#i wonder if that has any importance to themes and concepts the book poses

[gideonnavtheninth]

I do find it a little funny that in a fandom where the source material places so much power on deeply complex platonic love, idolatry & worship, and devotion / dedication, so many readers took Gideon's jealousy of Harrow's love of the body to immediately mean Harrow is romantically interested in Alecto. As if that's the only way you can be deeply dedicated and in love with something. And also as if Gideon wouldn't be jealous if Harrow had anything she doted on. Gideon's insecurities about Harrow's feelings on things are hardly the most reliable interpretations. I mean, even Harrow's opinions on her own feelings are like a solid 60% reliable

Hell, that's not even the most blasphemous wasy she can love Alecto! Worshipping her as a sort of false idol (in the way the ninth house sort of does the tomb) is infinitely more interesting to me than her just being "attracted" to her. I mean, some romance is tied in there sure, because the lines are so blurred in this series, but simplifying the connection Harrow has to the body she hallucinates everywhere to be a crush feels a little bit like simplifying the whole matter. But, that's just my two cents lol

[happi-tree]

On The Style and Effectiveness of 1-A Hero Costumes - Part 2/5

Part 2 of this post!

NAVIGATION

Part 1 2 3 4 5

INGENIUM / IIDA TENYA

It’s armor time!!! Behold a man. 

What I don’t like:

The costume seems too bulky for a Quirk and fighting style that optimize speed. And while it’s true that cars are pretty bulky but still go fast, it’s equally true that certain types of cars are designed to go faster. The current design reminds me most of a semi or a big SUV, but if the costume was more streamlined along the lines of racecars or sports cars, it would help take off the extra weight that the bulk provides, leaving Iida lighter and more streamlined - therefore, faster. 

Some examples of slimmer armor include Go Go Tomago’s from Big Hero 6 and Jim Lake Jr.’s from Trollhunters. And while I get that his body type inherently lends itself to being tank-like, lightening up on the bulk would probably be great for him.

The exhaust pipes out of his back confuse me. They bring some car energy, which is entirely welcome, but they likely hinder balance and motion, which is bad. They leave him looking a little unbalanced, and since so much of his strength and his fighting ability focuses on his lower body, having excess superficial material protruding out of the sides like that doesn’t seem to lend him any favors. And even while it looks cool, it just seems like it would be uncomfortable? Especially since a lot of runners - Iida included - like having full range of their arms to help propel them forward. The pipes might get in the way of that.

Here’s what I like:

The overall aesthetic. I love how this look both makes sense with Iida’s Quirk and personality and plays with elements of his older brother’s costume. It simultaneously puts across some knightly vibes - which is genius, considering how chivalrous and rule-following Iida typically is - and also calls to mind Transformers and cars with the emphasis on the engines and some of the more mecha elements.

The support! Armor is such an easy way to protect yourself while also getting some serious style points. His most essential areas are covered - neck, chest, arms, and legs - which is especially important considering that Iida’s legs are integral to his Quirk and his fighting style. The helmet is also a really good choice, considering this boy is essentially a human car. He looks a bit intimidating wearing it, which is good for fighting Villains, I suppose. Class dad is protected.

And a misc. note:

You know how after Iida’s special Recipro Burst move, he has to wait awhile while his engines cool back down? I think it would be really neat if he implemented some cooling technology into his Hero suit (similarly to Todoroki’s temperature-regulating gear). Theoretically, if he could find something that worked a bit like coolant for his engines, he would have a much quicker reaction time - and speed is the main facet of his Quirk, so it would probably help a lot!

Overall: Very good at providing protection while having a bomb-ass aesthetic. Not quite so good at being built for speed.

I CANNOT STOP TWINKLING / AOYAMA YUUGA 

On the other side of the armored spectrum… we have this kid!

What I don’t like:

*Edna Mode voice* NO CAPE! Why do I not like the cape? Capes can snag on stuff very easily and it would be an easy thing for Villains to target and use to unbalance Aoyama. Longer capes are especially susceptible to getting trapped under rubble, torn up, or covered in gunk from the environment (which is not the Look he seems to like). I feel like a shorter cape would get a similar message across while minimizing the potential dangers that a long cape poses. Of course, Aoyama can be trained via experience to utilize his costume effectively with the full-length cape, but when his life and the lives of others are on the line, I’d rather not take that chance.

The shades. I get that they’re iconic, but they’re taking rose colored glasses a bit too seriously. 110% will fall off his face and also messes with the princely Vibe the rest of his costume provides. I do like their Elton John energy, though.

Not a bad thing, but I just want to know how his belt works.

Here’s what I like:

The overall aesthetic. I love how the costume’s obvious “princely knight” vibe reflects so much of Aoyama’s character. 

The support here is also really good! Working the belt into the theme of his costume so seamlessly is very innovative and I love that for him. Getting the knee pads and shoulder pauldrons to match his central laser both adds to the uniqueness of the outfit and also pushes that royalty theme since they look very similar to inset gems. 

The color scheme. Purple, silver, gold, and black look very classy and regal together, and I appreciate how the royal purple ties back into the concept of European royalty, which is very in-character for this boy. His pantaloon-looking things??? Neato.

Overall: Eh, okay. Ditch the glasses and shorten the cape. Superb, you funky lil knight light.

CREATI / YAOYOROZU MOMO

Here we are! I’m finally taking a crack at one of the most highly debated hero costumes in the entire show, and like a good portion of people, I’m gonna be extremely salty about it. Yaomomo doesn’t deserve this - none of the girls deserve this. These are my thoughts:

What I don’t like:

The absolute lack of support. For any aspect of her. Nothing about this costume is protective (other than maybe the partial high collar). Her most vulnerable areas are exposed, and while it makes sense for easy Quirk usage, it does not make sense for a girl who’s fighting homicidal maniacs on the front lines. The most glaring area in need of support is obviously her chest, as nothing substantial is holding her bust in place. However, so much could be done to work with the benefits of Creation and against its weaknesses that is not being done in this costume. I’ve seen quite a few redesigns that include a sports bra with a front zip closure, which is worlds better. With the show being set in the future, having a slightly mechanized costume with the ability to retract certain pieces at the press of a button would be useful and likely doable considering Yuuei’s own Support department. Gloves would probably be a good idea to give Yaoyorozu a better grip on harder-to-handle Created objects, such as heavy metal machinery. 

The over-sexualization is, obviously, disgusting. Nothing about this costume says “Hero.” What it does say, in-universe, is that someone had the absolute gall to approve and send this outfit to a 15-year-old girl about to be thrown headfirst into training for an extremely dangerous profession. It says that giving a person in their freshman year of high school an overly sexualized outfit meant for combat training is okay (it isn’t, for reasons I can’t even begin to explain). This more closely resembles an outfit for a lingerie or swimsuit model than it does for any type of superhero, which alone should be enough to warrant some serious changes - especially, as I have stated, since the girl is only 15!

The overall aesthetic. There is no aesthetic reading for this costume other than “sexy”, which, as I explained above, is very problematic. Sure, the exposed skin makes sense for her Quirk, since she needs access to skin in order to produce items with Creation, but nothing about this outfit denotes anything about her personality. Yaoyorozu Momo is a gentle girl who has been shown to have self-esteem issues from early on in the show, and just knowing that makes me wonder if she feels uncomfortable wearing this. If she’s totally comfortable in this look, good for her! But comfort in our clothing factors so much into our mental states, which translates directly to our physical performance - it’s the same reason why having clothes that fit you and your style well make you feel more confident and more content. And especially if Yaoyorozu wasn’t quite expecting the amount of skin revealed when her costume was given to her, it could likely have added on to her self-esteem issues as seen early in the school year.

The skintight fit of what amounts to a glorified bathing suit is not conducive or acceptable whatsoever. With such a powerful Quirk, Yaoyorozu needs all the protective material she can get - which, as I said in Uraraka’s analysis, is quite simply not possible to fit under that bodycon fabric. Some padding at the very least would work wonders, and bulletproof material would serve her even better. 

Once again, heels are not good for any kind of running or fighting! At least it’s a block heel, which is marginally more stable than, say, a stiletto, but still.

The literal bookshelf on her ass. It makes no sense to put it there - it’s an inconvenient place (what if she needs to sit down?) and it looks incredibly awkward to move around with. Besides, there’s absolutely nothing stopping that book from falling at the slightest jostle. At least give her a proper holster or implement it into a toolbelt like some of the boys have. 

What’s with the belt? Can it hold emergency supplies? Or is it just there to make it seem like she’s wearing more than a deep v one-piece? I’m at a loss here.

Here’s what I like:

The color scheme. Deep red, white, and pale yellow look good on her! The color ratios are also pretty good in my opinion. Unfortunately, this is the only good thing I can say about her getup.

And to round us out, some misc. notes:

I feel like the book could be done away with entirely and replaced with something digital. This universe is set multiple centuries into the future, and I think something like a holographic data set would look slick, enable for faster search time for whatever info Yaoyorozu would need, and eliminate the bulk problem completely. At the very least, there could be a smartwatch-type gauntlet to pull up info with a larger screen to enable easy reading. Really, the lack of support for Yaoyorozu’s look is devastating because she could go so many directions in creating an outfit that works with her Quirk’s strengths and against its weaknesses.

Overall: Awful, a disgrace, and a disservice to one of the coolest, kindest characters in the class. I would kill for her to get the outfit she deserves.

INVISIBLE GIRL / HAGAKURE TOORU

Wow, look! Two travesties in a row! One more and I get a bingo!

Hagakure, I love you so much, and I am so, so sorry that the yahoos over at the Support company thought that this was a good idea.

What I don’t like:

Uh. The fact that there isn’t a costume. There is literally no in-universe rationalization for this. Surely, they have the technology. Just look at Lemillion! Togata Mirio’s Quirk is literally phasing through materials (including his own clothing) and they made him his own non-phaseable costume by weaving his own DNA into the fabric! Even if they don’t have the technology (they do), I know that Hatsume and probably the rest of the Support students would immediately jump on the chance of creating a fabric with the ability to switch between visible and invisible modes. 

Once again, the sexualization of minor Hero students continues to disturb me. Who in their right mind thinks it’s okay to send a naked teenager out into a live battlefield just because she’s less likely to be noticed that way? This line of thought surely doesn’t account for stray bullets or falling debris, nor does it account for this poor girl’s peace of mind. She should be focused on getting the job done and saving people, not worrying about how it’s too cold for her to work properly or how there’s nothing between her body and a loaded gun except for the air between them.

The gloves and shoes seem like they’re kinda. Missing the point of contributing to a stealth Hero costume? Yes, they’re good so that Hagakure can be easily recognized among her allies, but does she just have to stow them wherever when she needs to go fully invisible and hope she can find them once the mission’s over? Plus, Hagakure will always, at the very bare minimum, need something to protect the soles of her feet. Walking barefoot just for everyday civilian stuff would cause a lot of problems, but Heroes likely have a lot of broken glass, broken nails, debris, and other nasty things on the streets where they fight. Tetanus is not fun to have. 

Here’s what I like:

The gloves are a nice color, I guess?

Some misc. notes:

I gotta say, I’ve seen SO many good takes on outfit redesigns for Hagakure (same with Yaoyorozu) and the fandom collectively has some wonderful ideas on how to go about creating a costume for her. Personally, I think it would be cool if she had a full-body suit that could change between visible and invisible modes - that way, she would be easy to identify in head counts and it would likely be easier to see places where she could be injured after a fight. At the very, very least they could pull a Lemillion and have her outfit infused with something from her own DNA so it can disappear as she does while leaving her at least covered.

Overall: So, so bad. Please give this girl a suit. I’m tired. 

TLDR Part 2:

Great Costumes: 

Good: Iida

Okay: Aoyama

Questionable: 

Bad: 

The Absolute Worst: Yaoyorozu, Hagakure

[writingwithcolor]

Focusing on Native American Lore in Story; what are the issues?

When dealing with “Native lore”, there are a lot of pitfalls when it comes to respect. Because Native American cultures have been so badly appropriated, repackaged, and turned consumable for Christian society, there is a lot of material involved that just... isn’t us. But it’s being sold as us, which makes people think they know more than they already do.

This is a guide for how to respectfully use Native religions, plural, and the steps you need to take as an outsider to help stop treating us as consumables. 

1- Fetishization of the “Natives as savage” variety

Everyone Native I know is deeply uncomfortable with the white person’s focus on our monsters. I’ve addressed this a dozen times. I’ve spelled out how to be respectful in Using Native American Folklore.

When it comes to people who want to write Native monsters, I pose a few simple questions: why do you want to tie Indigenous identity to “monster” so strongly? Why are we tied so obviously to monsters? What about Native identity makes this such an easy connection? Why just the monsters and none of our defeating or healing from them?

If you want to write stories of boogiemen: this is not respect. This is exploitation.

You absolutely must write about our heroes along with our villains. Do not insert your own ideas of what our heroes should be, because these will be colonized. You have to take all of the folklore, not just the monsters.

1.5- Fetishization in general

Be careful you’re not attracted to your ideas about us instead of what we are actually like. Because a lot of pop culture is dedicated to people’s ideas about what Native life was like, and very little of it actually reflects us. So if you’ve read a few things and think Native lore is just the coolest thing ever and wonderful… you’re probably fetishizing. Or if you want to show how cool and awesome and brilliant this lore is… you’re probably playing saviour.

Read So You Want to Save the World from Bad Representation for more on that.

Because so much of the stories “about Natives” are from a fetishized perspective, you should assume you have some degree of it. This is okay! It is not morally impure to start off with a bit of fetishization. The trick is to catch yourself and to dig deep into who we actually are, to the point the idea the appropriated version feels off.

2- Flattening of our cultures

There’s an unfortunate part of appropriation: there are hundreds of resources about “Native American culture” as if we’re a singular unified thing. We’re not. There are some similarities across the continent, but those boil down to “sustainability focus.”

We don’t have a singular culture, and while our folklore can perhaps be of similar themes, approaching it with the idea that we’ll all match something already in your head that’s been created by white people, for white people.

Not all cultures have the same concepts. We aren’t interchangeable. You need to research each nation you want to use in detail to see about cultural diffusion, cultural exchange, and our own cultural concepts first.

3- Involving us

Asking for resources is good, but it’s very important to let go of the concept of sole authorship with the stories you want to write; if you’re too focused on your own exploration of a culture, your own compiling of probably cherry-picked legends, your own interpretations based on our lore (likely filtered through a culturally-Christian lens), etc…

If you focus too much on you, you’ve created a situation where our religious concepts are being shared around without our nations attached to them, which is the definition of cultural appropriation. You’re put your own ego in front of letting us have authorship.

You need to form a deep connection with basically every nation you wanted to pull from. They need to trust you enough to know you won’t appropriate what they tell you, and you need to find the correct people to teach you since not all stories can be shared by others.

You need to establish parameters for distribution (not all of our stories or aspects of the religion can be written down, for example), learn the cultural context of the monsters to decolonize your thinking and adapt them to the value systems of the nations in question, run the stories by sensitivity readers from the nation, edit accordingly…

And this would have to be done for each nation.

Is it possible to write about Indigenous folklore in a new way when you yourself aren’t Native? Yes! So long as you work with the tribes in question. Local folklore isn’t a free for all that you can pull from at will. You have to respect the original owners of the religion, because it’s a marginalized religion full of bad advice, appropriated stories, and stereotypes that further the colonizers’ agenda.

This is why I say you must let go of sole authorship. Native people are still too marginalized for anyone but us to have an involvement in the story.

4- Decolonizing your thinking

Because this is a big one.

Colonizers have certain attitudes about what they are entitled to, how the stories should be told, what Native American value systems are, and a whole host of other things.

This thinking devalues us, which is why I am so adamant that you have to talk to the nation in question to get it right.

I would suggest to read books you find on websites such as Inhabit Media and Strong Nations before writing your own stories, because then you can learn how we (or people very close to us who run it by us first) write our stories.

This involves also reading non fiction as well as fiction.

Part of decolonization is realizing how unfairly we are treated. What was imposed on us instead of what we do when left to our own devices. I’ve written about it extensively in the Native tag, all of these little colonizer things that people don’t realize are colonizer things because they haven’t read enough to know how much colonialism imposed.

5- Recognizing your Outsider status

The reason there’s a double status when it comes to “playing with” Christian concepts vs “playing with” marginalized religions is how widespread a respectful representation is, to a large group of people.

Most people in the West are what’s known as culturally Christian. They grew up celebrating Christian holidays, hearing about heaven and hell, the concept of sin, what makes a virtuous person, what a wedding looks like (did you know not all religions require witnesses?), and, in general, you are steeped in Christian ideology even if atheist.

Native religions are not Christian. They don’t have anything to do with Christianity. Our important heroic figures aren’t messiahs, our concept of greed doesn’t look like the Christian concept of greed, our concept of helping others doesn’t look like the Christian concept of donating, and, in general, there just needs to be a big reminder that Natives are not Western. Colonizers brought Western ideals to us. We did not have them before you got here.

