#i see a character with a particular experience → i jewishize them

[post-punk-revival]

I think I've actually read this side-comic before and even then I was like. Oh this is one of those stories. The kind that hits me right in the Jewishness

She's assimilated... she has a cultural disconnect just like me....

[fmluder24]

The X Files Loves Dead Jews (Part 1/4): Fetishization of Jewish Trauma in the Early Myth Arc

This multi-part meta, starting with an analysis of the “Anasazi”/“The Blessing Way”/“Paperclip” segment of the myth arc, is a look at the ways in which Jews and Jewishness are treated in TXF canon, and the ways in which we (or at least a version of us) are fundamental to the story as it is actually told in canon, and simultaneously made invisible by, frankly, bad writing and a fandom that missed a good deal of rich and difficult subtext.

The title is a reference to the book People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn. The basic thesis of the book is the way in which Jews figure in discourse  and are exploited for political and rhetorical ends in pop culture and arguments about many topics, without anyone caring about living, breathing Jews, and how dehumanizing that is. Basically, this quote from the Wikipedia page just about sums it up. 

“Author Dara Horn recounts an inspiring event for the book was at a Nashville quiz bowl tournament in the 1990s. Horn shared a room with two Mississippians, who stayed up late watching Mister Rogers. The Southerners were utterly convinced that Rogers was speaking directly to them through their TV screens — just like they absolutely knew that Jesus loved them. They waited for Horn to concur. When she instead mumbled something about synagogue, they looked, stunned: "I thought Hitler said you all were dark." Reflecting on that experience, Horn would realize that what people knew about Jews is that people killed them.”

Jews are fundamental to TXF, but really only in the pervasiveness of negative tropes about us, and that people like to kill us. No living, breathing expression of Jewishness is firmly found within the show, although as this meta series will explain, there is an ambiguous one lying in plain sight. We will get to him in time. Much of what can be said about the poor writing around Jewishness in canon can be applied to how other marginalized communities are written of by a really ignorant writing team, and I will mention some of that throughout this series of metas, but will focus on the treatment of Jews overall. I’m not the best person to speak to the other components of racist lore, but I hope this project inspires people to write and read other meta on these themes.

For the purposes of this meta “early myth arc” refers to the pre-cancer arc phase of lore. As the show went on, it became more and more about sexual violence towards Scully in particular. Of course, at this point Scully’s abduction was a major part of the lore, but the way in which it would consume her character arc and the way in which the myth arc would center on her more and more tightly was yet to be revealed. This shift in TXF was to the detriment of both the myth arc and the character of Dana Scully. The topic of the horror of the medical rape(s) and how badly it was treated in canon is the subject of countless metas and internet articles, so this meta will focus on a different aspect of the myth arc that I don’t see discussed as frequently or in as much depth as the (white) feminist angle. 

Disclaimer: I have only watched the first 8 seasons and first movie of TXF. I have never heard a single good thing about the rest of the show or the second movie, so I will not watch it. This meta series only touches on events in the first 8 seasons.

Let’s get into a summary of this segment of the myth arc. If you don’t need a blow-by-blow replay, you can skip to the analysis section. 

Episode Summary

This is a jam packed series of episodes. I have 1200 words worth of notes, so I’m going to summarize the plot beats briefly so this meta can focus on the problems I am setting out to describe. They use Navajo throughout the episode, but my research says that community prefers Diné, so I will try to use that throughout. If that’s incorrect, my apologies!

Let’s start with “Anasazi.” We start with breakfast with a Diné family that we can guess is a grandfather (Albert Hosteen), father (I cannot find his name anywhere which is… interesting. If y’all know it sound off in the replies) and son (Eric Hosteen). Eric is going riding. The boy returns later with an alien corpse Albert says to put back. 

We see a hacker get into the state department files about UFOs. We see a bunch of what we can assume are people in The Syndicate or involved with it calling each other about the hack and something they are calling the MJ file. The Lone Gunmen show up at a sick Mulder’s house and tell him the hacker is now on the run and wants to meet him. Mulder meets with the hacker, who apparently didn’t take any precautions or think through what he was doing before doing it. A Chris Carter self-insert, I see. 

Mulder shows Scully the files, which he then freaks out about because he thinks they’re gibberish. 

Dude.

Scully has a brain and says she thinks it’s Diné. In the next scene, Skinner confronts Mulder about the files. Mulder denies having them and takes a swing at Skinner, who bends Mulder over his knee and spanks him, metaphorically. Scully then has to come to a disciplinary meeting about Mulder’s behavior, and the meeting basically sets up that he’s going to be fired for this. We then see Bill Mulder and CSM talking at Bill’s house. Basically, everything has gone to shit because of the hacker, but CSM is still trying to protect Mulder. 

Scully goes to Mulder’s apartment and wakes up a sick Mulder. She’s worried they are going to get fired, and wants reassurance that this is worth it, so Mulder puts up the X in the window to summon Mr. X. Scully goes to research about the Diné language and eventually gets put in touch with Albert Hosteen, who was a code-talker in WW2. 

Mulder’s dad calls him and asks him to come. Mulder leaves his apartment, Scully shows up and someone shoots at her, ostensibly thinking she is Mulder. At Bill Mulder’s house, he says some cryptic shit to Mulder about never throwing in with other people’s politics, how he did it and regrets it. That Mulder’s going to find out terrible things about him. God, how I wish he would just tell him something useful. But this is a Chris Carter episode! Mulder’s dad goes to the bathroom and Krycek kills him. Mulder finds the body and calls Scully, who lowkey thinks he did it but tries to convince Mulder to leave the crime scene so he won’t get arrested. He comes to her apartment because she tells him she got shot at at his apartment and sleeps there. 

Scully steals his gun to run ballistics on it to clear him. Mulder is pissed as hell over this. Scully’s doing her best, but I get why Mulder took it wrong. Scully figures out that the water in Mulder’s apartment is being poisoned and that’s why a woman shot her husband of thirty years earlier that day. In the parking lot of Mulder’s apartment, Krycek sneaks up on Mulder, but Mulder beats the shit out of him. Scully shows up and shoots Mulder to keep him from killing Krycek, who gets away. 

Scully takes Mulder to Albert Hosteen in New Mexico. He tells them the files are about an international conspiracy about aliens that started in the 1940s, and apparently Scully’s name is in them. Hosteen talks to Mulder about the Anasazi being abducted by aliens. (Eye roll). Eric takes Mulder to the area where he found the alien body. CSM calls Mulder and tells him Mulder’s father authorized the project, which he doesn’t explain. Mulder climbs down into a buried box car and calls Scully to tell her about the pile of gassed alien corpses he found. Scully tells him the documents are about Axis powers in the U.S. doing human experiments. Eric closes the lid suddenly as a helicopter with the CSM lands. The CSM’s underlings don’t see Mulder in the bunker. I’m pretty sure the implication is that he hid in the pile of bodies. This… is certainly a choice we will discuss later. The underlings toss a bomb in the bunker. End of episode.

On to “The Blessing Way,” and I will try to go faster this time. Hosteen has a monologue about “Indian” sayings about history and memory that we will return to later as well. After this, we learn with Scully that the government men beat the shit out of the Hosteen family for not telling them where Mulder is, as the government men did not find his remains in the boxcar after throwing the bomb. Scully goes to look for him in the boxcar, but when she leaves the area, she is intercepted by a helicopter and the files are taken from her. 

Scully is being put on leave for missing a meeting with Skinner. The two argue about what is going to happen next and what Skinner is able to do about it. Scully goes to the basement office, but the digital copy Mulder hid there is gone. Cut to the CSM trying to convince the rest of The Syndicate the Mulder is dead. Cut to the Diné finding Mulder and starting a ceremony to resurrect/resuscitate him. Frohike goes to Scully’s apartment and tells her the hacker has been killed.

The Diné ceremony leads to Mulder having these terribly written visions of Deep Throat and his father. I rewatched this scene three times and I simply retained none of the atrocious dialogue. During Deep Throat’s monologue, Mulder has a vision of the aliens being gassed with *hydrogen cyanide* and clawing against the walls, eventually finding a little hole they tried to get out of. This is ostensibly how Mulder survived the bomb. This vision is very important to the point I will discuss below. Bill Mulder has a stupid ass monologue about fate and choices and this is when I rolled my eyes so hard they fell out of my head. So many words to say nothing at all!

Scully goes to Skinner to tell him the hacker is dead, which is somehow going to clear Mulder’s name? Skinner pretty much shuts her down and just wants the tape which she doesn’t have. Cut to Scully just now finding out about the chip in her neck???  How would she not have known??? She tells Melissa about the chip and Melissa thinks she should go to therapy to unlock her memories. She tries, but it gets very intense, the therapist startles her and she leaves. Poor Scully :(

Cut to Mulder, who is fine now due to appropriated mysticism and plot armor. Scully, randomly, sees Skinner leaving her apartment building. She goes to bed and has a vision of Mulder telling her he’s back from the dead and ready to do the work together. 

Scully goes to Bill Mulder’s funeral, where the Well-Manicured Man basically tells her people are after her and might send someone she knows to kill her. 

Mulder goes to his mom’s house to show her pictures of The Syndicate and ask her questions, but she keeps refusing to look and saying she doesn’t remember. Scully leaves her apartment to go to Melissa’s, but Skinner intercepts her to talk and they go to Mulder’s apartment together. She pulls a gun on him because she’s convinced he’s there to kill her. Cut to Krycek shooting Melissa because he thinks she’s Scully. Boo, Krycek. Tomato tomato tomato. While Scully interrogates Skinner at gunpoint, she gets distracted for a second and he pulls a gun on her too. 

On to “Paper Clip.” We are almost done. We get another monologue from Hosteen, this one is about a white buffalo that is a good omen. 

Mulder burst into his apartment and instantly sides with Scully and pulls a gun on Skinner. LMAO. LMFAO even. Maggie is at the hospital with Melissa, who is gravely injured but still alive. Cut to The Lone Gunmen filling the audience in on “Operation Paperclip,” where Nazi scientists came over to the U.S. to work for the government. This was a real thing, but TXF is fictionalizing it. The guy standing next to Bill Mulder in the photo is Klemper, who is a fictional Nazi who did terrible experiments on Jews in particular. The shudder that passes through Duchovny as Langly explains this— me too, bro, me too. I am not confident that was an acting choice, as opposed to Duchovny being uncomfortable, but it’s very compelling. In this alternative history TXF is offering, the project continued into the 70s. Frohike tells Scully her sister was shot and Scully wants to go see her, but Mulder convinces her it’s too dangerous. 

Mulder and Scully go to meet Klemper. Scully confronts him about some of the terrible shit he did, which was nice to see from the token conservative of the duo. Klemper tells them where the photo was taken and the mathematical equation to use to get into the files. He then calls the WMM to tell him Mulder is alive. 

Cut to Hosteen at the hospital with Maggie and Melissa. Cut to Skinner trying to strike a deal about the tape. Cut to Mulder and Scully finding Scully’s file in the archive, then Samantha’s file, which used to be Mulder’s apparently. They get split up, goons show up to kill them, and eventually they sneak out the back. 

