#i will still continue to respect the different iterations though and continue on creating with what aspects i love from fop

[usagifuyusummer]

Oh, I did not expect for you to agree with me lol. That's a first.

You can't really avoid those who think that animation should only confine to young children (those who complain about how these kid-friendly shows should not include darker themes at all). This problem will unfortunately persist until the end of time I'm afraid.

I'm more of an advocate that animation is a medium, not a genre. So, I will usually ignore those kinds of criticism if their reason and explanation is not sound and critical.

Still, I understand that not all people can avoid the dissapointment when reading these kinds of comments on the things you found fascinating. Like, "Why don't they understand this topic like I do?". So yeah, can't do anything about those "softies and overprotective people". They are just on a different wavelength of thinking, that's why they expressed their opinions on a show that way.

I will also shake hands 🤝 with you regarding their depiction of the fairy mythology in the Fairly Oddparents lol.

"Art disturbs those who are comfortable, and art provides comfort for those who are disturbed."

This quote by someone (I don't remember lmao), shows that art doesn't exist for a single existence. There's light and dark, ying and yang, the sunny and dark sides to everything in this world. So, I guess that's why you felt that way regarding the lore of fairies in FOP. It feels more complete in a way, how the lighter and darker aspects of the show complement each other and how they can also reflect how the real world views these concepts. I guess you can say that the lore worldbuilding in this show feels "realistic" at times despite the fantastical setting and cartoony depiction of abuse on children hahahaha.

The FOP show touches on serious problems that we can't avoid. Instead of dwelling on it and saying it's no use, the show takes its time to show that there's more to the world despite the terrible circumstances you're stuck with at birth, and for that I admire the show. Even if it doesn't give me an ending to the character I want to see finally achieving happiness the most.

That's why I won't touch FOP: A New Wish. Let the youngsters have their fun. I still feel somewhat... angry at them for not giving us the old gens the ending we deserved.

Its sibling show, Danny Phantom also suffered from writing problems, but at least there's a large dedicated fanbase and a recent comic tie-in with the show that addresses these writing issues. For FOP? Just scrap them all in the trash and just take the characters that most people actually want to see rather than giving us a special ending movie animated episode and then moving on to the new generation.

Sorry, that got cynical and bitter of me lol. You can enjoy FOPANW. I won't disturb you for it. I just... have a lot of lingering hostile emotions towards how the original got mishandled so bad towards the end. I'll handle this on my own.

Moving on..., oh you wish to create a horror FOP AU? Hm, I am not sure if you've shared your thoughts on this before, but I'm the type to read whatever anyone has written and shared. I think if you want your AU to be noticed by a large audience, you can include illustrations or sketches? It doesn't have to look pretty and complete, just understandable enough to get your idea through.

But, I don't mind reading your ideas on a horror FOP AU. In fact, I encourage you to share whatever you're thinking about the horror AU!!! There's so much potential for horror in FOP, and I think it's kinda disappointing that most people haven't realised how DARK fae lore can go in the real world lol. I've seen some fanworks that managed to implement the darker themes of FOP into their stories, and oh boy, do I enjoy it immensely. There's not many though, so just do it!!! Contribute to the darker themes of FOP fanworks *laughs maniacally*!!!

It's up to you ultimately. You can include any iteration of your favourite FOP lore (even FOPANW). I think there will be an audience for it. Just let it out lol. I'll just be reading and giving my two cents on it.

I also have a FOP AU that I've been thinking too much in the drafts lmao, but I am just swamped with university responsibilities that I can't make a serious post talking about it. I also won't expect much attention from the FOP AU I will be creating someday lol. It's just an AU I thought about to fill in the void from the original.

Yeah, this got long... Still, have fun writing!!! I can be one of your horror FOP AU readers when you eventually get that post posted lol. Thanks for reading.

A scandalous episode for many, which in my opinion changes the general image of fairies (clearly not for the better)

Many people were shocked, to put it mildly, after watching this episode. And many were unhappy and even more frightened by the behavior of Cosmo and Wanda, which I can't help but agree with. However, I liked this episode on the contrary. It shows the darker evil nature of fairies and how crazy they can sometimes become if someone simply offends their child. And it doesn't matter that this is their godson. Because of this, it now really seems to me that fairies are not who they pretend to be and the creators sometimes directly show this. For example, this phase of fairies at 2 years old(terrible twosome) when they start to go crazy and rebel against everything. You will say that "it's just a phase." Really? And the fact that Poof almost destroyed the entire Earth in this episode is considered "just a phase"? The fact that fairies can destroy all life just because of this phase begins to worry. Like, what makes them do all these terrible things? A sudden change in behavior or ….. an inner voice inside that is their secret dark essence??And if you remember the anti-fairies who are the complete opposite of fairies, then I'm starting to seriously think that they are less dangerous than them. And this is not the only scandalous episode…

(Poor Timmy… What the heck??)

And going back to that scandalous episode, I had a thought: "what if all this was true?" Because Cosmo and Wanda were enjoying this suspiciously so much and it all looked extremely realistic.. And the fact that they really left Timmy with injuries and bruises made me think that this is true and they really turn into monsters after 8 hours. And you know what? This would be a great idea for more lore between fairies and anti fairies (they, as opposites in THIS way, would look incredibly cool). And it would also be a great idea for creating some kind of horror game (well, just a note)

*Redacted

+comments to this episode

This is really.. something….

[revolutionary-girl-emily]

RWBY x Justice League Designs

For my very first RWDE post, I’d like to discuss the outfits for the Justice League in the upcoming movie. I love sewing, it’s a huge part of my life. I spend a lot of time researching fashion history and different textiles. I’ve had issues with how the clothing is modeled since the jump to Maya, but most of that has been discussed all over the place, so for now I’m gonna stick to the new designs. 

*HUGE NOTE* All of my criticisms with the models are due in the most part to the people making them not having the time or resources to really finish them. I do not blame any of the designers/modelers at all for any of these issues. They all deserve the utmost respect for making them as good as they are. Fuck RT and their exploitive business practices.

This is going to be a long post.

One more quick note before jumping in, I know almost nothing about DC. I watched the 2003 Teen Titans and the first 2 seasons of Young Justice. Outside of that, I don’t know these people. If there are any specific references their costumes make, they’ll definitely be going over my head.

Firstly, I have got to talk about the Flash. This goddamn zipper. This is the main reason I created this blog in the first place. The designs in RWBY have really trended towards throwing zippers all over everyone in later volumes, but this is the first time (that I recall) where they broke the laws of physics to do that. Zippers function by passing uniformly sized teeth through a zipper pull, which interlocks the teeth together. For this to work, the teeth have to all be the right size and shape. This means that even sewing zippers around gently curving slopes can be difficult. It is impossible for a zipper to turn on an acute angle and still function. And this guy’s got 4 of them.

Other than that I honestly don’t mind much about the costume. I like the lighting bolt scarf that trails behind him even when he’s not going super speed. He has goggles that he actually uses, which would be genuinely beneficial in combat. I don’t quite understand the bandages by his ankles; maybe they’re to imply that all his running led to increased strain that needs some extra support? Though then why not give him more supportive, calf-length boots? He also has bandages on his wrists and I really don’t know what they’re for. Maybe he hurt them trying to twirl his new staff with no prior training? My last note is that there are too many lines crossing all over his body. Zigzag lightning bolts, horizontal lines on either side of his waist, vertical lines on his pants, and the bandages again. It makes your eyes dart all over the place.

Cyborg seems a bit jumbled. I know he’s usually portrayed with red lights all over, though I remember blue in Teen Titans ‘03. Well they covered both bases by giving him red lights around the upper chest and head and blue accents for his right arm, hands and legs. But wait, there are also purple lights on the bottom of his drone, and his belt and shoes are both green (though not the same green). He also has a blue and black chain on the same side as his mechanical arm. There’s lots of stuff going on all over with him, but then his entire midsection is just an empty void that reads as unfinished. And for someone who is a cyborg, from the pecs down he just looks like an entirely normal human. I think it would have been a much more interesting (and I think faithful) design if they had his mechanical attributes continue down his body. 

(I just looked it up and it seems that in his most common depictions, only the right side of his head remains flesh. This iteration could very well be mechanical below the pecs but it would be nice to see that instead of completely covering it with cheap looking fabric. It’s not like that would be out of place in Remnant.)

Also, I wish the metal looked like metal and not plastic. But that’s an issue that plagues every single design on this show so let’s move on.

Superman absolutely got that jacket out of the children’s section. You could maybe read it as a cropped jacket with 3 quarter sleeves, if it also wasn’t clearly incapable of meeting in the front to zip up. Other than that I just wish his turtleneck didn’t have that random zipper on it.

Wonder Woman, the Amazon, also the only one wearing heels, is shorter than all of the men. I don’t care if that’s canon to the comics I still hate it. I honestly love her costume though, by far my favorite one.

Vixen and Green Lantern both look pretty good. I wish Batman had another color on him, just a small accent would be good. Maybe make his scarf that classic dark blue his cowl used to be decades ago, or make the utility belt yellow.

One final note, it seems so on the nose that they made the two heroes with animal themes into faunus. How come being isekai’d changed only two of them into a different species? And now Batman can fly when his whole deal is being such a good detective and so physically fit that he can keep up with super-powered guys even without any powers. Not to mention turning a billionaire white guy into an in-universe minority.

If you’ve read this far, thank you! I hope this post was decently coherent. It started from me ranting to my one irl friend that actually watches rwby about that goddamn zipper and I realized I needed to get these thoughts out into the world. I look forward to posting with you all through volume 9!

[bigskydreaming]

You're asked to choose one and only one or DC's future stops existing immediately. your choices:

1. Jason Todd the anti-hero who seldom works with only a couple of the bats he doesn't hate, for example Dick and Cass VS. Jason Todd who came back with healed body but broken spirit, folded back into the Gotham gang and learns to be part of the society again.

2. Tim Drake who makes all of his mistakes as canon but realizes he's been wrong and apologizes to people VS. Tim Drake back in his first iteration, a cute little brother character who is a reader insert and a fun teenager.

3. JayKyle VS DickKyle.

4. Jason Todd with a sword VS. Damian Wayne with a sword.

5. Chris Kent VS. Jon kent.

Okay but which DC future? Its omniversal future? Its hypertime future? Its multiversal future? Its Elseworlds future? Its dark multiverse future? Mwahahaha your threat is useless because the sheer wtf of DC's continuities, timelines and conflicting declarations of what to even call their multiomnihyperverse makes it impossible to target simply A future! DC's overly unnecessarily complicated nature renders it functionally immortal and impossible to ever truly destroy, take that Darkseid.

I mean. But anyway. Whatevs:

1) I honestly do prefer the idea of Jason someday fully reuniting/reintigrating into the Batfam as a whole, because fuck it, the found family I'm here for is the one where they actually act like a family....I just think it takes actual work to get to that point and I get irey when people are like we're here! We found it! And its like meanwhile, abusive dynamics still abound. Mmm. No thank you. But even though I've been on a huge Jason and Dick and Cass kick for like, forever, I do still aim for him having a dynamic of his own with the rest of the family.

Like the thing is, I hate playing the favorites card in families, and I think the emphasis on so and so being Bruce's favorite child or so and so being this kid's favorite sibling, etc, like it really does feel like to the detriment of the whole family, because once you start validating the idea of favorites, ESPECIALLY in a found family that is CONTINUOUSLY growing....I think you're kinda shooting yourself in the foot because you're kinda creating a situation where either no future new additions to the family can EVER be Bruce or one of the kids' 'favorite' or else you're innately positing that said fave status is conditional and even a current fave of Bruce or a sibling can be bumped down the ladder by the addition of a later arrival....

Which is LITERALLY the entire essence of the eternal conflict between Dick and Damian and Tim fans. Its not even that Damian is Dick's favorite, allegedly, its that prior to Damian's very EXISTENCE, fans felt comfortable declaring Tim unilaterally to be Dick's 'favorite'.....and then all it took was the addition of a single family member who had specific NEEDS in regards to Dick's attention and focus, largely because of his age and needing a legal guardian while Tim was old enough to literally jet set around the world on his own.....and like, everything went up in flames in large corners of fandom.

So I'm just like, death to the fave family member myth, its just incredibly counter productive to the idea of found family as a whole especially when it usually only exists to prop up a preferred character as better than others via the proof of see, these other characters say he's their fave or whatever...but also like, its not even necessary?

Because the thing is, you can have Jason reintegrated into the whole family overall, and still prioritize your personal narrative FOCUS on characters you like more than others, like say Dick and Cass.....because of course its natural for even people in the same family to have entirely different DYNAMICS with different family members....and these dynamics don't have to come with a ranking system in order to prioritize which ones you just focus on more in a story. Because its not necessarily that Dick has to be Jason's fave brother, y'know, just for Jason to prefer spending time with Dick simply because he's more comfortable with him due to knowing him longer or being more secure in the idea that Dick doesn't judge him based on their greater shared history.

This doesn't mean that Jason doesn't care for his other siblings, that he can't have strong dynamics with them as well, its just about finding a reason for why these two specifically might be in a story without the others that doesn't demand putting a definitive ranking on which one Jason considers his FAVE. Just like Damian doesn't have to be Dick's FAVE just for them to have the super close canon relationship they have, even relative to the other siblings, because there's everything needed in canon already to establish that the mere fact of Dick essentially RAISING Damian for a year, and being the first one in the family to really take a chance on Damian, like, this lends itself naturally to them maybe more naturally gravitating towards each other than other siblings due to comfort level and familiarity, etc, but it doesn't have to be like....oh but yeah, I just like Damian more than you, Tim, y'know?

So my answer on this one is a total cop out of both, both is good. Jason totally reintegrated back into the family, but with dynamics that still lend themselves fairly easily towards story lineups where its just him running missions with Dick or Duke or any other one or two specific family members even if for no other reason than they gel together best in the field, y'know?

2) Hmm. I honestly really do love and miss 90s Tim Drake and just....don't see him in a lot of what I read these days. I'm like no, why did he have to go, he was doing so well! BUT I'm also on a big accountability kick, and like, I'm so steeped in fics where Dick GROVELS for forgiveness for every little slight he's ever done real or imagined, with every character but Tim in particular, so its like.....I'm not gonna lie, I really have a preference these days for seeing stuff where its literally anyone actually owning up to shit they've done to Dick and apologizing or groveling or making it to HIM, like, completely unconditionally. In the same manner we usually see Dick apologizing, glossing over any reasons he might have had for doing what he did or feeling the way he did, and saying oh it doesn't matter, putting the entirety of his focus on what HE did and why it was wrong no matter what and he's sorry.....that's what I would kill to see from more fics, just in reverse.

Because so often even in the all too rare fics where we DO see other characters apologizing to Dick for shit, its watered down with Dick volunteering that oh he messed up too, it was a two way street, and its like no! This is Pettiness Hours! I want the unconditional apologies! Give me the groveling! From anyone, I don't care at this point, lol, just show me characters actually PUTTING IN THE WORK to make it up to Dick for harm they've caused him, even if completely unintentionally or via neglecting his feelings or considering the repercussions their actions or words would have on him. Aaaaaaand, frankly, Tim's a good place to start there, because of how one sided all the takes on their conflicts have been for so many years. I mean, if people need a place to start, Batman and Robin Eternal gets enough praise it can't be pretended that people in fandom don't know that story exists, so how about some stories where Tim says he's fucking sorry for punching Dick in issue #4 or #5 of that one, and it was uncalled for and he was clearly just looking for an excuse to unleash some more of his resentment and upset for the Spyral/Forever Evil stuff, and family deciding that its totally okay to punch Dick whenever they're mad at him and need to work off some aggression so they can then finally forgive him (for now) is a trend that needs to die in a fire post-haste? I mean just as an example.