This means you cannot play with them because you don’t have a right to them the way you do Christianity.

Christianity is yours to play with. You grew up with it, you subconsciously learned it inside and out, your paganism is filtered through the Christian lens (neo-druidism, wicca, and most European neo-pagan religions were created by Christians), and that’s all well and good.

Most of you did not grow up with Native religions*, no matter how many folk stories in your area you have borrowed from us. As a result, you don’t have ownership over our stories. 

*exception: you actually did grow up with a bunch of Natives around you who accepted you into the tribe, even though you’re non-Native.

Remember how I said you have to give up the concept of sole authorship in the purest sense? Yeah. There are probably going to be thousands of things you don’t realize are Christian, and that we do differently. 

It’s okay you don’t have ownership over it. You don’t need it to work with us to tell stories that incorporate our cultural practices. You can use your privilege to amplify what we have told you, in a way that will be more respected because of your non-Native status.

But no matter what, you will be an outsider.

Learn to get comfortable with it. 

Tl;dr:

You’re going to fetishize Native religions at first. Keep learning until you realize we’re all individual things and no part of us is better/worse than other parts, or Western society

If you find sources that talk about “Native Americans” too generally, it’s probably flattening our cultures and you need to dig deeper

You need to involve us and give up the concept of sole authorship of any stories you tell that involve our religions

You need to learn what colonialism has done to us, which means learning about how colonialism works and how it’s still being perpetuated in modern day

You need to be comfortable that you will never have ownership of Native stories the way you do Christian ones

~ Mod Lesya

[neworoldnews]

If your attention was ever caught by a fascinating theme, you know the feeling of being sucked into a mental dialogue.

Your inner voice, usually wandering on its aimless distractions, suddenly clicks! Dropping through a vortex of questions that curiosity begs to scratch.

This synchronised state of mind is rarely triggered during our daily tasks. So when it kicks, you are pumped with a focus strong enough to keep you wondering for hours. The Perception-high.

You mostly navigate in a pre-digested world, seeing what you would expect to see. Conditioned by predispositions, past experiences or hurried backup-conclusions.

Imagine perception as a color. The full rainbow representing the Object and each color a possible Perspective:

This is the perfect metaphor. Just like color is a brain’s hack to help you navigate, and not a property of the object itself, so your conditionings keep you moving in an otherwise overwhelming environment.

This eases decision making and enables action in an otherwise infinity of ponderation.

The mind reinforces the lessons you’ve gathered and the natural tendencies you have. It then paints the world according to your position at the rainbow.

When you look at something, you are actually throwing your colours at it and gazing back at the reflection. Imprisoned by a bubble of your own echo, moulded by imperfect barriers that guide your way into practicality.

Often, not aware of this colourful spectrum, we keep confusing our simplistic representations with the things in itself. The world stretches through our eyes so widely that is hard to notice our frontiers within it.

Just like someone before Newton wouldn’t see gravity in a fallen apple, who has never fallen in love will be blind to the colours of Romeo & Juliet:

The book is open, the apple cracks against the ground. Yet the observer will place the respective color in front of the object, collecting no more than a monochromatic representation. “God wanted the apple to fall”, colorises the priest; “what a teenage angst thing to do, Romeo”, scribbles the unlovable.

Think about the most practical and material-oriented person you know. Now picture her/him starting to drive. Imagine them becoming aware of the noises in the engine. Is it possible that this thought crossed their mind?

“The little noises it makes, it’s telling me what to do. For my whole life those were just random noises, but turned out to be instructions all along!”

Observation highs vary hugely in degree. They can be subtle, adding a little nuance to an existing colour. Or drastic, adding a whole new pigment to the palette.

You’ve been excited about becoming aware of something you were previously blind to before. Now compare that feeling with a man getting his mind blown by seeing colors for the first time [here’s a video].

Now compare that with the moment Einstein saw Time as another dimension, changing the colour spectrum for humanity.

Sure, most of us will never dream of such an intense revelation. But no matter the gradient of these perceptions, pleasure and admiration will always be aroused.

It’s about freedom. Novelty! To escape the circle of seeing what you would expect to see is to stand above a new landscape. To contemplate old sights with a renewed eye. It’s being a tourists to everything.

If you want to better master observation, and fix a dose of that sweet Perception High, you must realize how much your conditionings affect the impressions you gather.

Understand your mind-mold

The framework in which your mind operates is a complex interplay of psychological representations and social conditionings. These are the things that compose your colour.

To become aware of your mindset its helpful to play with some questions first. Let’s start small, with an experiment:

Think about riding a bicycle to work tomorrow. Allow yourself to reflect on the way you reason while answering these questions:

Check my emotional pulse. Have I intuitively made up my mind before pondering?

How did I tackled it, “why not” or “why would I”? How can that be a byproduct of my education?

Can I attach a fear to my decision-making? What fear would that be?

Is my analysis based on hopes or dislikes? Can those hopes be achieved or those dislikes avoided by my present self?

Is there any stereotype or belief on my thought process? What is it?

This is important because it put you in a original position. Like stretching for your eyes, preparing you to see.

Henrique Pousão was a naturalistic painter who deeply understood the power of learning how to see. To patiently allow the eye to catch up with every side, to delay judgment and isolate the different impulses that suggest a conclusion.

For him observation was in itself an act of Creation.

TAKE A GOOD LOOK AT HIS PAINTING:

This young boy, joyfully staring at us with mellow eyes, resting from the stillness of posing, may be one of the most iconic, yet ignored, symbols regarding Observation-Creation.

It’s amazing how natural the pictured moment is.

The scene couldn’t be less pretentious, the studio is perfectly ordinary, the kid sits in a relaxed and childish way, even the working environment is somewhat mild.

It looks like you just walked in the middle of the action. Your presence caused an Interruption, so you are caught by a delightful smile and two proud eyes staring for approval.

In fact, this painting is all about Interruptions.

The boy stops posing to show you his own version of himself, drawn on a little piece of paper. Behind him, on the canvas, is the painter’s sketch for the child’s picture.

So, how many painting are here, and what can they teach us about Observation?

1 — The Child’s Sketch

The boy shows no respect for the ritual of painting.

Turning his back on the canvas while breaking his pose, the child interrupts the painter to show a rippled piece of paper. He doesn’t do it out of malice nor ignorance, but out of a light-hearted disregard for convention.

Why show reverence to something just because it’s drawn in a proper canvas? Why not be proud of a piece of paper if it’s saturated with the same matter as the masterpieces: Pure Creativity.

The Child doesn’t aspire to rebel against anything, there is no duty in his creation. But the force he is driven by shows no mercy to authority, it is empowered by the value of curiosity and excitement in itself.

All principles are new and noble, all approaches worth considering. “Truth” is but a toy to be played with, open to amusing construction, while ideas are molded, tossed, mixed and joint like pieces of LEGO.

Nothing is too absurd, nothing is too serious, nothing is too evident!

It there was not a child in our way to Perception High, then Galileo Galilei would never have dropped balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, disclaming the solemn Aristotelian theory of gravity.

Never would Hennig Brand boild his own piss to discover phosphorus, or would anyone conceive the idea of a cat being both alive and dead at the same time.

It’s all about the freedom, the innocence, to level all that was thought and seen to a common ground where new values and concepts can flourish.

Interrupting authority, fuelled by Pure Creativity.

2 — The Canvas Draft

The draft presents a perfected version of the boy, nobler and more beautiful.

His wide potato nose is portrayed as small and delicate. The hat on top of his ragged clothes even seem aristocratic. His meditative head rests upon a steady hand. There is an overall feeling of idealisation

Somewhere, right now, there’s some small group of people working in a garage, dreaming about, if every single thing goes smoothly, changing the world.

Some eventually will. If Apple, Google or Microsoft had never dreamed of the most positive possible scenario, then how could they have aspired to be what they’ve become?

While playing with an idea, feel free to extend it into it’s most extreme scenario. Elaborate a whole mental experiment, or invent completely new laws and models.

The painter interrupts the boundaries of reality to go beyond the limits of his physical theme.

This is when you don’t think about how things are, but question about how things could be.

That thought functions as an arrow, pointing to a distant bright destiny that you ought to follow. At the dawn of agriculture, a man envisioning a golden field of wheat. A revolting slave dreaming of equality. A deaf scientist wishing to hear…

Though the complete opposite is also relevant.To warning us about just how bad something can become.

These are the so-called Utopias and Dystopias, and they are both a great compass and magnifying glass, when operated by Idealization.

3 — Henrique Pousão’s Painting

There was a moment when Pousão understood he would not be satisfied with what he was portraying.

That he would be missing something if he kept on painting the initial, sketched, version of the child’s portrait. So he Interrupted it.

Seeking the noble beauty he had first envisioned would cost him authenticity. By pursuing the classic canon, the stylised portrait that is set to elevate Art from the mundane (with its picturesque backgrounds and romanticised beauty) Pousão would then be blind to the real boy.

Blind to a shy smile concealed by proud eyes. He would never notice the elegance with which the child’s ragged, old, shoes touch the ground like a ballerina. And the chance to capture a manner so subtle, so enriched with truth, would be lost.

Roar back at the loud command of expectations. Both your own and all others. Understand that you also take part in shaping the concepts that are so often taken as truth.

Doing so widens possibility. Look beyond present conventions and morals. Shape this structure, because it will eventually also change your own views in a loop. Society is an ever mutable cycle of transformation. Check any history book.

The ability to sacrifice one’s present vision and opinion is the great virtue of adaptability. To be always permeable, taking pride in once being wrong and honouring not being sure of anything.

Embracing reality in its full scope, even when contradictory or hurtful, is to be synchronised with its complexity.

Facing ugliness with a wholesome disposition is what got us using Viruses, infectious agents responsible for taking countless lives, to Cure such diseases as cancer.

4 — Your Observation as a Painter

Though the paint didn’t move, the painting has changed. It’s no longer the one you’ve first seen. It has been painted over.

For every new observation a pigment has been added. colours been deepened and shapes widen.

In any sport, game or activity, enjoyment consists in taking part, is being committed to imprint your individuality, feeling and being engaged.

You stood, facing the canvas, in the position of a Painter. Ready to pick up the brush Pousão so thoughtfully left within your reach at the left of the canvas. Reminding that it up to you to give colour to any observation.

Facing the fact that we are painters of our impressions is as empowering as liberating. It offers the world as a palette to explore, strengthening our ties with everything and setting observation as an act of creation.

In a strange way the freedom granted for painters, to enthusiastically and with imagination depict their views, don’t set them apart from reality.

Quite the contrary, it allows them a stronger connection and sensibility with it, as it promotes inquiry and critical sense. The absolute contrary of Apathy, the great responsible for neglecting one’s relation to knowledge.

If you weren’t a painter, then Pousão’s masterpiece would have a painting less: Yours, an ever-changing piece.

There is no such thing as empty things or people. Just elements filled with something you haven’t yet learned to see.

By keeping in check Pousão’s lessons things appear less solid and more like an interplay of invisible fabrics. A tissue of colours filled with nuance, waiting to be experienced from every angle.

If everyone is looked at as a painter, then discussions are more fluid, people more tolerant, observation more engaging, and things just a lot more interesting to look at.

Do you remember becoming aware of something you were blind to? What?

[peachymess]

He chose friendship

After finally having visited the final exhibition in Tokyo myself, I’m left with a lot of thoughts. First of all: the exhibition was amazing! All the coverage of it does not do it justice! The videos made for this event, were stunning! And they have several important artifacts from the story on display in 1:1 scale that just gave me all the feels. Armin’s book, pages open, was lying less than two meters away from me, for instance! I wasn’t even aware they had his book until a few days beforehand, when I saw an image of it by pure chance! I went 4 times, and I could go again. A+!

Anyways, I’ll gush about my trip later. Right now, I want to tell you guys about something I picked up on that I really want to share. You see, I didn’t expect a lot of answers going in; the coverage had already show and told us what the exhibition was all about. And no, I still have no clue what that ending sound is… But I – quite surprisingly  – think I found the answer to the question posed on Armin’s wall. I’m sure you’ve seen it. Red background, seashell in hand. The nerve wrecking words: “is it truth or friendship that he has chosen to believe in?” like the truth is now in opposition with his personal relationships…

Well, I’m here to tell you I know the answer. Let’s just skip right to it: Armin chose friendship.

Here’s why:  

Truth is fleeting. It changes from person to person, based on the deciphering key we use to read the world around us. Truth is a construct. It is what we decide it is. Take Armin’s speech to Annie about good and bad people; it’s the same thing: one person’s action is in truth, both a good thing and a bad thing – depending on who’s looking. If Annie had chosen not to help Armin, she would – in truth – have made a non-beneficial choice. To Armin. However, that same choice, was a beneficial one – to Annie. Her choice is both beneficial, and not – but not both. Just either or, equally, depending on point of view. Two realities, both true. Truth is truly fleeting.

…That’s one way of seeing it anyways. I’m not here to start a philosophical discussion with you. I do, personally, largely subscribe to the abovementioned way of seeing it. However, whether you do or not, is irrelevant here. Because, the exhibition (and the story of SNK) very clearly, tells its visitors that this is how truth works in SNK. The notion of truth being fleeting, is explicitly confirmed as (ironically enough) true, for the SNK universe. As a matter of fact, the entire exhibition seems to have as objective to make you understand just how amputated your understanding of life is, if you lead your life with “one truth” as your compass. The exhibition fronts the duality of reality seen from “growing up inside the walls” vs “growing up outside the walls” almost to an awkwardly spoon-feeding degree. “Truth” is the weakest card, we get it.

As you enter the “paths room”, this is literally the writing on the wall:

By now you know,

that the “truth” is not the only one

in this world.

 But one thing that is for sure

Is that you were born here

 So, you can continue

to choose your own reality.

So, you can carry on progressing

until you burn out the life

you’ve been born with.

What I’m trying to say here, is that after setting Armin’s dilemma up in a way that’s supposed to sound difficult, the exhibition gives the answer away by thoroughly deconstructing “truth” to the degree that it’s barely tangible enough to “choose”.  

Listen, when you read the question, you wondered, didn't you? What the answer would be? Or if you didn’t, didn’t you at least entertain the idea that both “truth” and “friendship” are strong contenders for Armin’s core? Because they are. Almost; Armin is soft for his friends and for general kindness. He has a very human, very gentle side to him. The same side that dreams of far away places where lights dance in the sky and where you can walk on miles and miles of sand and ice – and much, much more. But he also has a cynical side to him, one that says the end justifies the means and that he should throw anything way (including love and kindness) on a personal level if that’s what’s required for the greater good. This side shoots women in the face without hesitation when, in the grand scheme of things, it is beneficial. The same side sees the benefit in having his friend eaten if he poses a threat to all mankind (sidenote: just because he can see such a benefit does not mean he wishes for it; I can see the benefit in going to the gym but it doesn’t mean I want to go). Basically, there is a duality in Armin: he is both full of love for life and people, and simultaneously ready to throw it away and turn cynical in order to pursue what’s “right”. So when those two sides are set up against each other, which side comes out on top?

That’s basically what the question at the exhibition is trying to make you think; that the current events of the story is making it impossible to hold on to both – that the “truth” is that he has to oppose Eren in order to achieve a positive outcome – or that the only way to hold on to Eren is by directly acting against his better judgment.

However, it’s easy to poke holes in this supposed problem: for starters, “truth” is not a strong representative for Armin’s cynical side at all. If there’s one character who’s explicitly opposed a fixed truth, it’s Armin (read: his speech to Annie). His strong desire to communicate with others also tell us that he’s open to the idea that things may look different from others’ point of view. Armin isn’t pursuing truth, because he doesn’t believe it’s fixed. Actually, it’s almost the opposite: he already knows his own truth, so he keeps trying to seek out others’ in order to expand/change his own. Basically, Armin already know the lesson that the final exhibition is trying to teach us: that “the truth” is a weak concept. So between “truth” and “friendship”, Armin will have no problem picking actual human relations with high chances of a positive outcome (based on context), over… something that can’t even really be pinpointed; truth. Hell, it even changes from person to person, so what truth would he be choosing?

 “Ok, so maybe they phrased that badly. The point is he has to choose mankind or Eren, right? That’s still the issue.” Nope. They worded it exactly right. Because the “truth” is, Armin doesn’t know where Eren stands. He can’t choose to go against Eren for the greater good, before he knows that the two are even opposites to begin with. Armin’s theme for this arc has been that he doesn’t feel like he understand Eren any more. We see him struggle to try to figure out precisely if Eren IS opposing the greater good or not. As of chapter 120, he has yet to know the answer to that. In other words, the “truth” option is NOT “I have to go against Eren”; it’s “I still don’t know exactly where he stands and thus what is the best action to take for the greater god. I will have to keep digging until I know enough to make a choice on what to do”. It’s still possible that his search would lead him to the fact that Eren needs to be opposed, eventually, but at this point in time, he doesn’t know that, and thus – since he has already “chosen to believe in” either – it cannot mean “opposing Eren”, as neither “friendship” nor specifically “truth” contains “Eren is bad”. Thus, the only one of the two option that opens up for decisive action, is “friendship”; ultimately, “truth” vs “friendship” looks like this: either Armin chooses to trust and back Eren, or he chooses to keep wondering where Eren stands. If not for any other reason than good story telling, it’s time Isayama put Armin on a decisive path, to push the narrative along.  