Skinner, Scully and Mulder argue in a diner about what to do about the tape. Scully decides that Skinner can start negotiating, but not actually give up the tape until Mulder says. Hosteen monologue time. The calf is sick and its mother died. This is bad. Skinner goes to the hospital and follows a mysterious man who was standing outside Melissa’s room. The man and Krycek jump him and steal the tape. Krycek escapes a car as it blows up. I still don’t know why? It doesn’t matter. 

The WMM, Mulder and Scully meet at Klemper’s, who is now mysteriously dead. The WMM fills them in on what Mulder thinks was the plan to create an alien human hybrid. Scully says this isn’t possible because DNA wasn’t discovered yet. (Once again, Carter’s attempt to write a smart person fails catastrophically because he is not a smart person). She thinks the WMM is feeding them a lie to prop up the Nazi agenda of human tests. That wasn’t the Nazi agenda— the Nazi agenda was a master race, but ok, Chris. Scully storms off. 

The WMM tells Mulder Samantha was taken as insurance to keep Bill Mulder from revealing the truth, and now Mulder is in danger. Krycek calls the CSM to tell him he’s alive. Teena tells Mulder Bill is the one who picked who would be insurance. Skinner tells the CSM Hosteen used oral Diné tradition to teach a bunch of men the contents of the file, so destroying the tape won’t do anything. The plot hinging on the U.S. government not killing a bunch of Native Americans is… exasperating but I suppose it is science fiction. Melissa dies.

Analysis

The invocation of the history of the Nazis for a sci-fi myth arc dehistoricizes the Nazis, making them into campy fictional villains rather than real people who harmed real people. Of course, the Nazis went after many groups, but it is absolutely undeniable that antisemitism and anti-Roma racism was fundamental to the entire project of Nazism and not a quirk of history. This problem is not isolated to these episodes— the later episode titled “Herrenvolk” also invokes this history. There is a similar critique to be made of “731” and “Nisei” and dehistorization of Japanese WW2 war crimes. In TXF’s telling of events, the legacy of German fascism is some goofy alien nonsense, and not the nationalistic fascism of the modern day. Of course, we live in a different time politically now, but it still creates this alternative history where the legacy reads totally differently and is removed from the actual historical legacy that we must constantly grapple with. 

Furthermore, the imagery invoked in the gassing on the aliens, desperately clawing at the concrete wall to get out of the small room they are trapped in is a conscious invocation of gas chambers. The decision to use hydrogen cyanide is deliberate. I only wonder why they didn’t go even further and label the canister Zyklon B, but we must be thankful for small mercies.

The writers might not have always known the tropes they were playing with, but in my opinion, this is too extended a sequence to be a coincidence. Surely even CC isn’t this ignorant. (He might be though. I do not believe he is a smart man.) To then add to that imagery by having Mulder (who we will get to in the final installment of The X Files Loves Dead Jews) hide in the pile of gassed corpses from the government who is trying to kill him is to reinforce Mulder’s association with these tropes. To what end is Mulder constantly martyred in ways that invoke historical Jewish suffering? We will get there. 

There is another element to this arc that I’m not sure they totally thought through and that’s the division of the concepts of memory and history. Here's a quotation that starts off "The Blessing Way."

 Hosteen: There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth.

There is something frustrating about things like “ancient Indian saying” rather than attribution to whichever actual community this idea comes from, assuming it comes from one at all and not CC’s brain. As I stated in the front matter, the problems in the portrayal of Jewishness are not isolated to Jewishness; they frequently apply to other marginalized groups, women, and general, deeper issues with CC’s writing in particular. Nevertheless, the concept of peoples who trust memory against peoples who trust history and seek to eradicate memory is quite poetic to me, and it’s actually a division that also exists in the Jewish world. There is a quote from the Chabad website by Mendel Kalmenson that encapsulates quite well the dynamic I am speaking of. 

“Put differently: History is made up of objective facts, and memory of subjective experience. As you might have guessed, Judaism is less interested in dry facts than in breathing experiences. It is for this reason that much of Jewish tradition and ritual draws on reenactment. We don’t just commemorate, we remember. We don’t just recount someone else’s story, we relive our own.” 

The idea isn’t that history isn’t true or important, rather that memory captures something history does not. Accordingly, in Hosteen’s monologue and this Chabad quote, we see that some treat history as something that is past and fixed, and some, in their valorization of memory, treat history as something living and dynamic. 

I don’t necessarily think CC is educated enough about Judaism to be invoking a discussion of memory standing in opposition to history and being given a moral value above it, but he nevertheless wrote it. Native Americans (CC’s versions at least) and Jews, (and Mulder judging by how the camera pans over where we just saw him during Hosteen’s monologue— we will get there) are two examples of peoples of memory. The U.S. government, Nazis, and other related historical forces are peoples of history. These malevolent sources use history to eliminate the truth and will eliminate peoples of memory to do so. At the end of the episode, it is memory that ultimately saves the day when Hosteen and company memorize the files. 

Paired with the intentional invocation of the Holocaust, we see this way in which marginalization is woven into the story of the U.S. governments involvement in what we learned in “Colony” and “End Game” is the impending alien colonization of the planet. Taking real life historical traumas of colonization and genocide and making it the sprinkles on your Bad Sci-fi Sundae is really dismissive of the actual human beings this shit happened to. I’ve only ever seen this talked about extremely briefly on the podcast “The MSR Files,” but hopefully more fans can understand soon how this is a major issue. One of the ways that it’s a major issue, as discussed with the above summary of People Love Dead Jews, is that it doesn’t include anything about these dead marginalized communities and what they were/are like while alive. That’s the crux of the problem. Not only is suffering reduced to a background ornament on the overall story, the real people this happened to are erased.

This is the point of my argument and this meta. Dead Jews, along with other dead and suffering marginalized people, are something TXF loves to waive around without any of the dignity and respect necessary for those conversations. The fandom tends to not understand this very well, reproducing the same dynamic in fics. As the myth arc evolved to focus on sexual/reproductive violence, many criticisms of the myth arc tend to focus on the violence against mostly white women, starting and ending with our girl Dana Scully. These criticisms are really important, but they tend to overlook the way in which the myth arc, especially early on, is a racialized eugenicist project, which is just as important to remember as the feminist criticisms of the arc. Of course, the villains doing racist things, as well as sexually violent things or things that remove someone's reproductive autonomy, could have been a good story despite being morally reprehensible, as depiction is not endorsement, but the lack of dignity given to real world victims really makes it plain that this is not about telling a meaningful story. This is about shock value. 

The next installment of this meta will move from the Jews-as-Victims framing to the Jews-as-All-Powerful one, by moving on to everyone’s favorite elite globalist [redacted] cabal— The Syndicate! In the meantime,  I’ve written other meta that touches on this subject. Here’s my meta about Mulder and antisemitic tropes, my meta about Pine Bluff Variant, and my meta about Drive. 

Thank you for reading!

[reel-fear]

Bendy And The Power Of Representation

So those graphic novel pages huh? Seems I posted my cover post at just the right time because literally minutes after I was informed the preview pages came out and uh. This is Buddy and Norman!

Oh dear... I'll put the full graphic novel pages down below but I have so much to say on how awful this is it'll need several posts. However, right now I want to mostly talk about representation and briefly touch on why it's so damn important + inform others about the current shit Mike and Meatly are saying about the books n such.

Now note: All the things I'm saying below are based on my personal experience, maybe some people don't care about seeing the representation of their identities in the media they consume. Maybe some will think I'm merely being dramatic and I might be but I'm not lying when I say I personally believe being represented and seen in the media you consume can be one of the most wonderful feelings in the world.

Look I'm not here to argue with people who think that Norman in particular was never meant to be a person of color, I would argue he is very coded but the points I'm making here are not about how Norman particularly had to be black. The point I want to make is the lack of diversity in our cast in general and how Norman's design has heavily dwindled it considering most people [including myself] rightfully assumed he was at least one of three black characters in our cast. Not according to this though and looking at the the rest of the pages our chances of seeing any kind of decent diverse character designs dwindle more.

So firstly... Buddy a character who has been said to experience discrimination for being Jewish, lacks any kind of ethnic features at all. That's... Cool but yeah I think this shows a rather grim future for the character designs as a whole.

Also, Norman... As I mentioned he was largely assumed to be black due to his southern dialect, his voice, and other factors. But nope, he's a generic white guy. With... Gross looking hair tbh...

Sadly this is not the first time the topic of poor representation has come up concerning Bendy either.

[note how he disregarded the other mentioned minorities and specifically cites LGBTQ+ characters]

This sucks as a response but sadly considering Mike's recent behavior it seems to fall in line with the Bendy team's general lack of care towards representing anyone who isn't straight and white.

So how did Mike respond to all of this? Well...

TDLR - "Who cares if the Graphic Novel we're selling to our fans for full price sucks, we now no longer consider the books canon."

This is horrible, I know Mike and Meatly are only really in this for the money, the fact BATIM is in the state that it is proved that, but they really couldn't have been less obvious about it?

So basically when it benefited them, AKA when it meant people would have to buy the books to understand important lore like Boris' identity... [the character you spend all of chapter 4 trying to rescue] They were considered canon... At least the author sure thought so.

Hell even in the tweet Meatly made here he doesn't say the books aren't canon, he just says they're not needed to understand Bendy's world. Now Mike is using that as a shield instead of doing the right thing and saying "You're right, the poc in our fanbase deserve better we'll have it fixed right away!" Like most reasonable people would considering how his studio has literally been accused of bigotry, poor rep, and general lack of diversity before. Why risk making more people avoid this franchise?

Also just... Imagine how insulting it would be to be an author who helps flesh out so much of this world and gives its characters depth like NONE of the games have managed to do, filling in plot holes, creating a timeline for events, etc... Then because they couldn't bother to change the graphic novel for ur story to be better they instead throw out all ur writing and declare it non-canon.

If I were her to put it bluntly I'd feel insulted and horrible. Why make her do all the work of making sure her works align with the timeline and game's canon if they're not part of it?

I can't speak for her obviously but Meatly and Mike know of her account, so speaking out against this could very much risk her being fired or at least not allowed to work on Bendy anymore... So I would take all her tweets on this situation with a grain of salt. She very much is not in a position where she could be honest if she was against this.

So with all that history now, the question I'm sure many are wondering is... Why does this even matter? Who cares how diverse the characters are when it doesn't affect the story?

Well for one thing, if you think like that consider having more empathy for your fellow human beings but also it does affect the story. One of DCTL's themes is about the bigotry of the period it is set in.

Now the Bendy team has managed to make the discussion of this book centering around their bigotry which is ironic in a way I almost find funny... Though this entire thing is just a bit too hurtful and upsetting to find any humor in, at least for me...

But another thing is representation can bring people such joy when it's done with care. It really shouldn't be understated how far it can go to make people feel more comfortable in their own sense of self to have a franchise choose to represent them and their experiences. I know this from personal experience.

Now if you've been following me for a while, you know I'm a big fan of Transformers. I no longer engage with it much due to baggage from the fandom's awful treatment of me, but before I left I remember being able to witness the release of Transformers: Earthspark first few episodes.

These introduced the Maltos the family who meets the Transformers and serve as our protagonists and guess what?

It's a family of Filipinos!

Now look I'm not Filipino, but I am half Mexican and I have a lot of love for that part of me. So seeing the representation of any Spanish culture in this franchise I loved made me so happy! I remember just watching the first episode I was happily telling my partner how fun it was to see people like me and my family in a world I love!!