But the thing that kills me about fanfic trends is like....the sameness of so much of it. There's SO much room for variety and diverse takes, and like....I don't actually hate Tim! I'm just cranky because of the imbalanced nature of most content out there for literal years at this point. Push the pendulum BACK in the other direction, create some balance by showing the flip side of things.....and that leaves a lot more room for me and others of like minds to then be more amenable to - and even interested in - other stories that don't scratch this particular itch, but don't need to, because other stories are doing the scratching by then, y'know?

And THEN like, at that point, I would be ALL FOR more stories that are just callbacks to classic 90s Tim who I adore, with his skateboarding and his EARNESTNESS and his go-get-em spirit and also the gumption. All the gumption. I like that Tim. I do miss that Tim. But like, for the moment, like, I want accountable Tim because I am tiiiiiiiired of groveling Dick and tbh at this point its not enough for me to just see people move past putting Dick in that position and just have mutually respective and doting brothers Dick and Tim having adventures together......nah, first I want some reciprocation. Ngl. Gimme the apologies for actual mistakes actually made.

3) DickKyle. Easy question, c'mon, you gotta know that. LOL. ;)

But yeah, I've been shipping these two off their like, two shared pages from way back in the Obsidian Age story years before Jason even returned, let alone was in Countdown together with Kyle, so like, its no contest. I don't mind JayKyle, I certainly prefer it to JayRoy tbh, but there's not a ton of appeal in it for me, particularly in how its usually depicted, because like....the entire basis of JayKyle is that they DO have stories together and spent a whole year worth of weekly issues traveling the multiverse together in Countdown.....but there's like, practically no trace of their actual dynamics from that series or any specifics of literally any issue from that entire comic in most fics I’ve read, so its like.....idk, it tends to come across as more generic, not in the sense that it cant still be interesting, but more in the sense that it feels like just someone paired with Jason just because history between them EXISTS without any interest in exploring what that history actually IS....and at that point, its like, well there's no reason TO prioritize that ship over DickKyle for me personally, when like, I have a shit ton of headcanon reasons for why those two in a pairing specifically. *Shrugs* My logic. Its not for everyone, but it works for me.

4) Jason with a sword or Damian with a sword? I don't understand the question. Both. Both is good. All the characters should have swords. Swords are awesome.

5) Chris Kent vs Jon Kent - oof. I adore Jon, I really do. I love his dynamic with Damian, I love a lot of their specific stories, the parallels between them as friends and Bruce and Clark as friends....its all very bien. But I gotta give this one to Chris, because I'm always gonna have a soft spot for him because I'm a sucker for all abused kid heroes, and I just miss that funky little dude so much. There's so many stories we didn't get with him and were just ripe for the picking, but nooooo, DC's like lol you can't have nice things, here we just rebooted the entire multiverse and now Clark and Lois never adopted the son of Clark's worst Kryptonian rival and raised him with tender love and care awww does that make you sad, were you invested in him, WELL TOO BAD, HE'S GONE NOW AND BASICALLY NEVER EXISTED, NOW GIVE US YOUR MONEY ANYWAY MWAHAHAHAHAH.

Yeah. I'm still not over that. Probably will never be tbh, so I with great grudge-bearing do affirm that I'm gonna go with Chris on this one and like, he is a Priority for me and I'm still very keen on the idea of him and Duke being besties for random reasons that might not make sense to anyone but me, but eh, whatever.

[theindiegamereview]

Meet the creative team: “Spellstone”

Are you a collectible card game (CCG) fan? If so, read on, because this week we spoke to the makers of Spellstone, a free-to-play (F2P) casual story-based fantasy card game that features vibrant, colourful, hand-drawn art on hundreds of beautiful cards that you can acquire and use in battle, both against the computer and other players!

TIGR: PABLO and DUSTIN are artists who have worked on Spellstone's art, helping create some of the iconic characters Spellstone fans know and love. We asked them how they came to work on the game, as well as what intrigued them about this project.

DUSTIN: I was working as a contract artist when I was asked to create some sample cards for a potential CCG, which is something I'd always wanted to do. The samples I submitted eventually led to me getting a contract to create the initial art for Spellstone. After about four months, I was offered a full-time position. I had such a great experience working with the team that I jumped at the opportunity!

PABLO: Prior to starting work on Spellstone, I remember doing an art piece to test my skills. I greatly enjoyed that because I particularly liked this game's art style - which is actually similar to my own! There were still slight differences though, so I've had to adapt a little. Blending my own personal style into an existing one was challenging. But something that intrigued me about Spellstone was the variety of factions in the game. Each and every one opens up a big array of possibilities when it comes to creating a character. I felt my options were unlimited and I loved it!

TIGR: Spellstone features many different cards and characters. We wanted to know who conceptualises all this, and how much creative licence artists get when crafting a character. FERNANDO, currently the main artist for the game, gave us more insight.

FERNANDO:�� That Spellstone has such an immense variety of characters means it's a complete and delightful dish for artists. It's hugely gratifying to find such visual diversity with which to play with. You're completely free to create, as long as you respect the game's universe and visual language.

As for the process, the concept of what a card must look like and how it must be functional in terms of gameplay comes from the guys in the game design department. Very creative people... sorcerers maybe? I don't know. Haha!

From a brief but concise description they give me, I can get a sense of what kind of character and action they want to see in a card. Once I have all the information I need to start sketching, my favourite hour finally begins: creative hour!

If the card description involves an existing type of character, like a goblin, part of the fun has to do with the way you depict that character, situation, action and specific emotion. There's also some freedom to create from scratch if needed - that's exciting and challenging! Sometimes the ideas come from a mix of characters, and that's when the laboratory inside my mind starts working: I press a button and something cool, spooky or funny comes out - whatever the game requires. Other times, new concepts require that I look for approximate references of what's needed, so that serves as the starting point. No matter what, it's always a very enjoyable process. Sometimes we have to make corrections, that's true. But as with everything in life, this is necessary for things to work properly. You may have to redraw stuff, but finally the card is done - it works, it delivers and it entertains!

  TIGR: In Spellstone, cards can be upgraded from a single to a dual to a quad, and we really like that this sometimes tells a "mini story" of of sorts through the artwork. Some are funny (we just love Honeycomb Lobber!), some cute (Bomb Spirit is soooo adorable when he’s angry!), some uplifting (Aurora Shaver ranks among our favourites), and some, um, a bit disturbing, to be honest (Cleaverstorm Hunter, anyone?!)! And some are just sad - we can't help but feel sorry for the poor li'l forest furries that presumably got devoured by Alphamech Stalker! We asked the team how they came up with ideas for all these tiny narratives, and MELINDA, one of the game designers, told us more.

MELINDA: When I was younger, there were a few creatures in video games that terrified me. One of those I remembered most was Medusa, an air jellyfish from Ecco: The Tides of Time. While traversing through a water pathway in the sky, Medusa would try to pick up Ecco the dolphin and fling him off the path. Tetraspout's concept came from that, and you can even see poor little dolphins getting swept up in its attack!

  TIGR: We asked the team if there were any cards they particularly liked creating, or found challenging to conceptualise. IVÁN, a colorist who worked briefly on the game, chipped in, as did TONY and RHADA, two of Spellstone's game designers.

DUSTIN: I loved working on the goblin cards! You could get silly with them. Frogs were a lot of fun too - the variety of colours made them interesting. For me, the water cards were challenging but I grew to love working on them.

PABLO: My favourite characters are Goblins! You can play around with them, making them look funny even when the card is telling a dark story, like a massacre. All of the cards were challenging to create!

IVÁN: I enjoyed working on Hedron The Critical Threat, Zyd The Unhinged, and some awesome Insect cards that have yet to be released (as of the time of this interview). I mostly liked them because of their cool concepts and Fernando's awesome sketches. Hedron in particular was a technical painting challenge, as it has textures, transparencies and glow!

TONY: As something of an artist myself (/sarcasm), the card I am most proud of has to be Dinged Waptor. Or really any of the cards I did for the April Fool's event, which is about the only time the art team lets me anywhere near card art. :) For April Fool's, I decided it would be funny to try my hand at drawing some cards I felt players would enjoy. So the first year I drew some original characters that consisted of a few stick figures, a chicken, and a bomb. The response was good, so the following year I continued the tradition, eventually going through and tracing some famous cards like Winged Raptor. My one rule while making these cards was that I could not erase what I did!

RHADA: We used to sell boxes that contained two new premium cards instead of one. We thought of making both cards in the box thematically linked. At the same time, while brainstorming concepts for dragons, I thought we could try to make cards that formed a bigger picture on the battlefield when placed consecutively, side by side. The initial idea was a serpent whose artwork overflowed into a second card, and after some iteration, we stumbled upon the idea of a dragon dance. The result was very cool!

TIGR: With the Spellstone story campaign recently concluded, we asked what was next in store for Spellstone fans. Would there be anymore new characters and amazing art to look forward to?

TONY: Absolutely! While the main story has come to a close, we still look forward to adding new characters, cards, and art to the game that lets our artists have fun and shows off the world of Spellstone.

TIGR: And finally, the most important question of all: would real-life Spellstone merchandise ever be made available for fans of the game? We really want a plushie of the adorable Bomb Spirit (complete with detachable bombs, perhaps?), as well as his angry counterpart, Firebomb Spirit! Also for Quetee Que and Adorabilis, please! And would there ever be any actual physical Spellstone cards produced for collectors?

TONY: I would personally love to see real-life merchandise, but we currently do not have the means to take on such an endeavour. Maybe one day we can strike a partnership with a team that can make this happen!

We thank the Spellstone team for their time and all the wonderful art assets that accompany this interview! Check out the game here on Kongregate, on Steam, or on mobile - three different ways you can enjoy this fun, cheeky and adorable CCG!

P.S. We just had to include our favourite card: Darkwater Adonis - don’t be fooled by his charms!

[ts1989fanatic]

Taylor Swift is the millennial Bruce Springsteen.

If there were any doubts about this, they should have been dispelled by her latest release: the haunting Folklore, which filters the exact kinds of story-songs Springsteen excels at through Swift’s modern, orchestral-pop aesthetic. The album has been one of the best-received of her career, but then, the response to essentially everything she’s produced since her 2010 album Speak Now has involved critics grudgingly being dragged toward having respect for her skills.

The overlaps between millennial Swift (30 and born in 1989) and baby boomer Springsteen (70 and born in 1949) — both of whom are among the best songwriters alive right now — are considerable beyond their songwriting prowess. But comparisons, by necessity, must start there.

Both musicians love songs about a kind of white Americana that’s never really existed but that the central characters of which feel compelled to chase anyway. They use those songs to tell stories about those people and the places they live. They’re terrifically good at wordplay. Both are fascinated by the ways that adolescence and memories of adolescence continue to have incredible power for adults. Both are amazing at crafting bridges that take already good songs to another level. And both write songs featuring fictional people whose lives are sketched in via tiny, intimate details that stand in for their whole selves.

For example: The opening lines to Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” (“The screen door slams / Mary’s dress waves / Like a vision she dances across the porch / as the radio plays”) tell you everything about that woman and the man observing her.

Similarly, the opening lines of Swift’s “All Too Well” (“I walked through the door with you, the air was cold / but something ‘bout it felt like home somehow and I / left my scarf there at your sister’s house / and you still got it in your drawer even now”) tell you everything about this doomed relationship and the nostalgia both people involved in it still feel, compressed into a tiny little stanza.

Springsteen released “Thunder Road” when he was 25; Swift released “All Too Well” when she was 22. Both songs continue to stand as touchstones for who the artists were at that point in their lives.

But leave this comparison aside for a moment. What’s most interesting about drawing this connection are the ways in which the overlap between Springsteen and Swift’s styles can tell us about how our culture treats art made by men versus art made by women — and art made by baby boomers versus art made by millennials.

Springsteen and Swift each entered the music industry as young wunderkinds with lots to prove. Springsteen’s first album — the loose and rambling Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. — was released when he was just 23. He had been playing in bands all around New Jersey for most of his teens, and signed a record deal with Columbia Records at 22.

He was expected to become an acoustic folk singer in the vein of Bob Dylan, at a time when the music industry was uniquely preoccupied with finding the “next” Bob Dylan. Springsteen quickly flaunted those expectations, assembling a group of musicians who would go on to be known as the E Street Band, in the name of creating a sound that captured a massive, orchestral blast of rock. Springsteen would finally perfect this sound on his third album, 1975’s Born to Run, and he’s been a global superstar ever since, even decades after reaching his pinnacle with 1984’s Born in the USA.

Swift’s rise was slightly more meteoric. She released her debut album, Taylor Swift, when she was just 16, and it featured songs that she had written as a freshman in high school. Swift broke into the industry via country music, and her country-ish second album, 2008’s Fearless, won her the Grammy for Album of the Year.

Just as Springsteen shirked folk in the name of rock, Swift’s sound quickly shifted away from the girl-with-a-guitar country archetype and more toward pop. By her fourth album, 2012’s Red, she had largely left country music behind.

(A fun game: If you line up Swift and Springsteen’s album releases roughly by how old they were when they recorded them, you’ll find surprisingly similar career trajectories. For instance, Born to Run and Swift’s 2014 album 1989 were released when their respective artists were 25. Both broke the artists through to even wider acclaim than they had before.)

Yet the two artists’ backgrounds are quite different, which may explain the different ways in which they’ve understood American political divides. Springsteen grew up in a blue-collar family in New Jersey, while Swift is the daughter of a former Merrill Lynch stockbroker who could afford to move the entire family to Nashville, Tennessee, when his daughter showed a talent for songwriting.

Springsteen’s songs have always reflected growing up in a world where poverty is just a lost paycheck away, even as he’s become incredibly rich. Swift has no such perspective. Her songs take place largely in a wistful world where money is rarely an object. And the artists came of age in very different political climates, too.

But the political divide has narrowed in recent years. Swift has taken a recent turn toward more political topics — particularly social justice issues involving the mistreatment of women and LGBTQ rights. That turn stems from her struggles to differentiate herself as an artist in an industry that routinely turns young, beautiful women into disposable products, wringing out of them a few years of hit singles and then tossing them aside. Her embrace of the ways her growing sense of (extremely white) feminism helped her attain more artistic control over her image has slowly but surely led to a greater understanding of the yawning disparities inherent to the US. She is more tapped into the ways that power is unequally distributed throughout American society and increasingly speaks out to that effect. (She’s still pretty lousy at confronting class issues, though.)

But even with all of their similarities as songwriters and increasing similarities as explicitly political artists — and even with all of the awards they have won and records they have sold — there’s still a knee-jerk insistence that Swift is either too self-obsessed or too much a creation of the music industry, while Springsteen went from being rock’s heir apparent to an elder statesman with only a few bumps along the way. And the reasons for that disparity go well beyond any artistic differences or similarities they might possess.

The most obvious difference between the reception of Springsteen and Swift is also the most obvious difference between the two of them as people: He is a man, and she is a woman.