As a digression, I’d like to say that I’m aware that the last two or three chapters seem to lean so heavily towards Armin trusting Eren that I’d almost say we’ve been shown the answer already – but I see a lot of you are still worried, and that’s why I’m adding in my two cents on the matter. I already beforehand wanted to believe he chose friendship, but it was only once I experienced the exhibition myself that I saw just how obvious it was.

Anyways, back on track: that’s why I say they worded it exactly right; Armin’s dilemma is not “opposing Eren fore the greater good” vs “discarding his better judgment to prioritize his personal relationship with Eren”. Armin’s two core personalities are not being put up against each other, so they can’t say they are. They (and by “they” I mean Isa/editors/those that worked on the exhibition) are simply playing off the theme of the arc: the fear that Armin has had – and that many EMA fans have had – which is that the truth about Eren will turn out to be that he’s gone off the deep end and needs to be opposed by the two people who love him the most. For a while, it also was made to look like it was likely the case (all to scare us, mind you). “The truth” sounds scary on its own – but even more so when they’ve built up a contextually contained denotation that it means something bad. By saying “truth”, they are using the decoy of fear to distract us from the fact that it’s an empty threat – for all the reasons listed above.

Another digression to make the dilemma sound even less scary: every major character whom had a wall dedicated to them, got an equally ominous rhetorical question written next to them. Look at it like the splash text at the end of each chapter; it’s just there to quicken your pulse, remind you of the stakes and make you want to keep reading to find the answer. Also, the color red is used to identify the Eldian side throughout the exhibition and is used to singnal “belonging to Eldia” - it’s not there to ask you scary questions you don’t wanna answer (while I’m sure it IS there to make you feel nervous about the fate and righteousness of their side vs Marley - again, to blow the “right and wrong” out of the water). 

Anyways, if Armin’s two cores were set up against each other, it’d be an interesting match for sure… but that’s not what’s happening here. Truth has got nothing on friendship in this context. Armin chose friendship. Because friendship… is magic.

[tacitcantos]

Why 2019′s Twilight Zone is Boring

Though 70 years old at this point, the original 1950 Rod Sterling Twilight Zone is still one of the creepiest and smartest works of speculative and weird fiction ever committed to TV. It’s a series that poses strange questions and offers even stranger answers, a series that’s moody and atmospheric and thought provoking, a dark parable that’s gone on to inspire other works of weird fiction.

It’s no wonder then that there have been so many attempts throughout the years to revive it: a movie in 1983, a series in 1985, and another series in 2002. Each has been greeted with varying levels of critical success, but none have been as culturally impactful as the original.

The 2019 remake... won’t be breaking that tradition.

Don’t get me wrong, the new Twilight Zone has a distressing amount of quality and talent involved. The cast is solid throughout, and the only reason certain episodes work at all is the powerful performances of the actors involved. There’s also a nice push for racial diversity in the cast, and sometimes in the themes of a few of the episodes like Replay and The Traveler.

The visuals of each of the ten episodes are gorgeous and moody, and the music wonderful and atmospheric and reminiscent of the discordant jangles and strings of the late and great 2013 Hannibal tv show. It’s a lot of quality to be draped on a fundamentally flawed structure.

To understand the fundamental flaw in the new series, we have to go back to the original Rod Sterling Twilight Zone. And the thing that has to be understood about the original series is that it’s not science fiction despite looking like it on the surface.

Science Fiction

Though there are dozens of definitions of science fiction, at its core one of the key aspects of science fiction is that it introduces a technology or technologies we don’t have in the modern day, and it explores and maps out the impact and implications they’d have on individuals and society.

For example, I, Robot by Isaac Asimov is interested in the implications of what sentient artificial intelligence means for our understanding of personhood, how an AI would define and think about itself, and how society would go about trying to control it, leading to the three laws of robotics for which the book is most famous.

This definition of science fiction is also why something like Star Wars, at its heart, is not science fiction despite having a lot of the trappings of it. It has a lot of technologies that don’t exist in the modern day, but it’s not interested in the impact of them. It has lightsabers because they’re cool, not because it wants to speculate about how they would change warfare.

Even the implications of the force, the speculative aspect of its universe that’s most critical to the story, isn’t really explored. How does the force change the universe? You get mystical samurai cops, and that’s about it. Nothing about the force is actually key to the functioning of the star wars universe. You could take it out and the movies would be a lot less fun, but the universe wouldn’t really be changed. This isn’t to disparage Star Wars: I love Star Wars, but despite its trappings it’s fantasy, and to say it’s science fiction just isn't accurate.

Parable

Much like Star Wars, despite its trappings The Twilight Zone isn’t science fiction. But it’s not fantasy either. The Twilight Zone is a much older and simpler form of story. It’s a parable. Each episode is a self contained story of right and wrong, with the strange or impossible element there to hammer home a message, not be explored.

All three of these genres we’ve talked about, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and parable, have strengths and weaknesses unique to them. One of the strengths of a parable is its clarity. There’s right and wrong, and not a lot else to be said. Almost by necessity, parables have to be streamlined and simple in structure. In a parable there’s a message or lesson and the story is really just a vehicle to illustrate it.

The parable of the boy who cried wolf doesn’t go into the emotional underpinnings of why a boy would consistently sound a false alarm over and over again, because it’s not important. Did he have an abusive childhood? Was it a metaphor for trying to escape abuse and the unwillingness of society to listen? Is the wolf symbolically his abuser? The parable doesn’t care and it isn’t important to the point it’s trying to make; don’t sound false alarms or no one will pay attention to you when the threat is real.

Simplicity of Structure

The original 1950’s Twilight Zone understood that simplicity of structure was key to a successful parable: each episode was a half hour in length; just long enough for setup, twist, and falling action. You can tell this simple structure was key to the Twilight Zone’s success because most of what people remember about any given Twilight Zone episode is the ending.

And while having such a simple structure might seem restrictive, I’d argue that not only is it the most effective way of telling a parable, but that there’s a lot of freedom in structure, that the simplicity of the structure allowed Rod Sterling and the other writers to grapple with issues other shows on TV couldn’t at the time, and allowed the episodes to breath in the grace notes.

And exhibit A in my argument is the new Twilight Zone.

Where the original Twilight Zone was a half hour, the 2019 incarnation is twice that length at an hour. And while I’m sure the writers and producers thought that was a great chance to expand and tell a more complete and complicated story than the original show, what it actually does is put the episodes in an uncomfortable limbo. They’re too long to be able to embrace the simplicity of the original show, that structure of setup twist and falling action, and too short to really be able to explore the core concept and theme of each episode. There’s a reason most movies aren’t an hour long, and that’s because it’s simply not a conducive length for telling a good story. With each episode of the New Twilight Zone I found myself bored around the thirty minute mark, impatient for the twist out of curiosity but not really invested in the characters or plot.

Not All Men

Episode 7, Not All Men, is a good example of the problems the extended run time of the new Twilight Zone can cause. The core concept is that there’s a meteor that falls and causes all men in the area to become violent. This is sort of a dumb concept to begin with, but not completely doomed. The main character even goes through some growth. She starts the episode unassertive and meek in the face of the patriarchal hierarchy of the company she works at and ends it standing up for herself against male harassment:

This isn’t an inherently bad arc, but it’s execution is pitiful, without enough weight for we the audience to become invested in. We never get any real indication of why the character starts the way she does, what her life experience has been to shape her into who she is, and there’s no sacrifice or growth involved in her change.

If the episode was longer it could’ve delved into that material, made the main character a fully realized and three dimensional person that we could’ve become invested in and root for, but as the episode stands she and her growth are more perfunctory than anything else. She’s meek, she runs from agro dudes for a bit, then stands up for herself.

The twist of the episode also isn’t worth waiting a whole hour for. At the climax of the episode it’s revealed that while the meteor makes men more violent, it’s not an overriding urge: the episode implies that the affected men didn’t resist simply because they wanted an excuse to inflict violence. But, because the twist comes so late, its not really given enough time to breathe and be explored in a meaningful way.

Simple Messages

This ties into another fundamental problem with the 2019 series, which is that it isn’t anywhere near as smart as it thinks it is. Often the idea or message at the heart of an episode is borderline offensive in how simple it is. By trying to avoid destiny you create it? Paranoia is bad? You should care about the suffering of others? Mind boggling. Truly.

They’re not bad messages, but they’re simple. And the television audience of 2019 isn’t the audience of 1959: the modern audience is more schooled and experienced with scifi and weird fiction. We’re not shocked or provoked into thought anymore just by the introduction of a weird element like your car coming to life and stalking you. It’s not enough.

This isn’t to say audiences of 1959 were dumb, but the discourse around scifi and weird fiction for even the casual tv watcher of today is a lot more complex than it was back then. We’re not in the 101 level anymore, more like the 103 level: we’ve seen the initial introduction of most ideas, seen them explored and challenged and subverted, and are now bored by those first two levels of discussion.

This is why the core message of an episode like Point of Origin, in which refugees from another world are rounded up and placed in concentration camps, falls flat. The episode follows a woman who’s privileged life is stripped from her when a government agency identifies her as an unwitting refugee from another dimension, and imprisons her in a concentration camp.

The episode’s message isn’t subtle: you should care about the suffering as others, you should treat immigrants as people: and that even before her fall from grace the woman should’ve cared more about the fate of her immigrant housekeeper and illegal immigrants broadly.

It’s not a bad message, and it’s one that a mind boggling amount of people nowadays somehow still don’t understand, but from a fictive perspective it’s too simple and trite to spark interest and engagement or make the audience think.

Preach Fatigue

And it’s also a message we’ve heard several thousand times. The way we consume information nowadays is different from when the original Twilight Zone first aired; the discourse around topics like immigration or gender nowadays is in many ways saturated and as an audience we suffer from a type of preach fatigue where we’ve been told so many times the given side of a given topic is bad or good that we’ve sort of stopped listening.

This wasn’t as much of an issue in 1960, and it especially wasn’t an issue with the Twilight Zone. Back then scifi and weird fiction wasn’t considered a mode of serious social commentary in the tv arena, which meant The Twilight Zone could lure audiences in for a fun and spooky time, their cognitive defenses lowered, and then sucker punch them with something deeper than what they expected.

That advantage of bypassing and audiences preach defenses is completely lost in 2019’s Twilight Zone. We all know that science fiction can effectively tackle big issues, and we know the deal with The Twilight Zone specifically: that it’s going to have a twist in the last act that makes us question our complicity in some social issue. Our preach fatigue hackles are already raised.

In 1960 the Twilight Zone was adding a new element to the discussion, but now, the social topics it was concerned with are are so heavily examined that to do truly do a comparable job, it needed to be way, way more clever than Point of Origin’s premise of "imagine its aliens instead of Mexicans". To be as effective as the original, 2019’s Twilight Zone really needed to tackle issues that are less clear cut than men having a choice in their violent behavior or whether illegal immigrants deserve basic human rights, issues that are less overtly preachy because they’re less discussed.

For example, Point of Origin actually has the kernel of a complex and interesting idea in it, it just doesn’t do anything in it. In the episode as it is now the main character’s fall from grace serves largely as a kind of gotcha moment of the irony in how the tables have turned, but in a better version of the episode her arc could be used to explore the idea that social lines are largely arbitrary and fickle, and that whether you’re part of a group or not can change on a whim.

It’s an idea that’s worth examining the facets of, the causes and effects of how and why and where social lines are erected, and one that’s more complex than Point of Origin’s trite message about how you should treat immigrants like people. There’s more material there for an audience to chew on and engage with, and one that’s less preachy and more thought provoking.

Metaphor and Censorship

Another element that made the Twilight Zone successful and relevant in 1959 but doesn’t really apply today, is the issue of censorship. In 1959 what could be portrayed on screen, and which topics could be explored was far less permissive than it is today.

There’s an interview with Rod Sterling right before The Twilight Zone first aired where he talks about being tired of clashing with sponsors and executives over what content and social issues his screenplays could include. One example he brings up comes from a teleplay on the Nuremberg trials in which the company American Gas insisted on an edit:

“In it as you recall, mention was made of gas chambers. And the line was deleted, cut off the soundtrack. And it mattered little to these guys that the gas involved in concentration camps was cynanide which bore no resemblance physical or otherwise to the gas used in stoves. They cut the line.”

“Because the sponsor was-”

“They did not want that awful association made between what was the horror and misery of Nazi Germany with the nice chrome, wonderfully antiseciptically clean beautiful kitchen appliance that they were selling.”

But just as with the point about the lack of complexity in it’s themes, the new Twilight Zone exists in a different era than the original. We’re at a point in television and fiction where creators don’t have to bow as much to advertisers or censors and can actually just say what they mean. Point of Origin doesn’t need to veil it’s message about immigrants and their demonization in scifi terms; it could just tell a story about real world immigrants and refugees. This doesn’t mean it has to be bereft of weird elements, those still have a valid role to play, but it does mean it can address the issues it’s about head on and directly, and I’d argue there’s value in that kind of clarity.

Some people will make an argument that veiling issues in scifi metaphors lowers an audience member’s kneejerk defenses and lets them look at an issue stripped of their preconceptions and prejudices. And there’s certainly a tradition of creators using weird fiction to try and accomplish that.

Rod Sterling himself spoke about it in several interviews throughout his career, though he seems to have been somewhat split on the utility of using scifi metaphors. At one point he said about audiences:

“You may have to tell them a story of prejudice in parable form in which they may step aside as third persons and cluck how awful we treat our minority groups but at least they know that it’s an evil, and they will recognize it as such. And by osmosis or some incredible process will somewhere along the line, be faced with a situation in which they too may have to exorcise a prejudice and be conscious of it as an evil.”

“Now on Twilight Zone for example, we made a comment on prejudice, on conformity, on intolerance, on censorship, but it’s easy to do it when you’re talking about Buck Rogers isn’t allowed to write his memoirs in the way he wants to write them so he puts on his backpack, his rocket pack, and he zooms over to the publisher. And they applaud and laugh and think how interesting. Now it may well be that the inner message never gets through, but I think peripherally it does get through.”

But in that same interview Sterling also emphasizes the need for clarity, immediacy, and hitting the audience where they live when discussing social issues:

“I think the- the purpose, the point of a dramatic show that’s used as a vehicle of social criticism is to involve an audience, to show them wherein their guilt lies, or at least indeed their association.

This latter point is the one I think is more valid. I’d argue that veiling real world social issues through weird fiction metaphors to make audiences think is a nice sentiment, it’s not a particularly effective technique, and often the metaphor simply goes over people’s heads.

How many red-hatted build-a-wall-enthusiasts watched Point of Origin and thought to themselves after; “yeah, you know what, immigrants aren’t so bad and we shouldn’t round them up into concentration camps.” I’d argue none. It’s far, far too easy for an audience member to simply think that sure, in this case what happened was unfair, but this real world case is different for x y and z reasons, no matter how insignificant those x y z differences are to the core situation.

Fundamentally, people are simply very, very good at ignoring and minimizing information that destabilizes their world view, and it’s relatively simple to do it with fiction. And none of the new Twilight Zone episodes are pointed enough to break through that cognitive barrier.

Get Out (Or In...?)

What’s ironic, is that for all that Jordan Peele shows up in the new Twilight Zone, his own movie Get Out is a far more effective blueprint of what the Twilight Zone should be, and a good contrast to it. To begin with, the scifi concept at the heart of it, that there’s an enclave of rich white people stealing black people’s bodies for themselves, is a manifestation of a complex and nuanced form of racism that often isn’t acknowledged or discussed.

Racism is generally thought of as a simple dislike or belief in the inferiority of another race, and while that’s accurate as far as it goes, racism can also fetishize or simply allow for superior traits in the othered racial group while still denying the people themselves their agency and basic humanity. It’s a form of racism that was one of the bedrocks of slavery, that as an institution it perfectly paired black bodily strength with white intellect, and you can see a modern expression of it in how until recenly most quarterbacks are white while the offensive line black, the black members serving as the muscle to the quarterbacks mind.

The racism at the center of Get Out is a far more complex and nuanced than Point of Origin’s message about treating immigrants like people. It complicates most people’s understanding of racism as the simple belief that races that aren’t their own are inferior, and makes us question our complicity and assumptions: as much as we don’t think other races our worse than our own, are we as careful about how we assume parts of them may be better while still not valuing their core humanity?