But it didn't end with the Maltos in fact... There was another character who spoke to me, their name was Nightshade. Their pronouns are They/Them and they spoke about it on the show! Not just mentioning it and moving on but actually sitting down to speak about their experiences...

This clip in particular really turned them into an absolute favorite among fans and well... I'll let you see it for yourself.

This scene... Fills me with a joy I cannot describe. It is the creators of a franchise I love telling me they see people like me and find the stories of people like me important enough to include in this series. There really is nothing like being able to say there are Non-Binary characters in a franchise I have so much love for. I was far from the only one too.

This is amazing, this is wonderful, this clip and character were moving to so so many people and...

This is a joy the Bendy creators have no interest in giving their audience. They don't care how you feel as a queer and/or black person, which... Hurts...

I... Discovered I was trans while in the Bendy community... It was where I learned the word Non-Binary and started using it for myself. To me Bendy will always have that connection... But the devs themselves seem to hate the idea of being forced to actually represent that in their games... And I still haven't really gotten over that pain or betrayal if I'm being honest.

So...

With Norman now being portrayed as white here, we are down to two black characters. Thomas [who Meatly has claimed is white in the past] based on a vague conversation with Sammy in DCTL they could easily ignore... And Jacob.... A book exclusive character which according to Mike means he is non-canon.

If we don't count Thomas' vague talk with Sammy about disrespect as confirmation he's black [which the devs don't seem to think so] then we have one black character in all of Bendy... And he recently got retconned into non-existence. Great.

Look... The Bendy fanbase has always been full of wonderfully diverse designs for the staff and even more diverse people creating them. Bendy's fandom was built with the work of queer people from all kinds of places.

If the Bendy team continues to show how little they care for anyone who isn't straight or white... I wonder who they are counting on to buy this book or in general financially support their franchise?

I know right now, I am furious, I am hurt and I most certainly don't feel like buying a book that's currently just a massive fuck you to the fans and I hope I've expressed why I feel this way in an easy-to-understand way here...

Either way, I will not be forgetting this anytime soon and I hope the fanbase does the same. Maybe just maybe, if there's enough backlash to this series of horrible decisions they'll learn better.

Right now, it's kinda of our only hope for a better future, and if you know any poc who are into Bendy right now... Maybe consider making sure they're feeling okay.

I know from experience how much this sort of thing hurts, to have the creators of a world you love straight up tell you they don't intend to fix the fact no one in their stories represents your identity or life...

What I'm trying to say is...

This is a really low point for Bendy and its fans... Even more for the poc who have to witness such ignorant and careless attitudes from Mike and Meatly towards their feelings.

Please don't forget them when you discuss these tweets or this situation. That's exactly what Mike and Meatly want right now.

For them to be unrepresented and therefore... Unheard.

[gynandromorph]

It's okay not to answer, I know it's broad territory, but I really respect you as an artist and writer. How do you handle people misinterpreting or missing elements of your work, especially when they may still enjoy it and get something out of it? As an artist I'm struggling lately with knowing my work will always inherently be read differently from what I intended as a matter of the human experience, as well as me being autistic complicating my ability to communicate.

An addition to that last ask. I don't know if it's clear what I'm asking so I'll give some examples. A 50 year old man and a 21 year old woman will get different things from a movie due to their lived experiences. As a gentile reader I might miss jewish narrative themes in a piece of work. That doesn't mean it's bad for us to have experienced it, but as an author I find it frustrating when something is missed or misinterpreted, and I don't know how not to be a control freak about it.

i feel you, i have ocpd and being misinterpreted when i agonized and stressed about how to present my wording makes me want to light myself on fire and it's something i'm working on. writers are supposed to expect and account for different perspectives ahead of time, so it always sort of shocks me when i hear interpretations i wouldn't have thought about at all. i know logically i can't predict all outcomes, but it's still surprising anyway!!! but i generally feel a lot of distress about being misinterpreted because i'm afraid it'll label me as A Bad Person, so i think that's where the experience diverges. maybe investigating why you need to or want to control the way your work is interpreted would help as a starting point? i think having a larger audience helps, too... it means more people will misinterpret your work, but it also means you're more likely to have at least One Guy who interprets it just right and makes fireworks go off in your brain, but there's no way to control how big your audience is!

anyway, the ways to control how your work is interpreted, to the degree that you can:

you can make it simpler. the more parts a story has added to its complexity, the more it's going to be misinterpreted.

you can make the intended message more blatant. you can have a character say exactly what you want the audience to think or hear, or something very close to it. don't want a detail missed? make it bigger.

you can reprioritize parts of the story. basically think of a group of interpretations you want the audience to have if you can, and then put them in order of importance. then the story has a hierarchy to lean on wrt artistic decisions.

you can give the story multiple meanings. more targets to hit. if they're mutually exclusive, i find this works better... i like making my stories ambiguous with conflicting interpretations a lot. yeah, people are going to interpret the story wrong, because it was made in a way that will guarantee it is interpreted wrong in some way.

you can layer the meaning so that less literate audience members will at least get SOME of what you intended. basically, close to the previous strategy, but like a hybrid of that and "make it simpler" imo because you're constructing multiple interpretations that are all supposed to lead to one conclusion (like a persuasive essay or something), but can act as an adequate conclusion on their own.

all of these options have obvious qualitative losses. if you have anything in particular that is repeatedly misinterpreted or missed, it's a good idea to think about Why you're making those choices. consciously committing to a higher-risk artistic choice will help you feel more in control of what happens to it once it's done. the way your art is interpreted isn't totally out of your control, you are making decisions that add to or mitigate the risk of misinterpretations, and you can bring those choices to a more conscious awareness to see them and appreciate them. sometimes it'll feel like a begrudging compromise, but it'll still be Your choice ultimately.

on an emotional level... hopefully this makes sense. there's always going to be the piss-on-the-poor scenario and sometimes i just remind myself that some people are not as literate as me, but it's great we were still able to connect through a work that was probably difficult for them!!! it was a privilege to get to grow up with a good education, access to art and technology, strangers who want to look at what i made, and there are times where i take this for granted, and my expectations of readers are actually kind of unreasonable!!! some people are younger than me and say stupid things like i did, but they aren't able to understand things like me yet, and it's important for them to learn by figuring it out on their own!!! i was and will always be That Guy to other artists and other writers, and i want to give other people the same grace as i get. some people have wildly different life experiences compared to mine, and these experiences can be much more nuanced than i could ever imagine, but it's a little gift that they made my world larger by sharing theirs through my art!!! it's terrifying and embarrassing knowing that i don't know much of anything, even about something i have total control over, but the consequences of that aren't always negative. and possibly the saddest but most common way i deal with this is nothing more than accepting that no one is ever going to understand me on the level that i want to be understood. sometimes my frustration has come from a place of miserable alienation, where the need to feel Seen can be quite desperate. i've made art explicitly about Me, and i've made art deliberately hostile towards its audience, art that's said they don't get it and they never will, but they still bothered to try. i made a game that said no one will win here and they still played it with me, and i can appreciate that. in many cases, they actually know more about me than i know about them. but more importantly, it isn't my audience's job to take care of that emotional need -- in fact, as much as art is made out to be a mode of pure self-expression, i don't think they can. it's a reality that i don't like, but i accept it. art made to benefit others is a one-way mirror: you make them feel seen, but they should never see you, because if they see you, the mirror isn't working.

[theoreticallysensible]

I cannot help but compare Aaron Bushnell’s poignant protest of the genocide in Gaza to the ideas presented in the book Catch-22, especially given the mainstream media’s craven instinct to frame his self immolation as insane, rather than a sane protest against an insane society, and especially given his role as a US airman, the same as the characters in the novel - a role he chose to highlight in his protest.

(This is not to say that we should all self immolate - sane reason can demand many different things of us depending on our position, skills, and character. Such self destructive tactics are never categorically necessary, and in a major sense Bushnell’s death is inescapably tragic and horrifying, but the conviction and symbolic power of his soberly deliberate death can be respected, even revered, nevertheless.)

Catch-22 contains several references to sanity and “craziness”. Its central concept, which entered into popular consciousness, is the eponymous Catch-22 described in the following passage.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.

Catch-22 is a study of how one can become overwhelmed by one’s own sanity when faced with a world and other people who have all seemingly gone mad. This is the experience of seeing so many of our authority figures, in particular the supposed reporters of truth in the media, deny the fact that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, a genocide that is - and has always clearly been - a direct and necessary consequence of the process of Zionism as conceived as the establishment of a Jewish state through colonisation.

Throughout the novel, the main character, Yossarian, is appalled and disoriented by the fact that his valuing of his own life and freedom is considered insane by his comrades, but when he tries to claim that since he is insane he is unfit for combat, he is told (rightly) that this is fear of dying is actually sane, and so he is perfectly fit for combat.

Life in the military is one where you are expected to be willing to lay down your life for a cause, usually “the good of your country”. This is never, in the mainstream, considered to be insane, but rather noble - except, as Shaun pointed out in the video he released today on the Palestinian crisis, in retrospect, such as when Wilfred Owen’s poems lamenting the brutality and pointlessness of WW1 are taught and venerated in schools.

But what about when someone decides to lay down their life for a cause not endorsed by US hegemony? Is that, like that of the military hero, considered “sweet and fitting”? No. As we have seen, the voice of hegemonic values, the mainstream media, cannot conceive of a logic outside of its own framework. Anything that is outside of it, especially that opposes it, is “insane”, “disturbed”, probably dangerous.

Throughout most of Catch-22, Yossarian’s rebellions against the military machine threatening his life are ineffective. He never changes his circumstances or anyone else’s. Aaron Bushnell, unlike Yossarian, did not spend most of his time fearing for how his military career could endanger his own life; instead, he was outraged that his career made him complicit in the killing of others. His abnegation of that, his total rejection of it to the point of ending his life, was supremely selfless. As we now know, it was a result of serious deliberation borne out of a selfless commitment to emancipatory politics also reflected in his engagement with mutual aid and other anarchist actions in his local community.

It is notable that at the end of Catch-22, when Yossarian finally decides to desert and at last we have a glimpse of hope as he is able to convince others of the rationality and nobility of his rejection of the military, it is because he is now acting for the benefit of others. He turns his reasoned analysis outwards. He refuses to be complicit, in this case with the US military forcing Italian citizens out of their homes.

It is only through selflessness and solidarity that we can turn our private analyses of personal injustices into social analyses that people can rally behind and collectively act on.

The last scene of the novel contains this exchange between Yossarian and another character:

'I can't do a thing to stop them but embarrass them by running away. I've got responsibilities of my own now, Danby. I've got to get to Sweden.'

'You'll never make it. It's impossible. It's almost a geographical impossibility to get there from here.'

'Hell, Danby, I know that. But at least I'll be trying. There's a young kid in Rome whose life I'd like to save if I can find her. I'll take her to Sweden with me if I can find her, so it isn't all selfish, is it?'

'It's absolutely insane. Your conscience will never let you rest.'

'God bless it.' Yossarian laughed. 'I wouldn't want to live without strong misgivings.’

Yossarian is still called insane, but Danby supports him both morally and financially, finally recognising the sanity of his insanity. But rather than linger on this book too much I’ll end on the words of the present, of the final statement made by Aaron Bushnell:

"My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it's not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal."