Swift didn’t exactly discourage listeners from constantly parsing her lyrics to figure out which of her famous exes she was singing about early in her career; she even hid hints in her liner notes to help fans decode her clues. But the degree to which she was written off, for years, as a fundamentally unserious and self-involved artist reflects the ways in which domestic and romantic concerns are written off as unimportant when women talk about them.

By comparison, Springsteen has so many songs about teenage boys crushing on teenage girls, but few people try to figure out who he’s talking about when he mentions the almost mythical “Mary” in songs throughout his career. Perhaps it’s because he wasn’t dating famous people as a teenager, and perhaps because it’s sadly still too common to think a man singing about an adolescent crush has more artistic merit than a woman doing the same thing.

Even in the wake of Folklore’s release, many corners of the music-discussing internet insist upon talking about the album more in terms of Swift’s male collaborators — namely Aaron Dessner of The National and Justin Vernon (a.k.a. Bon Iver), both indie-rock royalty — than in terms of her own talents, even when, say, Dessner does a whole interview with Pitchfork talking extensively about Swift’s preternatural songwriting talents. The idea that Taylor Swift has somehow been “created” by someone is one that seems to persist, regardless of how much control she has over her own image.

But the ways in which people doubt Swift’s talent, or her control over her image, reflect larger questions about how baby boomers remade pop culture in their image versus how millennials continue to do.

Baby boomers were born into the era of radio’s dominance over American airwaves, and television entered their lives during their childhoods. The presence of these mass media influenced how much pop culture boomers could be exposed to, pushing into hyperdrive the artistic loop of influence becoming creation. American popular art exploded and proliferated as a result.

Whether that explosion led to the rise of rock and pop music or the invention of the cinematic blockbuster, baby boomers took the popular forms their parents adored and accelerated them toward something more raucous and purely entertaining.

The dominant new medium of millennials’ lives was the internet, which arrived when we were still very young. And a major element of internet culture is remix culture. From the earliest days of the “information superhighway,” jokes that mashed up disparate elements of pop culture — now we’d call them memes — were incredibly common, because the central idea of the internet has always been many people iterating on an idea rather than one person releasing that idea into the world.

Inherent to this kind of remixing is the idea of transforming something, often something disreputable, into something else. Thus, many of the greatest millennial artists work in forms that have previously been written off as unworthy — like, say, pop music — because the gatekeepers in those areas weren’t as likely to be aging baby boomers whose taste was ossifying. (This progression is not all that dissimilar from what the boomers did to the popular culture they were born into.)

Millennial artists grew up amid the splintering of the monoculture and, therefore, feel less of an obligation toward it than older generations might. When all you’ve known are niches, it’s better to try to find a niche that appeals to you and explore it as much as possible, then hope enough people come along for the ride.

Swift’s eagerness to collaborate with other artists who really excite her isn’t a uniquely millennial trait: Artists have been doing this since artists have existed. That she is only too happy to spread that credit around (even as her increasingly well-known “voice memos” that show her coming up with the central ideas behind her songs center her authorship first and foremost) is a testament to how millennial artists feel comfortable with both celebrating their influences and revealing how their art gets built, brick by brick, often thanks to the work of other people.

This is not to say that all baby boomer or millennial artists operate exactly the same way as Springsteen or Swift. Both artists write music that is equal parts heartbreaking and fun, evocative, and ephemeral. They’re constantly searching for their version of an America that does not exist, while not forgetting to make sure that we all have some fun in the one that does.

The impulse they share to tell stories about average Americans searching for meaning amid a crumbling world is a natural one for artists in the US. Yet Springsteen has so often been celebrated for doing just that, his rugged vision of a fading nation and talent for making national crises deeply personal treated as authentic and brilliant.

By comparison, Swift is often derided for how she digs into the ways personal apocalypses visit themselves onto the rest of reality, making her something like Springsteen’s inverse. The struggles she faces are deeply rooted in biases against women, the genre of music she operates in, and her generation. It’s worth reexamining the notions that drive this disparity in the two artists’ reception, if nothing else.

Perhaps we take Springsteen more seriously than Swift because he’s a man, or because all the great rockers of his generation have been venerated by time and nostalgia, or because his influences were men like Chuck Berry and Woody Guthrie instead of Shania Twain, Patsy Cline, and a litany of contemporary collaborators. But one of art’s great pleasures is finding the ways in which artists of different generations talk about the same topics across the span of years.

Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift craft their impeccable story-songs utilizing the tropes of very different musical genres. But they’re equally good at crafting songs built to both sing loudly on the freeway and accompany a flood of tears in the wake of some new heartache. Different as they might be, Springsteen and Swift are always talking about the same thing — all of the ways that every new day, no matter how promising, carries within it the potential to bring about the end of the world all over again. Until then, though, let’s sing about it.

ts1989fanatic all of that just to Tell us something swifties have known for years, the music industry is sexist and misogynistic DUH!!!

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

Why Do I Still Ship Lotura (Allura/Lotor) in 2020?

The Voltron: Legendary Defender show ended in December of 2018—and it ended on a pretty sour, nihilistic note for both Allura and Lotor, with their relationship torn to shreds. Now, it’s 2020, but I still love Lotura. So why still care for a sunken, “problematic” ship from a show that also crashed and burned in its final season? Here’s my thoughts on it:

To start, Lotura itself flirts with some larger tropes that are attractive to many people (and to me!). There’s Pride and Prejudice, Star-Crossed Lovers, Feuding Families, Forbidden Love, Enemies to Lovers, Scorned Lovers, Royals Who Actually Do Something, and more. All of these larger-order tropes funnel into Lotura, at the same time. And there’s a reason why these tropes are so popular—because they’re so fun to play around with. There’s such a wide net that’s been cast over their interactions that the possibilities from all those combinations are pretty endless.

On that note, even Voltron itself can’t stick with one story—and the franchise always explores the Allura and Lotor relationship in some way. In DDP 2003, for example, they were childhood friends. In the original 1984 show’s final season, the only reason Allura gives for rejecting Lotor’s marriage proposal is because he’s already promised to another. The tensions and connections in the Lotor and Allura relationship are inherent in the fabric of Voltron itself, and the iterations and possibilities of it are so incredibly vast—it’s an ultimate creative playground. You can engage with almost 36 years (as of February 2020) of fandom content and multiple Voltron iterations to construct different iterations of Lotura.  

But VLD definitely threw some additional complexities into the ship.  

Personally, I like VLD Lotura because there’s a very strong foundation for a love that’s based in something mutual and uplifting. Even though the ship crashed in season 6, canon gave Lotura a strong Enemies to Lovers base, founded on mutual, genuine emotions. And that is definitely fun to play around with, compared to some previous iterations where the Lotura angle was a lot more canonically one-sided.

Let’s break it down:

According to showrunner Lauren Montgomery, “(Legendary Defender’s Lotor) has a genuine appreciation for who she is and what she is capable of. It comes from a real place. It’s his better side that’s drawn to her.”

Likewise, in another interview, Montgomery adds:

Other showrunner Joaquim Dos Santos agreed:

Even without EP confirmation, in canon we see a LOT of Lotura fanservice. It contains the beginnings of a genuine relationship and various ways their relationship changes both Lotor and Allura for the better.

In s5, Lotor is functioning as an ally of Voltron. He defeats his own father and is seen in a contemplative, moody state. Allura gives him a look of genuine worry, capable of seeing that he has conflicting emotions about the death of his father. And Allura, despite having been enemies in the past, tries to assure Lotor of the legitimacy of his decision, offering an olive branch:

From that point, it’s confirmed that Allura and the paladins have a plan to put Lotor on the Galran throne, as part of their alliance. The only major rift between them is when Allura realizes that they’d have to fly into the Kral Zera (a battle-to-the-death of major Galran commanders) to fight for the title of emperor. The paladins squabble over whether it’d make more sense to let the commanders fight each other, and then swoop in at the end. And Shiro makes an executive decision that Lotor needs to be there during the fight, against Allura���s recommendation.

But Allura is not displeased to discover that Lotor manages to win at the Kral Zera. In fact, Allura realizes this Galran man is now capable of the “royal alliance” he had insinuated to her previously. She declares she’s not only willing to work with her previous enemy—the son of the man who killed her people and destroyed her planet—but also that she’s willing to put all of her cards on this new Galran emperor to achieve lasting peace for all.

This is the first major turn in the Lotura relationship, in which the Enemies to Allies arc is complete. The Allies to Friends/Lovers arc quickly follows.

Believing that Lotor is still fully Galran, Allura places her trust in him fully. And Lotor respects her as an equal partner in this alliance, walking alongside her in step.

Allura is even trustful and bold enough to accept him as a royal escort, taking on somewhat romantic imagery as she walks away holding onto him:

In their relationship prior to her discovering his half-Altean ancestry, Lotor also espouses a lot of ideals aligning with her own for peace. He convinces her of his genuine desire to create peace by meeting the quintessence demands of the empire. And he calls Allura the “key” for all of this peace:

By this point, Allura has been fully won over by Lotor, without even knowing his ancestry as a half-Altean. She is delighted by his vision and that he sees peace as a partnership. 

And even once she, as an Altean princess, discovers this Galran emperor is actually part-Altean per his mother Honerva (a legendary scientist), Allura’s immediate reaction isn’t to fall in love with him further. Instead, she worries about Honerva’s technology having been in the hands of Haggar, the witch.

She returns to his side only when she senses that something’s wrong with Lotor—that he’s upset, and her first instinct is to ask after him. He admits he is upset by his own mother’s science logs, during which he says, “By the end of these logs, it’s like they’re written by a different person. She’s frantic, paranoid, erratic. Her reason and intellect are gone, replaced by fear and paranoia.”

It’s actually Allura who brings up the concept that perhaps his mother was corrupted by quintessence, just like Zarkon, turning her into Haggar.

This is a very touchy topic for Lotor, and he cuts her off gently, shutting down the conversation. But Allura feels empathy for Lotor again, sensing that he is clearly upset with the notion she’s suggested—that this powerful ally of hers has some scars to him.

Nevertheless, she respects his privacy and feelings on the matter. They move to focusing on their task at hand—working together to find a way to solve the energy crisis wreaking havoc on the universe, instead of focusing on the past. That focus jumpstarts an episode-arc in which Lotor and Allura grow closer than ever.

She immediately believes him when he tells her he believes Oriande—the Altean version of Atlantis—is real.

When he later expresses upset again about his failures in the past (he willingly admits he failed to protect an entire planet from Zarkon), Allura encourages him about his intentions:

When that doesn’t work to cheer him, Allura changes to encouraging him about the progress they are making together in the present time; that they are NOT helpless now:

Successfully lifting his spirits:

She even protects him during their journey into Oriande, creating some gender reversal imagery in which Lotor is very much a damsel in distress, and Allura is his knight:

But despite how Oriande turns out (Allura succeeds in obtaining the secret knowledge, while Lotor fails), he’s not envious of her. And she, knowing that he failed, still credits him as an integral part of their success. 

Lotor and Allura continue to work together, growing increasingly closer as they build the Sincline ships to access the quintessence field. (JDS confirms there was at least a three-week to a month gap in time between s5 and s6, suggesting a multitude of interactions that we never seen on the show.)

They grow close enough to get caught almost kissing, with Allura closing her eyes to willingly receive this kiss from him:

Their closeness is not ignored by the other paladins, in which Pidge and Hunk tease Lotura marriage proposals and babies:

Allura and Lotor get close enough even to actually kiss after returning from the quintessence field:

All of this is to say that canon confirms they had a really strong, mutually genuine interest in each other—and not because of what they were (with a shared Altean ancestry), but because of the ideals they were fighting for and how they could understand each other’s situation.

As such, Lotura involves equal power dynamics (egalitarian power fantasy trope). And I’m personally really attracted to that concept. You’ve got a prince and a princess with the potential to either change the world or destroy it, and that’s some god-like power there. They’re very much a power couple, with very mythological vibes—precisely because they’re both very powerful as individuals. They both know exactly who they are and what they stand for. They’re both very defined characters with total agency to act independently of the other. And neither of them necessarily need the other to survive, but there’s a lot of benefits to be had in a genuine relationship between them—where they accomplish even greater things together precisely because of their partnership.  

The tragedy of Lotor’s character, and in Lotura itself, definitely haunts me, though:

The ultimate wrench in the lotura relationship gets thrown in season 6. Initially Allura tries to protect Lotor from the paladins raising weapons at him:

Allura is, understandably, disturbed to hear from her team that Lotor is a murderer and has been hiding all this underhanded business with the remains of her people. 

The real tipping point is when Lotor himself admits and takes ownership over the decision to sacrifice certain Altean civilians for his cause.

Allura is clearly upset by Lotor’s own admission to secretly sacrificing some of her people. She responds poorly to his physical touch after having just previously kissed him, now traumatized by her own decision to trust Lotor unquestionably, shedding tears over it and blaming herself for believing that Lotor was genuinely a good guy.

The implications of Lotor’s tactics to kill certain Alteans to preserve others do create some really uneasy echoes of maliciousness. The maliciousness is in how his tactics involved preying on a vulnerable people group who had already experienced omnicide and were reliant on him for protection. And the maliciousness is compounded by how he lured the Alteans themselves into a false sense of security about the purpose of the second colony (via Romelle and Bandor’s backstory).

In the Let’s Voltron Podcast, the main story editor for s6, Josh Hamilton was asked at 17:54: “So the question is, is [Lotor’s tactics] worse [than Zarkon’s]?”

And Hamilton responds, “It’s weird…I guess it’s just…they’re both just kind of killing people. Lotor’s kinda looking them in the eye, and that’s a level of crazy, man…psychotic, that’s scary. I don’t know man, they’re both bad. I will say this…Lotor seems to be doing this for the right reasons…If he can get in there, the Galra empire will live peacefully. I love it when you have a bad guy who has a basic motivation that’s not so bad. I’m going to say Zarkon’s worse because he’s killed more people.”

Despite his “right reasons,” Lotor’s decision to hide from her what he’d done with her own people and his very willingness to sacrifice civilians for military gain sets Allura fully against Lotor:

The situation does parallel something she wasn’t expecting. It’s not just an accusation of murder that Allura alludes to when she accuses Lotor of being like Zarkon—she believes Lotor has intentionally manipulated her trust.

From Allura’s perspective, he’s betrayed and used her emotions—just as Zarkon did to Alfor—to access the quintessence field for his own goals, at any cost, effectively repeating the same sins of his father.

Genuine trauma—and fear of the past repeating itself—sets the foundations for an ultimate downfall into Allura being unable to believe any truth in his words.

So there’s some legitimate reasons behind Allura and Lotor’s ultimate feelings of betrayal. There’s real pain on both sides: Allura feels betrayed and used, triggered by the apparent repetition and cost of life from her own father’s mistakes in trusting Zarkon. Meanwhile, Lotor has established a trust bond with Allura and the paladins and has been working as a faithful ally, only for them to not believe him when he tries to explain himself or recalibrate on common ground. Everything he’s worked towards is in shreds.

Lotor’s reaction to Allura’s accusation is notably different than it is when Pidge—someone he had previously called “my friend” at the start of s6—accuses Lotor of being a murderer just like Zarkon. Unlike those other times, this accusation is coming specifically from Allura, with whom he had bonded intimately. But now, she no longer believes the genuineness of anything he says to her anymore. He’s just admitted he loves her, and she ultimately rejects it as a lie.

Allura’s final rejection of his several attempts to reconnect results in Lotor totally snapping and being also overcome by the dangerous power of quintessence. He transforms his Sincline ships into a mecha, suddenly espousing ideals such as killing Allura and the rest of paladins, committing genocide against the Galra, and imposing an imperial reign via a New Altean Empire.