At 144 minutes, Get Out also not only has enough time to explore this idea, but also to breathe and build to its twist and flesh out its main character. Unlike Not All Men’s main character, Get Out’s main character is a real and multifaceted person with weight and history, and goes through a coherent character arc. We never get a concrete reason for why Not All Men’s main character starts the episode meek, which makes her blurry and poorly defined: by contrast, we’re shown Get Out’s main character was traumatized by what he feels was his complicity in his mother’s death, which gives his eventual overcoming of it real emotional heft.

The alternate ending of Get Out even threads his emotional growth through the themes of racism: despite having his body imprisoned, the main character is mentally free, an inverse of the fate he would’ve suffered at the hands of the Armitage family. Here’s director Jordan Peele explaining the scene:

“He beat the dragon, but more importantly for Chris when he says ‘I beat it’ he’s talking about his inner demon. And that was the moment he went back for Georgina after hitting her in the car, he defeated his personal demon of when he didn’t go and get his mother. So in a way he made the only decision that would free his soul. And even though he’s in prison like many black men are unjustly in, his soul is free.”

Get Out also has the advantage of being in a genre that, just like the original Twilight Zone, isn’t oversaturated with serious political commentary. While there are smart and socially intelligent horror movies out there, many people still think of them as dumb fun, and thus Get Out can effectively draw you in with the promise of cheap thrill before sucker punching you with depth and message.

Get Out has clear cut right and wrong, it’s not like we don’t know who to root for and who is evil, but these three elements together, a complex theme, a real character, and low expectations, save Get Out from the preach fatigue I talked about before and from which the 2019 Twilight Zone suffers so heavily.

Ultimately, 2019’s Twilight Zone feels like an outdated show, stiff and limited and slow. Worse, it’s boring, which is really the greatest sin. It’s stuck in an uncomfortable limbo both in terms of era and length; it’s mired in the past trying to emulate a tv show that’s sixty years old at this point while also upending its structure and replacing it with one that’s incompatible with what it’s trying to imitate.

[two-are-the-trees]

31 Days of Poe Day 20: “The Oval Portrait”

“The Oval Portrait” has been one of my favorite Poe stories for a long time. It’s one of the shortest, only three pages long, and yet the imagery it contains is so distinct and unforgettable that truly stands out amongst many of Poe’s other works. The themes that it raises surrounding art and creation are elegantly represented, very similar to the themes showcased in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s simple, yet haunting and it encapsulates so much of what we love about gothic tales. 

The story begins as the narrator takes shelter in an abandoned chateau after being wounded in an unexplained way. As he rests in one of the rooms, he notices the walls are covered in various paintings and finds a guide book that describes each one. After some time, he discovers one painting that catches his attention because of its startling effect. It appears to him as though the woman in the portrait is actually alive because her expression and features are so life-like. He turns to the book to read the painting’s description and finds the tale of a devoted wife, a neglectful artist husband, and the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of art. 

For the short amount of time that he has to do it, Poe sets up the scene masterfully in order to reflect the rest of the story. The landscape outside is described with “gloom and grandeur” and the inside of the estate is “rich, yet tattered and antique.” Even the room in which the narrator relaxes is filled with dramatic candelabras and black velvet bed curtains. These details introduce one of the main aesthetics of the tale; the co mingling of beauty and sorrow. We can even see this in the narrator’s description of the titular portrait. It depicts a beautiful young woman, yet she is framed all around by darkness in a vignette style. The narrator notes the edges of her torso and her lovely hair being swallowed up by the black borders, representing the pervading sense of gloom that surrounds the house and the very painting itself. 

This aesthetic theme even continues into the story of the painting, as it describes the painter’s lively young wife being forced to spend hours in the dark turrets of the chateau, posing for her husband’s painting. The wife is described as “all light and smiles” while the lighting that surrounds her is “ghastly,” a stark contrast which emphasizes an intrusion of gloom into the realm of beauty. As the story continues, this concept becomes even more important regarding art and its relationship to real life. 

Would I recommend “The Oval Portrait”? Absolutely. It’s a gorgeous story and so drenched in the tragic relationships between passion, sorrow, beauty, and decay that make the gothic, and especially Poe’s gothic, so entrancing. It’s excellently crafted and so short that you won’t regret giving it a look. This is one that I would personally recommend to anyone.

For more analysis (which contains spoilers!!!) please read below the cut!

I absolutely love the ending of “The Oval Portrait,” as Poe’s affinity for poetic narratives and tragic irony shine through. As the painter paints the portrait of his bride, becoming more impassioned and enthralled with his work, he fails to notice that as the portrait becomes more lovely and vivacious, his real wife becomes more sickly and withered; sort of a reverse Dorian Gray. As the painter finally puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece, in a brilliantly paced climax, he suddenly notices that there is real life within the painting and soon after notices that his actual wife has just fallen dead. 

The sentiment behind the ending is clear; there is a dangerous line that each artist must walk between their creations and their lives in reality. Truly great creation comes at a price; the more of your life you put into your art, the less life you have outside of your craft. This balance can become especially difficult when loved ones are involved, as is the case with the painter’s wife, who is increasingly neglected for her husband’s painting. In devoting everything to the portrait, it’s true that the painter was able to accomplish a feat of artistic skill unlike any other, but unfortunately, this came at a great cost to himself and those near to him. I enjoy this theme because I feel that it is entirely universal; we each have only so much of our lives to give and so we must be cautious about what we devote our very limited time to. Poe seems to imply here that behind every work of truly great beauty there will always be a sense of underlying tragedy as we wonder what that artist must have sacrificed in their own life in order to put so much soul into their creation. 

So, what do you think? Do you believe that great art must come at a price? Do you note any other similarities between “The Oval Portrait” and The Picture of Dorian Gray? Have you felt a similar struggle finding balance between your creations and the other parts of your life? If you would like to share, please comment on this post or send me an ask! You can also use the tag #31daysofpoe to write your own response post!

[featheredglasspen]

Review: A Thousand Beginnings and Endings by Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman

A Thousand Beginnings and Endings by Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman is an anthology retelling of East and South Asian mythology through various female voices. Review under the cut.

Rating:  ★ ★ ★ 1/2

The description of this is a little short, but that’s because, like I said, it’s an anthropology. Anthology means that there are several stories inside this small one.  This is definitely one of the better YA short story collections I have read. As with all anthologies, some stories are much stronger than others, but I enjoyed far more than I disliked. Plus, it was just so great to see the exploration of mythologies we don’t often see in the mainstream. And, honestly, it's just so refreshing to see fantasy stories outside of the vaguely-Medieval Euro-centric books we've come to expect. There's a whole world of fascinating history and culture out there - it's time to explore it! My average rating over the fifteen stories was 3.7. Now I will rate each one and discuss my thoughts on them. This is going to be a long one so buckle up!

Forbidden Fruit by Roshani Chokshi - 5 stars

The collection gets off to a bang with this gorgeous Filipino fairy tale and love story. I didn't love Chokshi's first novel The Star-Touched Queen, but I have to say that her flowery, poetic writing works MUCH better in a short story. It's lush and vivid, raising goosebumps along my arms at its end. A goddess falls in love with a human man - oh, what could possibly go wrong?

Olivia’s Table by Alyssa Wong - 4 stars

This was a little strange, but in the best possible way. Wong takes on the Chinese Hungry Ghost Festival in her story. A young girl who has lost her beloved mother makes it her duty to feed crowds of ghosts. It's a tale about grief, told in sweet, subtle interactions. There is something so wonderful and sad about this uniting of the living and the dead through food.

Steel Skin by Lori M. Lee - 3.5 stars

If I was rating the ending alone, this would probably get five stars. It's a science-fiction story with androids, but also about grief and the loss of a loved one. There's the familial aspect: the narrator's relationship with her father hasn't been the same since her mother died; and also a mystery aspect: she teams up with a friend to uncover the truth behind the androids that were recalled. For the most part, I glided through the story, kinda enjoying it but not really loving it like the previous two. And then the ending happened. Perfection.

Still Star-Crossed by Sona Charaipotra - 2 stars

It's a shame about this one because it took some interesting steps but stopped very abruptly and strangely. I turned the page and was shocked to discover that it was over! It's a Punjabi folktale retelling and the author's explanation for the story was really interesting, but I didn’t think her intentions came across at all. The main guy was pretty creepy, too.

The Counting of Vermillion Beads by Aliette De Bodard - 4 stars

Like a lot of these stories, this one was quite weird. Though I found myself really liking it. I also found myself doing some reading into the Vietnamese story of Tam and Cam, which starts like something of a Cinderella tale, in which a jealous sister envies the other's beauty and it leads to tragedy. Here, Bodard rewrites it with a more positive spin, showing the power of sibling love above all else.

The Land of the Morning Calm by E. C. Myers - 5 stars

Aww. This was one seriously emotional, beautiful story about loss and gaming. As gaming is such an important part of Korean culture, it was great to see it explored here. And while I usually find video game-centred stories too light and silly, Myers did a fantastic job of showing how a game can be really important for someone. It can be a much-needed escape, a creativity outlet, or a doorway to an unending universe. I liked this story so much because it took something I don't usually love and did something new and deeply moving with it.

The Smile by Aisha Saeed - 4 stars

Well, I always like a good feminist fairytale! And I LOVE what Saeed did with this one. She takes a tragic love story and rewrites it to give a king's courtesan choice, freedom and agency. It's a gorgeously-written South Asian addition, and somehow both happy and sad. Happy, because it is about a woman finally getting to make her own choices and understanding what love really is. But sad, because much must be given up for the sake of freedom.

Girls Who Twirl and Other Dangers by Preeti Chhibber - 3 stars

This was okay. I enjoyed the alternating between Hindu myths and a modern-day celebration of Navaratri, a holiday I had never heard of before. But, though educational, I didn't feel as much of a spark with this one as I did with the others. It was light, but fairly bland. It seemed a little too long, too.

Nothing into All by Renée Ahdieh - 4 stars

I really enjoyed this one! It's a retelling of the Korean folktale��Goblin Treasure and I loved what the author did with it. A girl makes a trade for goblin magic so she can achieve her dream of going away to music school, but her brother becomes angry that she isn't using the magic to make gold that could benefit the family. It's a tale about siblings, forgiveness, the decisions we make and how bad actions can be hiding a good person.

Spear Carrier by Rahul Kanakia - 2 stars

Too long and emotionless for my tastes. I felt like this story was droning on and on in parts, and I neither learned something new from it, nor experienced an emotional response to it. The protagonist goes on and on about wanting to be a hero, and about life and death, and I just took so little away from reading it.

Code of Honor by Melissa de la Cruz - 2 stars

There was a definite slip right around this later middle part of the book. My two least favourite stories were lumped together here. Melissa de la Cruz's work seemed to be a companion to her Blue Bloods series, which I have not read and don't particularly have any interest in. This story was about Filipino aswangs - vampire witches - and contained a lot of gore and gruesomeness, but not a lot of emotion. A potentially interesting concept that left me feeling cold.

Bullet, Butterfly by Elsie Chapman - 4 stars

Gorgeous. Chapman retells the Chinese tale of the Butterfly Lovers - a "tragic tale of two young lovers kept apart by familial duty". Set during a war, this reimagining sees a boy posing as a girl and falling in love with another girl called Zhu. The author breathes new life into a very old concept - that of forbidden love and being torn between duty and what your heart truly wants. Beautifully-written with a touching ending.

Daughter of the Sun by Shveta Thakrar - 4 stars

Inspired by two stories from The Mahabharata, this is a powerful feminist tale about sticking to your guns and putting your true passion first. Always. I loved reading about the two stories this was based on - about “Savitri and Satyavan” and “Ganga and Shantanu”. The theme of a smart woman cleverly tricking a god or demon or jinni seems to come up a lot in South Asian folktales and I must confess: I like it.

The Crimson Cloak by Cindy Pon - 5 stars

Oh, I loved this! I'm not sure why but I sometimes love it when the narrator speaks directly to the reader with a conspiratorial wink (You can never out wait a goddess, Dear Reader. I have all the time in the world.). In this, Pon retells “The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl”, which is itself a wonderful folktale, but here becomes even more so. It's very romantic, definitely a love story, but it's a good one. The author gives a voice to the mostly silent weaver girl in this version, allowing her to tell the story from her perspective. 

Eyes like Candlelight by Julie Kagawa - 4 stars

I wonder if this story has anything to do with Kagawa's upcoming novel Shadow of The Fox because it is also about foxes (well, kitsunes, to be precise). Takeo, the protagonist in this story, is an extremely likable hero and we get pulled along for an adventure with one of Japan's most loved mythical creatures: kitsunes. Typically, human/fox shapeshifters. It's also a little creepy, too. Kagawa captures the eerie small-town setting perfectly and, let's not lie, there's something deeply unsettling about never knowing whether a human is really a human or something else.

Overall, this was a stunning anthology. I would really love to see more fantasy short story collections exploring mythologies around the world with own voices authors. If you like fantasy and you like short stories, I highly recommend these.

Until next time.

[vanitygrxxx]

Vanity. Seems like a dated word and an old concept that has never been more prominent before today. What does vanity mean in a world of social media, cellphones and perpetual exposure? What does vanity mean in a world of lax morals and little dignity? What is dignity? What are morals? What are lax morals? Are they a bad thing? Who sets the bar? Everything is up for debate. Is it immoral to be so into yourself? Why is it frowned upon by some but glamourised by others? And if today’s world is characterised more and more by shameless vanity should we just all embrace it? Or should we be more critical of it? Is it an inherent thing that we learn to suppress due to societal standards or are we conditioned into it through societal pressure?

These are a few of my concerns and questions on the matter of vanity and to be honest I haven't been able to answer any. And to be even more honest every answer seems right. Depending on one’s point of view of course. In my case, my background and upbringing are a somewhat unorthodox mix of traditionality and forwardness that have made my confusion on the subject even more intense. My parents were raised in the rural town of Sparta, Greece. Greece, where I’m from, has always been a deeply traditional country that even though considered part of the western world, it has deeply rooted middle eastern influences that can be considered as more conservative. It has also been characterised throughout the years by a core dispute between communist and right wing parties and their respective followers which is still very prominent. Therefore the country itself is a nation defined by a series of conflicts and contradicting mentalities. However, the ‘westernisation’ that we espouse as a nation calls for an open-mindedness and progressiveness that Greeks were not eased into. And that has definitely created a sort of conflict for my peers and me. Because we are a generation that has grown up with the ideals and ethics of our parents and grandparents, family being a very strong institution in Greece, but with the need to keep up with current trends and norms and be more open to change. Moreover, carrying the weight of an ancient civilization that has shaped the entire humanity, we are expected to honour that heritage by adhering to expanding our intellectual capacities and disregarding superficiality. Therefore, it strikes me as odd and troubling when I see any greek girl my age posting pictures on instagram of her face accompanying it with a misspelled inspirational quote in english just to project a certain image of herself and simultaneously downplay the vanity angle by easing it with a ‘meaningful’ message. This is a common occurrence that is truly baffling to me which highlights the vast disparity between truth and image. This is also a recurring theme in many ancient greek written works such as the Odyssey; the concept of «είναι και φαίνεσθαι», the difference between reality and appearances.

On the other hand however, I wonder, am I just being an overly critical, contemptuous, angry person? I could cut people some slack. At the end of the day is vanity so bad? It has existed since the dawn of time and has been the driving factor behind many achievements I am sure. After all how can we distinguish vanity from self-love, ambition and confidence? They say be comfortable with your looks, love the skin you're in, but when does loving yourself become a little too much? These are questions that constantly trouble me and to which i have tried to give answers multiple times but to no avail.

Greek artist’s alter ego Anna Goula shown above is a trash pop singer who mocks contemporary Greek performers.

The most obvious and early tale of vanity is that of Narcissus. Enamoured by his own reflection but not being able to realise his feelings towards himself, he was burned by the flame of his own passion. This myth gave its name to what we now know as narcissism, the overt admiration of ones self and looks and their self-idealisation. Vanity, on the other hand, started off as a term referring to the futility and ephemeral nature of life and material things, however it has mostly become synonymous to narcissism and egomania in current times.

One very prominent example of how the social and cultural dynamics surrounding vanity have drastically changed over the past  few years is the rise of the Kardashian aesthetic and the reign of instagram culture. Kim Kardashian has almost single-handedly rendered shameless vanity an acceptable if not desirable trait, and has even managed to capitalise on it by not only using it to expand her followers which in turn translate into more money but by also publishing a book full of her selfies, titled ‘selfish’ and rightfully so. I think that current instagram culture has a lot to give when it comes to insight on the matter and probably more so when it comes to ordinary people rather than celebrities.

Kim Kardashian’s aforementioned book.

I am also interested in how female artists like Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin explore the female image and sexuality in their photography, which could provide insight coming from either a pro or anti vanity point of view. I also once attended a talk by Juno Calypso, a young photographer who explores the issue of vanity, self-worship, the futility of beauty and its attainability at any cost, through her site specific performances and photographs. Her pinky pastel aesthetic also alludes to stereotypical explicit femininity and seamlessly blends the past with the present. I would certainly like to look at artists like that whose strong aesthetics are a source of debate and inspiration.