He died shouting “Free Palestine!” until his body was no longer capable.

[olderthannetfic]

I definitely think there are people who use those "diverse reading challenges" to show off, but I also think you can have a truly genuine desire to diversify your reading habits, and challenges can be a good way to incentive yourself to do that and keep track of it. And I'm not sure there's a go-to standard for who is "tryhard" beyond if they act cringey and show-offy about it on social media. I was going to say something like "do they genuinely seem like they're trying to branch out, or just reading the same things as they usually do but with a black lead" - but honestly, I want the people who are "just reading YA" or "just reading romance" or whatever to read more diversely, too. Like for romance readers specifically: Read more romance with COC or written by POC, read more M/M and/or F/F if you primarily read het, read more stuff written by people from outside of North America and Western Europe, etc. And if you primarily read serious "classic" literature, try reading one from Africa beyond the lit-class staples like Things Fall Apart rather than another white British author, just to give an example. I think everyone should do more of that. I think those can all come from a genuine desire to try new things, not just show off to your followers about how open-minded you are.

Actually, I think the big way to tell if someone's being "tryhard" is, yes, their reaction on social media, but particularly how they talk about the book when they're done. The one big Tell I see on Goodreads about people who want to be seen as "reading diversely" but don't really appreciate diversity is when they read a book about, say, Muslim characters and then leave a 2-star reviewing whining that they didn't like that the book expected them to know 101-level things about Islam like what Ramadan or the hajj is. (Or alternately, are mad that it DID explain that stuff "too much," oblivious to the fact that in Christian-majority cultures, that's a publisher expectation that you do that with any other religion, because of ignorant readers who will whine if you don't spend a paragraph teaching them what Ramadan is because apparently these supposed "diverse readers" can't be assed to learn literally anything about the best-known Muslim holiday.) I saw someone complain on Tumblr about Goodreads reviewers getting mad at all the "Jewish stuff they were expected to know" to read Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, and this person was like "I'm a goy and I understood all of it because it's stuff you would know just from having seen Fiddler on the Roof. If all the Judaism you need to know for a book is stuff that you can get from watching Fiddler on the Roof, then maybe the issue is not the book, it's you for not having such basic information about a major world religion and then reading a book about it."

Or as another example, when people complain about how the particular set of lingo this person who is oppressed in a way you are not used to describe their oppression is not the exact thing that Twitter discourse has told you is "correct" to use or that it is offensive. When they get mad that a book where a black person is talking about their life experience with police brutality has "too many descriptions of violence" and "I'm rating this lower because it might be triggering." (In general, when people seem to conflate "this triggered me" with the kind of "productive discomfort" that relatively privileged people NEED to confront in fiction about marginalizations they don't experience in order to grow as humans. But also it's just like... there are some topics where it would be doing readers a disservice not to describe them graphically. Not everything can be communicated in a way that would earn a G rating on AO3. That might mean the book is inaccessible to you, but that's on you to deal with, not on the author to censor themselves.) Or when they, as in the American Fiction example, expect it to fit some stereotypical ideas of "authenticity" and are mad that this POC or LGBTQ+ or disabled person's lives are more like their own rather than feeling like a museum exhibit about an exotic Other culture.

To me, "tryhard" is when you don't actually value diversity FOR diversity. If you're going to read diverse media, you can't get mad when it actually is diverse. If you want to read about stuff about/from other cultures and identities, then a) you need to be okay with being challenged, b) you need to not expect the author to hold your privileged hand all the time. You can look up unfamiliar words like "hajj" or "Purim." It's 2024. You have a tiny computer in your hand that is several times more powerful than the big computers that put astronauts on the moon. You can use it to go to Wikipedia when you see a word you don't understand, it's not that hard! Expecting authors from other cultures and identities to patiently explain every aspect of that to you like an elementary school teacher is the ultimate sign of entitlement and privilege, especially if you're reading, say, a book by a Congolese author about the Congo, not one that they wrote specifically for Western audiences!

When people make a big show of reading "diversely" but then seem to be upset that those books are actually, you know, DIVERSE, that's a big flashing sign that it's performative tryhard nonsense to me.

--

It's pretty sad when we'll go google some xianxia thing to watch The Untamed, but we can't manage to look at a ten thousand times more commonplace wikipedia article on a major world religion.

[scarlet--wiccan]

Not completely sure how to word this and sorry about it being so long, but do you think a good way of making it make sense that Billy & Tommy are not white but were born to and raised in white families with no concerns about adoption or affairs or anything that both of their families assumed that what’d happened was something like what’d happened with Liam in Shameless US? If you’ve never watched that show, basically Liam was born to Frank and Monica, two white parents, while looking fully black and being played by a fully black actor, and basically they explained how this was possible in-universe by saying that Frank had one black grandfather, and somehow because of that, Liam turned out to look fully black, so basically my idea is that Billy’s & Tommy’s parents each had like one Desi or Romani close ancestor, and they just assumed that they turned out to be brown because of them.

I want to clear up a couple things here-- first of all, Romani people are not desi. The diaspora originated in what is now India and Pakistan, but we are not interchangeable with modern-day Indian or Pakistani natives. Second, that Shameless storyline is weird as hell to me, on several levels, and I would advise you to never compare it to real-- or fictional, for that matter-- mixed-race people or families. I come from a mixed background, and I will admit, genetics are crazy, and you'd be surprised the way features can skip a generation. But casually and retroactively making an entire family of white characters, played by white actors, part Black for laughs is not what I'd call authentic representation.

I actually answered a very similar question a while back, and you can read that here. I recognize that acknowledging Billy and Tommy's heritage and/or depicting them as people of color creates a weird discrepancy, and there's no perfect solution to that. I think if Wanda had been drawn or more commonly recognized as a woman of color back when Young Avengers was written, we probably wouldn't have this problem-- most writers, I hope, would not choose to magically turn characters of color, even babies, into white people.

I do actually think that giving the Kaplan and Shepherd families mixed Romani and Jewish heritage is the easiest solution, but not if you're going to frame it the way Shameless did. I also think it's actually important that Billy and Tommy were not fully aware of this heritage growing up, or that they each arrive at different parts of their identities differently, because that is a real experience within diaspora. Having that experience represented within this family adds to the diversity of the story.

As far as character design goes-- if you assume that their parents are white-presenting, it might be more realistic for the twins to be somewhat lighter or more ambiguous in appearance than Wanda, just to diminish the obvious questions. But these are also magical cartoon characters, and Wanda's canon design is not that dark in the first place. It should be pretty easy to suspend disbelief, especially when we don't see the Kaplans more than once a decade. I've been using edits and recolors to make my point about representation for years, but at the end of the day, I think the look is a lot less important than understanding Roma identity and the historical context these characters exist in.

Additionally, I think that Billy and Tommy's unique situation makes the most sense if you view it as a metaphor for transracial adoption. It doesn't answer the practical questions about their birth or looks, but it is a real experience that maps very closely onto these characters and their identities. For Romani people, in particular, this is a very sensitive part of our history that ties into where the Maximoffs come from and what they've been through. Exploring that experience, even through allegory, adds a lot of depth to the representation these characters provide.

[arromantica-lucha]

i got a lot of thoughts about loveless by alice oseman and if this post seems very one sided well thats just how it read to me. my opinion isnt the end-all and i value how everyone interpreted and was affected by this book. this isnt a closed topic lets talk about it

gripes with loveless by alice oseman

took a while to actually explain that ace and aro are two separate identities and still not that well. it makes aro seem like a subset of ace which is entirely false. its cool there was an aroallo character involved but still

the book title 'loveless' is a real term and identity and the entirety of the book kinda shits on it by enforcing the ideal that its still okay to be aspec cause platonic love can be experienced and any type of love is required or at least better than "not feeling anything and being alone forever"

it was weird for her friends to forgive her over gestures that had nothing to do with apologizing before georgia actually apologized and explained but that may just be more of a personal thing that i didnt like. likewise the story being about platonic love it kinda sucks her deepest connection is with her roommate and not the people shes known for years and wronged

kinda sex negative. i mean rooney says she doesnt dislike casual sex but then that whole thing becomes the reason she hates herself and a reason to cope with being "unloveable" and its kinda lame. you can tell that story without making it seem like casual sex is just a means of devaluing yourself. and you can be sex repulsed and still not do that. it just feels unfair to aroallo people especially who are told they are monsters for enjoying and only wanting casual sex when this book is supposed to be about aromanticism too

(can we also be done with harry potter references??? lets stop hurting trans and jewish people thanks)

basically particular identities' stories shouldnt come at the expense of others and other ways of life. its great and important to write different experiences because no one is gonna relate to them all but no one has to replace romantic love with ANY type of love to feel good about themselves and be human. loveless and aplatonic people shouldnt have to read something that uses rhetoric against their identities within a book about aspec people

things i like about loveless

i didnt relate to it personally but the experiences felt very genuine. internalized aphobia, being hounded by aphobic comments, finding it hard to portray love even in a fictional or artistic sense, etc.

I appreciate the references to race and intersectionality that come with being queer even if they were minimal. so few times is it actually acknowledged that there is privilege when it comes to being understood, coming out, being accepted, etc. the references to that were nice to see because too often intersectionality being brought up is brushed off and blatantly ignored or people pretend like they understand

it was written by someone who is aroace even if there are some things that can be less isolating within the aspec community with the language being used. someone being open about their identities and how they choose to define them in the mainstream world is how we get more peoples voices in there

it has helped people discover their own identity though id still recommend further research on the actual identities being named and ones not named. these stories are the first introduction of aspec identities in mainstream and that hopefully means itll start to expand to other identities within that community that have not yet had representation

this should be the start of developing more rep. the first takes are not gonna represent everyone and its a good thing it exists to tell a few peoples story. but that doesnt mean it should be free from any criticism because thats how we make them continuously better. i hope to see an aroallo character soon. i want the term loveless to be properly used in media and expressed for what it is. i want to stop pretending like ace is the umbrella term for all aspec identities. i want amatonormativity explained as the sociological term it is that harms all life not just aromantic and polyamorous people. i want a polyam aspec character and polyam characters in general. i want disabled and ethnic aspec characters where the intersectionality is just as important to the narrative. i want a whole lot more and to stop prentending like any of that should be unreasonable

[grandhotelabyss]

Knowing that it's one of your favourite films, have you ever written or have any wish to write anything about Ken Russell's Altered States? I watched it last night and was appropriately dazzled by his images and high conceits, but I can't help feeling that, like Dostoevsky, the final embrace of love as a panacea feels forced and inadequate in comparison to the earlier spiritual darkness of the self that begets the high visions.

I haven't written extensively about it, but I did discuss the film, and particularly this aspect of it, with the poet Emmalea Russo at the end of our conversation from last summer.

Obviously Russell's spectacular aesthetic accommodates a tragic conclusion, as when he's working with the more "severe" literary source material provided by Lawrence and Huxley for Women in Love and The Devils, respectively. Chayefsky's script for Altered States could be described ungenerously as promoting the quotidian, even the bourgeois, against the pursuit of metaphysical extremity these earlier films indulge. We could even historicize this development, if we really wanted to be wet blankets, by seeing the 1980 film as a document of the transition between the residua of the radical '60s and the vanguard of the conservative '80s.