Lotor’s mental, ultimately self-destructive snap is disturbing enough, especially given his threat to end his father’s race and his actions that destabilize the very fabric of space, endangering the whole universe. The show never confirms if this was just the quintessence talking, or if he’d been hiding some genuine hatred for his own Galran side all long.

Either way, Lotura crashes hard because of multiple tension points surrounding the value of all life—and because Lotor had, however unintentionally, committed a similar crime as pre-rift Zarkon had: withholding truths to achieve a goal, at the very real cost of people’s lives, and believing that some people are more worthy of life than others.

The showrunners discuss how philosophical differences on the value of life ultimately pitted Lotor and Allura against each other:

And in VLD, the tragedy of Lotor’s character is what he could have been with the right support:

It’s even more of a cut when you realize that Lotor’s interactions with Allura had actually changed him, even from his entrance to the show. And the show itself supports this subtle through-line. 

In his debut at season 3, Lotor speaks of peace and partnership but ultimately doesn’t commit to the work it’d take for such. He instead throws Throk, the dissenter he turns to an ally, under the bus.

In season 4, when Lotor realizes that the Voltron has a legitimate capacity to stop Zarkon’s reign, he saves Keith from committing suicide to shut down a barrier. And Lotor successfully completes that mission without loss of life. 

In season 5, Zarkon fights Lotor and wounds him, and Lotor is frozen for a time in pain. But when Zarkon is about to strike at Voltron paladins, Lotor panics and cuts him down. It’s not for his own sake that he kills his father in that moment—his fear is precisely for that of his new allies.

And season 5 shows Lotor’s increasing willingness to open himself to vulnerabilities with his allies, allowing for Voltron to sync up to Galran intelligence, showing Allura the very rooms where Haggar kept her powerful baubles, and admitting his own failings regarding a mining colony.

In season 6, in trying to justify his previous actions, he even reaches out to Allura as he had before, presenting himself in total physical vulnerability.

But for all of the objective strides he’d made to prove himself a legitimate ally on a genuine quest for peace, he couldn’t wipe away the sins and bad decisions of his past—or his decision to hide them from said allies. And Allura’s bad reaction to him the first time means his next attempt to plead with her and the paladins is from behind weaponized ships, which naturally doesn’t go well.

So why did Lotura have to blow up to such a magnificent extent, with so many wild problems and terrible messages that people are defined by their pasts and their parents? Why was this colony twist even dropped into the show at all, without previous indications that Lotor was hiding a massive operation (that also required and used significant Galran resources to build)? Was he—as s6 Allura believed him to be—the malicious smooth operator just gunning for power and a throne, with a trophy princess on the side?

The showrunners explain that Lotor was genuine in his motivations, but that they intentionally wanted him to fall to a bad nature:

But why was Lotor was already on the chopping block to fall to his lesser nature? Why did the show have to thrown in the colony plot at all to make Lotor a bad guy? We know he needed pure quintessence to break into the quintessence field itself, but why harvest Alteans when there were other, less damaging options like respectfully mining a self-replenishing Balmera? Not even the details of the colony plot twist make internal sense. What was the actual payoff for all of this (unnecessary) drama?

Perhaps it was said in jest, but the main writer Tim Hedrick once said, “As long as in the end, robots are fighting in space, that’s all that’s important.” But there seems to be a kernel of truth to the statement. Looking back, it’s very obvious that canon VLD Lotura was the sacrificial lamb for Ye Olde Plot Device, taking on a multitude of sins in order to move the show into a big robot fight. This design decision of the colony plot intentionally unraveled all of the progress that the previous five seasons had accomplished, cheaply justifying the continuation of the series itself at the expense of all character growth.

And that decision to pursue (admittedly, visually stunning) robotic theatrics over positive character growth disrupted any message they were hoping to make out of Voltron—just as it informed my own increasing disregard for canon, lol. But for as much as I dislike what VLD canon plot ultimately became, the result is that there’s a lot of content to explore regarding the genuine foundations for Lotura—as well as the angst and complexity of their downfall.

In other words, the very downfall of Lotura in canon was the trigger for it to rise from the ashes in fandom, sparking an unprecedented level of fan participation in the ship. Since s6, there has been a huge outpouring of content for Lotura on fanfiction and fanart archives—fix-its, redemption arcs, canon AUs, total AUs, you name it.

If you like the angsty and tragedy of it, there’s stories exploring that! If you don’t like the angsty and tragedy of it, you have a huge breadth of ways to rewrite canon or just utterly reject it and create AUs as well! It’s a big feast of content!

And for me, fiction is all about tension and conflict—and resolving it. As squicky as VLD canon is, it turned Lotura into a maelstrom of conflict, and there’s a lot of potential for different kinds of redemption arcs/fix-its because of all the intersecting problems. That whole side of it—How do you rewrite or fix this mess?—is an intriguing puzzle to consider and maintains Lotura as one of the more complex, multifaceted relationships in the entire series, with a wide breadth of potential fanfics and fanarts to explore solutions.

Also, for me personally as a reader, I enjoy greater struggle for greater glory. I don’t read or write stories just to watch someone drink tea (although I do like tea!). I’m personally attracted to stories where characters overcome serious hardships and come out as better, stronger people for it. I like it when characters can evolve, and Lotura—with or without its s6 plot twist—offers a lot of struggles to explore, just by virtue of their different backgrounds and differences in worldviews. Even a coffee shop AU for Lotura would involve a little conflict and tension, and that’s not a bad thing. Because conflict is what makes fiction interesting. And it’s also what makes genuine resolution and reconciliation so satisfying, underlying why Lotura is ultimately attractive to me.  

But how can I possibly ignore or WANT to even work with/transform that canon, you might ask? Especially when there’s “better” or “purer” ships to consider?

Here’s my answer: Throughout the history of literature, writers have consistently transformed or rejected the canon off which they base their own stories—and Lotura fandom simply continues that tradition. Around 280 BCE, ancient Greek writer Theocritus rewrote the cyclops villain (Polyphemus) of Homer’s Odyssey into a love-sick idiot in his work, Idyll XI. In 1819, English poet Lord Byron took the legend of Don Juan, which was about a man who seduced a lot of women, and reversed the original plot so that Don Juan ended up seduced by a lot of women. In 1820, John Keats rewrote the monstrous, child-eating Lamia of Greek mythology into a beautiful creature who genuinely falls in love with a human man. Imre Madach in 1861 wrote a fanfiction of the Bible called The Tragedy of Man, in which God is the violent and evil ruler, and Satan is the jaded/trickster victim. Beginning in the 1930s, DC and Marvel comics began to appropriate mythological figures for superheroes. Even Disney hasn’t escaped this trend of rejecting canon—for example, ignoring the incredibly problematic content of Greek mythology (rape, violence, abuse, etc.) to create its fun and enjoyable Hercules movie with fairly tame Greek gods. All of this is to say, entertainment throughout history has had absolutely zero problems looking at a canon construct and rejecting or transforming it for a new purpose. As a matter of fact, a lot of fiction has become popular precisely because it turns a previous construction on its head.

So when I look at VLD canon, I realize it’s just a springboard, like everything else. All the bad stuff in canon and in the Lotura ship? Well—I can join the leagues of Theocritus, John Keats, DC, Marvel, and Disney to create something more interesting and meaningful, or even (as Disney did to the Greek gods) genuinely kid-friendly and fun. 

And regardless of how it ended in canon, the initial basis for Lotura has a very fascinating set-up, in that the ship is literally a physical manifestation of the ideal theme of Voltron (which is “Strength in Unity”). Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Lotor and Allura were both canonically at their happiest when they were working together as partners. The reason? They were actually accomplishing steps toward peace and unity, coming together as separate entities for a united goal.

Even though the show crashed, fandom allows for the personal relationshiop of Lotor and Allura to still be capable of representing Voltron’s theme of a very universal hope. And in doing so, fandom allows for further explorations into just how the Lotura ship can better both characters.

We’ve talked about how Lotor’s increasing belief in Allura and the paladins inspired him to be a legitimate ally. But it’s not just Lotor who experienced a positive growth.

For Allura, her character arc regarding her struggles with the Galra empire itself is completed through Lotor. Her trauma from experiencing omnicide at the hands of Zarkon originally influenced her to see everything in a black-and-white, “us versus them” worldview, believing that all Galrans were just like Zarkon: 

But by season 6, having interacted with more Galrans and fallen in love with Lotor, Allura even goes as far to insist, against Lotor’s own wishes that she remain at his side, that she can help protect Galran citizens from attack:

And that jumpstarts an episode arc ending in Voltron and Allura saving Galrans from death, with Allura giggling over Hunk saying, “Vrepit sa!”

Even after Lotor’s assassination in the quintessence field, Allura continues to experience a heightened sensitivity and willingness to listen to the Galra caught in the cross-fire, and to work with them. This also translates into even the Altean Romelle’s humanitarian efforts with helping Galran soldiers with their wounds:

Lotor and Allura were genuinely more open-hearted people as a result of being together. Allura provided Lotor real opportunities to do things the right way. And Lotor’s influence on Allura echoed down in the ways Voltron made alliances with other—even at times, more outwardly menacing—Galran soldiers and respecting their right even to medical care.

But Allura is never as happy as she was in s5-s6 again after the loss of Lotor.

Honerva, the mother of Lotor, also realizes what Lotor and Allura’s relationship meant to her son:

And after all the war and death Allura and the paladins face after Lotor’s assassination, Allura realizes the problems and difficult decisions Lotor was having to make. It’s at that point—after all she’s seen—that Lotor actually HAD been telling her the truth about his motivations:

In the end, after the incredible losses faced on Earth per the rise of Sendak (and seeing her own people convert into willing cannon fodder for Honerva’s agenda), Allura understands Lotor’s dilemma—at least in a way. That there is no such thing as zero-sacrifice-war, regardless of the tactics. And so she exonerates him from the crimes she had previously believed him to be guilty of.

In an additional twist, Allura, in seeing the universe in fragments, gives up her own life along with Honerva to preserve life as best as she can.

This is a pretty painful end for her character—paralleling Lotor’s tragic end that he could not escape the fate of his parents, for Allura would ultimately not escape the fate of her father or people either. Her decision to devalue her own life for the sake of others is a haunting echo of Lotor sacrificing some Alteans to preserve the many.

And this is how VLD as a show crashes and burns. For as much as Voltron wanted to believe in the value of all life…ultimately, Allura has to choose to sacrifice life at a critical story point to ensure universal survival. Even Voltron itself fails to be any better than the worldview of Lotor, because the paladins allow Allura sacrifice herself as the most readily available, expendable asset for restoring the universe.

I think this damaging end-result of putting robot battles first is why I see little to no reason to respect canon, lol. Because in the end, the show wasn’t designed for an intentional message about the tragedy of not respecting all life or about discovering what true justice should be for bad decisions. If it was, there would have been actual reflection about what true justice is, and likely a higher show rating with a darker tone from the start. Instead, VLD did everything possible to foster sustained conflict between Voltron and one (1) big bad, at any cost to the characters, ultimately writing itself into some awkward corners.

And I think that need to fix the ultimate moral failings of Voltron is part of why I still ship Lotura. The pure desire for “robot battles” (or, the creation of a villain/scapegoat to fill a battle need) resulted in a very dark path that at its core, forced Voltron to reject its own messages about strength in unity and that all life is sacred. The moment the Lotura relationship fragmented, it threw the entire universe into chaos, creating the very circumstances that Allura had ultimately hoped to avoid, and also turning the paladins into hypocrites.

On the other hand, a positive spin/rewrite on the Lotura relationship in VLD results in Voltron being able to champion positive messages once more, in alignment with the happier, more hopeful outlook and promises of the series from seasons 1 to 5--and also in greater alignment with the legacy of the Voltron pilots from the original 1984 cartoon. 

And the possibilities for how to get back to or rewrite the Lotura ship and Voltron’s legacy for a happier end are infinite.

So a lot of what I do as a fan of Lotura is reject published canon for the depressing nihilism that it became, precisely because I appreciate the redemptive potential of what VLD could have championed instead. And as a Lotura fan who knows that the history of literature is all about transforming previous work—I have no issues with transforming VLD, and rewriting it for a better message and positive character growth for all involved.

Specifically, me celebrating content with a positive outcome for/rewriting of the Lotura ship carries with it a craving for hope—that there really is strength in unity. That people can overcome darkness and bad decisions to champion their better sides. That two people from opposite sides of a conflict can genuinely work together to achieve peace and unity. That people can break generational cycles of evil and oppression and stand for real justice. That communication and redemption is possible. And that for all the mess in the universe, love can win out over all. And I think those are messages worth exploring in 2020 and beyond.

[correspondencearchive]

3. Interview with Asianish

An interview with Sara Jimenez, Maia Cruz Palileo, Gabriel de Guzman and Cecile Chong, co-founders of Asianish. Part of our series of interviews with affinity spaces and groups.

Correspondence Archive (CA): Can you please tell us a bit about your group?

Asianish: A few of us, including artists Sara Jimenez, Maia Cruz Palileo, Cecile Chong and curator Gabriel de Guzman, were interested in informally sharing and discussing the nuanced complex iterations of Asian/South/Southeast/East Asian/etc identifying individuals in NYC. We are interested in holding space for these “Asian-ish” hybridized identities that sometimes overlap and are also incredibly unique and specific to each individual.

The idea for these gatherings came out of our experience after participating in the NYC Creative Salon in March 2018, around the theme “identity.” That particular discussion was so rich that when it ended, we knew that we needed to do it again because there was a deep desire and an urgency to share intimate, non-white space together, what has come to be called Asian-ish.  

We are grateful that this community exists. It seems at the root all of our discussions has been the need and desire to come together to identify the various ways in which we are affected by and wish to fight against the white supremacist structures of power. We hope that this community that we’ve built can continue to grow and recognize each other as resources for growth, strength and wisdom.

CA: From what I understand your group meets regularly for discussions and presentations. Do you do any other projects like pop-up exhibitions or public facing programming or have plans to do so in the future?

Asianish: Since March 2018 we met every few months in person and every time we had a different topic of discussion - identity, home, embodiment, community, food, nature. We also had a one day community celebration at the Dedalus Foundation with the Sunset Park community with performances, hands on activities and slide presentations. At the beginning of Covid we started to meet via Zoom, then our meetings became weekly when we felt the urgency to center our discussion around Asian solidarity with Black Lives Matter. In the future we may think about having public facing programming hopefully when we can meet in person.

CA: Why was it important to you to intentionally form your organization as an affinity group? What specifically did you feel was missing that needed to be addressed by your group?

Asianish: There were no spaces in the NYC art scene that had a contemporary lens for artists who identify as being in some kind of multiplicity in an Asian identity. We wanted to create a space that was not just for scattered pocket conversations but having it be a community. We felt that it was missing and that was what brought us together.

CA: What can an affinity group do that a mixed/blended group cannot? What is the unique work that your organization can do?

Asianish: Our conversations are centered around being POC. We felt the need to create a space for BIPOC to get together in the room and to be able to talk about things in a completely different way. The conversations are able to go in directions that typically in a mixed blended group the discussion can become limited. We recognize the inherent power structures that tend to exist in a room, whether it is intentional, conscious or subconscious. There are power structures and privileges that tend to take up space. Our discussions in a way function to upset this power imbalance. We want to let these conversations exist without the presence of these judgments or opinions which make it harder for BIPOC to express how we feel.

