me and i am going to use the tools i have to make this relationship work despite this.” your partner just has to understand that these tools might not always be foolproof and also that things like setting reminders of your phone to have a conversation with someone isn’t because we see it as a chore but because it’s so important to us that we can’t risk forgetting to do it. which i don’t think adrien will have a problem with at all once he understands because he’s a very understanding person. he’d be touched as long as marinette was able to communicate the fact that this is an expression of love and not an obligation or burden to her.

i see a lot of people headcanon adrien being autistic and even have gotten fic comments on how i wrote adrien in a way that people found resonated with their experiences with autism. which made me think a lot because while i totally welcome that interpretation, it wasn’t something that crossed my mind while writing! so i started thinking about why that would be. and in that story, adrien has an extreme response to curtains being installed in his bedroom, which to me was him reacting to the total lack of control over his own life and not having any other way to deal with it or express it. but of course that’s an experience common to a lot of neurodivergent people! in canon, the thing that struck me was the moment gabriel told him he’d had too many emotions, because boy did that resonate. so i think adrien is representative of a lot of neurodivergent experiences and that is true regardless of whether you headcanon him that way or not. which also makes him a good match for marinette in the long run because even if their brains work differently, they do still have a lot of common experiences that will help them understand each other in the long run