(Here I would distinguish Chayefsky from Dostoevsky, whose vision of Christian "active love" seems more extreme than what Chayefsky portrays: for example, if you contrast Sonya's extremes of self-sacrifice in Crime and Punishment, the novel's ethical model, with the more mundane portrait of an apparently resilient marriage in Altered States—and not even a resilient marriage as the spiritual communion of gnostic self-sufficient souls, as with Lawrence's Rupert and Ursula—or perhaps Rupert and Gerald—in the aforementioned Women in Love, but rather an apotheosis of loyalty and affection over this kind of soul-vision.)

And yet for all that I am willing to take Altered States on its own terms: there is nothing really there for us in that inner space or journey back down the brain stem the film's visionary sequences depict. It's not truer than anything else we experience for all that it may be more spectacular, hence the idea Pauline Kael alludes to that there is some conflict in the film between Russell's Catholic baroque and Chayefsky's Jewish iconoclasm. In any case, the film's thesis is that primordial holds no priority, that evil is not more interesting for being only the absence of love. I think the film is a coherent elaboration of this idea, but it's certainly true that Russell's visionary and occult imagery overwhelms the philosophy and is mostly what we remember—unless we join Emmalea Russo in our conversation linked above and romanticize the party sequence where Edward and Emily meet in the first place and allow the (erotic) charisma of the actors to challenge the memorable perversities displayed elsewhere in the film.

As for the overall question of whether or not a happy ending cheats an otherwise dark narrative or dramatic vision of its integrity, I tend to think not. Hegel gives us a test we can apply in his Aesthetics (I quote the Osmaston translation from Hegel on Tragedy):

Much as poets present to us the bare downfall of particular people they are also able to treat the similar contingency of the development of events in such a way, that, though the circumstances in all other respects would appear to give them little enough support, a happy issue of such conditions, and characters is secured, in which they elicit our interest. No doubt the favour of such a destiny of events has at least an equal claim upon us as the disfavour. And so far as the question merely concerns the nature of this difference, I must admit that I prefer a happy conclusion. How could it be otherwise? I can myself discover no better ground for the preference of misfortune, simply on its own account as such, to a happy resolution than that of a certain condition of fine sensibility, which is devoted to pain and suffering, and experiences more interest in their presence than in painless situations such as it meets with every day. If therefore the interests are of such a nature, that it is not really worth the trouble to sacrifice the men or women concerned on their altar, it being possible for them, either to surrender their objects, without making such surrender as is equivalent to a surrender of their individuality, or to mutually come to an agreement in respect thereof, there is no reason why the conclusion should be tragic. The tragic aspect of the conflicts and their resolution ought in principle merely to be enforced in the cases where it is actually necessary in order to satisfy the claim of a superior point of view.

In other words, a tragic resolution is only required if the narrative logic demands the sacrifice of the characters to a worthwhile principle higher than themselves. (Hegel's model is the ideological conflict between legitimate transcendent principles—the family vs. the social order—in Antigone.) Lawrence's extraordinarily ideal vision of marriage, to which neither Gerald nor Gudrun can measure up, might also qualify in Women in Love, and likewise Grandier's fidelity to a kind of robust human wholeness threatened with extinction both by the hysterical nuns and the pious witchfinders in The Devils. But if a character is immolated for a worthless principle, then we are, Hegel suggests, in the presence of a merely morbid authorial sensibility. On this account, Dostoevsky's Christian ideal and Chayefsky's humanist one deserve their triumph over the evils that confront them, however (merely) spectacular. Whether in aesthetics there is any such thing as a "mere" spectacle is another question, of course, and we continue to dream of a work of art that is whole and unriven, its theme and its form one and indivisible—at least as a picture of human happiness.

(You might please keep all of this mind as you read the forthcoming epilogue of my novel Major Arcana...)

[frances-kafka]

A big thing I run into with discourse around “The End of Eternity” is that modern readers miss a big point of the narrative and just are not going to stick out enough of the story to see how Asimov resolves it. We’re in the era of “any portrayal of a structure equals condoning it.” People don’t grasp that a particular structure is Objectively Bad unless that is pointed out early on. There is a real anxiety about not knowing who you are supposed to root for.

I feel like this ambiguity was a bigger preference for readers of lots of 90s work; you can’t really portray moral grayness now. I do not feel TEOE is a “gray” work - the author’s moral stance eventually becomes clear regarding the primary bureaucratic structure of the setting. However - the main character doesn’t really begin to question that structure until halfway through the book or later. And if you don’t stick out Andrew Harlan’s development (this is actually a very richly worldbuilt setting for its length and you will experience quite a bit of immersion into the Eternals before Harlan begins to question what he’s been taught all of his life) then it’s easy to make assumptions about the work.

I think this is hard for people who grew up with YA and haven’t engaged harder work, especially in sci fi, to engage with.

also the book has a lot to say about gender segregation in society and toxic masculinity but you have to stick the book out for that. Asimov didn’t just give you that on the first page. And if you’re the type of reader who has been primed to not empathize with *men’s* experience of that thing or with complicated, kinda fucked up male characters then you may not find Harlan relatable.

TEOE is easily one of Asimov’s most adaptable works, and Hollywood has been leaving money on the table for a long time, and Ridley Scott was going to adapt it but it got stuck in development hell at one point. At this point it probably won’t be made, as that was (well?) over a decade ago. An adaptation would probably leave out the parts that are the most problematic to modern viewers/readers. It would probably remove all the weird gender politics from the Eternals and make some of the Eternals women. (Understandably so; some of the assumptions about why women most often can’t be Eternals, are based in a cultural context of women’s lives in 1955, vs men’s; there was a far greater likelihood of a 1950s man leaving no descendants, than of a woman.)

unfortunately, if it did that, to me - it would sanitize away what’s actually one of the most interesting aspects of the book. I’m fascinated by what it has to say about gender, because to me, there is a way this book hits different if you can contextualize Harlan and the Eternals in terms of a strict gender-segregated society that strictly limits one’s understanding of and contact with the opposite sex so that every possible interaction between the sexes is tremendously fraught and full of tension.

There is a whole analysis of this book that’s possible if you have read authors like, say, Chaim Potok, and or are in general familiar with the gender mores of ultra-orthodox Jewish culture, or some other kind of equally regimented and gender-segregated culture.

Harlan doesn’t react to being attracted to a woman in a manner of a contemporary man who has grown up in *our* world. He hasn’t been taught to manage his emotions in any other way besides the most strict suppression, and is overwhelmed by them the first time he feels them. He was taken away from his family young and has only ever known this all-male world that has raised him.

There’s also a queer reading that’s possible, if you read it in a certain light, though Asimov would likely not have intended this. Andrew Harlan is basically a non-asexual hetero man in a world where that’s Bad, and basically the plot is that he’s going to be straight and do crimes.

the book doesn’t at any point get rapey, though Harlan’s emotional landscape would be alien to modern readers. Some things he seems to experience and express seem to be from the point of view of a man who has never been allowed to actually gain any kind of emotional maturity about relationships, and it’s actually a best case scenario in that regard.

a common complaint about the book is that Noys Lambent (love interest) is basically a human McGuffin with no real character development of her own but this actually comes off better considering Harlan as a somewhat unreliable narrator who doesn’t see the world beyond his own introspection. (This is easily one of Asimov’s very most introspective and personal works, compared to the tone in his other writing.) And basically the common complaint is that she’s Just A Pretty Face.

well… once again, people critiquing the book didn’t stick it out.

I really suspect modern readers require the “tells” a lot earlier in a book and a moral dilemma or surprise twist characterization can be missed when the thing takes too long to build.

[fmluder24]

The X Files Loves Dead Jews (Part 5/7~): Fox Mulder and Paradoxes of Pain and Privilege

We are going to start closing out our discussion of Jews and Jewishness in the context of The X Files by studying the way these tropes all coalesce around Fox Mulder. For Part 1 on the appropriation of the Holocaust in the myth arc, go here. For part 2 on appropriation of the Holocaust in “The Field Where I Died,” go here. For part 3 on the Syndicate being essentially a Jewish cabal, go here. And for part 4 on Kaddish, you can go here. 

Let’s round up the ways in which Mulder is associated with Jewish tropes, in terms of Jew-as-Victim and Jew-as-All-Powerful. Basically, Mulder is repeatedly and continually associated with tropes around Jews and Judaism because that was an easy cultural shorthand for the blend of martyrdom and power they were going for in the writers’ room. Additionally, as we will explore in the next meta (I am almost done, I swear), this coding serves to make him a Christ figure, who was Jewish. Therefore, by the transitive property of Jewishness… let’s get into it.

TW for historical and contemporary antisemitism and also experiences of sexual violence

Mulder is meant to be a fairly archetypical Western hero. This means we need him to have sort of high born and low born qualities at the same time. An heir to en empire raised on a barren planet. A prince in exile after he sees the suffering of other people. A wizard raised by muggles. A demigod born into poverty. Baby Moses, a Hebrew slave and a prince of Egypt. However, TXF is not just culturally Christian in the abstract way that virtually every piece of American pop culture is, it is actually very committed to self consciously invoking Christian symbolism, particularly in the martyrdom of Mulder. Lets pretend we are in the kitchen cooking up our hero. We need him to be the lowest of the low. We need him to be persecuted and suffering as much as possible. Lets draw on the tropes and historical references we’ve already been invoking around what it is to suffer and use them in our character. Due to the sloppy nature of the writing, we are then shoveling tropes around Jewish trauma into our hero.

Mulder and Tropes of Jewish Victimhood Mulder is repeatedly associated with historical and contemporary moments of Jewish suffering. We’ve talked about most of these moments already in this meta. Here is a quick rundown mostly pulling from parts 1, 2 and 4 of the meta, although we need to take a quick detour to touch on other tropes.

Associated with Jewish Experiences of the Holocaust and WW2 He is explicitly invoked in situations where literal Nazis are after him not once, not twice, but three times. Each of these times invokes imagery of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. The first of these, that I rarely see the fandom talk about is him hiding in a piled of gassed corpses in the “Anasazi”/“The Blessing Way” segment of the myth arc. The Greys are the Jews relative to the Nazis of the Syndicate quite explicitly and he has to align themselves with their desiccated (did I mention gassed?) corpses to survive. He has to do this to avoid murder by the self-same Nazi collaborators. The second time is the monologue in “The Field Where I Died,” where he remembers his death as a Jewish woman in the Holocaust. The third, while less evocative of Jewish suffering in particular, is when he is trapped in the 1940s and facing execution by Nazis in “Triangle.” These Nazis don’t make a comment on his “looking Jewish” thankfully, but it is hanging in the air, as we are coming straight off “Drive,”  where he was captured by an antisemite.

Contemporary Jewish Experiences of Discrimination In addition to the use of tropes that tie him to historical Jewish oppression, he regularly has experiences that align with contemporary Jewish oppression. These happen in “Drive,” which I discuss here., and “Pine Bluff Variant, which I discuss here. Obviously, there is also the exchange with the antisemite in “Kaddish,” which is the most referenced incident of the antisemitism Mulder faces. It is interesting to point out that in none of these situations does he disavow Jewishness. Neither does he affirm that he is Jewish, although he does quip that he is speaking on behalf of the international Jewish conspiracy in “Drive.” He regularly is shown in situations that invoke contemporary profiling and violence against Jewish people in the modern U.S. context, strengthening the association between him and tropes of Jewish people as victims.