CA: What are the limitations of an affinity group? Is there something a mixed/blended group can do that an affinity group cannot?

Asianish: The fact is that mixed/blended groups tend to have more economic power and can raise more money. Because of this system of privilege that exists maybe an affinity group can tap into that privilege. As an affinity group we may not have that much access to privilege versus wealthier mixed/ blended members.

CA: What has surprised you about being involved in your group? What are some of the unforeseen impacts it has had on you personally and on the community/ies you are serving?

Asianish: There are many of us (96 participants and we keep growing.) We are surprised that so many are creating this space and how large our community actually is. On one hand we’re tied in together as Asianish, on another hand we’re very mixed and blended. The framework of the questions here could challenge that we do and we do not center around whiteness. Our discussions are about complicating that kind of binary, even though many of us are of partial white descent.

We’re also surprised that at one point we wondered who would be willing to meet and do all the work and planning? But there has been much to talk about and enough people to meet every week. It has been wonderful and surprising of the kind of support that is there.

CA: How do you view your and your group’s role in relationship to the larger, WSCP art world? For me, assimilation seems both impossible and problematic, while trying to force it to change is exhausting and depressing.

Asianish: Theaster Gates comes to mind who used the financial capital system and bought a building in Chicago to create opportunities for his community. It is about learning how to work with the existing structures in order to create change.

Recently we’ve had discussions of perhaps not moving towards utopia, but instead being in this inherent contradiction of a system and realizing that big money means blood money. We question how we can navigate within that conflict in an ethical, accountable way. Even if that means naming it and continually participating in a very mindful, collective and active way. Perhaps we can shift our perspectives and attitudes and think that there’s no utopic way or a simple answer. Instead we can see it as a daily struggle to grapple with and continue to have conversations to try to understand and unpack.

In our conversations we also find ourselves sharing with each other about after the trauma of our education system and many of us being in and part of the education system now, and how we’re still surrounded with white supremacy capitalism patriarchy. We’re having a place to come together to share those experiences. A big part of what we want is to create a visual culture that we want to see, one that makes more sense of our experience to our world.

CA: Shout outs! Who are the groups (contemporary or historical) that you look to for inspiration and that you are excited about?

Asianish: We admire organizations that support black artists like MOCADA and the Studio Museum, and also organizations that support Latinx and Caribbean artists. In the past there was Godzilla Collective but now besides A4 we don’t see organizations that support Asian or Asianish artists. We admire Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and we love Kundiman!

CA: How can people support Asianish? Does Asianish have any social media accounts that we can follow?

By being a guest speaker in our meetings. You can follow #asianishsolidarity on IG.

Asianish is a common space for people of Asian descent working in the field of visual art. We acknowledge the multi-racial, multi-ethnic identities shared and honor and respect our intersections. We are interested in holding space for these hybridized identities that sometimes overlap and are also incredibly unique and specific to each individual. By sharing our practices, we intend to deepen our connections individually and collectively so that we may strengthen and support our community within and beyond Asianish.

[roadtohell]

@mynamesdrstuff​ thank you ur brain is so big, i had like 10 moments of revelation while writing this

A Labour of Love- or, How to Write a Song That Makes Me Want to Lie Facedown On The Floor

Four decades separates the respective rises of singer-songwriters Hozier and Bruce Springsteen, nearly as large as the gap between the worlds in which their public images reside. According to popular myth, the former is the tall, near-ethereal Bog Man, half in this life and half in the next, who rose from a fae-inhabited woodland after 1000 years of slumber to find he was able only to mourn his lost love through song; the other is the Boss, a hardy yet compassionate working-class hero permanently streaked with the blood and sweat of a marathon shift, toiling endlessly alongside the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, earth-quaking, booty-shaking, Viagra-taking*, love-making, legendary E Street Band. The domains of fen and factory may appear to be irreconcilable, but in reality the musicians have many things in common:

Broadly speaking, they both create wildly variable mixes of folk and rock, often with particularly strong Irish and African-American influences.

Their lyrics are poetic and commonly reflect on social issues with a progressive voice.

Songs about romantic relationships typically portray them as complex and difficult but remain respectful, sometimes near worshipful, of women.

Their characters yearn, long, pine and crave more often than not.

They both really like to use religious imagery.

They enjoy and return notable amounts of wlw love.

Representative of many of these are Hozier’s “Work Song” and Springsteen’s “Maria’s Bed”, two songs with close thematic parallels. Each is ostensibly told from the perspective of an exhausted labourer who dreams of returning to his lover. In a twist, however, “Work Song” is a melancholic love story, while the upbeat “Maria’s Bed” is a subtle tale of death; the opposing moods are complex reflections of these underlying narratives. These songs have Hozier and Springsteen skilfully intertwine the concepts of love, death, freedom and spirituality, creating two deeply moving portrayals of desire** that never fail to eviscerate the listener after 10pm.

Though the songs differ in overall lyrical structure, the similarities in narrative are evident from the first few lines:

Boys, workin' on empty / Is that the kinda way to face the burning heat? / I just think about my baby / I'm so full of love I could barely eat

Been on a barbed wire highway forty days and nights / I ain’t complaining, it’s my job and it suits me right / I got a sweet soul fever rushing round my head / I’m gonna sleep tonight in Maria’s bed

The audience can gather that each character works in a harsh environment where they are exposed to the elements. Their work is likely in manual labour, but the details are skimmed over because the narrators don’t particularly want to think about the details. Pushed to their limits, each instead copes by preoccupying himself with thoughts of his lover, though it makes him literally lovesick.

I’d never want once from the cherry tree / ‘Cause my baby’s sweet as can be / She gives me toothaches just from kissing me

She gives me candy-stick kisses ‘neath a wolf-dog moon / A sweet breath and she’ll take you, mister, to the upper room

The worker recalls his lover’s kisses as being vibrantly sweet, sweeter than nature. So, too, is her company- in contrast to the grim situation he is currently in, she is something to be savoured. Sugar cravings, an innate biological compulsion, come to mind; his hankering for her is likewise deep-seated and out of his control.

The reason for such devotion, the narrator reveals, is that she saved his life at a time when he had already resigned himself to death. He believes he was undeserving of such a deed; Hozier describes “three days on a drunken sin… she never asked me once about the wrong I did,” while Springsteen’s character recounts being “burned by angels, sold wings of lead / then I fell in the roses and sweet salvation of Maria’s bed”. In other words, his state of ruin was at least partially self-made, and her care seemed completely inexplicable. He eagerly returns her love, perhaps feeling that it’s the least he owes- but he still doesn’t quite understand where it came from.

True to both songwriters’ styles, these lines are direct allusions to the idea of redemption in Christianity: God sheltering a faithful person from the literally hellish consequences of their wrongdoing, through no merit of their own. However, the worker is notably dismissive of traditional doctrine:

My babe would never fret none / About what my hands and my body done / If the Lord don’t forgive me / I’d still have my baby and my babe would have me

I’ve been out in the desert, yeah, doing my time / Searching through the dust for fool’s gold, looking for a sign / Holy man says “hold on, brother, there’s a light up ahead” / Ain’t nothing like the light that shines on me in Maria’s bed

His faith rests not in God but on his lover; she is his religion now. Her act of grace already gave him a new, better life- he doesn’t need biblical promises when her love is tantamount to anything heaven might offer. This implication conveys a staggering depth of feeling, particularly to a religiously raised listener. Spirituality is, at its core, emotional; combined with the values and customs of religion, it is a force that can exert incredible influence over a person. The worker doesn’t reject spirituality itself- it’s an intrinsic part of him- but he has put all that power in the hands of the one he adores. It may make him vulnerable to her (that’s love!), but he is certain that she will give him the strength he needs.

Theological redemption also has close ties with death, as its benefits aren’t meant to be reaped on earth. Instead, the love, glory and freedom that are promised are relegated to the afterlife. Historically, the presumed ecstasy of achieving this gave death a sexual connotation; after all, if a lover could take the spiritual place of God, then perhaps sex could take the role of death as a gateway to paradise, far away from a life of pain. Work Song embraces this analogy, explicitly linking spiritual fulfilment to the pleasure of sexual intimacy:

When I was kissing on my baby / And she put her love down, soft and sweet / In the low lamplight, I was free / Heaven and hell were words to me

The equally suggestive Maria’s Bed allows the audience to draw similar conclusions, but it accomplishes this using a far less serious method: regular mentions of the titular bed, wink-wink-nudge-nudge. Yet this light-hearted sauciness is something of a misdirection. It’s easy to gloss over the song’s references to water, but they are strong hints that support an alternative reading: Maria is not a woman, but a river***. The story, from this perspective, then becomes much more sombre- the worker is a dying or suicidal man who wishes to have his body laid at the bottom of a river that provided for him in life, and whose real desire is for the peace he hopes to find there in death.

Got on my dead man’s suit and smiling skull ring / Lucky graveyard boots and a song to sing / I keep my heart in my work, my troubles in my head / And I keep my soul in Maria’s bed

This darker interpretation arguably makes more sense than the face-value love story, as it resolves some figures of speech that otherwise seem out of place. Even so, the more obvious reading is no less meaningful****; in fact, the coexistence of these narratives is what makes Maria’s Bed an almost perfect thematic inverse to Work Song.

When my time comes around / Lay me gently in the cold dark earth / No grave can hold my body down / I’ll crawl home to her

Hozier uses the finality of death to illustrate the strength of a man’s desire for love- his narrator embraces his own passing as he is certain not even the most permanent of barriers can keep him from his lover. Springsteen, through the personification of the river, uses the language of romance to demonstrate how fervently a man might desire death- his narrator embraces his demise because it offers a reprieve from life, just like a lover would.

All that said, no amount of lyrical analysis will reveal the clearest point of contrast the songs have: their music.

Work Song primarily draws from blues and folk music, both of which have roots in historical work songs used to coordinate physical tasks as well as boost morale. Reflecting this musical heritage, instrumentation is fairly simple, with the steady rhythm of claps and piano chords punctuating hard. It is slow and heartfelt, almost mournful; though there’s no mention of time frame, the audience has the sense that the worker still has a long way to go before he can return to his lover.  This notion comes largely from the song’s circular structure. By ending with the same music it opened with, its story is also implied to finish at its beginning: with the men hard at work in the “burning heat”, and no true relief in sight. This is furthered by having little development over the course of the song- though iterations of the chorus are more intense than the verses, the arrangements underlying both sections barely change. The worker, it seems, is never quite far enough from his reality of hard labour, and never close enough to home.

On the other hand, Maria’s Bed is relentlessly optimistic, driven by a strong forward momentum. Where most modern songs have their choruses as their most powerful feature, here the wordless refrain (“hey hey, la la la li li li li”) acts more like a transition between verses, keeping the story moving. The jaunty fiddles that fade out are quite different to the introductory guitar and organ, suggesting the worker’s situation has developed for the better. In addition, the orchestration builds continually, only briefly pulling back before the music culminates in an extended musical outro. Many of the instruments work in counterpoint, each additional layer contributing to an air of an unrestrained joy that is further spurred on by Springsteen’s high hums and whoops. The linear musical direction and overall impression of good cowboy fun results in the feeling that, unlike the singer of Work Song, the narrator is already on his way to his heart’s desire- though, in light of the lyrics, what this actually means is somewhat ambiguous. Are those final echoes him moving out of earshot… or his ghost ascending to the “upper room” of heaven?

We may not know for sure how either of these stories end, but we can feel the aching hope for something better. This longing is an emotional line that runs all the way through both Springsteen and Hozier’s work, though it never seems to get old. Combined with explorations of love, faith, life, death- that’s why we return to their music again and again; they are experts at playing on old motifs and universal themes in new and creative ways, their crafted melodies and narratives touching wild and industrial hearts alike.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* I am legally obligated to include all these adjectives.

** Maria’s Bed seems to be sadly obscure even among fans; the one and only online forum discussion I have seen about the song refers to it as “not that deep”. Having written this whole essay- if Springsteen himself said that to me, I’d laugh in his face.

*** A random internet comment I can’t find anymore backs me up on this. It even specified that it was about the Santa Maria River in California, as quoted “from Bruce”. Obviously an infallible source 😊

**** It’s important that “[drinking] the cool clear waters” can totally be the description of oral sex you thought it was.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Van Pelt

“A hunter from the darkest wild, who'll make you feel just like a child.”

Jumanji is already one of Robin Williams’s most enjoyable films, being a fun dark fantasy adventure film based around a supernatural board game, and while the board game itself is technically the main antagonist, its desire to test its players is given form in the maniacal hunter Van Pelt. And while I certainly would not argue that Jumanji is the deepest film ever made or anything like that, I think there is a bit of unique symbolism and interesting character quirks that make Van Pelt an enjoyable antagonist.

Actor: Johnathan Hyde portrays Van Pelt, and interestingly enough, he also plays Alan Parrish’s father. This bit of casting is honestly brilliant; think of the description of Van Pelt quoted above, used to announce his arrival from the game into the world - he is said to “make you feel just like a child.” And who above all others makes Alan feel just like a child at this point? His father.  Van Pelt thus becomes symbolic of Alan’s parental issues, which makes his overcoming Van Pelt in the end all the more poignant and powerful. On a more meta level, it is an amusing coincidence Robin Williams starred in a film where the father and the antagonist share an actor, something typically the case when it comes to Captain Hook/Mr. Darling in theatrical adaptations of Peter Pan, whose eponymous character Williams had played five years prior to this film. It was likely unintentional, but it is an amusing thing to note.

Motivation/Goals: Van Pelt is clearly a creation of the game, a hunter conjured up by whatever poor schmuck draws his card and given a form that will cause the most psychological damage as well as the most physical damage. To that end, he relentlessly pursues Alan with the intent of killing him, with nothing stopping him and very little actually slowing him down. In fact, Van Pelt seems to be indestructible, likely a side effect of his supernatural nature. Nothing short of beating the game is enough to defeat him, and his goal is just to make that as hard as possible by targeting the one who brought him out. It’s a simple motivation, but it’s pretty effective and allows room for all the other insanity of Jumanji to take the stage without him overshadowing it entirely. He ends up feeling more like an extension of the game’s will than anything, and that’s honestly for the best.

Personality: Relentless, implacable, and clearly very bloodthirsty: these are the traits that define Van Pelt. Considering he’s just another manifestation of the board game, he didn’t even need a personality, but as the game tends to exaggerate real life dangers of the jungle, so too did they exaggerate the stereotypical “Great White Hunter” character into its perfect form. An interesting thing to note about him as that he seems to have a certain respect for Alan, and despite being incredibly dangerous and skilled never seems to land a single hit. An interesting idea is that perhaps he is intentionally missing as part of some ploy on the game to help Alan overcome his father issues and truly mature; of course, it could just be that Van Pelt enjoys the chase more than he does the kill.

Final Fate: Alan calls out “Jumanji,” ending the game and causing Van Pelt to be sucked back into the board. This version of Van Pelt would never be seen again, for obvious reasons; using someone else’s symbolic antagonizing force would be a bit weird, no? Van Pelt does show up in a different form in this film’s sequel, with some more intriguing powers but a lot less plot relevance and personality.

Best Scene: In an amusing and darkly comical scene, Van Pelt decides to forego any form of background checks while attempting to purchase a fancy new gun, instead opting to dump a pile of gold right on the gun shop clerk’s desk. Thankfully it is not this ridiculously easy for mentally unstable lunatics to buy dangerous weapons and perform horrible crimes with them, and this sort of thing only happens in fiction… Ahem.