Juno Calypso’s Honeymoon Series.

I would also like to look at Yorgos Lanthimos, the only famous Greek director who is currently the pride and joy of Greece due to his accolades. Even though I have only watched some of his movies in fragments, I was surprised by his distinct aesthetics and concepts when I saw a magazine editorial he shot with Taylor Hill. The young model is posing in her underwear in her grandmothers utterly traditional home, resulting in an unusual but very real and gritty visual, that speaks volumes to Lanthimos’ greekness. I would definitely want to explore his earlier movies more in depth, more so because of his exploration of greek social and familial dynamics rather than his exploration of vanity, but at the end of the day aren’t they both related?

Lanthimos’ shoot for V magazine.

Last but not least, I would like to look at how vanity is related to fetish and explore their relationship to fashion and cinema. Looking at collections and runways from the 90s by Thierry Mugler, the sheer theatricality of the models, the way they have been directed to essentially perform instead of simply carry out a catwalk and of course the clothes, inevitably bring to mind dominatrix-y aesthetics. Of course latex also plays an important role in forming that aesthetic and is a big part of the fetish notion which is worth looking into.

Thierry Mugler’s fashion shows.

I believe that all the works I have done so far have more or less included the element of vanity and body ideals in one way or another. Combining latex with traditional victorian hoop skirts was a way for me to explore the relationship between the traditional and the contemporary and examining the dynamics between the conservative and the sexual. I also tried to explore that relationship in my manifesto project, where I looked at my upbringing and more specifically my rural roots and the agricultural background of my family and tried to explore the gap between the aforementioned traits to the more ‘liberal’ and modern upbringing I had in the city. I also tried to explore that relationship in two linked performance/photography pieces I did last year, combining again my traditional background to my sexuality and self-admiration; one was set in my grandmother’s house while the other one was set in a temporary stay sex hotel in Athens. I feel like my experience so far with latex and pvc will prove useful, at least as material exploration and experimentation are concerned and will pave the way for me to explore further the notion of vanity and fetish through their material realisations.

My ‘Portrait of a millenial’ project, set in Priamos sex hotel in Athens. I placed objects like family photos, christian icons and doilies from my grandmother’s house and did traditionally ‘grandmother’ things like crossword puzzles as if I were in my own home.

Second part of my ‘Portrait of a millenial’ project. I made a revealing burlesque costume and wore it around my grandmother’s house to highlight the difference between the sexual and the flamboyant and the religious and traditional.

[moonlitgleek]

I'm sorry! I didn't mean to sound like I was trolling you! I was just wondering how Jon should view Ned after learning about the truth and what it means for Rhaegar. I'm sorry.

No, no, don’t apologize. I made that leap so it’s on me. It’s just… somehow when I wasn’t looking, Rhaegar became the most argued about character on my blog. I don’t mind discussing him - I’ve been engaged in such a discussion over IM for the past two weeks - but I’ve gotten some, let’s say, interesting responses that were pretty much designed to pull my leg. I found the premise of your questions kinda strange and based on a dichotomy that does not really exist in the books, which is why I thought you might be trolling me in the vein of previous responses I got. I’m sorry if I made you feel bad.

I’m gonna start my response to the questions you posed in your previous ask by asserting one point: Ned Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen do not occupy even a remotely similar place in the text. There is simply no way to compare their respective narrative importance to Jon. Ned is the guy who raised Jon and the father Jon looked up to and loved. For better or for worse, he is the only parent Jon ever had and the father that Jon wanted to make proud; his model is the one that Jon strove to live up to. And Jon loves Ned and loves the family Ned raised him in, that’s not going to change just because he discovers that he is not biologically Ned’s. Because he is still Ned’s son in all the way that matter. Ned, for all his mistakes, loved Jon and protected him and gave him a family at a high personal cost to himself. He besmirched his honor in order to save Jon’s life and essentially committed treason and put his life on the line by concealing him. He is an integral part of who Jon is and a vital linchpin to his identity.So Jon would certainly be angry (and he has every right to be), he’d probably lash out spectacularly, but I don’t think it’dlead him to stop seeing Ned as his father or that it’d change how he feels about him. The bonds Jon has with the Starks run deep and true and so I imagine that his dominant emotion once the initial shock wears off would be only sorrow.

But while Ned is personally dear to Jon, Rhaegar would be little more than a name to him, a name attached to a dark history at that. The significance of Rhaegar’s fatherhood in Jon’s arc is largely thematic because the truth about Jon’s parentage is gonna be a major hit to Jon’s self-conception and identity. Because the only identity Jon ever wanted or dreamed of is that of a Stark. He struggled with his bastardy and the conception of his identity in light of it but he was proud that he was Ned Stark’s kid. Finding out that he is not Ned’s son is a hit in and of itself but then to discover that his father is none other than Rhaegar Targaryen, oh that would be just brutal.

This is (one instance) where GRRM subverts the classic trope of the downtrodden boy with a hidden parentage and a grand destiny, because Jon’s origin story is a horror story that is going to devastate him. Not only does his real parentage remove him even further from the identity he desires, not only does it mean that the father and siblings he loves so well are not really (biologically) his own, it also comes with the sobering realization of the circumstances of his own birth. Like, the identity of Jon’s mother has always been a point of tension in his relationship with Ned, and he finally, FINALLY gets his answer, except it’s a punch in the gut. Because the circumstances of Jon’s conception and birth are fucked up. Rhaegar absconded with Lyanna without sparing a thought to the consequences of his actions, so focused he was on getting a third child for the prophecy that everything paled in comparison, even insulting two Great Houses and throwing the realm into war. Lyanna was his means to fulfill the prophecy and get the third head of the dragon in a situation that reeks of consent issues. It’s not a particularly happy origin story.

That’s the truth Jon will find out, the answer to his lifelong question. His mother is the sister of whom his adoptive father couldn’t talk because of how painful it was. His father was the crown prince who is known for carelessly breaking every chivalric code by absconding with Lyanna Stark, the guy whose actions sent the entire realm into war and created the situation that led to the murder of Rickard and Brandon Stark. His father pretty much used his mother as a vessel for a prophecy-child that she died birthing, and then his adoptive father had to claim him as his own bastard - damaging his own marriage and lying to both his wife and Jon himself - to prevent his best friend from murdering baby Jon for the grand crime of existing. Jon was literally born for the purpose of a prophecy so that he could fulfill a destiny his birth father was willing to throw the realm into war for. So how is Jon going to react to that? My belief is that he, in his initial anger and pain, is going to reject said destiny. He’ll reject his Targaryen heritage, he’ll reject the prophecy, he’ll reject Rhaegar and his ready-make destiny and the purpose for which he sired Jon.

And that would be the struggle in Jon’s arc and the choice he needs to make. Is he a hero because his lineage dictates it or a prophecy told it or Rhaegar decided he would be, or is he a hero because he chooses to be? Is he the maker of his own destiny or a puppet dancing to the strings of prophecy and his ancestors’ decisions? Is he fighting for humanity because he is the ready-make prophecy-child fulfilling the purpose of his birth or because it’s the right thing to do? Is he is driven by the prophecy or by hope that humanity can prevail and usher in spring after they throw back the winds of winter? Who is Jon Snow and why is he fighting?

Here’s the thing, Rhaegar prioritized the prophecy above any and everything else. He caused a lot of destruction in his pursuit of a prophecy-child and in the name of saving the same realm he doomed to war. Causing a political crisis that ended up making the realm bleed was an acceptable collateral damage to him as long as he got the third head of the dragon. Jon is going to have to come to terms with the fact that this guy is his father and that he was born specifically for a prophecy; he’ll have to accept his parentage because it’s a part of accepting himself - you have to accept where you came from before you conceive who you are. But Jon’s parentage isn’t going to be what defines him or who he is, his own choices are. Because choosing who you become when you’re faced by the abyss is perhaps the most prominent overarching theme of ASOIAF.

Jon is not going to be a hero because Rhaegar made him one by siring him, or because a prophecy foretold his birth. If my prediction that he’ll reject the prophesied destiny that Rhaegar was willing to throw the realm into war for is true, that means that Jon is not going to be a hero because of Rhaegar but despite him. He did not need either Rhaegar or the prophecy to put him up to fighting the Others or saving people, he was doing that on his own and by his own choice because he recognized that as the most important cause and the right thing to do.Jon’s heroism is his own choice, his destiny is of his own making; he’ll fight not because his lineage compels him to or because it’s the purpose of his birth but because he genuinely wants (and chooses) to do the right thing and save the world.

[scrawnydutchman]

Why Craig McCracken is a Genius

Anybody who follows my work as well as my most frequent postings and discussions knows that I LOVE animation. I sincerely and confidently say it is the greatest art form in the world, simply because in one way or another it’s every art form combined. It’s drawing, painting, acting, film making, special effects, literature and music all at the same time, and while cartoons get the unfortunate shove as being nothing more then non-intellectual “kid’s stuff”, the field has produced some of the finest achievements in art of the 20th century as well as the 21st so far. But much like any art form, the field is only as great as it’s artists and what they bring to the table. There are many great animators and animation directors that any enthusiast can point to for inspiration like Rebecca Sugar, Lauren Faust, Genndy Tartakovsky, Don Bluth, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Hayao Miyazaki, Sitoshi Kun, and of course the most obvious answer Walt Disney. While I have great admiration and nothing but respect for the artists above, I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the genius of the man behind the shows I bring with me throughout my childhood and even adult life. The creator of such shows as Powerpuff Girls (which incidentally he collaborated with Faust and Tartakovsky on), Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and Wander Over Yonder, Craig McCracken.

Make no mistake; there is a reason this man is so heavily respected and regarded in the current landscape of western animation, and you know a McCracken cartoon when you see them. But what exactly makes his work stand out? What is it about the cartoons McCracken has produced and directed that makes it so accessible to such a wide audience of kids and to an extent adults? How is it that whenever I put on an episode of Fosters or Wander Over Yonder I’m immediately put in a good mood and am enthusiastic about life? Well, after watching and studying his work I think I can boil it down to a few elements which, incidentally I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts before.

1. Beautifully Simple Character Design

Aesthetically speaking, what do the Powerpuff Girls, Bloo from Fosters Home and Wander all have in common? The answer of course is that they are deceptively simple designs that all take a very minimalist approach. So many household names from cartoons are memorable but their designs can often be so complex that if one were to try and draw them from memory, even as a skilled cartoonist, they’d have just enough trouble that they may forget a few key aspects of the design. With McCracken’s designs you can draw them likely in less then 2 minutes, especially ol’ Bloo from Fosters Home. You just draw a little pac man ghost with little flipper arms, circular eyes, a grin and a straight line at the bottom and you’re done. One might think these designs are very limited because of how minimalist they are with how you can express them, and if you’re feeling particularly like a snobby Jackass you might call it lazy. But in truth these design choices are the most practical you can get as they give you all the essentials of the character with nothing superfluous. First, because of how quickly you can draw them by that very nature they are also SEVERAL times easier to animate, and with the added aid of glorious modern day technology (when it’s not crashing that is) producing high quality entertainment quickly has never been easier. Second, all the essential parts of the character are there. Each character in a show is a distinctive shape not replicated by any other character, meaning that if you were to put them in a silhouette you could easily recognize who is who. Also, the whole art of animation is expressing character and personality through motion, which is where the acting part of the field comes in. Just by mannerisms, typical distinctive poses and even the very nature of their walk cycles we know exactly what kind of person each character from these shows is. We know the Powerpuff Girls are only innocent on the surface level and in truth are actually quite violent and gruesome (unless you’re watching the new horrendous show that completely misses the point of what makes the original so great), we know Bloo from Foster’s Home is a mischievous egotistical little trickster who is always causing trouble and we know Wander is a happy go lucky optimist who only seeks to bring happiness to all. Sometimes the best way to go is to not think too hard about it and let the main points of the character come through with no additions holding them down or distracting from the point.

2. Creative Yet Broad Show Premises

*This is my new favorite Gif*

I have to imagine each one of these shows had beautifully smooth pitches to get them funded (except maybe Powerpuff Girls because of the violence) because they have such imaginative and original premises that can be summed up so quickly to anyone who wants to watch and they leave themselves open to so many different types of stories.

*A boy visits his Imaginary Friend at a Foster Home where he and many other Imaginary Friends go on all sorts of hijinx or adventures, along the way saying goodbye to imaginary friends who find a new home*

or

*a superhero parody where a bunch of seemingly innocent and adorable little girls are actually quite violent and aggressive, and the show plays off of superhero stereotypes while also challenging typical gender roles*

Done. Great simple premise with unique concept not explored before. Take my money.

I’ve said before that it’s important for a show to have an easy to grasp premise, especially for children, because the easier it is to understand the more accessible it is to a larger audience. Plus because of the broad nature of the summary you can tell any kind of story you want between episodes. Premises like these  have story ideas that just write themselves; it’s why the family sitcom of middle class family with idiot father and hot overcompensating wife exist, because everyone can relate to having a family and the dichotomy of a couple where one is the straight man putting up with the ceaseless antics of the other. Wander Over Yonder is a  particularly good example of this because quite honestly all you need to know is “A couple of do-gooders wander the galaxy making new friends and incidentally run into an incompetent arch enemy a lot”. It’s basically just Road Runner but it takes place on a new planet every episode. 

3. Color!!!!

Craig McCracken KNOWS how to use color. It gives all of his shows such a warm inviting feeling because it’s all so bright and either blends nicely or makes decent contrast. This may seem like a minor point, but You’d be amazed how quickly a bad color palette can ruin a show for an audience. the color choices of these shows immediately attract the attention of the viewer with it’s positive vibes and satisfying placement. Plus each character has a color scheme appropriate to their personality (or more accurately they contrast, appropriating a common theme in McCracken’s work; polar opposites hanging out with each other). The goodhearted reasonable and well behaved Mac is red, but his mischievous trouble making fun loving imaginary friend Bloo is, well . . . . blue. The happy-go-lucky Wander is orange, but his logical and pragmatic best friend and steed Sylvia is blue. The leader Blossom is pink, the innocent Bubbles is baby blue and the tough tomboy Buttercup is green. They remain consistent with these choices and much like the contrast of these characters physical appearance it makes it all the more apparent that the characters themselves contrast too.I don’t know what else to say about it, but just TELL me you don’t watch the intro to Fosters Home and get all hyped up in the process!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZiB_S9VpiU

4. Surrealist Humor

One thing you’ll notice about these shows is that they aren’t afraid to be weird, Fosters especially. They take every chance they can get to have something surreal happen only to play it off moments later like it never happened. I think that’s always been a great strength of McCracken’s shows. A huge part of comedy is playing with expectations: nobody ever gets a laugh out of something predictable. But another great and common aspect of comedy is stark, jarring contrast. I once read a WONDERFUL book called The Humor Code by Joel Warner and Peter McGraw, that was all about studying what makes people laugh, and they brought up a theory in the book that comedy is all about violation + benign. Something is jarring to our senses but we quickly find out it’s actually nothing to be afraid of. Hence why being tickled by someone we love makes us laugh: it’s a violation of our personal space, but we know our loved one wouldn’t actually hurt us. But it wouldn’t be funny if we tickled ourselves because it’s not a violation, and it isn’t funny with someone you don’t trust tickles you because the violation isn’t benign. This can also happen in reverse: something that initially lowers our defences turns out to actually be harmful or annoying or bother us in some way. I’m not necessarily saying this is the be all and end all of comedy as it’s only a theory, but I think you could apply it to McCracken’s work. His cartoons are littered with moments where a character does something strange or random or out of the ordinary and nobody bats an eye, or maybe it’ll shift in perspective about how large the situation at hand is. An immediate example that comes to my mind is the episode of Wander where a planet is attacked on a huge scale by a destroyer of planets called “Buster” . . .which actually when you zoom out it turns out it’s an adorable little puppy just playing with a ball. Humor is largely subjective, but if you ask me . . that shit is funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ5QRrAosQo

Conclusion

McCracken

 has been making numerous contributions to the field of animation throughout his career and has gained notoriety for the shows under his belt . . and rightfully so. He understands pure and simple what cartoons are all about: simple, down to earth, easy to access entertainment that’s fun and leaves you in a good mood. Some television can be considered junk food like reality tv shows (cheap to produce, quick to make, advertised well but loaded with garbage), and others can be considered fruits and veggies like Breaking Bad or The Simpsons (they make you a better person and challenge your sensibilities), but sometimes all you really need is a light simple snack. One that’s colorful, sweet, and maybe even a little nutritious. McCracken delivers in his work with original premises, accessible characters, bright inviting colors and a delightfully weird sense of humor. God bless ya, Mr. McCracken!