The Christian God uses him as a scapegoat This aspect of the character is a little hard to disambiguate from the whole Jesus thing, but suffice to say there are two separate canonical forces we can understand to be the Christian God in The X Files. The first of these is the Christian God as he appears to Scully in Catholicism episodes; the second is CSM’s function in the myth arc as the God who will sacrifice his specialest boy and impregnate the unsullied womb of Dana Scully (ew to both). We are going to focus on the “Monster of the Week” God. I’m reproducing a segment of a meta I wrote on this a while back. Basically, Mulder’s distance from God exists to improve Scully’s faith in the Christian God. To quote myself:

He is a sign [of the will of God] in the context of the show, yes in terms of his Jesusness but also in terms of how he doesn’t connect to the Christian God. Take this exchange from the end of “Revelations.”

SCULLY: Because my partner didn't see them. He didn't … he didn't believe them. And usually he … he believes without question. PRIEST: Maybe they weren't meant for him to see. Maybe they were only meant for you.

The Christian God, per the priest, did not reveal his wonders to Mulder because they were only for Scully. His lack of blessings in this regard is meant to test and ultimately strengthen her faith. Is it that far of a leap to say that a God who would not grace him with his wonders would also not grace him with his protection and intervention? A God that would possibly allow Mulder to suffer as he canonically does to ultimately strengthen her? The way he exists as a symbol of what happens when one is outside the body (politic) of Christ? He, the martyred pseudo-Wandering Jew to her questioning, yet ultimately repentant, Catholic; her, the fridged, raped, helpless woman to his action hero. It’s not empowering writing for anyone. Really, aside from a line in the revival where he says he outright doesn’t believe in God, I think the majority of X Files episodes that touch on Catholicism do establish him as a man who does believe that God exists, but that he ultimately does not find this God to be worthy of his worship. I take as evidence of this these two exchanges from “Orisons” and “All Souls” respectively:

Orisons: SCULLY: How do you prove that somebody isn't being directed by God? You don't believe that it happens? MULDER: God is a spectator, Scully. He just reads the box scores.

All Souls: MULDER: And why would God allow this to happen. Why do bad things happen to good people? Religion has masqueraded as the paranormal since the dawn of time to justify some of the most horrible acts in history. SCULLY: I was raised to believe that God has His reasons, however mysterious. MULDER: He may well have His reasons but He seems to use a lot of psychotics to carry out His job orders.

God exists for Mulder in these quotes. He has merely decided to not believe in the benevolence of said God, and therefore not give him his devotion as Scully has. This has always brought to mind for me a Phillip Roth quote from Operation Shylock.

“‘Yes? And was it for their sins,’ Aharon asked, ‘that God sent Hitler?’ ‘God sent Hitler because God is crazy. A Jew knows God and how He operates. A Jew knows God and how, from the very first day He created man, He has been irritated with him from morning till night. That is what it means that the Jews are chosen. The goyim smile: God is merciful, God is loving, God is good. Jews don't smile — they know God not from dreaming about Him in goyisch daydreams but from living all their lives with a God Who does not ever stop, not once, to think and reason and use His head with His loving children. To appeal to a crazy, irritated father, that is what it is to be a Jew. To appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years, that is what it is to be a crazy Jew!’”

One common trope of how Christians view Jews historically is that our persecution is God teaching us a lesson. This is basically the point of the Wandering Jew, which is a European folklore character of a Jewish man who is cursed to wander until the end of world because he taunted Jesus while he carried the cross. Mulder, due to his relationship with the canonical God of The X Files, exists outside of the covenant as a sort of metaphysical whipping boy for Scully to learn from. Mulder, perhaps in a move that originates his cosmic torment, perhaps in retaliation for it, takes a very dim view of a traditional understanding of God, one that parallels certain modern American Jewish orientations towards God. So not only does Mulder take on a Jewish role in the psychodrama of The X Files, he has a stereotypically Jewish response to what is happening to him.

4. Emasculation through the Torture of Scully I considered skipping this component of what is going on, but unfortunately I think I need to lay this out. One of my least favorite things about canon is the constant need to make every terrible thing that happens to Scully ultimately about Mulder. Fanon inverts this by trying to make every terrible thing that happens to Mulder ultimately about Scully. This is also annoying. However, with the way they are written to be codependent perfect opposites that are so informed by each other and feel for each other so deeply, we do have to grapple with the fact that, yeah, what happens to her impacts him pretty deeply and vice versa. One perennial theme in The X Files is Mulder’s impotence in terms of keeping Scully safe. Specifically, he cannot save her from the reproductive and sexualized violence she faces in her abduction and subsequent conception of Emily, and then the events of “En Ami” that led to the existence of William. Of course, we can pause here and do a whole thing about how Scully should have been given the option to save herself, and that the fixation on this type of violence is really reductive to her character in canon, and all of that is very true and something I deeply agree with! But many, many meta written by many fans have covered this point well, and I am focusing on other problems at play. Does this patriarchal framing of Mulder as the man who can or cannot protect Scully as a victimized woman reflect some screwed up gender norms in the writers’ room? Yes. It, however, mirrors an anxiety around Jewish masculinity and an inability of Jewish men to protect their female counterparts from violations of sexual and reproductive autonomy. Here is a very famous quotation from the controversial poem “The City of Slaughter” by H.N. Bialik:

“In that dark corner, and behind that cask Crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks, Watching the sacred bodies struggling underneath The bestial breath, Stifled in filth, and swallowing their blood! Watching from the darkness and its mesh The lecherous rabble portioning for booty Their kindred and their flesh!

Crushed in their shame, they saw it all; They did not stir nor move; They did not pluck their eyes out; they Beat not their brains against the wall! Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher had it in his heart to pray: A miracle, O Lord,—and spare my skin this day! Those who survived this foulness, who from their blood awoke, Beheld their life polluted, the light of their world gone out— How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke? They crawled forth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord, They offered thanks to Him, the sweet benedictory word. The Cohanim sallied forth, to the Rabbi's house they flitted: Tell me, O Rabbi, tell, is my own wife permitted? The matter ends; and nothing more. And all is as it was before.”

This is a controversial framing of the Jewish man’s experience of Jewish women’s mass rape during pogroms. They are framed here as unable or unwilling to save the women that are framed as being under their protection, concerned only with how this impacts their own sexual purity. I do not think this is a healthy framing for anyone, but it is nevertheless a thing in Jewish spaces historically that there be the anxiety or emasculation for Jewish men around the type of violence Jewish women have been subjected to. Some will say, although there are competing explanations for the practice, that the violation of the reproductive and sexual autonomy of Jewish women is a reason for the matrilineal descent rules that most Jewish communities prioritize. If a Jewish woman were raped and a pregnancy was the result, the child is still a member of the community, and the identity of the presumably non-Jewish rapist would be incidental. This is actually something you can see reflected on certain varieties of revival fix-it fic, where William may still be the result of CSM raping Scully, but he is nevertheless the child of Mulder and Scully in the ways that matter culturally.

Mulder’s emasculation by way of the constant assault on Scully’s autonomy invokes more tropes around Jewish manhood through the feelings of impotence and judgment around that impotence that ultimately fueled the development of political Zionism This is another way that Mulder is associated with tropes around Jews-as-Victims, although it may be unpopular for me to say so. Noting how Mulder suffers in the myth arc does not detract from the fact that it is ultimately Scully’s autonomy that is being violated and that she should be prioritized when it comes to the rape(s) she survives. However, there are many meta on that topic and I am looking at a different angle.

In summary The writers are pulling from a grab bag around victimhood and suffering. That grab bag of tropes is heavily infused with tropes that are associated with Jews in the Western, culturally Christian understanding. In these tropes around victimhood (historical suffering in the Holocaust, contemporary experiences of antisemitism, getting picked on by the Christian God outside of the myth arc, and being emasculated through Scully’s being stripped of her sexual and reproductive autonomy), Mulder is associated with Jewishness.

Mulder and Tropes of Jewish Power Okay okay, we don’t want our hero to be totally disadvantaged and have the shit beat out of him all the time. We gotta give him a leg up sometimes. Actually let’s give him the ultimate leg up! Coming from a group with the ultimate power and privilege. What tropes can we apply to our hero in this way?

The Cabal of it All As explored on my meta about the Syndicate, Mulder’s background invokes a lot of stereotypical tropes of Jews in power. He was born into an elite international group bent on the establishment of a new world order through white genocide, who controls the media, was involved in covering up for Nazis after the Holocaust and deliberately spreads disease amongst innocent people. While we don’t get canonical blood libel in the show, the show gets damn close by invoking just about every other popular trope around “Jewish cabals.” This is the world that Mulder stands to inherit twice over; by virtue of being raised by Bill Mulder, and by virtue of being the literal progeny of CSM.

Richie rich The various times we see the numerous homes that Bill and Teena Mulder own hint at the fact that Mulder comes from a quite wealthy background. It isn’t quite as established as the cabal nonsense, but it is there, and it’s something Fanon tends to run with. This invokes a lot of historical tropes around Jews having a lot of money, or being good with money, or controlling money, and so on.

In Conclusion In terms of tropes that align Jews with power, particularly sinister uses of power, Mulder also checks a lot of boxes. He is a rich guy born into the elite global (Jewish?) cabal. When you add in that he consistently experiences antisemitism in historical and contemporary ways, things get even more uncomfortable. When you sprinkle on top of that that he is a cheapskate (“Bad Blood”), that he hates his nose and longs for a nose job (“Sanguinarium”), and that he has an in with shady Yiddish speakers (“Fight Club”), you get another weird smear of negative tropes around Jews that are sprinkled on top of his character for no real reason.

Essentially, if you sit down in the European American world and want to write a long-suffering hero who regularly faces the ultimate evil, it’s easy to end up writing a Jew. If you sit down in the same context wanting to write a character who comes from the ultimate, most powerful, evil background imaginable, you might just accidentally write a Jew. If you do both at the same time, well. But then the drive to sprinkle on other negative tropes and have him played by a famous Jewish guy… what a mess.

In our next, penultimate installment, we will focus on how Mulder functions as Jesus in the myth arc, and how this actually reiterates a lot of the tropes around powerlessness and power that are historically associated with Jews. After that, we will discuss the move to reclaim Fox Mulder from this bullshit. Thank you for reading.

[ryanweintraub]

Telling Real Stories

At around 28 minutes the actors read things that their family members did and didn't want them to say about their experiences being part of the Roma people. I wonder if these are real things that the actors real families told them to say? It inspires me for the finale project where my group has to make something with our parents. Maybe I will ask my parents to send me a list of everything they wish for me to achieve in my life? This blending of real life and the theatrical world is something that I see happening time and again in German theater. The rules of 'the well made play' don't apply here. A play can be psychedelic and real, it does not have to take care of the audience. When the floor rose up and became a wall that then came crashing down at 52 minutes in, I realized that the rules of this theatrical event can be constructed and destructed at any moment. I wonder why there was a Jewish character on stage? She fit in with the others but also existed as a counter point to the others. Having a Jewish character on a German stage has a particular connotation. Is her existence in the world of the play to represent the commonalities between these two oppressed peoples?