Best Quote: His introductory quote: First, a bullet from offscreen whizzing by Alan’s head, followed by: "You miserable coward! Come back and face me like a man!"

Final Thoughts & Score: Van Pelt is definitely more of a living setpiece, an obstacle to be overcome much like the other supernatural critters the game unleashes, but he’s one with a lot of dramatic and thematic weight to him, seeing as he represents Alan’s conflict with his father that is set up at the film’s start. He’s quite similar to the T-800 in a lot of ways, seeing as he is a hyper-competent implacable and unstoppable assassin sent by a fantastical force to ensure the continued existence of its creator, with a dash of Captain Hook thrown in for personality and the little bit of symbolism present in theater adaptations of Peter Pan. 

Van Pelt is a solid 7/10 for the level of symbolic brilliance he brings to the table, but I can’t justify rating him any higher because, ultimately, he is just another figment crafted by Jumanji to make the game more entertaining, meaning he has no real backstory, goals, or motivation and exists only to cause trouble. Still, for what he is, he’s more entertaining and intriguing than he has any right to be.

But you know who isn’t entertaining or intriguing?

Psycho Analysis: Russell Van Pelt 

Ok, so that was unnecessarily dismissive and harsh. I actually think that the iteration of Van Pelt from Welcome to the Jungle has some pretty interesting concepts going for him. Ultimately though he’s kind of done in by the fact that he is the villain in an 80s video game, albeit a supernatural one. And 80s video games were not exactly known for their intriguing, complex villains.

Motivation/Goals: So this Van Pelt actually has a backstory, and it’s kind of interesting too: he was once a determined archaeologist who just wanted to have some proof of the Jaguar Shrine... unfortunately, said proof was the Jaguar’s Eye, which is the Chaos Emerald seen in the picture above. 

Here’s the problem: as he is a generic antagonist created to oppose our heroes, he has no motivation other than that he wants to use the jewel for nebulous nefarious reasons. He kind of just exists to be a threat, and yeah, it makes sense, but it is a bit of a letdown compared to the original. In fact, he’s very much a non-action villain and doesn’t even really directly confront the heroes until the very end, and even then it’s not like he has some spectacular throwdown. You’d think the guy with the one magical glowy eye would put up a better fight, but maybe Dr. Sivana and Sans Undertale just set the bar too high for glowy-eyed super battles.

Final Fate: The heroes return the eye, and he collapses into a big pile of rats and bugs. Why does he do this? I’ll get into it more below. Needless to say, he’s beaten in a way that lines up with all unsatisfactory 80s video game endings. 

Final Thoughts & Score: I definitely don’t hate Russell Van Pelt, but I think that he ultimately fails to even come close to recapturing the magic the original Van Pelt had. This is despite of, amusingly enough, having just about everything the original lacked: he has a backstory, he has intriguing powers, and he looks genuinely intimidating. The problem is that nothing is done with him and his motivations aren’t explained at all, and he ultimately lacks any sort of personality to try and glean some entertainment from.

It stings all the more because he utilizes one of my favorite tropes: The Worm That Walks. Essentially this trope is when a character is, in actuality, a mass of worms, bugs, or whatever other creepy critters you might want in there. Oogie Boogie is one of cinema’s shining examples of such a villain, and something of the gold standard; these sorts of villains are fun and creepy when utilized correctly. As you might of guessed, with Van Pelt... they don’t. It’s kind of just there to add to his creep factor and doesn’t much come into play very often. When he does utilize this strange power to store animals inside himself and add them to his hive mind, it’s suitably disturbing and eerie, but it’s not a major focus.

Still, I don’t think I’d give him more than a 4/10. Yes, he is a generic doomsday villain, but at least in this instance there’s actually a legitimate in-story justification for that. And even if they don’t use it to its full effect, I do think that his powers are really cool and the backstory he has is pretty neat. I think I would have preferred if they just tossed aside the backstory stuff and go for the more psychological approach of the original, but I guess that wasn’t exactly in the cards. Ah well, you can’t win them all I suppose.

[tacittherapist]

Heartbeats quicken. The tremors return. Rose opens her laptop, glancing about to make sure she’s alone. Gods forbid anyone, especially Jade, see her revisit one of her lowest points. She craves it -- to know the bitter ennui of her past mistakes is a nectar that keeps her reality grounded and the fire under her lit. This particular memory is perhaps the worst mistake of her young life though, and to correct it would be to supp deep from the ichor of sweet relief. She pulls up the log...

tacitTherapist [TT] started trolling grimAuxiliary [GA].

TT: So. GA: So TT: It’s come to this. GA: Indeed It Has TT: And you’re still not budging. GA: Consider My Position Entirely Unmoved TT: Entirely? That seems a bit harsh. GA: This Is A Harsh Reality TT: I imagined you’d have at least granted me the niceties and lied about how malleable your convictions are. GA: Rose GA: What Is There Left To Say GA: We Have A Crucial Difference In Opinion That Cannot Be Reconciled GA: We Have Iterated Our Arguments To Each Other For Days Without Relent GA: The Underlying Basis To This Disagreement Is Presupposed On The Notion That This Infernal Game Has Shown You The Right Course Of Action Without Any Other Supporting Evidence That It Isnt Simply Lying To You Once Again TT: They aren’t lies, they’re possibilities. GA: But Only One Of Them Will Happen To Us GA: The Rest Dont Matter GA: Thus They Are Lies And There Is Just One Truth TT: Couching your beliefs that way is what I disagree with. GA: Then You Arent Fucking Listening GA: Only One Of Those Timelines Will Be The One We Are In GA: So Forgive Me If I Buttress My Language In Solipsistic Idiom GA: Unless You Can Give Me More Than One Percent Assurance That We Will All Make It Through This By Jumping On This Fantastic Savior Satellite GA: I Cannot Support Your Idea And I Suggest You Let It Go TT: I can’t. GA: I Know GA: Thats Why Theres Nothing Left To Say TT: I disagree. I think there are a variety of things left to say. GA: Do They Relate To The Problem At Hand Or Are You Stalling TT: Irrelevant. The impetus of communication isn’t inherently problem-solving, it’s to convey meaning. GA: The Impetus Does Solve A Problem GA: You Want To Convey Meaning So The Solution Is Communication TT: Semantics. I’m saying there are other avenues of thought we must explore first. GA: Rose According To You We Are Running Out Of Time GA: Is This Truly How You Want To Spend Your Last Moments With Us GA: Bickering Pointlessly On Separate Computers To Avoid Devolving Into Another Shouting Competition Which Karkat Invariably Wins TT: Would you rather I pivot into sweet nothings about how I’ve so enjoyed our time together on this desolate rock? TT: Would you rather I spin the yarn of our tale aboard this distant laboratory, slowly starving as our grist cache dwindles? TT: Must I recount our feeding calendar in which we literally take turns stemming the hunger pangs until we all eventually succumb to malnutrition and sickness simultaneously? GA: No TT: Then this is how I’m spending my last moments. Quite presumptuous of you to assume I’ve made up my mind as well. For all you know, I could be swayed and end up staying here. GA: Given You Were Just Eviscerating My Position Mere Seconds Ago As To Why We Should Stay Here Im Sufficiently Certain You Wont TT: That’s another issue. Your certainty. The Light has shown me countless avenues to success. There are literally endless timelines in which we follow my advice and everyone meets up to finish the game. TT: And yet you’re somehow unwaveringly certain that none of them will occur? GA: Your Argument Swings Both Ways TT: I don’t appreciate the implicit reference to my confusing sexuality, but go on. GA: If There Are Countless Possibilities In Which We Succeed Following Your Idea Then There Are Also Countless Possibilities In Which We Succeed Not Following Your Idea GA: Its Two Infinities GA: The Question Lies In Which Infinity Is Bigger TT: That makes no sense, infinity is infinity. GA: Yes But Some Infinities Are Larger Or Smaller Than Others GA: Some Infinities Are Not Even Truly Infinity But We Consider Them Infinity For The Sake of Mathematics TT: How does that make even remote sense? GA: While You Were Studying The Majyyk I Was Reading The Calculus TT: I didn’t realize I was speaking to Jade’s pupil. GA: You Arent GA: If I Were Jades Pupil Wed Have Met Up By Now And We Wouldnt Be Having This Inane Conversation TT: But you can become her pupil! If you just come with me. Trust me, Kanaya. Please. GA: I Trust You Rose GA: But I Cannot Go With You GA: Look GA: The Prophecy Satellite Is On The Horizon GA: You Have Not Much Time TT: Technically I have all the time I need. GA: Dave Has Sworn Off His Powers And You Know This TT: He can be convinced. GA: If Your Powers Of Persuasion On Him Are Anything Like They Are On Me I Highly Doubt That TT: Fuck you. GA: Rose

A pregnant pause passes as Rose looks over on the horizon. The satellite is indeed coming into view.

TT: I’m sorry, Kanaya. TT: I love you. GA: I Love You Too Rose GA: But This Is Goodbye TT: It doesn’t have to be. GA: What GA: Didnt We Just Go Over That Im Not Coming With You And That You Arent Staying Here TT: Yes. But if you don’t say goodbye, it means we’ll meet again. GA: Rose This Is Childish TT: If you don’t say goodbye, it isn’t the end. GA: This Is The End Rose TT: It isn’t the end. I’ll see you again. I’ll find John and Jade by myself and we’ll come get you. GA: How GA: How Long Will It Take To Find Them GA: And How Will You Find Us If You Ever Do GA: This Laboratory Is Bound To Continue Drifting Even After You Depart GA: We Wont Stay Frozen In Place Once You Leave GA: This Isnt Like One Of Those Trashy Rainbowdrinker Books You Devoured GA: This Is Real Rose GA: You Must Face This Truth TT: We are the shapers of our world. GA: Not This Again TT: We determine our own fate. GA: Rose This Is A Quote From Another Novel Please Dont Do This TT: We mold the physical to our whims and thrust it forward through our own designs. We shape destiny. We reject that which displeases us and create our own reality. TT: Can you really not indulge me? As this one last act of kindness? GA: I Will Allow You One Kindness But It Will Not Be This TT: Fine. As my last act of kindness from you, I want... GA: It Cannot Be Something Ridiculous TT: I want you to forget me. GA: What The Fuck Did I Just Say TT: Hear me out. TT: If truly everything we’ve been through thus far has meant so little that you can’t put your faith in my decision, I want you to forget it. TT: It will be as if it never happened. I was merely a phantom in this session, and should I somehow return (against your predictions), I will get to vindictively rub it in your face. TT: But if you’re right, and I never return, the pain for you is lessened. You were never in a relationship with me, so there’s nothing to mourn. I never existed. Things were simply bad, and my nagging insistence to redirect our course was never there. TT: I want you to forget me. GA: Rose You Know I Cant Do That TT: Not even for me? As your last kindness? GA: It Would Not Be Kind To Invalidate The Memories You Ensured We Would Create GA: It Would Not Be Kind To Devalue Everything You Have Done For Us GA: And I Still Cherish Those Memories Even If They Led To Something Painful TT: It will only cause you more pain if you hold onto them. I don’t want you to suffer. GA: I Want To Suffer These Memories GA: They Offer Me Some Reassurance TT: But not enough to convince you to join me. GA: No

Rose stops typing, a nerve in her snapping. Her face goes beet-red, despair swelling into wrath. She sets her claws to the keyboard once more.

TT: Then if not by your grace, I’ll make you forget through spite. GA: What TT: I want to be forgotten. I want my existence to be erased from this failure of a timeline. I never loved you. You meant nothing to me. GA: Rose TT: My departure will be a curse upon you unless you forget. Whether by magic or by will, you must forget me. All those memories I made with you meant nothing. I did those things only to ensure my own survival. Your presence was happenstance at best. TT: Now that I’m heading out on my own, our destinies are uncoupled. Whatever happens to you is beneath me. I am taking the path to victory, and you can all squander the rest of your miserable lives here. TT: I won’t come back for you. I gave you all the chances I had. This is your fault. GA: Rose Please Dont Do This TT: You won’t see me again. I’m getting on that satellite and I’m not looking back. Even if I am to die, alone on a satellite, it will be a Heroic death as the only one with any sense not to continue a cursed existence on this fucking rock. TT: I will live with only a spectre of guilt that I didn’t forcibly coerce you onto the satellite with me, chastising myself for respecting your wishes and letting you choose your own demise. TT: That is all. Goodbye.

tacitTherapist [TT] stopped trolling grimAuxiliary [GA].

True to her word, Rose closed her laptop and walked briskly to the edge of the floating laboratory to wait for the satellite to pass by. Sheer anger coursed through her veins, hoping that would mask her true intent. She had never displayed that kind of fury before, let alone to Kanaya. If she played her cards right, Kanaya might still join her, moved by the pure strength of her conviction. But there was no hesitant hand on her shoulder, begging her to stay or to join her. There was no last-second plea, no ‘Rose Wait’, and not even a footstep in her general direction as she waited.

Resigned, she boarded the satellite, breaking her word and casting a desperate glance back as the satellite continued its course away. Through the tiny window, she could see Kanaya simply looking down at her grubtop, her face stained jade. Regret swelled, and for just a second, she could feel herself begin to open the hatch and jump back towards the meteor. But the second passed, and soon she was out of range to give even a cursory wave goodbye.

The same tears begin to stream down her face as she closes the pesterlog and wraps her sheets tighter around her shoulders. She can’t keep putting off her meeting with Cetus forever... but she still doesn’t know how she’ll reckon with the shadow of her failed ploy.

[therachelperspective]

BOOKS | Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

[[&]]  Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling

For reasons unbeknownst to me, I’ve always liked Mindy Kaling. I didn’t watch the American version of The Office (I know, what is WRONG with me?!)... I would sometimes watch The Mindy Project reruns in the middle of the night many years ago... but not once would I say that I actually followed her career enough to take interest in her memoirs. But alas, I liked Mindy and I found myself with her memoirs on my bookshelves. Thanks to this ever so lovely situation the world has found itself in, I’ve finally made it around to reading them (along with many others that have been lingering in my TBR pile).

At first, I was going to write about Mindy’s books separately as I would a normal review on here, but after finishing them both, I think writing about them together is really for the best. They are such extensions of each other, of which I would probably make the same commentary about them both anyway. So their discussions here are joint. 

When I started Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, my hopes were high. I even jotted down a note that, forty pages in, so much of what she has discussed has been similar or has outright matched some of my same experiences and I loved it. And really, that statement did hold true for both IEHOWM? (it’s such a long title, you guys!) and Why Not Me? – I finally found a celebrity that I can say I really relate to, who shared the same struggles and exploits as me in our young adult lives. Furthermore, I also wrote a note saying that Mindy has a unique humor in both her acting and this (her first) book that I enjoyed. Plus, you’d be lying if you said you didn’t love the adorable photos of baby Mindy scattered throughout EIHOWM.

But I think, sadly, everything was short-lived.