[2pmalways]

[TRANS] SHEL’TTER #41 - Wooyoung Interview

WOOYOUNG (From 2PM) x EMI SUZUKI SPECIAL COUPLE SHOOTING!

“SPRING LOVE STORY”

Special Q&A of Wooyoung!!!

Q. For the outfit and hairstyle in “Party Shots,” which part were you fussy about? A. In the MV, just like the Joker who appears in Batman, I made an image where it looks like I don’t know where I’m heading to. That’s why I didn’t want the outfits to have a very neat impression on it, so I made it a little bit messy!

Q. Please tell us the main point of the title song “Party Shots” and the highlight of its MV! A. Since I like doing things such as gathering with friends, having different conversations and talking about real feelings, I personally really like parties. Generally speaking, I gave the song a theme of “Let’s make some noise!!” and let it blow up with a fun atmosphere. That’s why I want everyone to enjoy while listening to it! For the MV, the camera blocking is quick. I think that’s the highlight? It's like… you wouldn’t be able to take your eyes off of it!

Q. Do you like fashion? A. Of course, I like fashion. But rather than “I like fashion,” I think of it as a very essential part in entertainment. It’s one way for self-expression.

Q. Do you have a fashion item that you like? A. Hmm.. If I have to choose one…. I like Hawaiian shirts!

Q. We have this impression of you that tries variety of hairstyles… A. I made my hairstyle neat and clean this time! But usually, it’s pain in the neck to go to hair salons. (laughs) That’s why I’m keeping this hairstyle for now. If ever I end up doing the hairstyle that I really want, I think there would be no fans left. (laughs)

Q. Do you have your own rule when it comes to fashion? A. I don’t go as far as making a fundamental basis. There are times when I would go out with my friends wearing clothes as if I’m going to the supermarket or convenience store. Other times, I would wear a little bit of showy clothes when I go to supermarkets. The feeling for that day is what matters! I also highly take the size of the clothes into consideration. I don’t like it when it’s uncomfortable to wear. I prefer styles that would always let my body move freely.

Q. First appearance in SHEL’TTER! Please introduce yourself to our readers. A. I’m a member of a Korean group called 2PM, and we debuted in Japan 6 years ago with the song “Take Off.” As a group, we release albums and do tours every year, but this time, I’m appearing as a solo artist! 28 years old this year. No girlfriend. I’m Wooyoung! (laughs)

Q. Do you experience “love at first sight”? A. I do experience love at first sight! Just because I get taken with someone at the first meeting, it doesn’t mean that I would ask for her contact info on that same day, or convey my feelings to her right away, or make moves on her, or even confess to her. I want to be prudent when it comes to love.

Q. Please tell us your ideal type of girl! A. I think I’m not in the position to choose though… (laughs) I used to have ideal types but now, I don’t have any. Love is a feeling, right? (laughs)

Q. What do you do on your day off? A. I listen to LPs in my house, read books, or sleep. Ah, I watch documentary-type movies and shows. But that doesn’t mean I’m a complete indoor person. I still hang out with my friends or go to LP bars and bookstores.

Q. Have you ever felt a difference between Japanese women and Korean women? A. I don’t feel any difference just because someone is a Japanese or Korean.

Q. Ideal fashion for girls? A. A simple coordination of “white t-shirt x jeans” to be exact! I like casual and simple styles of female fashion. I would want her to come in a simple style even during dates♡

Q. On a regular basis, are you a night owl or an early bird? A. I am most active when it’s 12 midnight and I sleep around 10 in the morning. (laughs) My morning and night are completely reversed so we can say that I’m perfectly nocturnal! Hmm.. but right now, I have my make up on which is why my skin looks smooth. (laughs)

Q. What phone apps or SNS do you usually use? A. I only have music player which is necessary in my everyday life, internet bank app, Japanese and English translator app in my phone. SNS….. I consider it convenient and I also think it’s one good way of promoting in this modern age. But I don’t use it that much because I don’t want my daily life to be displayed more than it needs to be or to become something I just show off.

Q. Among the fans, you are being called #LittleDevil #DoingThingsAtMyOwnPace #Cute #ActuallyTheFunniestMember, but how do you think of it personally? A. Everything is correct! Well said! (laughs) But if I have to add anything, that would be “I have a lot of charms”! Also, “I love talking to people.” I just really like expressing myself. Fans are truly amazing! They can see through everything~ That’s scary~ Ah! I’m kidding~ (laughs)

Q. What food do you definitely eat whenever you are in Japan? A. Ramen and sukiyaki! I go to Jangara ramen frequently! Also, I love sukiyaki♡ I always mix up shabu shabu and sukiyaki. (laughs) The raw egg that comes with it is also good! Really delicious♡ I’m getting hungry now. (laughs) Please introduce a good restaurant to me!

Q. Do you like any artist from Japan? Please tell us a song that you like. A. Hisaishi Joe-san who is a musical director of Ghibli and Sakamoto Ryuichi-san. I actually like the soundtracks used in dramas, movies, anime, and documentaries. That made a way for me to get to know and like them! By the way, I was able to go and watch the concert of Hisaishi Joe-san in Japan! I own a lot of DVDs of Ghibli films. The first Ghibli production I encountered was “Howl’s Moving Castle” and I think I’ve watched that the most.

Q. Please tell us a song that you usually listen when you travel. A. I frequently listen to an album called “UTAU” by Sakamoto Ryuichi-san and Onuki Taeko-san. This album is really great, so I recommend all of the songs. I want to meet Sakamoto Ryuichi-san! Where should I go to be able to meet him? (laughs)

Q. Since you produce the outfits for 2PM concerts, do you want to try having your own brand of clothing? A. I really only do it for our concerts and music production. I don’t have any thoughts on wanting to try creating my own clothing line. Who will even buy it? (laughs)

Message from Wooyoung!!!

A long interview of WOOYOUNG (From 2PM) who appeared for the first time and was chosen as the first male to be on the front cover of SHEL’TTER!

What are your thoughts for being the first male on the front cover? Thank you! It's an honor. But why me? Really... why is it me? (laughs) From now on and then, I would want to appear in SHEL'TTER♡

What is your impression of SHEL’TTER? All of the models in SHEL'TTER are truly pretty! It's great to see that each of them has their own personality. Just by looking at the magazine, it can serve as an advice to all female who admires fashion. I think it's a very useful magazine. (After knowing it's a magazine where you can order) While looking at the magazine, can you purchase easily the item you like!? That's so nice! I want a copy now! Ah, but then again.. I don't have a girlfriend (laughs)

Please tell us your thoughts about the photoshoot To tell you the truth, I've known Emi-san even before as I have seen her in Japanese magazines. When I found out that my partner is going to be Emi-san, I was glad and I looked forward to this photoshoot. Since she is someone who I've always seen in magazines, I also felt the sense of relief. When I met her in person, her face was very small and she was tall. She's really a beautiful person! I was able to have fun during the photoshoot as well!

Please let us hear your thoughts about the outfit coordination

Since the concept for this photoshoot was to be a couple with Emi-san, I made sure to give importance on creating a sweet atmosphere just like real lovers. Even our matching clothes suited the concept, right? The coordinated outfit of Emi-san was very cute!

2ND SOLO ACTIVITIES! NATIONWIDE TOUR STARTING ON 4/5(Wed) 「WOOYOUNG (From 2PM) Solo Tour 2017 “Party Shots”」WILL BEGIN!

Did you have fun during the photoshoot? Of course!! I had a lot of fun! Uhhmm.. I can't remember it well but I think I didn't have much opportunities to have a photoshoot with Japanese female models. So when the discussions for this project came, I was surprised! I would want to do another photoshoot! Please let me appear in SHEL'TTER every time! (laughs)

Please send a message to the fans who are anticipating your solo activities! I’m always grateful to all of the fans! Thank you! As of right now, I’m in the midst of preparing my new album and concert. In fact, I myself am very excited with the solo activities and I want to meet the fans’ expectations as well! I want to make a show where we can have fun together and enjoy the concert to our hearts’ content. I’m planning on making it exhilarating so please look forward to it!

Complete REPORT of a rare backstory during the photoshoot! Wooyoung greeted with “Please treat me well” and entered the studio in a stately manner. After greeting his partner Suzuki Emi and the staff, the photoshoot began right away! When the cameraman requested “Hold hands and act like a couple!” on just the first cut, Wooyoung got surprised a little bit. While worrying about Emi’s nails that were freshly painted for the photoshoot, he held her hands gently feeling shy which you can check at page 13! Furthermore, Wooyoung personally suggested “Let’s do a funny dance!” on page 15. As a matter of fact, Emi used an iPhone and consecutively took photos of Wooyoung who seems to be having fun while dancing. The group of female that was in the set raved with words of “So kind♡ So wonderful♡” when Wooyoung put the hat on Emi and showed concern by fixing softly her messy hair. The posing where both of them hid their face with the hats was actually Wooyoung’s ad-lib! A peeping out pose is kind of rare, isn’t it? The photoshoot continued in a harmonious atmosphere while they were holding hands, taking selfies together and exchanging jokes occasionally. We were overwhelmed by the aura of the two during the last shoot which was for the front cover. Doing back hugs, putting arm around the shoulder… the eyes of the whole staff were glued to them who looked like a real couple♡ Just as we thought he would do playful dance and show us a cool picture perfect face even during his solo photoshoot, Wooyoung showed a pampered expression gazing at the camera and several more facial expressions. With fresh denim, chino pants adult style, casual street coordination, Wooyoung is exploding a lot of charms that we couldn’t take our eyes from him more and more! On his nationwide tour starting from April, he’ll definitely show variety of expressions and entertain the fans for sure!

JPN-ENG: Yumi

Scans by 2PMAlways

MAY BE TAKEN OUT WITH PROPER CREDITS!!!

[troger]

By Daniel Nexon March 17, 2017

Sebastian Gorka, President Donald Trump’s deputy advisor on national security affairs, has emerged as an extremely “visible defender of the administration” on television and radio, especially on counterterrorism policy. Apart from his full-throated defense of policies such as the immigration and travel ban, Gorka likes to boast of his credentials and denigrate his predecessors, as when he told Fox News that “I think the message is deadly clear to our enemies and our adversaries. We don’t have a national security team made out of 28-year-old grad school students who have degrees in fictional writing.” Gorka maintains that the West is locked in an existential ideological struggle with Islam — a view that plays well in the Trump administration.

But Gorka’s own credentials have already come under scrutiny. Before his appointment, he was not a well-known figure among terrorism experts. A report in Politico noted that “several experts … puzzled over the gap between the numerous military academic credentials listed by Gorka — a political science Ph.D. who unfailingly uses the title ‘Dr.’ — and their unfamiliarity with his work and views.” This dovetails with a number of reports that raise doubts about his knowledge of Islam and terrorism, as well as about his ties to Hungarian far-right groups — including one, Vitezi Rend, whose members “‘are presumed to be inadmissible’ to the country under the Immigration and Nationality Act” — and his claim to have access to confidential information within the White House, despite no confirmation that he has security clearance. The biggest concern: Despite casting himself as an expert on radical jihadi ideology, Gorka does not speak Arabic and has spent no time in the Middle East.

It’s possible for relative outsiders to produce important work. Often, those scholars extend their intellectual reach beyond their area of immediate expertise and bring fresh or disruptive perspectives to research communities. But sadly, Gorka’s scholarship is as shaky as his credentials, as I discovered when I went to one of the few available sources: his dissertation. I wanted a better understanding of Gorka’s views and their scholarly foundations. As he has, to my knowledge, published only one article in a peer-reviewed journal — a slim, multi-authored piece cautioning against overthinking “complexity” when it comes to grand strategy — my pickings were slim.

I should stress that I am not a terrorism expert, either. However, I have advised many dissertations, including a few on counterterrorism policy and insurgencies, in nearly 15 years as a practicing academic. I am also currently the lead editor of a well-regarded international studies journal, for which I read hundreds of academic manuscripts (of varying quality) in any given year.

I have assessed plenty of rushed, incomplete, and problematic academic manuscripts, including doctoral theses. When I read dissertations, therefore, I anticipate something less than perfection. What I do expect, however, is to see substantive works of scholarship. I would particularly expect this from the only scholarly work produced by a man who loves to wave his doctorate “as though it’s a big deal.”

But I was shocked by the lack of scholarly merit. This is particularly troubling because

Gorka’s work constantly recycles core ideas found in his dissertation.

Gorka submitted his thesis in 2007 and defended it in 2008. He received his doctorate from Corvinus University of Budapest in Hungary. His dissertation advisor, Andras Lanczi, has no academic expertise in terrorism or national security issues — but is, for the record, a strong supporter of authoritarian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Lanczi became rector of Corvinus in 2016 after seeking the position unopposed.

In his dissertation, Gorka makes three major arguments, all of which are central themes of his subsequent policy work and now, one worries, U.S. national security policy.

First, al Qaeda represents a “fifth wave” of terrorism, which he calls “irrational, transcendental” terrorism. The terrorist in this wave “represents a wholly different category of threat, since due to the fact that he is completely uninterested in political resolution, he can justify the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Second, the organization of the modern state and its security apparatus is unsuited to deal with this threat; thus, the entire structure of Western security that evolved in the context of the Cold War requires a radical overhaul. Third, the ideal solution would involve a tightly integrated supranational security apparatus, but since “we are unable for various reasons (foremostly political) to create supranational solutions,” the only viable alternative is for states to develop a “unified multi-agency approach.”

This last one involves getting rid of the “internal barriers between the police force, the army and various intelligence services,” although Gorka implies that constitutional barriers might pose a problem. In other words, he wants a “unitary body which conglomerated all the skills of the various separate agencies and units into a new structure better suited to facing threats transcendental terrorist threat such as al Qaeda.” (See also this paper by Gorka.) This sounds like the stuff of totalitarian nightmares — or perhaps just a lot of interesting details for security professionals. Gorka likes big ideas but is not big on fleshing out the specifics.

Indeed, the dissertation is particularly thin on the central topics that Gorka trades on: Islam, terrorism, and Islamic terrorism. For example, Gorka’s discussion of Islam and democracy is sourced pretty much exclusively to Louis Milliot’s 1953 book, Introduction a l’étude du Droit Musulman — a scholarly, but dated, work by a French academic born in Algeria during the colonial period. He writes: “In fact of the few Western scholars who have written on the subject it is the French speaking world that has most to offer with Louis Milliot’s Introduction a l’étude de Droit Musulman being a seminal work.” Gorka also cites conversations with “leading Hungarian Arabist Miklós Maróth.” Maroth is a Hungarian academic and government advisor who has argued that European Muslims should be stripped of their citizenship and that Muslims who fail to assimilate should be “wrapped in pig skin.” From these two sources, Gorka confidently asserts that:

Without over-exaggeration it must here be noted that the two starting points are very different. For the Muslim understanding of law and political order the bedrock is faith and more specifically the will of Allah. Subsequently human action primarily depends upon God and only secondarily upon the human himself. As a faith-system Islam believes completely in the concept of predestination. All is determined by God and as a result there is no room for free-will. As a result the status of unbelievers is very different from that say of the Christian faith. For the Muslim, the concept of converting the unbeliever has little importance since the separation of believers from non-believers has been determined already by the Creator.

It follows, argues Gorka, that “our version of democracy cannot be sustained in a Muslim context, for if there is no free will, if the world and the future are predetermined, then the people’s choice as prerequisite is irrelevant.” Gorka shows no interest in the varied and careful literature on the subject of, or related to, democracy, Islam, and the Middle East nor concern about generalizing a large and diverse community of believers with different theological and pragmatic religious commitments. He also fails to explain how, if doctrines of predestination frustrate democracy, Europe’s Calvinist republics ever got their act together. One also has to wonder, as a Middle East expert commented to me, how Islam is now the majority religion of countries from Morocco to Pakistan if “the concept of converting the unbeliever has little importance” in its theology.

Gorka’s ridiculous understanding of Islam is only one part of a pattern of consistent carelessness and narrowness that runs through his dissertation.

Gorka’s ridiculous understanding of Islam is only one part of a pattern of consistent carelessness and narrowness that runs through his dissertation. At the outset, Gorka does list some hypotheses and what he will do to demonstrate them. But he includes nothing resembling a methodology, very little in the way of consideration of alternative explanations, or any of the other basic requirements of scholarship. For example, Gorka relies on very few sources and shows little interest in engaging with more than a handful of works on terrorism.