[pet-shop-of-horror-fan]

Didn’t want to derail with a reblog and don’t know how to really organize my thoughts but… Ok firstly I 100% agree with your post regarding the problem of disability erasure for the sake of queer representation. I see it way more often than I’d like and it gets tiring. To say the very least. I’m asexual and even I wish people would stop looking at characters who are infertile or uninterested in/uncomfortable with having sex and immediately slap the ace label on them. It’s like the other side of the coin of people taking ace characters and insisting that ‘oh but they can still have sex or be sex positive’ for every single one, erasing those of us who aren’t. Sometimes there are explanations for the ways people act that aren’t queer, or romantic, or what have you! Not everything is about us!

I say that because I think another thing fandom often does is use queer headcanons OR disability headcanons to erase other important aspects of a character, and that can be just as bad. An example I’ve seen a lot is people looking at Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ as a metaphor for disability. While I can definitely see how that view makes sense, saying that was the intended interpretation feels… wrong. Looking at who Kafka was and the historical events surrounding the story’s creation gives a very different perspective on what it was about: Kafka was a Jewish man in a time and place where antisemitism was on the rise. He woke up to a world that saw him as vile and detestable for existing, a world that made it incredibly hard to survive without relying on others to do things he was no longer allowed to. The underlying idea of feeling like— or being treated as— a burden on others for existing is, understandably, very relatable. However, something being deeply relatable to one group doesn’t mean you can automatically “claim it”, so to speak, for that group.

Human experience overlaps a lot, but that overlap shouldn’t be treated as substitution; groups having shared experiences means respecting the shared part, not saying a given experience means it represents one group in particular over another. Two people can feel the exact same way about themselves for very different reasons, and that’s something that needs to be embraced more often in fandom, rather than looking at the experience and immediately chalking it up to being only a queer experience or only a disabled experience or something else entirely. Sometimes it’s both, sometimes it’s one or the other, folks need to learn to accept the latter, or even the possibility that it’s none of the above. Along those lines, nobody is immune to bigotry, and the first step to becoming a bigot is believing that you are. This is another lesson fandom needs to learn.

Sorry for this I just needed to ramble my thoughts off and I thought you’d have the best odds of understanding where I’m coming from.

[Post for context.]

Woof, I got to this late. Sorry, Anon.

Anyway, I am not sure if I understood 100% of what you were trying to say but I think we are mostly in agreement.

Though is should be clearly stated that there is a difference between explicit representation and metaphoric ones.

For example, in my original post, I was talking about disabled characters having their disabilities erased to read them as metaphorically trans. This is different from reading Metamorphosis as a disabled vs Jewish story, as Metamorphosis is not explicitly Jewish.

And like many metaphors that may not have been intended to be about disability, it maps on to easly. Let me ask, if someone slowly transphormed as shown in the story, wouldn't that person be disabled? And does the main character's experience not mirror what many disabled people go through?

Even if it was meant to be a Jewish story, due to both the metaphor and vagueness of its internet, it is a disability story.

As for the context you gave, I could not find any smoking gun as to whether or not it was indeed intended as a Jewish story. But taking your word for it, what I said still stands.

And I also have not seen a notable amount of people erase non-disabled stories to make them about disability. But I could just be missing it. IDK.

[shdwtouch]

What was the first muse that you’ve written? & How do you create an OC? What are your steps for developing an OC?

oh goodness, the first muse I wrote on tumblr was an alternate universe clint barton ! but first muse is general ? I don't remember. but considering I was roleplaying on a forum before I came here... it was most likely some sort of original character ?

I didn't write a lot of canon characters, since threads were usually organized around a central plot or location with multiple people playing one or more character, all of which were usually created specifically for the thread. however, I do remember two relatively clearly. one was some sort of... mutant ? he had been experimented on in a lab alongside a bunch of other kids, which ended up escaping and were basically being hunted as fugitives. the other was a professor at a magic school a la x-men, but he was actually like... secretly undercover investigating the school because there was some shady stuff going down ? I'm sure I could still find them on my account... but oh, the cringe. I did. and yes, it was very cringey. also the first guy was a vampire, not a mutant. all in the distant year of... 2011. I was eleven years old lmao

as for how I create an original character ? it kinda just... happens. at least, in regards to original / fandomless characters. others are a product of the fandom I made them in. Shade was created because I really liked the lore of the shadow-cursed lands and wanted to make a character that was involved in it. my (currently fandomless) original character Kaey started out as an antivan crow oc in drag-n age. my oldest original character, Lorence J Harving, started out as a team fortress 2 oc ! then I have muses like Zhu Dai and Yew, which were inspired by mythology and folklore. Wyn started out as a random picrew design I made ! Indi and Caoimhe were made for roleplay groups that were abandoned. it really just depends on what the inspiration is ! so I don't really have a tried and true method for original character creation. but trust me, if I did I would be bottling and selling it XD not to blow my own vertubenflugen, but I know people have expressed interest and envy towards my creative process... and I genuinely wish I could offer advice other than embrace the process !

as for developing an original character ? again, it kinda depends. with Shade just being able to talk about her to others and see how she interacts with other characters has done wonders for her development ! Zhu Dai was embracing different mythologies, cultures, and religious ideologies. if the muse is there then things will come somewhat naturally, but muse can also be fickle and wishy-washy so. it can definitely take time ! but I honestly believe that some of the best development does happen in the cooperative process that is roleplay. yet, I have other methods. music plays a lot into my muse and development, as does the media and content I consume ! I take inspiration from a lot of different places !

but if we want to talk nitty gritty... I don't know. I tend to walk my developments around quite a bit, feeling them out to make sure they're what I really envision / want for the character. I change my mind a lot, go back and forth on things. and tend to write very cryptic late night notes in my personal Discord server that awake and lucid me must then decipher for optimal impact. uwu; but in general... yeah I have no idea. it happens. sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't. Kaey in particular has been victim to that indecision and, dare I say, overabundance in ideas. lets just say I can't kill my darlings. I cannot. but I also hate recycling ideas, so. make it make sense.

idk but here are my general steps / points I like to hit

character name [ex. shade]

what is their basic story ? [ex. a fugitive assassin doing their best to survive]

appearance [ex. long black hair, gray eyes, short]

cultural heritage / identity [ex. jewish + indian ]

notable features or characteristics [ex. spooky eyes, always wears a hood]

general personality, defined by arc / period in life, i.e. how has this characters personality, habits, etc developed and evolved through their story up to their current point ? (asking questions like why is my character like this now ? etc can help you figure out important points in their history that may have influenced their current state, basically providing a skeleton to work a timeline off of)

asking random questions. whats their favorite ice cream ? do they listen to podcasts, if so what kind ? do they celebrate holidays ? etc. (knowing basic details can help you paint a better understanding of your muse, and help you find their voice, especially in terms of decision making !)

important relationships, whether they be past or present, or even the optimal / wishlist relationships you would want to explore. (this can really help set a foundation for creating meaningful dynamics through roleplay !)

what does your character want ? what is their goal ? what is their optimal ending ? is their optimal ending what they want / expect ? if the character doesn't have a perceivable ending then consider how this journey impacts them ! do they have a turning point ? etc

alternate universes. ask all the "what ifs" you can think of, silly or not ! (even if you don't use these for rp, they can help you find your characters voice !)

turn them around and around in your head until you are either obsessed with them or sick / frustrated. if you are obsessed then you have succeeded in making an original character, congrats ! if you are sick / frustrated take a step back and come back to it later; go through the steps again, rework things as needed, but if you still end up frustrated... keep the things you like the most, discard anything that makes you go eh or nah, take a step back, then return with inspiration !

hope that helps ! ; w ;

EDIT: I have had a very long day so I don't know why I thought answering this now would be a good idea owo; but I just want to say... the gist of my approach to writing any character is this: we are all a tapestry of what we have experienced, the people we have met, etc and a good, dynamic character will reflect that. humans are also flawed and full of contradictions, so don't be afraid to embrace those !

but yeah. if you're ever stuck developing a character, figure out what about them ticks, then find out why it ticks. your character is really gruff, certainly they weren't born that way. did they have a rough home life ? were they in the military ? did they get their heart broken, did they watch a loved one die ? how has that impacted other aspects of their life and story ? have other traits / experiences interacted with this gruffness ? is this gruffness a product of an interaction between traits / experiences ? are they aware they are gruff ? do they care ? do they secretly wish like they could be less gruff ? do they need to be gruff ? what would it look like if they weren't ? I could literally go on and on listing questions that could lead to a thousand different tangents. point being: cause and effect. explore it. your character is a product of what they have been through, of their world. embrace it.

[this-is-z-art-blog]

This one was a little difficult for me because seeing a Jewish character buried not just in a visibly Christian cemetery but specifically under a cross themselves was staggeringly upsetting. I personally disagree, and do not care for gentile creators deciding it's okay for them to do to Jewish characters, but I have heard from Jewish friends that they can see wearing a cross for fashion being a fun 'fuck you' to Christian supremacy and a way to show not taking them seriously. But the idea of having my Judaism so erased as to be buried as a Christian was…one of the more distressing experiences I've ever had online.

It didn't really leave me in the mood for playful snark, so instead my goal for this drawing was more straightforward and sincere, a quiet bittersweet moment of visiting a passed loved one. I went with Sam's great-grandfather instead of Sam herself because I was not in the mood to do performative angst about killing off a Jewish character I know and love, vs her quite old relative who's presumably passed by the time the show even opens and is less of an acute loss. I drew a lot of stones left on his grave to show his memory is honored and beloved, implying strong, lasting connections to their family, friends, and community. And finally Sam's shirt, by which point I was feeling a lot better, I think speaks for itself pretty clearly: she's not just Jewish until anything, she's Jewish forever. Also this is a ghost show, so I wanted to play a little bit with death isn't quite firmly the end.

Also as an aside, I got a really lovely and supportive response from this one, and particularly enjoyed being asked about Izzy Manson- I love when people engage with the things I make! It makes online space feel collaborative and community-oriented On a day with a stark reminder of some of the drawbacks of being online, it was nice to be reminded as well of the very things I love about fandom in general and events like this one in particular.

[ID: digital drawing of Sam Manson standing in a cemetery. She is setting a stone on top of a grave for her great-grandfather, which is inscribed ‘Isaac “Izzy” Manson’, then his Hebrew name Yitzcak Ben David and a Star of David sigil, then finally ‘Inventor, Father, Friend’. There are a large number of stones on or around the base. Other gravestones visible also have Jewish symbol and small rocks. Sam is wearing scuffed black boots, a dark purple skirt, and a black shirt with purple text saying ‘Jewish til I die Forever’, as well as a Star of David choker necklace. Her expression is contemplative.]

DannyMay 2023 Day 19…2! It’s Grave Again.

It had been 21 days since I last saw Sam Manson drawn with a cross. How do I put this: folks, do not draw a Jewish person buried under a cross

[fdelopera]

A Jewish Analysis of Jake Lockley (or, How the Moon Knight System Are Jewish AND Latine)

Sooo I have been working on a loooong meta on Jake Lockley’s portrayal in the MCU. Like, 5000 words long. It’s part of my Autistic Analysis of Moon Knight series. (In case you doubted my autistic capacity to write a chapter-length meta about a character with a few minutes of screentime — though as you’ll see in my meta, he appears extensively throughout the series, as a silhouette that’s traced in the space between Marc’s and Steven’s lives.)