I completely understand that Mindy’s career is rooted in comedy and that’s how she built a name for herself. In her early years, she and a friend created and starred in their own Off-Broadway production (about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, no less) that gained quite the audience during its run. She then became a writer for The Office, then a star of the The Office, and well... so on and so forth, the rest is history. But I read non-fiction novels to learn more about people and his/her inner thoughts amidst stories of their life. That did happen with Mindy, but those peeks into her childhood, teens, and twenties were scattered throughout some pretty unnecessary chapters and what I perceive to be Mindy trying too hard to be funny. If I wanted fictitious ramblings, I would have just read a fiction novel. Not once did I feel that, for example, an entire chapter about fictional revenge stories that she concocts during her workouts had a place in her first book. Nor did I feel a good chunk of the second novel required fabricated emails (that were waaayyyy too thought out) between her and her imaginary coworkers she created had she lived another life and hypothetically become a Latin teacher at a private school. And – though it is known that I love a good list – she also included list upon list about the most random of topics (i.e. in IEHOWM? she included two pages worth of different iterations and levels of “chubby” people. Yeah Mindy is bigger than the average actress, but come on). In my mind, these books would have been a lot shorter had all the bullshit been removed. During Why Not Me? I literally wrote down the fact that, at some point during both of these books, I made it a point to read more quickly/more often, just to get them over with.

What became even more disappointing to me as I continued to read through these books was that... much of Mindy’s view of “comedy” was actually in poor taste. Granted these books were published in 2011 and 2015 respectively, and maybe had I read them back then I would have flew right past some of her commentary without a second glance. But in the here and now, in 2020, a lot of her comedic jabs left a bad taste in my mouth. In IEHOWM?, during a discussion about the people in New York City, while I find it perfectly fine that she says most people “function daily while in a low grade depression” because that’s at least mildly true, thirty-something pages later she makes a comment about how people with depression are “boring” and “tedious to deal with.” Maybe I didn’t enjoy this because I myself deal with some level of depression and always have a fear that I’m bothering people... but regardless, I still would not find those statements in the least bit comical. To further illustrate, when Mindy was on a “Curvy Celebs We Adore!” list and was smaller than the others included, she called the other female celebrities “porkers” and in more or less terms said how dare she be lumped in with these women on a list. And lastly, in a chapter about her characteristic requests for a boyfriend, she says she thinks she should date an older man, because they are more secure and have the immaturity out of their systems. She then, however, continues by saying that she doesn’t care if that man has kids, as long as those kids are away at college and (direct quote) “his wife is dead.” I believe my literal thoughts here were “WTF?!?!?!?!?!?” and I just really... lost interest, but continued reading just to finish the book (thankfully this was towards the end). Don’t even get me started on that Dartmouth’s 2018 commencement speech she gave, included in Why Not Me?

Despite everything I just said... I still enjoy Mindy, I do. I just can’t bring myself to fully disregard her. Even though she is roughly a size 8 to 10, she is still a better visual representation of the average woman in her roles that viewers find more relatable (though she made another ridiculous comment in Why Not Me? about how she does try to conform to societal norms of beauty but she just isn’t successful at it). Likewise, the character of Mindy Lahiri also does so much to showcase a professionally successful woman (and even more, a woman of color) at the helm of The Mindy Project. All of this is similarly what Mindy herself does as a whole in the industry – she is praised comedienne in (let’s face it) what has always been a male dominated field. It is because of her depictions and stature, as well as the undeniable similarities in our life narratives, that I can’t help but maintain a fondness for Mindy Kaling. Now it’s just... slightly subdued.

I have pages of quotes that prove that she does scatter her novels with solid advice and insight. But on paper, I mostly find that Mindy tries too hard and blabbers too much for my palate. There’s being funny, and then there’s taking it too far. Maybe because I read them back to back, it was just all beyond me. I just had a hard time getting past some of it. So they’re just another set of books that finally made their way out of the TBR pile and into “try and sell online for spare cash” pile. It is what it is.

[innuendostudios]

A small supplement to Always a Bigger Fish, The Origins of Conservatism. If we’re going to claim conservatism is fundamentally about preserving social hierarchies and defending the powerful from democratic principles, we need to talk about where conservatism comes from, going all the back to the late 18th Century. From there we take an extremely truncated traipse through conservative thought throughout the ages.

Keep this series coming out by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

I have suspicions that some of the claims I make in Always a Bigger Fish - that conservatism isn’t, at its core, about fiscal responsibility, limited government, or the rights of the individual, but is about maintaining social hierarchies, that it believes people are fundamentally unequal and likes the free market because it sorts people according to their worth, and even softly implies capitalism itself may be innately anti-democratic - might, ah, raise some eyebrows? So I’m gonna show my work on this one.

Two of the architects of conservative thought were Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, who formulated much of their political theory while writing about the French Revolution. They, in turn, were influenced by earlier writings from Thomas Hobbes on the English Civil War. And what all three of these men were doing in writing about these wars was defending the monarchy. The sentiment that the masses should be powerless in the face of nobility was being challenged, and, while these men thought the revolutionaries themselves actually quite compelling, the democracy they were fighting for Hobbes, Burke, and de Maistre found repulsive.

Come the end of the Revolution, when it seemed democracy might actually spread across Europe, Burke, especially, began to hypothesize ways that one’s position within the aristocracy might be preserved even should the monarchy fall. He turned his eye to the market.

So, OK, round the cusp of the 19th century, the prevailing economic theories were those of Adam Smith, who championed what’s called the Labor Theory of Value, which I don’t super wanna get into because there’s like a billion videos about it already, but really briefly: if you take materials out of the ground and turn them into useful goods, it is that labor that makes the good more valuable than the raw material, and when someone buys that good, they cover the cost of materials plus the value your labor has added to them. In contrast, what Burke argued was… well, a lot of nebulous things, but, among them, that, in actuality, when a person of means buys a good, that, rather than the moment the good is produced, is when value is bestowed upon it. Value is not dictated by the producer, but by the consumer.

Now there’s like two centuries of argument about this, we’re not gonna dig into it all, but, obviously, this is, in some sense, true: if the people with money don’t want to buy a good at a certain price, eventually the price will come down. So price is not solely dictated by labor. But what Burke does is claim that price and value are the same thing. No one ever gets cheated, no one ever gets a good deal, whatever the buyer pays for a thing, that’s what the thing is worth. Your labor is only as valuable as the degree to which it satisfies the desires of the moneyed classes.

This was Burke’s nod to the fact that, within capitalism, the wealthy held outsized influence - being that, the more money you had, the more value you could dictate - and he argued that this was moral. That the wealthy deserved this influence. (Burke was, by the way, wealthy. Sort of. He had a royal pension) What he felt the French Revolution revealed was not that oppressive nobility was bad, but that France must’ve just had the wrong nobles, because a proper aristocracy wouldn’t have been overthrown. The problem was, as we’ve discussed, not the hierarchy itself, but the wrong people being in power.

The Revolution had taught him that perhaps power should not come by birthright. Perhaps we needed a system whereby those deserving of power could prove their worth. This should, ideally, be war, but capitalism would suffice. The structure of royalty would continue to exist, simply derived by different means, because the structure of democracy, where, on election day, the nobleman has no more power than the commoner, was, to an aristocrat, profane. What the structure needed was some tinkering to make it democracy-proof.

So that’s Burke. Over the next century, democracy did, in fact, spread across Europe, and Burke’s - and several others’ - theories of value were picked up and iterated on in what came to be known as The Marginal Revolution by economists Carl Menger, Stanley Jevons, and this Valjean-looking motherfucker Leon Walras. Marginalism amped up the idea that it is a good’s utility to the consumer, and not the worker’s labor, that gives it value, which confers a unique power upon those with money, and brought this thinking into a post-monarchal world. Their theories became especially popular when people realized they could be used to rebut Marxism. Jevons was taught all over Europe, and Menger became core to the Austrian School.

And by the time we get to Austrians, this mass of theories has, somewhere after Burke and before Hayek, coagulated into what we know of today as “conservatism.” These are among the most influential thinkers in conservative thought, and they are in a direct lineage with Burke and de Maistre.

Now, while Burke is called “the father of modern conservatism,” these boys are not the alpha and omega of early conservative thought, but their ideas helped form the basis of conservatism and have never gone away. If you can point to some paradigm shift in the history of conservatism where the royalist sentiments of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre were rooted out, I’d love to hear about it. Because I listen to the thinkers championed by conservatives throughout the ages, and I keep hearing the same thing: that humans are innately unequal and society flourishes when power is doled out to the deserving.

Friedrich Nietzsche was not a conservative but was deeply influential on the early Marginalists, and he claimed the purpose of society was to produce the handful of Great Men who created everything that made life worth living, believing, “Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness."

James Fitzjames Stephen, who wrote a book-length rebuttal against early progressivism, believed, “[T]o obey a real superior, to submit to a real necessity and make the best of it in good part, is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting."

Hayek and Schumpeter believed, respectively, that “The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use” and “[W]hat may be attained by industrial or commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man." (He’s saying that’s a good thing, by the way.)

Need I mention Ayn Rand’s belief that "The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment... The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains."

The “godfather of neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol, echoing Burke’s yearning for a good war, felt the hierarchy should extend beyond the borders of a single country, believing, “What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?"

And modern conservatives love the “natural hierarchies” of Jordan Peterson, who believes “blblblblblblblblblb.”

We keep behaving as though conservatism’s disdain for equity isn’t there, or, if it is, that it’s new. But it’s been there since the beginning. Conservatism upholds the status quo and defends the powerful, first from democracy, then from communism, now from social justice. Conservatism has rallied every time a movement has tried to share power with the disadvantaged: They were against same-sex marriage, they were against giving women the vote, they were against freeing slaves (note I said conservatives, not Republicans; do your research.)

Conservatives say, “We are the party of measured steps, caution, of evolution over revolution,” and that’s usually just before they say, “But now, now is the time for swift, decisive action!” Most every Republican claims to be a break with tradition. “This time we’re gonna flip the script: bend the rules, outspend Democrats, invade your privacy, and start a war with no exit strategy.” And that’s what they’ve always said. All that changes is which continent the war is on. I’m not going to say the slow, stodgy conservative doesn’t exist, but it has never typified the Party. Rhetorically, it’s a character that they bring up to contrast themselves with whenever they need to rally their reactionary base. They tell us that’s what their Party is like, and we just take their word for it.

I don’t feel the need to pretend that, just because most democracies have a left wing and a right wing, that both are equally valid and moral. There is no rule that proves this. There is only the liberal sentiment that saying otherwise is poor sportsmanship (a standard the Right does not hold itself to). Conservatism is a reactionary politics that has, at best, mixed feelings about democracy, where my biggest issue with liberalism is that it is ill-equipped to deal with the problem of conservatism and does not fully commit to its own democratic principles.

I’m going into all of this not because I want to stick it to the people who insist I don’t research my videos - though I, a little bit, do - but because we can’t talk about the Alt-Right if we keep portraying them as a break with the conservative tradition. They are the conservative tradition, only more. There is nothing they believe that conservatives don’t have a long history of being sympathetic towards, they’re just usually more ambivalent about it. As I’ve said before, this is, ultimately, my interpretation of history, and, while many experts agree with me, I am not an expert. But I do my homework.

So, tell you what: I’ve made a post on Tumblr listing all the books, essays, and documentaries I’m consuming for this series - the ones I have lined up, the ones I’ve completed, and some notes on what I’ve found valuable in them. I’m going to treat this as a living document and add to it as the work continues. Not that the people who say I just make shit up ever read the show notes, but I will keep a link in the show notes of every video, so, if you want to check my work, or research alongside me, you can do that. I have also livetweeted several books, including the primary source for this and the previous video, The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, under the hashtag #IanLivetweetsHisResearch, so, if you want a play-by-play of an entire book complete with my own observations, that’s where you can find it. So far, in addition to Robin, I’ve done Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians, Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works, and one weird essay on Lara Croft I read for the Fury Road video.

If you want to read more about the history of conservative philosophy, in addition to The Reactionary Mind, I recommend “No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty” by Elizabeth Sandifer, in the essay collection Neoreaction a Basilisk. (El recently got some grief from Nazis, so maybe consider buying her excellent book.)

Going forward, if anyone comments that I clearly don’t know anything about conservatism, I hope you will stand with me in not taking them too seriously unless they demonstrate having done at least some research, because I do mine.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Back in 2016, I wrote that Sen. Bernie Sanders shouldn’t drop out of the Democratic primary to help Hillary Clinton. That’s because, contrary to conventional wisdom, there’s no consensus on whether a long, divisive primary contest hurts a party in the general election.

In 2019, with more than a dozen candidates still in the running, Democrats are confronting another iteration of this question. The field has narrowed in the last few months, but there are still several potential front-runners, not to mention a bumper crop of second- and third-tier candidates. This means that even though many voters are still undecided, many of them likely won’t see their first-choice candidate — or maybe even their second pick — become the nominee.

What are the implications of this for the party? Well, the reality is we don’t have a lot of examples of presidential primaries with fields this large. But as Hans Noel, an author of “The Party Decides,” wrote in 2016, the parties want a candidate who appeals to all their factions, not just some of them. This was one concern about Donald Trump in 2016. It’s not just that he lacked elite support, but that he might alienate key Republican constituencies like the business community or evangelicals. (Both groups ultimately embraced Trump in 2016.) Nevertheless, when the party elites were unable to select the nominee, the large primary field yielded unpredictable results.

There are already signs that Democratic Party leaders may be slow to decide this year. But does this year’s unwieldy primary actually spell trouble for the Democrats? Or is the crowded field just evidence of natural fissures within the party?

As FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote earlier this year, the size of the primary field can signal a lack of consensus within the party. In previous cycles, it has meant that both party elites and voters are slower to rally behind a single candidate. But as you’ll note in the table below, a crowded primary field hasn’t led to more losses at the general election level — in fact, there isn’t a real pattern at all.

Big primaries don’t spell general election losses

Number of “noteworthy” candidates in presidential primaries since 1972* and whether the eventual nominee was favored by party elites

Year No. of Major Candidates Party Nominee Won General Election? 2016 17 R Trump ✓ 1976 16 D Carter ✓ 1972 15 D McGovern 2012 12 R Romney 2008 12 R McCain 2000 12 R W. Bush ✓ 1996 12 R Dole 1988 11 D Dukakis 2008 10 D Obama ✓ 2004 10 D Kerry 1980 9 R Reagan ✓ 1992 8 D B. Clinton ✓ 1984 8 D Mondale 1988 7 R H.W. Bush ✓ 2016 5 D H. Clinton 2000 2 D Gore

* Excluding nomination processes for which an incumbent president was running for that party.

There’s no precise definition of what makes a candidate “noteworthy” — editor-in-chief Nate Silver created this list earlier in the year and erred on the side of inclusivity, although a few candidates may slipped through the cracks. The table includes candidates who withdrew before competing in any primaries.

Source: Wikipedia

As to why some primaries are so much more competitive than others, there isn’t a straightforward answer. Some in political science have argued that competitive primaries occur only when the party is already divided, which sounds like a plausible explanation for the 2020 Democratic primary, given the fractures that emerged in the party last cycle. The differences between the progressive and moderate wings of the party have arguably been exacerbated since 2016. Candidates in these two wings have already had some pretty serious disagreements over whether to scrap private health insurance entirely and how to reform the immigration system.

There are other splits in the party, too, that aren’t about policy. These divisions are generational and, at times, deeply personal. For instance, the Democratic Party is continuing to hash out how it will talk about race, as shown by a clash between Sen. Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden in the first debate over his remarks about working with segregationist senators and his opposition to school integration via busing in the 1970s. Gender also remains a flashpoint in the party, as some feel that gender worked against Clinton in 2016 and now have reservations about nominating a woman.