Sometimes the results are unintentionally amusing, as when he makes claims about the state of terrorism studies in 2007 based on a book chapter written in 1988 — which itself uses field surveys conducted in 1982 and 1985. Twenty-two years is an eternity in most scholarly fields, but this means his claims about the state of the field are sourced to a period before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Oklahoma City bombing, the emergence of al Qaeda, the Good Friday accords, the conflicts of the North Caucasus, 9/11, the attack on the Parliament of India, and the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Other parts are just plain weird. He includes a brief and pointless survey of past “apocalyptically motivated terrorism.” It discusses only the Zealots-Sicarii, the Assassins, and the Thugs. This is something of a cliché in histories of terrorism, and his account of the latter two groups comes almost entirely from a 1998 book called Warrior Cults: A History of Magical, Mystical and Murderous Organizations. This section showcases a pattern found elsewhere in the dissertation: Gorka drops a footnote indicating that relevant material comes from a particular source unless he indicates otherwise. He then proceeds without additional references, leaving the reader in the dark as to how to check his research. At least in some places, this leads him to pass off direct quotations from source material as his own language.

Given its overall tone and lack of depth, it’s perhaps not surprising that at least 5 percent of the doctoral thesis is cut-and-pasted from his prior nonscholarly writings.

Given its overall tone and lack of depth, it’s perhaps not surprising that at least 5 percent of the doctoral thesis is cut-and-pasted from his prior nonscholarly writings. One of these is a Human Events opinion essay that Gorka co-authored with his wife. Another is a policy piece that he first drafted in 2004, which Gorka does not bother to update. In consequence, a crucial claim in his 2007 dissertation — that terrorism is increasing in lethality — rests entirely on data from the period between 1993 and 2003. As he writes in his dissertation, “For the years 1998 until 2003, the average number of terrorist victims per attack jumped to 13.71. In 1992 the number of victims per attack was 2. In 2003, the number was 20.5 victims per terrorist attack.”

When we zoom in on this claim, we can see the sloppiness of Gorka’s methods. Not only is this an unacceptably truncated period, but the aggregate, descriptive statistics he gives just aren’t remotely good enough. The period from 2001 to 2003 covers not only the 9/11 attacks but also the first years of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. He does not even bother attempting to identify the proportion of such attacks carried out by groups — including in the Middle East and Central Asia — that would qualify as “irrational, transcendental” terrorists rather than, say, secessionists or guerrilla movements. In other words, this is an exercise without any evidentiary value.

Figure 1: Average number of fatalities per terrorist attack, per the Global Terrorism Database. Prepared by Peter Henne.

It gets worse. The data Gorka relies on does not extend beyond 2012, so I asked former students to run the same measure using counts from the Global Terrorism Database (for some of the limitations of this data, see, for example). The lethality of attacks — that is Gorka’s own measure — while consistently rising, remains consistently lower than Gorka reports. It does not, to be blunt, seem like evidence of growing “hyper-terrorism” that would require a total paradigm shift in how Western states secure themselves against threats.

What’s going on? Is this a function of the different datasets? Well, Gorka writes that the “lethality” of attacks is increasing, but his footnote discusses “victims.” His table on page 205 has the same discrepancy. He labels it “Lethality of Terrorist Attacks, 1993-2003,” but the relevant column reads “Number of victims.” Until I started to look at the data he uses, I assumed that Gorka was using the terms as synonyms. He’s not. If we check his numbers against the 2004 report that he draws on, it’s obvious that he’s conflating “dead” and “wounded” in his lethality analysis. Big spikes in the number of wounded from attacks tell us something about terrorism, but this kind of semantic obfuscation also tells us something about Gorka’s modus operandi.

Indeed, Gorka’s thesis reads like one of his interviews: It’s full of strong claims, boldly and confidently stated, backed up with very little evidence. Gorka tells us about Turkish-European relations. He opines on globalization. He confidently proclaims on the “sacrosanct nature of sovereignty that would later lie behind the creation of the ‘balance-of-power’ system that would be so important to Europe in following centuries.” Sometimes his assertions make sense. Sometimes, as in his claims that “sacrosanct” sovereignty explains the creation of the “‘balance-of-power’ system,” they don’t. (For these and more quotations, and a longer discussion of them, see here.) But seldom does Gorka provide actual evidence, let alone citations, to support them.

If his dissertation is any guide, then Gorka is, in fact, bluster all the way down.

If his dissertation is any guide, then Gorka is, in fact, bluster all the way down. His thesis is part smoke and mirrors, part testament to self-importance, and not at all serious scholarship. Gorka believes what he believes. In the case of his dissertation, that we face a new phase of historically lethal terrorism carried out by irrational actors, this can only be met by radically overhauling the state. Indeed, in 2010, Gorka asserted that the terrorist threat is so supreme that “[w]e need not prepare in the short or even medium terms for conventional warfare between nation‐states, using tanks and aircraft carriers. For the foreseeable future our enemies will be non‐state actors — with or without state sponsorship — using irregular means against us.” Regardless, evidence, methodology, and analytical rigor are nuisances that can be shunted aside, whether in the pursuit of a credential or in the formulation of policy.

Much has been written on the factually challenged echo chamber of the far-right. In the United States, its descent into a world of suspect facts has even alienated some longtime conservative commentators. President Trump himself has a fraught relationship with the truth — whether the size of his inauguration crowd, claiming credit for long-planned corporate hiring initiatives, accusing former President Barack Obama of having him wiretapped, or asserting that the American murder rate is at an all-time high. When a Department of Homeland Security report concluded that Trump’s travel ban would not reduce the threat of terrorism on American soil, the administration simply dismissed its findings.

In a powerful essay, Jacob Levy argues that such post-truth politics move us in the direction of authoritarianism. As he concludes, “insisting on the difference between truth and lies is itself a part of the defense of freedom.… [T]he power to tell public lies and to have them repeated is evidence of, and a tool for the expansion of, a power that free people should resist and refuse.” But there are many consequences of post-truth politics short of autocracy.

To the extent that members of any ideological movement — right or left — respond to “inconvenient facts” not by adjusting their beliefs and preferences but by creating “alternative facts,” they are likely to support and enact counterproductive, and downright dangerous, policies.

It is precisely attention to the significance of inconvenient facts that distinguishes good scholars and true experts from pretenders. Pretenders present themselves as scholars and experts. They adopt the language, get the credentials, and perform as they — or, at least, their audience — imagine scholars and experts sound. Rather than speak truth to power, they peddle what their ideological compatriots want to hear, wrapped up in the trappings of intellectual authority.

The more that political movements, politicians, and leaders move into a universe of alternative facts, the more they render themselves vulnerable to these intellectual grifters. And the more these fake experts influence actual policy, the more damage that they can do. I do not believe that a doctorate, let alone an academic background, is a prerequisite for good policymaking. But the president of the United States is best served by advisors who place facts before ideology, who care about the substance more than the credential, and who would never make sweeping judgments about millions of people grounded on essentially no evidence at all. This is particularly the case for a new president who has repeatedly demonstrated that when ideology — or even vanity — runs into inconvenient facts, he expects the facts to bend. In this sense, Gorka seems a perfect fit for the worst impulses of this administration.

Photo credit: ALEX WONG/Getty Images

[passportandpack]

A Journey Through Moroccan Feminism

For almost a month now, this blog has featured personal stories, articles, and videos that highlight the modern way in which Muslim women wear and regard the hijab. As this series comes to a close, I hope to connect these individual posts to each other, to modern feminism, and to Morocco. If you’re a reader, particularly one who is interested in Islamic culture, you may have heard of Fatima Mernissi. Though I myself have hardly begun to explore her expansive body of works, my friend and fellow volunteer, Shawn Dubberly, always seems to be reading yet another one of her groundbreaking works. So I asked her to share with us how Mernissi has guided her through understanding womanhood in a Moroccan context and I couldn’t be happier with the result. Read on!  

                        A Journey through Moroccan Feminism                                                By Shawn Dubberly Motivation 

Fresh off the plane I was interested in women’s stories. I was interested but I didn’t have the language to ask. So, what was I to do? I couldn’t wait for my language skills to develop. I was eager to dive into Moroccan culture of the past, the present, and all of it in between. I wanted to connect with the modern feminist movement in Morocco. 

So what did I do? I turned to the matriarch of feminist literature in Morocco, Fatima Mernissi (sometimes spelt Fatema). Mernissi has chronicled her personal story as well as the stories of her countrywomen and lucky for me she was so well received that her books were all translated into English. She has focused on the lives of women but she hasn’t limited herself to any one type of woman. She has written about daily life, she’s written about powerful women in Islamic history and she’s written academically about sexuality. Her books revolve around themes I can relate to: marriage, mother and daughter relationships, and sexuality. These were the topics I wanted to discuss with the women I was surrounded by, but I was too shy. 

Likewise, these are the subjects that fall in the shadows between two pillars of Islam and feminism. I, like many people, naively did not understand how a person could be a Muslim and a feminist. Coming from the United States, I harbored a subconscious bias, a general belief that Islam was oppressive toward women. Fortunately, my two years in Morocco has provided me with ample examples of strong Muslim women who contradicted this bias. But first, Mernissi showed me the way though her books. 

Recently I read an article that discussed that the need for people to understand the connections between Islam, women’s daily lives, and feminism. In an interview by Paper Magazine, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, the founder of MuslimGirl.com, discussed the “flattening” of Muslim women in the media and the importance to raise up specific Muslim women in order to combat superficial or biased perspectives. Amani said, “Islamic feminism also has a long tradition, a long history, and there is so much academia around it and so many different feminist scholars have contributed such exceptional work to this conversation, that it feels important to do them justice.” 

Fatima Mernissi is one of those feminist scholars that sheds light on the shadows that the two pillars create. Mernissi is helping me understand Muslim feminism through understanding Moroccan womanhood in her books; The Forgotten Queens of Islam, Beyond the Veil, Doing Daily Battle, Dreams of Trespass, and Islam and Democracy. 

What have I learned about Moroccan Feminism?

In writing this article I found myself focusing more on describing the motivations that lead me to Mernissi and less about my actual discoveries through her books. I finally had to admit that the former, the “motivation” is more important the the later, the “what” I discovered. Obvious to me now, I want to articulate that the desire, the curiosity is the power that pulls us through to the other side. Pulls the inexperienced, like me, through the countless stories and hopefully out into a world that has a more balanced perspective. That’s why I call it a journey. Moving forward in this article are some of my personal discoveries and some quotes that struck me as important, but they are in no way a comprehensive summary of Mernissi’s writing. 

Assumptions are easy to come by when observing Moroccan women. Mernissi’s writing forces me to consider history, culture, and my own biases, before jumping into a judgment. When I read Beyond the Veil, the big take away was how Islam differs from Christianity in regards to sex. She explores theoretical parts of religious texts that refer to sex and how social interpretations of religion have lead to gender inequalities. Mernissi writes, “In Western Culture, sexual inequality is based on belief in women’s biological inferiority… In Islam there is no such belief in female inferiority. On the contrary, the whole system is based on the assumption that women are powerful and dangerous beings.” That concept had me thinking for months; it seemed very clear that women are treated as inferiors in Islam. But this had me thinking that Muslim feminists understood parts of their religion that I did not. I went on to read, “Imam Ghazali in his book… gives a detailed description of how Islam integrated the sexual instinct in the social order and places it at the service of God. [Sexual activity], used according to God’s will, the desire of the flesh serves God’s and the individual’s interests in both worlds, enhances life on earth and in heaven. Part of God’s design on earth is to ensure the perpetuity of the human race, and sexual desires serve this purpose."

Whenever I saw power dynamics in Moroccan households I kept wondering if the sex and power might be at play. There was no way for me to seek information about their sexual politics because it is not in my nature to broach that topic. But instead of assuming that men felt completely superior to women I tried to see how there was a space in Islam where a woman’s sexual pleasure is prioritized. But it wasn’t just what was happening behind closed doors that aroused my interest. When public space is mapped out in Morocco, the cities seem to be equally accessed by men and women but in the smaller villages the public spaces are visibly dominated by men. The private space remains mysterious to me. Why do women stay in doors? Why do women wear veils? Why don’t women buy their vegetables if they are the ones cooking them? Reading Dreams of Trespass painted a picture of the interior landscape of the harem, a female space of Muslim households. It was a much bigger space than I had previously imagined. 

Dreams of Trespass captured the concept of a mother educating her daughter to be a feminist. Mernissi has a character mothering a young girl, “Beauty is in the skin! Take care of it, oil it, clean it, scrub it, perfume it, and put on your best clothes, even if there is no special occasion, and you’ll feel like a queen. If society is hard on you, fight back by pampering your skin. Skin is political (A-jilida siyasa) otherwise why would the imams order us to hide it?” While I still think women have the right to all public spaces, reading Mernissi helped me see that private spaces are not prisons. They can be playgrounds, they can be schools, and they can be politically charged, just like the public spaces. 

It wasn’t until I read Doing Daily Battle that I found what I was looking for in terms of the real stories of women. Mernissi records interviews with different women. These are candid and frank descriptions of all the things I wanted to ask women in the site I was placed. What was it like growing up? What was your first sexual experience? What happens if a girl found herself pregnant outside of marriage? All these questions were on my mind, but it wasn’t until I read Mernissi’s directive on “listening” that I realized that Moroccan women were already telling me these stories.

Mernissi said it better than I could when she discussed the result of hearing stories. “A comparison between the interviews with Tahra Bint Muhammad and Khadija al-Jabilya is absolutely necessary, not for developing grand theories about patriarchy, capitalist development etc. but for posing in all humility, all the issues that women’s voices raise. Namely, that it is necessary to avoid generalising, to avoid projecting on poor women our own preoccupations and problems, and, above all to do our work as intellectuals. By this I mean: to develop our listening capacity, to be sure that we hear everything even those things that don’t fit into our theories and our pretty constructs. And, above all, to abstain from positing a ‘return to the past’ as an alternative for women.”

Continuing the Journey 

After reading my fair share of Mernissi, I realized it is not about asking women about their lives but merely listening and being open for the stories that women share freely. I am more capable of empathizing because I can relate them to Mernissi’s stories. Reading Mernissi enables me to acknowledge my biases.

I return back to what Amani Al-Khatahtbeh says about western media, that it, “… shows the two-dimensionality of the way that we represent Muslim women. We know in the context of foreign policy, that that misunderstanding of who Muslim women are has actually empowered a lot of faulty military interventions overseas that have devastated entire people. So, to me, one of the number one ways of combatting that [flattening] is by creating our own representation.” This quote connects to something my country director tells us, that we as Peace Corps volunteers are the largest group of Americans serving in an Arab Muslim country in a non-military capacity. It strikes me that my most pivotal duty as a volunteer has been learning about these women’s lives. In order to do that properly, I had to rid myself of this bias that I knew better, that my way of life was better. So as inconsequential as I think duty may be, it is connected to a larger mission of cultural understanding that is on par with military intervention. Understanding Islam and understanding women’s struggles empowers me politically; politicians and the media can no longer convince the naive side of me that the hijab is the problem. No the problems are much more complicated than a one dimensional scarf.

Shawn Dubberly is a United States Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco. Currently serving with her husband in a rural village near the west coast, she has devoted the last two years to learning Darija and serving her community. Shawn enjoys spending her time with women, cracking Argan shells, and reading Mernissi. A big thank you to Shawn for contributing! 

To check out more of Shawn’s experiences in Morocco, visit her blog: https://bonjourhellosalam.wordpress.com/

[zoeeeeeeeeli]

Week 1

MoMA PS1

Land: Zhang Huan and Li Binyuan

I think their works are extremely powerful.

The descriptions of works are comparably long and detailed. It might be because the context of the work has many cultural reference, or it might be because the artists want to be that way. Even though I think the artworks work powerfully without the text, but the artist might think it is necessary to make his intent and performance clear and understandable.

The first big screen is a performance in which the artist conducts a two-hour process of jumping into the air and falling back down into the muddy patch of soil until he was on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion. Li has explained the jump as departure and the fall as return. I interpret the exhaustion at the end is the person’s final death, just like his father’s passing (on the text). It strongly tells a story about the land-people relationship, the land raises him, he comes, he goes, and finally go back to the land – his body buried in the mud of the land. In this series of artworks, artists also show the relationship between human and nature, such as To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond. They all depict a picture of collectivism and the limits of human beings’ power over nature. In Drawing Board, Li pits his body against a powerful cascade of water that spills through an opening in a dilapidated roadside dam. He holds a wooden board against the surge of water. When my friend and I see this, we see his pose – he stood knee-deep in the water, holding the board against the strength of the water, we feel the balance between he and nature. Later his strength is running out, he falls down in the water and collapses. The balance is broken, all of a sudden we feel the fragility of the human body in front of the nature’s power.

The most powerful and impressive piece is Nine Holes. Zhang and his artist friends --- seven men and two women perform a kind of symbolic intercourse with the land. I normally don’t think the intercourse artwork is powerful, because there are too many. But the intercourse with the land is much more than the intercourse itself. The theme of human-nature relationship is always about balance and imbalance. But his performance describes human-nature relationship to a new level, I think rather than balance and imbalance, “exchange” is more accurate to describe the body and the land. Nine Holes is the exact continuity to the jump piece at the beginning.