You can read the other parts of my Analyses here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

But I have a few sections of this Jake meta that deserve their own post. This is one of them.

The implications of this particular analysis extend beyond Jake’s characterization and tie into the way that the Spector family is represented in the Moon Knight series. Particularly in relation to the family’s Jewishness.

This analysis started back when I watched Episodes 4 and 5. I've thought a lot about the reveal of the “Tomb Buster” show at the end of Ep. 4. The fact that Dr. Steven Grant was looking for Coyolxāuhqui, the lunar goddess of the Aztecs. Not an Egyptian deity. Not a Greek deity. An Aztec deity. Specifically, a Mesoamerican deity. There's something in there that relates to the MK system, I think. A reason, perhaps, as to why Marc fixates on THIS episode of the show in particular, enough to bring it into the system’s headspace.

Because I think it also helps to explain Jake’s characterization in Ep. 6. The fact that he speaks Spanish fluently. The fact that he has Mayan symbols on his collar, and is NOT appropriating their use.

Of course, Jake’s characterization is a way to honor Oscar. It was Oscar’s idea to have him speak Spanish. Meghan Kasperlik, the costume designer, ran with this idea, and she added Mayan calendar symbols to Jake’s collar (the dates of Oscar’s and his brother Mikey’s birthdays).

But then there’s the fact that Mohamed Diab and the Marvel casting department chose to cast Latine actors to play the Spector family.

Now, again, you could say that this was meant to honor Oscar and his heritage.

But I think there is more to this casting choice than a meta nod to Oscar.

I think that in the show, the Spector family are MEANT to be seen as Latine Jewish people.

Now, if you are not Jewish, this might seem like an obvious statement to make. Oscar is Latino, and Mohamed Diab and the Marvel casting department wanted to acknowledge Oscar’s heritage. So they cast Latine actors to play the Spector family.

But if you are Jewish, especially if you’re a millennial who grew up in North America, you may understand the implications of what I have just written, in terms of the world of the show. Especially regarding the MK system’s experiences growing up in the 90s and 00s in a Midwestern Jewish community.

You see, I don’t think that the Spectors are meant to be seen as Latine Jewish people whose forefathers and mothers lived in a Central or South American country for a generation or two before immigrating to the US (as is the case for many Latine Jews).

Instead, I think the Spectors are possibly meant to be seen as descendants of Jews who fled Europe or Russia (perhaps in the 19th or 20th Century, but possibly as early as the 1500s), moved to a country in Central or South America, for example, where there were many Jewish communities, and then intermarried, before immigrating to the US.

I think they are Jewish people who maintained their Jewishness AND their ties to their Latine ancestral heritage.

I don't know exactly how much Mohamed Diab, Oscar, and the production team knew about the implications of this, or if they understood what that experience might have been like for a family of Latine Jews in Middle America at the turn of the millennium. And I don’t know how much the consulting Rabbi would have divulged, because it would bring up some ways in which the Jewish community has typically looked askance on intermarriage.

Being Jewish is complicated, because it has historically been about maintaining an uninterrupted Jewish bloodline on the mother’s side that can be traced back to the descendants of the Jewish Diaspora of the Middle Ages — primarily Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews from Europe and Russia, who were themselves descendents of Jews who immigrated from the Middle East under duress or were brought to Europe as slaves. One possible reason as to why Judaism has maintained itself as a Matrilineal religion is because Jewish communities were so often invaded and ravaged by foreign armies. This meant that you couldn’t always know whether a child’s biological father was a Jew, but you at least knew that their mother was Jewish. As with most aspects of Jewish history, Judaism has survived because of its cultural ability to adapt to the cyclical traumas that Jewish communities endure.

If the Spectors were Jews with Latino ancestry (and not just cultural heritage), they might have come up against some “raised eyebrows” within certain Midwestern Jewish communities in the 90s and early 00s. This is slowly changing nowadays, but back then, Judaism was all about bloodlines. As a Patrilineal Jewish person myself, I never felt welcomed into Jewish spaces when I was growing up. And as painful as it was, I can partly empathize with the people (including members of my own family) who wanted to exclude me. Six million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust within living memory, and there were members of the Jewish community who didn’t want to further dilute the Jewish people through intermarriage.

In 1983, only four years before Marc’s birth year in the MCU, the Central Conference of American Rabbis of Reform Judaism allowed Jewish children without a clear Matrilineal Jewish bloodline to be considered Jewish, so long as they had one Jewish parent and were raised in a Jewish home. The Reconstructionist movement also allowed children without clear Matrilineal descent to join, so long as one parent was Jewish. But these were controversial decisions. In the case of the Reform movement, not all Reform congregations were on board with it back then, and most other Jewish movements still required children without a secure Matrilineal line to go through the lengthy conversion process before they could take part in Jewish life.

Because of this, the Spectors (and Marc in particular) might have encountered lingering questions of, “But how Jewish are you?” Wendy’s bloodline might have been called into question. Did her parents intermarry? There might have been questions about Marc being Patrilineal. Some elders at the family’s Temple or Synagogue might have suggested that Marc should undergo conversion first before having his Bar Mitzvah. All of this would have served to alienate and disenfranchise Marc from his experience of Jewishness. I mention these examples because these are all things that have happened to Jewish people I know who weren’t considered to be Jewish “enough” or “correctly” — two of whom were Latina Jewish people.

As for Jake, I think that he relates far more to his Latino roots than to his Jewish roots, because he is the only one that we never see wear their Magen David necklace, as I’ve written about in my post on Judaism in Moon Knight.

The appearance of the necklace shows Marc’s progression in his relationship to his Jewishness throughout the show, aided by Steven as his emotional and spiritual protector. But on Jake, the Magen David is tucked away, hidden beneath the Mayan and Egyptian symbols of his collar. Jake’s relationship to their Judaism is the most complicated, I feel.

Unlike Steven (and possibly Marc), I don’t think Jake ever had the “luxury” of Hebrew school. Based on his role in the system, I don’t know how involved he would have been in their Jewish education or their Bar Mitzvah. As I wrote in my analysis, I think that Steven may have been the most involved in their Jewish life.

Now, I think the family must have spoken at least some Spanish in the home while the MK system were growing up. Perhaps the extended family also spoke Spanish. Marc and Steven would be able to speak it as well as Jake, perhaps to differing degrees of ease, but all with some bilingual ability. The critical window for first language acquisition is part of a neurological mechanism. While each alter has specific accents and abilities with the languages they speak, and they each have different associations with their cultural/linguistic identities, they would all still likely be able to speak Spanish, even if Jake speaks it with the greatest fluency.

Jake speaks Spanish as a native speaker, not as someone who learned it at school or later in life, meaning that the MK system learned it within the critical window for a first language. He’s not speaking it in the same way that Steven speaks French, with an accent. And he’s not speaking Peninsular Spanish. Nor is he speaking Ladino (the cultural language of Sephardic Jews, who were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century). Instead, he’s speaking the accent that Oscar speaks.

He’s wearing Mayan symbols on his collar, and I think he has a CLAIM to that. So too do the entire MK system — Marc and Steven, as well.

Jake’s costume is not meant to be seen as a “Jewish person appropriating Mayan symbology.” He has a personal tie to this culture, in a way that a regular Jewish person would not really have, even if their parents or grandparents had lived in Central or South America for a time.

And I have to wonder if that is why Jake speaks to Harrow and Ammit in Spanish. Clearly, on a meta level, it is meant to be seen as a nod to Oscar’s heritage. But within the world of the show, I wonder if there is more to Jake’s use of Spanish here.

Because Wendy, their mother, is thematically linked to Ammit and Harrow. We know this based on this interview that Oscar gave about the "Diab cut" scene that was removed from Episode 6, in which Marc and Steven confront Wendy as the embodiment of Ammit.

So I wonder, is Jake speaking Spanish as a language that he knew that Wendy would understand?

Because, not to get too much into detail, but Jake as a protector of the system wouldn’t necessarily front during her abuse. Within system roles, that is more the job of a trauma holder — in this case, Marc. Jake’s role is to protect Marc INSIDE, but not necessarily to front during abuse. That could lead to a far worse outcome due to the power dynamics within the family. It is often safer to endure abuse in the moment than to fight back.

Based on the times we see Jake front in the show, we can infer that he often fronts when the system is incapacitated, usually from Marc (and sometimes Steven) doing something that is reckless or suicidal — something that without Khonshu’s healing factor would lead to death. I believe it’s possible that Jake’s role in the system came from protecting Marc from self-harm and suicide attempts — and possibly from defending against extreme trauma when Marc was overwhelmed — but not so much from fighting abusers offensively. Jake doesn’t seek out violence. He’s not looking for people to harm. He is a protector. And the way that Marc often seems to self-harm is to get in close in a fight, take the hits instead of deflecting them, and keep going until he is at risk of injury, and so Jake fights to eliminate the outward threat so the body is safe.

Jake’s doctrine is one of life, and there were only two times we know of that he wasn’t fast enough to preserve the system. The first was when Bushman shot them at the archaeological dig site, when Khonshu intervened and gave them the gift of life, a gift which Jake clings to, a gift that he won't give up because it is his safety net. Khonshu SAW Jake that night as he searched through the alters’ minds; the old god is perhaps one of the few entities who have ever recognized and acknowledged Jake’s distinct personhood. (If, as I desperately hope, Gena and her kids also exist in this universe, they would know Jake by name as well, but I don’t think that too many other individuals do.) I think Jake feels a connection and loyalty to Khonshu because of that; perhaps when Khonshu says, “Meet my friend,” Jake feels a lessening of the profound, existential void of loneliness that defines his existence. After all, Jake’s job is to work alone — he has to keep himself separate from the rest of the system so that Marc can’t overpower him like he does Steven. If Marc could impede Jake in times of emergency, then none of them would be safe.

The second time Jake wasn’t fast enough to save them was in Alexander’s Tomb, when Harrow shot them. Harrow’s ace up his sleeve is his savage capacity for unpredictable violence. He normally manipulates people with his words. He doesn’t need to raise a finger. He has Ammit’s acolytes to do his dirty work, after all. He doesn’t broadcast what he’s about to do. He doesn’t threaten the MK system with his gun. He just points and shoots. Too fast for Jake to front and save them all. Two bullets. One for Marc and one for Steven. But even Harrow, who has been through their minds, who knows that other alters exist in their system, doesn’t do Jake the courtesy of acknowledging him. Even in his own murder, he goes unseen.

And so, in the end, Jake shoots Harrow/Ammit because Marc is only just beginning to find his grounding and self-worth through Steven. Jake knows that Marc could be swayed to keep Harrow alive as a form of penance and self-punishment. Harrow and Ammit could continue to torture them for years to come, just as Wendy has done, and Jake cannot have that. He needs to DO something. Jake is a protector; he is also a weapon. Ammit must be destroyed.

But, in the final scene, I have to wonder. Is Jake finally getting the offensive upper hand over Wendy? The final way that he can protect Marc and Steven? When he says those words, when he points that gun, who is he really speaking to? And is this the reason he addresses Harrow/Ammit in Spanish? Because he knows they’ll understand, because of who they truly ARE? Is he telling WENDY, “Hoy te toca perder”?