But these internal party conflicts aren’t necessarily a harbinger of failure. Sometimes a party split over big issues in the primary still wins the general. Take the 1980 Republican primary. There was an insurgent movement among conservatives like Ronald Reagan, who didn’t adhere to party orthodoxy and instead pushed for things like massive tax cuts without cuts to government spending, while more traditional Republicans like George H.W. Bush toed a more moderate, establishment-friendly line. (True, Bush later became Reagan’s running mate, but the 1980 contest still exposed a rift in the party that ultimately reshaped the party’s ideological direction.) Yet despite that intraparty turmoil, Reagan still managed to beat President Jimmy Carter resoundingly.1 A similar thing happened in the 2008 election. Despite a hard-fought competition — and an incredibly close one that had serious implications about gender and race — Obama still managed to win the general election handily.

Intraparty divisions are more visible in some cycles than others (such as this year), but I’d actually argue they’re a constant, not a variable. The idea of party unity tends to be an illusion. For example, Democratic and Republican parties winnowed their respective fields fairly quickly in 2000, giving the impression of unity. But serious policy divisions among Republicans affected George W. Bush’s agenda throughout his presidency. Notable Republicans like the late Sen. John McCain criticized efforts to enact a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage, and Bush’s efforts to reform immigration were deemed them insufficiently tough by members of his party.

Similarly, even though Obama was popular among Democrats and faced no real competition in the 2012 primaries, the fissures among Democrats were clear by the end of his presidency. Critics on the left had long been dissatisfied with the compromises the administration had made on the economic stimulus package and the Affordable Care Act, as well as the environment and immigration. And these complaints — particularly about economic issues — found a voice in the 2016 Sanders campaign.

But ultimately, as history shows us, a big or fragmented Democratic field doesn’t carry real general election risks. A large and unwieldy primary field can produce an unexpected nominee, but it doesn’t mean a party can’t or won’t rally behind a candidate by the time of the general election.

Granted, we can’t be totally sure of the effects of a field this large. But I’d argue that a primary as competitive as the current one can be better for the party than artificial unity (even if 12-candidate debates are a bit exhausting). The primary thus far has helped to clarify what those factions actually are — and what they’re not. It tells voters important things about the state of politics in the party, including divisions over policy solutions and among different demographics. It also illustrates the challenges faced by parties trying to resolve these issues and highlights the fact that democracy, even within parties, is difficult and often full of disagreement. All that said, having 10 or two candidates in the race by the Iowa caucuses should have little bearing on whether Democrats are competitive in 2020.

[trans-advice]

this article has been copied & pasted in its entirety in case there’s a paywall or future removal. however, please try to read the article from the link first so that the journalist & newspaper staff get their wages. thank you.

SaVanna Wanzer's We The People wants to bring the transgender community together to talk, learn, and celebrate

By John Riley on April 25, 2019

SaVanna Wanzer is setting a lofty but necessary goal: make May a month to focus on the needs and wants of D.C.’s transgender community.

A founder of D.C.’s annual Trans Pride celebration, Wanzer has created We The People, a committee of activists and advocates who will plan events that uplift the larger transgender community. Under Wanzer’s guidance, We the People has organized “May Is? All About Trans,” the third iteration of a series of events focusing on the transgender and gender-nonconforming community.

“As a founder of Trans Pride, I can tell you we’ve only had about 45 minutes on the day of the celebration to talk about issues in our community,” says Wanzer. “So by creating ‘May Is? All About Trans’ we now have up to three hours at each event to talk about an issue where we can get more accomplished.”

Deirdre Denise Gray, co-chair of the event alongside Wanzer, says that the goal of the month-long series of events is to highlight different aspects of the journey a transgender, nonbinary, or gender-nonconforming person goes through in their life and to provide advice and resources to those in the process of navigating their identity.

The month kicks off with a day-long summit on Wednesday, May 1, at Metropolitan Community Church of D.C., followed by a dinner at Busboys & Poets.

“At the summit, we’re looking to bring some great minds from the community,” says Gray. “We’re going to have legal presentations, medical presentations, spiritual presentations, covering a whole variety of topics for those who are going to be in that space. We’ll have different people from all different walks of life, who identify as trans, LGB, queer, allies, spiritual advisors, all exchanging ideas and information so that we can come out of it with what I call our ‘Points of Light.'”

The “Points of Light” are specific action items, proposed by members of the trans and gender-nonconforming community, that will serve as part of a policy agenda for the greater D.C. area. Gray hopes that by identifying priority items, the community can continue to highlight certain issues over the course of the next year, and speak in a more united voice about the goals of the community.

“We know some of the biggest things are housing, employment, and access to medical care,” says Gray. “But we need to think about what are the other things that we can look at as a community, and say that when one of us has a platform, to make sure we raise this point or bring this topic to the attention of those who we are in front of.”

As part of “May Is,” Wanzer has designated specific lieutenants in charge of outreach to specific communities. Alexa Rodriguez serves as a coordinator for Latinx and immigrant outreach, and aims to push for more inclusion of different voices and perspectives.

“It doesn’t matter what language we speak or where we’re coming from, we are part of the community,” Rodriguez says, adding that she hopes to inspire and create opportunities for leadership roles for people in the Latinx and immigrant communities.

“There’s a lot of barriers for undocumented immigrants coming from the Latinx community, the language barrier is really hard,” says Rodriguez. “D.C. is a sanctuary for all communities, including the LGBT community, and for the trans community there are a lot of resources, like Whitman-Walker or La Clinica del Pueblo. But sometimes, if we don’t have documentation that reflects our gender, it’s hard to seek out services because of the fear of being discriminated against or being misgendered. When we don’t have documentation, we cannot access health care.

“Housing is another issue we face as undocumented trans women, because if we are homeless we cannot go to the shelter for women because we don’t have documents that match our gender,” she adds. “And we cannot go to a shelter for men because we are not men, so it’s hard. There are a few programs like Casa Ruby and SMYAL or other organizations who provide shelter, but they’re restricted by age. We, as trans people, often transition as adults, in our 20s or 30s, so it can be hard to find resources for us because there are no programs for people our age.”

LGBTQ seniors are another underrepresented community that organizers hope to engage.

“Older adults and seniors in the trans community are a group that’s really been left out and forgotten,” says Gibby Thomas, senior advisor for “May Is?”

“A lot of the programs they have are geared toward younger transgender people, but they’ve forgotten about the older transgender women who paved the way,” says Thomas, who has been promoting the various events among her social circles. “I hope the older trans community can take away from these events that they’re not forgotten, that they’re still part of the community, even though we don’t go to the clubs anymore and do the things we used to do. We want them to know they’re still very much a part of the community, very much welcome, and very much needed, especially to mentor younger trans people.”

Among the events planned for the month of May are community discussions around issues such as addiction (Sunday, May 4), PrEP and forms of HIV prevention (Wednesday, May 15), and “Bridging the Gap,” a conversation on Wednesday, May 22 focusing on resolving the differences between the gay male cisgender community and the transgender community.

“I feel like there are some misunderstandings between the gay community and the trans community,” says David Moody, a straight man who serves as the awards coordinator for “May Is?” “There’s also misunderstandings between the two communities about what each other represent, and whether they can work together to build each other up as opposed to trying to tear each other apart.” Moody notes that some people may see the gay and trans community as competing for a limited pool of resources.

Amy Nelson, a legal advisor and queer lesbian representative, is hopeful that the variety of events held throughout the month — including an art showing and open mic night on Saturday, May 11, and a Happy Hour at Denizens Brewing Co. on Sunday, May 12 — will attract people to attend, while also highlighting the community’s major priorities.

“I love that we have a mix of events with different formats,” she says. “Some are strictly for entertainment purposes. Some are to socialize and have fun, and others are educational panels. Then there are events targeting particular demographics. It allows particular groups to have the unique opportunity to get together and interact in a designated space.”

Above all else, Wanzer says an important aspect of “May Is? All About Trans” is that the events are safe spaces where all people can feel welcome.

“It’s about self-pride, self-respect, self-loving, honoring yourself, loving yourself, being yourself, staying out and staying proud of who you the individual are,” she says. “But at certain locations you can’t do that. So at all of our events, we try to create an environment of love.”

“May Is? All About Trans” kicks off on Wednesday, May 1 with a Trans Summit from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Metropolitan Community Church, 474 Ridge St. NW, and a post-summit dinner from 6 to 9 p.m. at Busboys & Poets in Brookland, 625 Monroe St. NE. For more information, and full list of events, visit www.mayistransdc.com.

John Riley is the local news reporter for Metro Weekly. He can be reached at jriley@metroweekly.com

[saltwukong]

Volume 6 Episode 11 aka Torchwick is rolling in his grave.

This is the moment of truth. This is where things went to shit last volume...so let’s see how the looming Blake and Yang vs. Adam goes.

Cordovin could literally go up in flames and I wouldn’t care. She’s like the anti-Maria Calavera. I would rather have Flynt and Neon back, the actual fucking memes, than listen to this transplant from a shittier anime go on about the greatness of Atlas anymore.

Remember last week, when I complained that Jaune shouldn’t be a strategist when Ruby is in the room? Yeah, that’s still an issue. I am sick of listening to the experienced combatants in the room listen patiently to and take orders from Vomit Boy.

I talk a lot about how ugly Ruby’s semblance has become, but I didn’t think Monty’s iteration of it involved Ruby literally becoming encased in a weird red tube. Slow-mo-ing the effect of it un-summoning from around an already re-formed Ruby was not to this abomination’s benefit.

Alright so we’re ripping off Metal Gear Rising now? Least we’re ripping off something I’ve heard of now.

Is that another goddamn Mirror Mirror Part 75?!? Jeff Williams, shut the fuck up already!

The water splash effect is still gross, but now we’re up close and personal with it.

Okay, ya know what, rather than simply transcribe the individual errors of this fight, let me just break it down to its base issue: rather than Volume 5, where the fights could’ve been really great had Rooster Teeth not been exceptionally lazy, we have now entered territory that is genuinely beyond RT’s capabilities. Three different teams of fighters all doing different things is simply not their forte, proven again by the fact that Maria does almost nothing in this fight. All I can think of is the Paladin fight from V2, which worked way, way better.

And they still think slapping a rock-out, guitar-laden track onto it will make up for this.

No one at Rooster Teeth will have my respect as long as they continue to use those goddamn spinning discs. It’s been years. Literal fucking years. How have you not had time enough to learn the proper way to animate spinning objects?!

At this point, Firefox decided to freeze for forty minutes. Mood is not improving.

Remember Weiss’ Queen Lancer summon? Now you can see it again, with no leg or cephalothorax movement whatsoever. It simply sits still in the air, only its wings moving.

Really great strategy! I can totally praise the brains and brawn used to bring down a giant mech that effectively had a giant “kick me here” sign on its back!

See, here’s the problem with trying to create a mech fight on this scale: the whole point of going for that shield generator is so Nora’s grenades can get through...when they’re not really going to be much more than a nuisance regardless.

The team all get smacked mid-air. All of them make it to the cliff without aid, but Ruby for some reason needs her Semblance to do so. And then she just....stops mid-air and falls. There is no reason for her Semblance to deactivate before she can reach the cliff, but it does so. We’ve reached a point where I just legit don’t understand what Miles and Kerry are trying to show me here.

Clearly Miles and Kerry directed the mech fight, while whoever was doing Tock vs. Maria is spending their time on Adam vs. Blake. I can tell.

Gambol Shroud got broken. That’s another RWBY weapon in the chipper.

I still don’t get the point of the blindfold.

Well, they got the markings off.

Firefox froze on this frame for ten minutes straight, it really hates me and everything I stand for today. 

And they lost Bumblebee too.

I can actually say good and bad things about this fight. The good thing is that it looks complete and competent...for what we’ve had so far. The bad thing is that Adam vs. Yang is not a Miles and Kerry production. This looks a lot like the leaked Adam vs. Yang from Volume 3 that came about right after the Adam Short. The similarities are uncanny. 

But I was right overall: it was route A: Yang is somehow fighting on Adam’s level despite having had no real boost to her power, speed, or skills--and having recently spent months recovering from trauma and injury.

And she just tanks Adam’s super-duper mega-strike beam slice even though she got de-armed last time. There is no explanation for this.

“She’s not protecting me, Adam. And I’m not protecting her. We’re protecting each other.” I think I died a little bit at the ill logic here. A^2 + B^2 = C^2 does it not?

Oh my god I’m done. I’m finally fucking done.

[taliabct]

Playtesting Tiles – Iteration 3 ft. feedback from Herewini

Week 7: 9-12/4/19

For our third iteration, we made the following changes:

To encourage discussion and collaboration, we changed the orientation of the table and questions so that multiple participants can complete the activity together whilst facing each other.

To make the order of the questions more intuitive and build a greater connectedness between each, we took inspiration from the Au to Whakawhanaungatanga framework that Herewini gave us last time.

To allow a greater sense of individual expression, we offered a range of tile shapes for participants to choose from based on whether they felt more individualist or collectivist. We used the circle to represent individualist because of how it has very few connection points, and the hexagon as collectivist as that is the optimum shape for tessellation.

As we want our work to be engaging across multiple senses, we introduced an auditory question where participants would choose which environment soundscape they connect to the most. We decided to use sound because of its emotive qualities.

Feedback from Herewini:

To ensure we remain respectful of Maori culture and are using the frameworks correctly, we set up a meeting with our Maori adviser, Herewini to discuss our idea.

He was really happy with our idea and said it shows the pepeha. He said that if we want to use Maori symbols, we should use generic ones as each tribe has their own specific symbols. He also suggested we think about how we might intertwine the entities of the pepeha into the Au to Whakawhanaungatanga framework i.e. language, mountain, river etc…

Feedback from Playtest:

Did you feel like you could express yourselves?

There was a mixed response. Those who felt ‘yes’ said it because they didn’t feel restricted, the process was like a gamified pepeha and that it made them think about what they were connected to. Those who felt ‘no’ said it was because the questions felt more like a census and thus had nothing to do with them as a person i.e. factual v.s. character.

Did you feel a sense of connectedness?

Most participants felt a sense of connectedness whether it be with their tile, with the people they did the activity with, or with the other tiles placed on the wall. Those who playtested our previous iteration, said that despite having different shaped tiles that didn’t tessellate well with each other, they still felt connectedness between them.

Did you feel a sense of collaboration?

Most participants said they did not feel collaborative because it was a very individual experience. However, they did sometimes discuss or help each other understand the questions. Some participants said that if there was a summary tile, like in our previous iteration, they would have felt a greater sense of collaboration as they would have contributed to something.

Reflection

Once again, the question is raised: how do we create a system that everyone can express themselves in? From talking to Donna on Wednesday, the answer is: we can’t. However, through playtesting Olivia and I can distinguish where we make an ‘informed’ line. We can continue to iterate on the wording of the questions so they are less census-like

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that having different shaped tiles didn’t diminish the sense of connectedness whilst increasing individual expression. It was interesting, though to see how this informed where people placed them. With only hexagons, everyone automatically slotted theirs next to the existing tiles. Contrastingly, this time participants placed theirs anywhere. For future iterations, I wonder how making more obvious connection points on each shape would influence tile placement and sense of connectedness. E.g.

People were unsure about where to start the activity, so I think we need to continue to iterate the layout and UI and UX design so that it is more intuitive.  

I think we still need to iterate on the collaborative aspect of our system as currently it is very self-focussed.