 Fernando Palma Rodriquez: In Ixtli in Yollotl, We the People

One aspect I like about this show, is the sculptures appear to me as fragmentation and deconstruction. They certainly convey the themes that the artist was trying to state – violence, land, land-people relationship and indigenous culture. Robotic hands, house heads, butterflies, seeds, dead birds and stones. Those fragmented story reminds me of newspaper. The news on local newspaper are fragment and altogether form a story of history, stating the emotion of the land and the land-people relationship. However, one aspect I don’t like about these sculptures is that they all seem like interactive sculptures, but at the end I don’t know whether they are or not. The audience are all wandering around to see if they are interactive. I saw Arduino were installed, but it seems not that effective. The audience there were confused as well. I think that is indeed a downside of interactive pieces, they sometimes make people focus on the technology, instead of on the artwork itself. However, if the artworks seem like interactive pieces, but actually just moving instantly by themselves, then that is a very interesting presentation and there is some context hidden by this move, but I am not able to tell if the interactive part is deliberate.

 Seth Price: Danny, Mila, Hannah, Ariana, Bob, Brad

I think the most interesting point about Price’s work is the scale. There are a lot of works showing the scene of violence, the interaction, the movement and so on. But Price’s works choose to zoom in. He chooses to zoom extremely in, to the extreme that we might feel uncomfortable, to show the theme of violence. This zoom-in view isolate the identity of the models, which I read it as equality.

 DDA Faculty show

Carla’s work Pattern Recognition has a reference of another artist’s face, who I can’t recognize. It reminds me of the “reference pleasure” that one of my professor in my undergrads mentioned. The audience who recognize the reference in the artwork got much more pleasure than the audience who do not recognize it. Some artworks are designed to be appreciated by the one who can recognize the reference in the work. I would say maybe all arts are not designed to be seen by all people. Most of arts have reference, sometimes national social issues, philosophy problem, and sometimes more specific like persons, books, other artworks.

The work The Year We Make Contact I still not sure if it is interactive, but the tape and the shape of projection remind me of the shape of early computer screen. Maybe the artist is referring to the first computer screen? The show does not have long description like the one in MoMA PS1, the only clue we can fine is the text on the artist tag. It makes me wonder a question, for an artwork, sometimes what the audience receive and what the artist trying to say are different, but which one is more important?

 Readings: 

"Redefining Sculpture Digitally"

quote:

“At what point, as we add and refine perceptual cues, do we cease to think of the object as being “virtual” and just think of it as real? If we can see a single view of what appears to be a three dimensional object, is it a “real” object? No, we say, because we can't walk around it. If we can “walk around it” by using a joystick to control our point of view, is it then real? Suppose the image is displayed to us not on a stationary monitor set on a table, but in a tiny head-mounted monitor that reads our body movements and updates the image accordingly, so that we can physically walk around it. Is it then “real”? And if there are two images – a left eye view and a right eye view – so that we see the object in stereo, as our eyes normally do? Suppose we program into the object virtual tangibility, so that we can “feel” the object – perhaps with a set of electronic gloves that would be to our sense of tactility as CRT monitors now are to our sense of vision. And if we add sound? And scent?

How many, and which, characteristics must the object have before we consider it real? Or before we become incapable of distinguishing between what is real and what is not? Or before we cease to care about the distinction? (6)”

The reading makes me keep thinking the definition of virtual and reality, or even sculpture, which is defined in “introduction to Art Concepts, SAC, ART100″ (https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sac-artappreciation/chapter/oer-1-25/) as “ any artwork made by the manipulation of materials resulting in a three-dimensional object”. By looking at this definition, I still cannot decide that whether my object in Maya can be called as sculpture. I always call the work in Maya as “virtual installations” even though it will finally be presented as two-dimensionally. Because I think I was making installation, to express an idea, but digitally instead of physically. For “the work in Maya”, I was manipulating data to make an artwork, and the object was three-dimensional. So if data can be defined as “materials”, then the thing in Maya can be sculpture. 

I believe Virtual Reality is a challenge to the definition of “virtual” as well as “really”. We can somehow “physically” walk around it. With the headset on, we basically cannot receive the sound from the physical world. When our sense immerse in the VR world, is this still “virtual”? When playing with VR, I feel terrifying. Because my sense is in an environment but my body is not. I still can feel my body in the physical world, without my sense, my body feel even more unprotected. It still challenges “virtuality” by taking away some senses. but it is awkward that it takes only some senses but not all of them.

"A Series of Digital Interactive Multimedia Murals" 

quote:

“This is also why abstract painting and sculpture can succeed. Willem de Kooning’s painting, A Tree in Naples, is powerful not because it represents a moving event of thing. In fact, we cannot say that it “represents” anything (in spite of the title). The painting is powerful because of the relationships between the forms and colors. These relationships are somehow analogous to experiences we have had, and that is why we respond viscerally to the painting.”

In addition to the “analogous” effects that art serve, I think powerful art also have the ability to make the audience strongly feel something. I strongly agree that good art have this analogous effects, and also I think that the same principle can be applied to more dimensional art such as sculptures and performances. In a discourse on the beautifulness of art, I commented that the beautifulness of art impresses the audience not because of how much pleasure it brings, but how much feeling that it can generate, which means, the power of art does not depend on how beautiful the art is, but how much feelings that it can generate. For instance, Chris Burden’s performance: Shoot (1971) and Through the Night Softly (1973). They are powerful not because the pleasure they bring --- they did not bring any pleasure, they are ugly, if I would say --- but because how much pain that they can let the audience feel, which is “analogues” effects described in the reading. In Through the Night Softly (1973) Burden was slithering across broke glass in his underwear with his hands bound behind his back and in Shoot (1971), Burden was shot in front of the audience. (I can not imagine how shocked the audience were when witnessing the artist being shot during this performance.)  

[swipestream]

Esoteric Gaming Jargon

In our hobby and industry, there are quite a few terms of jargon tossed about. Not all of them are specific or unique to tabletop gaming, but for enough of them we gamers have our own definitions. Someone new to RPGs might need a little guidance on understanding what we’re saying when we drop some of these terms.

About ten years ago, Walt put together an RPG glossary here on Gnome Stew. This list is by no means a replacement, but, rather, an appendix to his wonderful and in-depth article. I’m not going to cover the basics like GM, PC, NPC, etc.. Walt’s glossary does a wonderful job of this already.

This post will be a little long in the tooth because of the number of terms I’m going to lay down on you, so I’m just going to jump in the list. Also, I tried to group the definitions together in a way that made sense instead of alphabetically.

Grognard – French for “grumbler.” An old soldier. I suppose grumbler and old soldier can be synonymous. In the RPG world, we use it to describe folks who enjoy older RPGs as opposed to the newer selections.

Newb/Newbie/N00b – A newcomer to the hobby. Can be applied to pretty much any hobby or profession. Usually used in derogatory terms, so be careful with this one.

RAW – Acronym: Rules As Written; Some groups will run a game RAW. This especially applies to organized play, so that all players and the GM are on the same page as far as rules go.

RAI – Acronym: Rules As Intended; This occurs when different people or groups interpret the written rules in different ways. This can come from ambiguous wording in a rule, or a shift from RAW due to personal preference.

House Rules – House rules are used to alter the RAW language to adapt the game to personal play styles, personal preferences, to adjust for shortcomings in the rules, or to overcome serious flaws in an otherwise playable game system.

Homebrew – A homebrew RPG can apply to both worlds and rules. With worlds, the GM will run in a setting they have come up with themselves (or within a group effort). With rules, the GM is running a set of rules that they (or a group) have come up with. In many cases, homebrew worlds and systems never see the light of day outside the immediate gaming group immersed in the worlds/rules.

Organized Play – This is where a character is not part of an ongoing campaign, but the player controlling the character moves from adventure to adventure and levels up according to proscribed meta-rules. Some examples of organized play are Pathfinder Society, D&D’s Adventurers’ League, and RPGA’s “living campaigns.”

THAC0 – Acronym: To Hit Armor Class Zero; This method of determining if someone hits a target with an attack has fallen out of favor because of the difficulty of the math involved. THAC0 has its roots in the wargaming systems Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson played and used as a basis for the original D&D system in the 1970s and continued to be found in mainstream gaming until D&D 3.0 was released. It can still be found, sometimes with variations, in some modern games.

Metagame – The information outside the game that involves the game. This is generally player knowledge that is outside what their character knows. An example of this would be the knows that trolls (in D&D) can’t regenerate fire or acid damage, so they throw oil on the troll and light it up, even if their character has no way of knowing this tactic at the time.

Monty Haul – A style of gaming or campaigning where the GM loads up the PCs with treasure, magic, experience points, and other loot even if it’s not fully earned. This is named after “Monty Hall” from the “Let’s Make A Deal” TV show.

Hack ‘n’ Slash – A style of gaming where the players are basically playing a tactical simulation against the monsters the GM throws at them. The whole point of the game is to Munchkin a character to become the most effective killing machine possible to slay as many monsters as possible.

Min/Maxing – This concept is where a player will completely cripple (or minimize or min) one or more aspects of his or her character in order to trade off for additional powers in areas where they want to be supreme (or maximize or max).

Munchkin – A player who must “win” the game at all costs. This can be a power gamer, a min/maxer, a cheater, or someone who will memorize every bestiary, every spell, and every rule in order to metagame the process of playing to gain an advantage.

Power Gaming – A player that, within the rules provided, will find a way to create the strongest and most capable character possible. This is a slight difference from Min/Maxing in that most power gamers will do everything they can to avoid having any weaknesses that are exploitable by the GM during the course of the game.

On The Fly GM – A GM that changes the direction of the campaign or storyline because players’ ideas are better than the GM’s.

Anonymous NPC – These are NPCs who have no names. They typically are the barkeeps, shop owners, messengers, etc. who the PCs interact with in a transactional manner, but not in a way that changes the direction of the story.

Named NPC – Named NPCs are people in the world under control of the GM who have a name. These tend to be folks who alter the course of the story, plant new story seeds, are targets of quests, or obstacles to overcome.

Mook/Minion – These are synonymous with Anonymous NPCs in that they aren’t important to the storyline. However, they do pose an obstacle the PCs must work together in order to overcome. Mooks typically work for a Boss or BBEG.

Boss/BBEG – BBEGs are the Big Bad Evil Guy/Gal of a campaign or story arc. They control mooks, set their own plots into action, have goals and motivations, typically have a back story, and consider themselves to be the hero of their own story. Generally, when the BBEG is taken down, the world changes, the story arc concludes, and, unless a fresh BBEG is presented, the campaign might roll to a close.

GMPC – Acronym: Game Master Player Character; A GMPC is a fully-fledged character controlled by the GM, is an equal member of the party, collects loot and experience points, and travels with the rest of the party. The GMPC is generally protected by plot armor, and tends to be more of an annoyance to the players than any benefit. Temporary GMPCs (such as an experienced guide or bodyguard) can work well in games, but generally not for the long term.

Plot Armor – This occurs when a single character has become so vital to the continuation of the storyline or campaign arc that the GM cannot afford to kill the character off. The plot itself has become “armor” or immunity from death for the character.

Railroading – A style of running the game in which the players’ decisions have limited impact on the story arc that is being told. This can work well in one-shots or convention games due to the limited scope and time involved, but long-term railroading can lead to player dissatisfaction.

Sandbox – A style of running the game in which no predefined story arc exists. The GM may prepare encounters, locations, treasure, and other vital items to the game beforehand, but when the GM sits down at the table he or she may not have a true idea of what will happen next because the world (or local area) is laid out in front of the players for them to pick a direction.

Fail Forward – This is a style of running the game in which failure to overcome an obstacle will not stall or stop the progress of the story being told. It will certainly alter the story and will generally produce some sort of interesting consequence while allowing the obstacle to be overcome, avoided, destroyed, or somehow mitigated.

Dungeon Crawl – A style of game in which the PCs make their way through a dungeon (usually one of large scope or a “megadungeon”) during the course of the campaign. They might retreat to the entrance (if possible), return to the handy village that is nearby, and resupply at the Anonymous NPCs’ shops. However, the bulk of the gaming is done within the confines of a dungeon.

The Three Pillars – A concept in which RPGs are described as being part exploration, part social interaction, and part combat. These three parts make up the three pillars holding up RPGs.

Session Zero – A session in which the GM and players get together to define a social contract, pick a game, generate characters (and potentially a world/setting), agree upon a theme and style of play, and generally kick off the start of a campaign.

Rule Zero – A understood concept in which the GM has final say on any ruling, despite what a rulebook may say. This is where many house rules are generated when a GM is consistent in implementing rule zero.

Crunch – The hard and fast rules, numbers, tables, charts, and other artifacts of the game that can be rigidly defined or understood.

Fluff – The descriptive text of a rulebook or setting book in which the ambiance, style, themes, genres, and feelings of the game are encoded, but not rigidly defined.

PvP – Acronym: Player vs. Player; This occurs when a player decides to use their character to attack another player’s character. This can be part of a story arc, caused by a BBEG, or can be a sign that the gaming group has come to an violent and ugly end and should disband (or alter membership).

Buff – The act of boosting another PC’s ability or abilities. This can be done via assistance, spells, magic items, or innate character abilities that alter other abilities or other characters.

Nerf – The act of lowering another PC’s (or mook’s or BBEG’s) ability or abilities. Has the same sources as buffs.

Tank – A character designed to absorb as much damage as possible while allowing the rest of the group to take down the opponents.

DPS – Acronym: Damage Per Second; This phrase has come to describe a character who has the main job of doing as much damage as possible in order to take down opponents before they get taken out of the fight.

Controller – A character designed to control the battlefield, area of play, or other locale in order to gain an advantage for his or her group.

Healer – A character who is mainly focused on keeping the rest of the group alive and in as good of shape as possible. Often combined with buffs to offset nerfs.

Leeroy Jenkins – When a player gets bored or tired of planning, they will kick down the door, charge into the lair, and attack whatever is on the other side. The phrase comes from a moment in the World of Warcraft online game where a player tired of the excessive planning of one of the players, screamed his name, and charged into the BBEG’s lair. The event resulted, as you would expect, in a TPK. You can see the video on YouTube.

Murder Hobo – A person or group of people who have no base of operations and they respond to every encounter as a physical fight in which they kill everyone around them. Very little social interaction occurs with murder hobos, and very little story telling occurs during games involving murder hobos. This can be fun if, during session zero, the group agrees to go with a hack ‘n’ slash style game.

Rules Lawyer – A player who knows every rule, every nuance, every errata, and every combination of how these things work. They typically will correct and attempt override GMs who are attempting to invoke rule zero.

Bennie – Abbreviation for “benefit.” These are in-game bonuses given to players by the GM for exceptional play or to help shore up a weaker character during random character generation. Bennies can also be a metagame currency allowing players to adjust rolls or influence the storytelling aspect of the game.

Boxed Text – The text in adventures or modules that the GM is supposed to read out loud (or paraphrase) to the players when an event occurs or locale is discovered.

FLGS – Acronym: Friendly Local Game Story; This is where gamers can get together to acquire supplies for gaming, play in a back room, post notices on cork boards about games, and build their community.

LARP – Acronym: Live Action Role Playing; A style of gaming in which the players can be in costume, use props, and physically move around an area to marked off locations in order to meet with each other, NPCs, the GM, etc.

OOC – Acronym: Out of Character; Generally this is limited to comments and questions about food, bathroom locations in the house, or rules questions. Most conversation around the table should be IC, not OOC.

IC – Acronym: In Character; These are the words spoke by the player to represent the actual things his or her character is saying.

PBeM – Acronym: Play by Mail; This is a method of gaming in which the players and GM communicate via physical mail. However, email has mostly supplanted these types of communication due to the near-immediate delivery of email.

PbP – Acronym: Play by Post; This is a method of gaming which the players and GM communicate via some form of posting or message board on the Internet. There are many variations of this approach to gamine because of the various technologies available today.

Social Contract – An agreement between everyone within an RPG group on style of play, themes, trigger areas, genre, and other choices made at the table to guide how the players will interact with the GM and each other.

TPK – Acronym: Total Party Kill; This usually occurs through a series of poor decisions by the players, bad dice rolls, new GMs making judgement mistakes, or experienced GMs deciding to end the campaign via “in rule” fiat that kills every last member of the party.

Now that this list is done, I have some people to thank who helped out on this article:

Angela Murray — For starting the conversation that led to this article.

John Arcadian — For jumping on the ideas and requesting I write this article.

For suggested phrases:

The Gelatinous Rube (@TempestLOB)

Guy Milner (@milnarmaths)

Duke Aaron McGregor

David Dolph

Rob Abrazado

Darren Wade

Travis Casey

thom_raindog (@thom_raindog)

Buddy Fazzio

LoneWorg (@LoneWorg)

Craig Barnes

So, did I miss any esoteric or weird phrases used in RPGs? If so, drop a comment with the phrase and your definition. If you’ve heard a word or phrase and aren’t sure what it means, feel free to drop that in a comment and request a definition. I’ll see what I can come up with.

Esoteric Gaming Jargon published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames