#in reality evil is usually banal

[utilitycaster]

Love can save people. It can redeem.

It can also damn you and others.

If anything, Delilah is a cautionary tale on how you could love someone so much, you never think twice about damning the entire world in the name of it, and that it can be so easy to never stop.

As you say, many others could have gone down the same road as Delilah and Sylas. And yet they didn't. Because they chose to stop and reflect before it was too late.

But because she never did, all that waited Delilah was perpetual defeat. It doesn't matter if she's got all the time in the world. Because no matter what, she will never win.

It's a lesson that she will never learn.

I mean…one can I suppose take that message from the story of Delilah, but that’s not really what I was getting at. I am not personally saying “oh how sad for her!”; I am saying this:

As you say, she’s a dark mirror - a living example of how it would have been so very easy for so many heroic characters to be just a touch less scrupulous. She serves to show just how easy it would have been for Percy to say “well, I guess what’s done is done” re: guns; for Vex to give into Saundor or for her justified hunger and self preservation to calcify into avarice; for Fjord to have Jester take them and theirs to the Feywild and leave the Menagerie Coast to drown; for Caleb to go on his Assembly Murder Spree and use the T-Dock; or, a millennium before Delilah existed, for the Ring of Brass to have cut line and teleported or flown out rather than mitigating their damage. And yet none of them did, because they not only loved their partners and friends; they loved their homes and the world. So our post-Divergence era heroes are happy, and even amidst the Calamity the Ring of Brass endures...and Delilah was deservedly hoisted by her own petard into the mind palace of a weird girl who likes rats.

Delilah is compelling not because others would do what she did - in fact, everyone I mentioned demonstrably did not. She is compelling because she didn’t know when to stop, and it’s her own fault. It’s fitting and, at least to me, pretty hilarious, that Delilah never wins; with any luck she’s been swept under whatever cosmic rug Laudna’s resurrection achieved and we never hear from her again. She played stupid games and she won stupid prizes. In the same way that I am most interested in heroic characters who were asked who they were in the dark and in doing so realized they were, at heart, not the monsters they could have been, and dragged themselves out, I am bored stiff by the “oh the villain just needed LOVE and they would have been good” school of thought.

I want a villain (like Delilah, or Avantika, or Lucien) who was shown an off-ramp, and each time slammed down on the gas, and then crashed into a wall, and then exploded. And I especially want a villain like Delilah who had love, and who didn’t need to choose between love and power, and who managed to still take truly the most garbage third option possible.

(Relatedly: this is also why all concepts of Imogen making even the tiniest deal with Delilah to save Laudna, let alone this become a full corruption arc for her, absolutely suck. Why on Exandria would one ever willingly make a deal with the tattered, miserable, widowed cringe fail patron of Love Isn’t Enough, Actually? This is D&D: there are far better fiends and horrors available.)

[the-leegend-99]

There's a reason this site sucks and is so profoundly hateable sometimes.

The reason is that since it's the nerd site (beaten out only by Reddit bc its r/topic function allows people to geek out to the max in one specific subject and build forums), where people dedicate essay-length blog posts to contrast (or compound) each other's interpretation of your favorite fictional characters through the most minute lore analysis possible, going "um actually" with all the casualness allowed by such a free reblog feature. And where is it used most of all? Why, to explain away absurdly mediocre or outright bad stuff like the Star Wars Prequels into being "Secretly Good™️" because let's face it, the alienation of living and working into capitalist society has stunted most of us (mostly us Westerners who get to enjoy the full breadth of consumerism) into needing to preserve their childhood security blankets. Of course, sometimes it's not that. Sometimes it's media analysis that wants to have a point and is actually done with more of a grain of salts. But most times, it is that. And sometimes it's cute, most times it doesn't involve the usual BS of manchild fannish behavior as Reddit does (probably bc there's a lot less cishet men).

But then some people here will apply that same mentality and behavior of politics.

And no, you just can't "um actually" your way of rightly being called a genocide and fascism enabler for supporting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Applying character arcs and lore to reality is brainrot. Yes, friend, I know that their hands are tied by the system. They made the choice to try and become top dog in it, nobody was expecting them not to comply in its basest crimes against humanity. But then you twist yourselves into hoops trying to rationalize the crumbs they throw at us to keep us content and not threaten their power, or better yet the system of exploitation they profit from, into actual progress. You try to rationalize them into being "Secretly Good™️" when they are the fullest representation of the banality of evil.

Sure, in doing so, you show more argumentative capabilities than Taylor Swift fans, but let's face it, it's not much of a compliment. All those Swifties, Beehives, Lil Nas X or Charli xcx fans who haven't taken their favorite celeb/artist to task for supporting the genocide, they cheer for these genocidal criminals because they've got far less awareness, and superficial diversity appeals to them. I'm not gonna go into who's more starved for crumbs from the master's table between them and you because it's not useful to this dissection. The actual difference is that they've formed a parasocial relationship with the *person*, with the celebrity, while you've formed a parasocial relationship with the *story*.

And you have to hammer the story into making sense, into being good, don't you? Because deep down, you're more aware. Deep down, you know it's wrong, you know that what's happening is wrong, bur you don't want to bring yourself to believe they've been stringing you along, asking you to be an accomplice. You want to explain your way out of letting this realization settle in, because if it does, then you are an accomplice.

Well you are, until you start doing something about it in the real world. Until you join protests, until you join working-class, anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist organizations fighting to overturn this system and build a better one instead.

And sure, that's a big jump, out of the realm of "permissibility", of "respectability", and it's scary. But maturity is having the courage to do the things that scare you the most, because you've analyzed them and realized that they're the ones that bring about the most material good for you and everybody. And everybody can reach that maturity. You, too, can be brave.

[skaruresonic]

I notice a trend that people tend to gloss over a villain trying to murder the heroes a s then defending themselves in self-defense to make the villain seem like a misunderstood baby, same as other characters that aren't villains.

I get the underlying idea, that villains are usually shaped by pain and trauma and plain bad luck or circumstance. That's what folks are usually trying to convey.

But... idk, sometimes that message is too... not naive, per se, but simplistic? Trite? Sometimes it just doesn't fit every situation, such as Eggman's. Evil doesn't take the form of the bully victim, or kid who got stuck in the foster system, or whatever else cliche sob story you can think of. The banality of evil means it exists everywhere, in all of us. Stub your toe the wrong way and you, too, can become a maniacal supervillain. xP

No, but seriously, it gets a little infantilizing and borderline apologetic after a certain point to insist that all villains must be misunderstood or wayward. Maybe some, but you have to consider that there are characters who have suffered just as much, if not more, and chose not to continue that cycle by inflicting suffering on others. Where does that leave them?

I think part of this has to do with Western culture's desensitization towards violence as well. Sex is treated as inherently traumatizing no matter the circumstance, and violence the inverse, as something you can easily brush aside when in reality, just the threat of violence is immensely traumatizing.

This leads to online puritans' Arctic-cold takes like how rape is a special evil worse than murder. And it's like. Nobody survives murder. That's why it's called murder.

IIRC, in Japan, violence is the big no-no in media. People always ask "Why doesn't Sonic finish Eggman off for good?" and they don't stop to consider that maybe SoJ just aren't interested in answering that question.

[holdoncallfailed]

can you expand on what you meant by the actual context for the zone of interest? just curious, i only recently heard about the movie so i don’t know much

well, the movie is about the director of operations (? idk the proper title lol) for auschwitz and his family who live in a beautiful home right next to the camp. as far as i can tell the whole point of the film is to illustrate hannah arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" in that it's just the daily lives of this family and how accustomed to and unbothered they are by the unimaginable human misery that they're contributing to. there are scenes where the characters talk very casually about the violence taking place next door; there are scenes where the main guy, hoss, is talking with other military officials about how to operate the camps (i.e. kill more people) more efficiently. all of these conversations are really boring, perfunctory, the way anyone would talk about their job or mention a current event, and of course that invites the comparison to how we currently talk about terrible things in the news when we're personally unaffected by them, as just a passing thought and then back to our own lives...

what i took away from it was how well-integrated the misery of the camps is into their regular lives (obviously, cos it's the guy's job) and yet how distant the reality of it is, how little they care about the actual jewish people they're killing, because they don't think of them as human. there's never a point where we see the characters reflecting or feeling "guilty" because it's obvious that they don't think there's anything to feel guilty about.

basically i grew up learning about the holocaust in immense detail but of course it was always focused on the suffering of the jews and other victims. so it has always been difficult (impossible?) for me to imagine how german society could have just gone on as usual when all of that was happening, how they could have been so unbothered by it on such a large scale, and the film gave me a much better sense of how easy it might have been to just ignore it as an issue, especially if you specifically were profiting from it in any capacity. and that was extremely unnerving for me!

[lightdancer1]

In the second case a bit of a historiographical note:

The reality of the Buffalo Soldiers, as with so many other aspects of the 'Wild West' was considerably different than what popular culture and memory preferred to make it. Among the details usually overlooked in the history of this particular side of the Wild West was that the myth was built along with the reality and co-existed with it uneasily. Buffalo Soldiers both benefited and lost from it like everyone else did, and in their specific aspects with the combination of presenting their roles as somewhat grander than they were, and troops who suffered all the evils of a segregation-era society that dumped its unpopular and ineffectual officers on its segregation units as being treated as either elites or cannon fodder and in truth it was not quite either.

The rise of the myth here, as with the rest of the West, is a good US-specific look at how societies reinvent the past in a mythical way that is rather frankly detached from the world that was actually there, which was both starker and inglorious in certain aspects and fraught with things like logistics, boredom, and all the banal elements of keeping society functioning which the myths are mythical because they take this for granted and it never comes up as a daily reality.

[superectojazzmage]

QAnon’s entire thing is basically being a FAR right-wing breed of conspiracy theorist who obsess over a modernized version of “WON’T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN”/Satanic Panic-type conspiracy shit where they accuse everyone and everything that isn’t hyper-conservative of being a plot by the evil liberal elites who secretly rule the world to molest kids and feast on their blood. So basically imagine old-school antisemitic, holier-than-thou killjoy conspiracy idiots like Patricia Pulling or David Icke but with a particular focus on trafficking and hard political ideology based around sucking the dicks of right-wing politicians who act adversarial with the left (hence the stereotypical image of them as Trump supporters and such) or accusing random people, groups, and places of being part of the supposed rapist cabal. They’re basically the center of what the media calls “the Alt-Right”.

In actual practice, QAnon is no different from your average group of braindead freaks, creepers, bigots, incels, and scammers that you see in any internet sewer like /pol/, and their actual influence on the world can be charitably described as beginning and ending with a tiny cluster of gullible and terminally online conservatives who got lured into that culture war bullshit, and the only provable impact they’ve had is making up elaborate and cartoonish stories about evil rich people and then pushing the most stupid and gullible of their number into trying to investigate or break up the “conspiracy” and accomplishing nothing at best, getting people in danger at worst, promptly abandoning their “friends” to their fates when they get in trouble.

The reason you see people going on about “political galvanizing” is because, like many things, the media likes to hype QAnon up as a much bigger deal than they really are for ratings and drama and narrative purposes, same they do with all sorts of things. To hear the news say it, QAnon is either “the doom of democracy” or “true patriots”, while the reality is banal and barely even worth talking about, at least not anymore than your usual hive of politics-brain-poisoned dickheads on the internet.

You are right that Sound of Freedom is pretty much just a Taken rip-off dressed up under a “based on a true story” blanket. That’s all it is, and nobody who matters really cares about it. The only reason anyone’s giving it attention is the media using it for cheap drama because of who made it, mocking how Tim Ballard and OUR unironically did the “making a movie about themselves that paints them as total badasses who kick bad guy ass” thing, or people who actually buy those conspiracies treating it like the “biggest movie ever!!!” (when it doesn’t even actually include any of the conspiracy shit, probably to avoid setting off the viewer’s bullshit sensors) and acting like people calling it out as the pack of lies it is are “proving it right”. Occasionally mixed in are people who were actually involved in the real events or make an effort to sway people away from bogus charity groups like OUR stepping in just to say “this movie is a load of bullshit and the people who made it are just trying to bilk money out of you”.

In other words, it’s all just another case of culture war morons trying to stir the pot and make a tiny matter into a media circus for their own profit. Not worth wasting any time on.

Re: The Sound of Freedom

From what I’ve read, the film itself contains some over-embellished / dramatized scenes, as almost all “based on a true story” movies do. However, both the director and the person the film is based on appear to be staunch QAnon supporters and believers of “adrenochroming” (the supposed practice of torturing children to harvest a drug for sex parties / satanic rituals / DNC events). Apparently, however, the movie itself does not contain any reference to either QAnon or adrenochrome harvesting.

Yeah, I haven't been to the theatres in forever, so I have no clue about that, but I did skim some of the things related to it because people here who are victims of csem or similar were pushing their charity organization positively, so I like to dig into charities because I've been swindled before, but the only real accusations that came up were extremely suspect and honestly, I don't have an ounce of faith in Hollywood, so they don't get the benefit of the doubt. I haven't had the time to deepdive into this like I usually do, so I'm taking everything I hear about it with a grain of salt until I actually get some hard facts or watch the damn thing myself.

I was only commenting on cuties because fuck that noise, that is verifiably disgusting. But also if we're going to jump on anything that remotely resembles "protect the children" because someone accuses them of Qanonery (still waiting on a definitive definition as I know diddly squat what Qanon actually believes besides they're the every conspiracy ever guy), we're going to have a big fucking problem here. I'm not saying that's what you or anyone else is doing here, just to be clear, it just comes off weird to me who is foreign to all the political galvanizing around the film. I just thought it was like every other Taken, Safe, The Equalizer and/or Man on Fire, what makes this one so different other than the hooing and hawing?

[reflections-in-a-critical-eye]

About report accounts, I noticed that as soon as a tkkr account features on pjm report all other tkkrs start following them. Their followers only increase after that. Tkkrs really be moving like a cult in Twitter. So much toxicity over a kpop ship. It's very stupid really.

This is one reason why report accounts can defeat their purpose, especially when they're used in more malicious ways, than for a good thing.

I want to expand a bit more about this topic in general because it got me thinking yesterday. I had a talk with a dear friend of mine, who is not part of any fandom, doesn't really understand stan culture, but we know each other for ages and we've both been basically fan girls of bands when we were in high school. And I ended up talking about the damages of stan culture on the internet and what I see in this fandom, specifically about the way death threats and how other fans need to do the reporting and how ultimately and realistically, nothing happens. And I was surprised at how shocked she was because she said, how is it possible for someone, including a public person, to receive multiple death threats and that still continues to happen? How is this not seen as a really serious situation in which someone with authority can do something about it? And I basically said that a lot of the times, these are frustrated girls who only do it for show, they are not actually aware of how bad it sounds and how it became a weaponized word in fandom spaces, just as swearing at another person. And my explanation wasn't enough for my friend, and as she put it "how can so called fans who are not actually fans came make a death threat with no repercussion? John Lennon was shot by a fan in front of his home. That's the reality and a consequence of obsessed people". And I realized that, as much as I think this is such an awful behavior and an incredibly serious issue, I also became "desentisized" in a way because I see almost weekly report accounts, a lot of the times focused on one person in BTS who statistically, gets the most DT, and because it happens that often, it's somehow the "usual", "nothing new under the sun" "to be expected from haters and shippers and you name it. When it shouldn't be. It fucking shouldn't be. In what reality is this ok? In what actual reality these things can happen on a daily basis, in a fandom in which it's ignored by so many people because it's part of shipping issues or whatever else excuse they can find. We are slowly losing our humanity, compassion and being able to truly realize how fucked up everything is. Just because we're used to seeing it, it doesn't mean it's not just as bad. And I don't think that actual serious report accounts can deal with this. Or the fans sending emails to BH. Because one post is deleted, another account is closed and then they pop out again and again. When in fact it's an issue that first of all, should be resolved from the inside. Weverse should be a platform made in such ways that can have an algorithm that automatically identifies such messages and the users banned forever. Twitter, the same, although we all know that due to freedom of speech seen as without consequences at first, anyone can make malicious and violent threats and only then, through countless reporting, the account can be banned.

And I want to circle back a bit to our attitudine, the fandom's attitude. Because I thought of Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil. In which not everyone is evil, but people can be clueless, ignorant and do evil things. I believe that all these awful people who send DT, who fantasize about sexual violence towards the members, are not some amoral masterminds. No, they just do it, as if it's something so banal. And the rest of this fandom has its own part in perpetuating this behavior because they are part of it. Because they will never be able to admit their collective guilt at allowing this current climate to "flourish". We think in individualistic terms and we're not capable of putting the foot down because it would mean we are recognizing that we're part of the problem. Because acting ignorant and saying that we're not like the others doesn't absolve us. It just makes us accomplices.

[unkalaki]

I just read Small Gods again and then I couldnt stop and due to some reasons that I dont fully understand myself i then continued on and read Going Postal and Making Money. I think thats how Pratchett goes, for me at least. It is such an adventure, even on your 10th or 20th time, that you just cant have enough.

Small Gods though. I reread it, an activity that i recommend everyone do from time to time. Of all of Pratchett’s books this one has always affected me the most. I dont really know why. I think i read it at a time of my own life that Brutha’s journey from certainty of faith to questioning and going on conicided with my own, less defined portion. When I first read it, I was myself starting to venture into the quicksand of doubt and it was scary. Going your whole life, with certainty of faith and then losing it is, as necessary as it may have been, a very scary, lonely thing to do. Just the simple questions that you are faced with, which when unanswered use that very own simplicity to batter down your previous assumptions and lay your own worldview bare. To see the same shown happening to Brutha, a character that i found myself endeared to from the first moment of being described as a giant with a heart of a mouse and the simplicity of a newborn (some would call it stupidity, shows what they know) just elicited a very simple feeling of kinship.

Moving on, the part of Small Gods that makes me go back again and again is the very simple line that just breaks me.

“In a hundred years we will all be dead.... but here and now we are alive”

A lot of people, me included, learn to start thinking, actually thinking about the world in their mid to late teens. They start to see the realities of the world. Most of them till that point have been sheltered from the world in one way or another. Even those that have not rarely have the words to describe the evil things that may have happened to them. Evil is a word that you know but it is usually limited to things that are not actually real. It is stories about things that dont happen to real people. It is an aspect of fiction that you have heard about but whose existence you dont really fathom. However, this is the time where you start to think about actions, about the world and about the realities of evil. And when you start to do that you start to see evil everywhere. You start to see it in the small acts that people commit everyday. You start to notice it in the small things. Not the big evil of nefarious individuals in thier high rooms cackling to themselves about stupid words like “schemes” and what not. It is the small evils. The banal evil. The stupid mindless evil that people have looked at everywhere and learned to live with.

This is the point where most people make the choice to make limiters. People calibrate their eyes. You choose the level of evil that you are comfortable with and block it. Your eyes no longer see it, no longer recognise it as anything at all. They just glaze over it. It is a necessary thing to do for some. Looking at the way society deals with those it deems necessary all the time, taking it all in all the time, trying to conjure up all the requisite pain that you should for everything is something that is not possible. You learn to choose your battles. For some people these are limited to certain things/peoples/organisations etc. 

Others go down the darker paths of cynicism or nihilism. It is all bad everywhere which means that it does not matter. Everything is bad, everything is awful, all the people are bad. So your response is:

“FUCK IT”

This doesnt help anything. Bald faced cynicism is just another shield that you make to make sure that you can survive this world with you sanity intact. But its not a good path. It is a self defeating one because it by its very nature leads you down a path where everything and everyone is bad and thus you just lose those very important things that make life worth living, such as hope and the yearning to do more, to be better.

Terry however knows this and addresses this head on. The world may be evil, you may be a finite speck of dust on a cosmo that cares naught about you. In the grand cosmo you may not matter but that does not mean that here and now you do not matter. In a hundred years we will all be dead but that does not give you the right to say that a life happening today, a simple life, a humble life, a life that all the stupid high minded people would term as “unimpactful” does not matter. It matters because that life is being lived. Here and now they are alive. Here and now they feel. Their pain, their loss, their joy, it is real and the fact that it might not be remembered in a hundred years matters not in the least. IT IS REAL, IT IS A LIFE AND THEY MATTER. And in saying so Terry tells you in a such a caring and soft way that you cant help but cry:

“You Matter”.

Terry Pratchett was a funny old man but he was at the same time one of teh most compassionate men. It is just so apparent from his works. His compassion was directed at that most forgotten sections of society. The lowly masses of people that are necessary to make a society, if only to create the background music for the more “important players” to play their highly important games with each other. These people are often glossed over by most player but Terry saw them, saw us and he loved them. He didnt romanticise them. He saw them for the small minded, often stupid, mindlessly offensive people that they could be and most often were but he said “yeah so what”. That is who we are most of the time and we still matter.

I started reading Discworld about 6 months after Terry died. But to this day i sometimes still cry because i miss him. I miss someone i never knew but whose words have changed me. Changed my life and my world view over everything. Changed me in ways that i still appreciate. A beacon of humanitariasm.

GNU TERRY PRATCHETT.

Thank you for everything 

[whatevergreen]

Evil is usually presented as sexy, chic, and warped-intelligent in pop culture.

The reality of actual evil is a grimy ignorance, a mindless hate, a banal monotony of conformity, fear, and cowardice. Greed and supporting violence.

A grey splattered with blood. Dusty, rusty, and lethal.

[headspace-hotel]

I can’t stand that worldbuilding trope that’s like “magic stays secret partly because muggles/normies/whatever see only what they *~*want*~* to see and will rationalize it away” and I can’t articulate exactly why

I think it has something to do with the protagonist(s) always being unsusceptible or an exception somehow. It’s not portrayed as a human flaw, just a muggle/normie flaw. The protagonist and the other people who are “in on the secret” are Different

And I’m not saying I think of it as a straight allegory for confirmation bias or something, but it’s still just a very bad representation of human fallibility to have the main character be unaffected because they’re special. Everybody is the main character of their own lives, yo, and most people who are horribly, devastatingly wrong think they’re Different and see the Truth to some extent...more so the wronger they are.

Or maybe it’s just that...that is not how humans work? People are way more susceptible to believing things that are dramatic and outrageous than to accepting that the truth is banal or boring. Or at least, generally, they’re more likely to want the truth to be at least sort of exciting. I would argue that, in fact, people regularly bend their perception of reality based on what they percieve as cooler/more interesting/more badass—just look at all the people that REFUSE to accept that dinosaurs had feathers because they think dinosaurs aren’t as cool that way. The people that pitch gigantic fits when you tell them that wolves don’t have “alphas” that gained their status through violent struggle. Or, idk. The persistence of the idea that black widow spiders Always Kill You when fatalities from black widow bites are actually rare.

The worst part might be that these books generally insinuate that the muggles/normies want to be ignorant and to live in a banal, nonmagical world. Which is just...what. You can’t convince me that the upending of worldview that would occur if a grocery store cashier found out that there were wizards living in hiding is significantly worse than the banality of day to day reality working for wal-mart. The explanation is usually something like “they want things to be simple” and it’s like. Are you suggesting that our reality is simple? Don’t you wish we were just dealing with Voldemort or some shit rather than the current sociopolitical climate? Don’t you think people would fall face first with open arms into the idea that there are problems because of this one guy that does evil magic or something?

Like do some research into cults. People are alarmingly susceptible to believing that the universe is a crapsack supernatural hellscape as long as the reasons for it being that way are relatively straightforward. People will seek out simple explanations almost regardless of how frankly horrible those explanations are, because there’s no horror like the existential horror of not having any explanations.

[ignitification]

LoV Colour Analysis Part I: Shigaraki Tomura.

As this analysis would be quite too long to read in one go, I decided to split it into three parts, each covering one of the Three Main Villains of BNHA (Shigaraki Tomura, Himiko Toga and Dabi).

All three do denote a precise and powerful colour scheme, but on today’s episode I am going to focus on the Leader of the League of Villains aka Shigaraki Tomura or Shimura Tenko.

Shigaraki’s colour pattern variates from Red (shoes and eyes), Black (his usual outfits, his hair when younger) to Light Blue, Grey and White (colour of his hair, skin and hands).

The interesting fact is how Shimura’s colour evolve with his persona and Quirk. The third paragraph is dedicated to the colour Yellow, which is not part of the palette associated with Tenko, but I included it because it adds to the detailing of Shigaraki’s character.

(Spoilers ahead! & tw/: mentions of canon-compliant violence; death)

I.) From Black to Light Blue to White 

During his growth, evolution as a villain and person, not considering the one spurred from his Quirk, Tenko’s hair undergo a quite big development. While the colour of his clothes stays more or less stable (being black throughout the entire series), what differentiates his eras is the colour of his hair. In his childhood, before manifesting his Quirk, Tomura’s hair was dark (strikingly similar to the one both Touya and Izuku sported). This changed to light blue/grey in his years until last arc, where after being himself an experiment under the hands of Doctor Death (Kyudai Garaki is a very creepy man) to inherit the original AfO’s Quirk, his hair becomes snow white (as a result of the transformation, I would believe - but it might as well mean another thing which I will talk about later). 

Beginning with maybe the easiest association: the colour black. 

A little note of the fear association: in this case, I would like to interpret it as Shigaraki being aware of his decaying Quirk and freak people out because of that, and because of his external looks, which do look like the one of a decaying child.

Power refers definitely to both his position and his Quirk, in this case - which make him stand out even more. However, the strength in this case, in my opinion, is more a smoke screen: black is also worn as a protection from external damage, as in stress and emotional backlash. This creates a barrier between the subject and the world, protecting internal emotions, and hiding its vulnerabilities, insecurities and lack of self confidence. The emotional trauma, the ‘hands shield’ Shigaraki derived, in a way, from his trauma and from being confronted with something, has shaken him to the core since childhood, and in this case the clothes serve to protect him from himself and his ‘actions’. In this aspect, him wearing black as a child might also stand for him trying to shield himself away from his parent’s judgement and stare, while protecting his will to want to be a hero, despite their negative reaction to any hint of that. These meaning are, in conclusion a full circle: one calls for the other, especially in Shigaraki’s case.

Black is also associated with mystery, evil and aggression. Shigaraki is written as an enigmatic villain, cold-hearted, devoid of any humanity and the will to full front destroy everything in its path. And while the meaning perfectly fit to how Shigaraki should be, I do believe that this is a very superficial and banal description of such a complex character. 

One thing which I found particularly interesting about this colour and its relation to Shigaraki, it’s the rocky tie that appears between black and its meaning as in rebellion. This aspect might refer to two different conditions: it might suppose a certain degree of refusal and hate for authority (The society at large), and at the same time the rebellion from his own family/persona/mentor, which could entail a fundamental foreshadow for Tenko’s destiny.

The color black affects the mind and body by producing feelings of emptiness, gloom, or sadness.

 I think here again, this might just an extermination of the feeling that have been torturing Shigaraki from the inside since he was a child, and that he himself has not acknowledged, which also stands to explain how he tries to feel that void or to ‘eliminate the scratch’ that has been tormenting him, and that knows no peace.

Furthermore, In Japanese culture, the colour black mainly denotes non-being (apart from mourning) and evil-heartedness in a person. This meaning is consistent with the personality described to us by Horikoshi: Shigaraki Tomura ceases to be a person at one point, when his consciousness gets subdued by AfO for a while. It is important to note here, how White (on the other side of the spectrum) is also the colour of death and mourning.

Not entirely worth mentioning, is that black is the stereotypical colour worn by villains and bad guys in different fictional environments.

(Light) Blue/Grey.

Just a reminder: neither grey nor blue are explicit colour in Tenko’s palette as a character, but I think they are still important and since greyish blue (the precise colour oh his hair) has not its own meaning, I took the freedom to actually associate the two separate colour in association to describe this period of transition between black and white.

The phase in which Tomura has Greyish-Blue hair is the longest one (in terms of years), but also the phase of passage (which consequently is the phase he is exploring, and is in the ‘grey zone’, where things are just getting defined and there are no absolutes). Grey, in this sense, sports both characteristics from White and Black (depending on the shade used), and even if not explicitly used for Tenko, it still represents a landmine in his development.

The colour grey is an ‘unemotional’ colour. It is detached, neutral, impartial and indecisive - all traits that can be reconnected at Shigaraki. Indeed, it is after his encounter with Izuku at the mall where he recognises why exactly (or so he thinks) he rages and wants to bring destruction to the world as known. This indicates how he has been striving for a real purpose, like the one Stain has, in order to actually understand what he is doing and evolve from the child the Heroes define him as, to a Villain with the capital V. He does relate to reality in partial ways, while he tries to define his identity as something that has died inside of him, Shimura Tenko, and at the same time the part that has lived on through the memories he removed and the hands which accompany him. He does not know which part is stronger, and trying to figure it out he tries and fails, only to try again.  To confirm the shaping of Shigaraki, indeed grey is a conforming colour and most of all it struggles with identity, which is arguably the most prominent trait Shigaraki presents during the first arcs of the story.

On the other hand, Blue symbolises coolness, passivity, fidelity. Somehow it reverberates the meaning of grey, while at the same time enhancing its other effects (it being emotionless and calm, undecided but also flowing). Blue is also indicator of depth, wisdom, confidence, and intelligence (among others). This also confirms the precedent meanings (of especially white) and it adds another dimension to Tenko’s character. It is clear how he feels deeply, and is still very clever in its own way. Still, this development and phase serves for him to obtain the other characteristics proposed by blue, especially wisdom and confidence (refer to Black where I said how sometimes the clothes are a screen to hide his true feelings). 

Blue is a colour that’s constant and unchanging, which contrasts with grey and brings forwconstant struggle in Tenko. Blue is also nostalgic. Curious is how blue lives in the past, relating everything in the present and the future to experiences in the past. I think that this is what blue is about with Tenko: he struggles to look forward, to forgive and let go because he never forgot his dad, his grandma or even society for when they had brought upon him as an innocent child. His bringing up has been focused, after all, on his developing his constant feeling of sadness, rage and gloom and the necessary power to express them in confident ways, which could bring destruction forward. Tenko is a puppet in AfO’s hands since he has ‘saved’ him, so I think this is why the sentence in which Shigaraki tries to break free from AfO’s will is a break point for the story, and for Shigaraki as well. 

Blue is also known for being deceitful and spiteful, depressed and sad, passive, self-righteous, emotionally unstable, weak, unforgiving. It can also indicate manipulation, unfaithfulness and being untrustworthy.

Indeed, it is after that Izuku sees Tenko being kneeled over by AfO and his presence that he understands that Shigaraki too, is human and that maybe the reasons for his rage and absolute hate for everything he comes across have deep roots, which is why even if he cannot forgive him for all the pain he has brought, he wants to save him.  

Finally, the paler the blue the more freedom we feel - which brings me to my theory on what, throughout the years Tenko’s hair have been ‘decaying’ and bleaching out. I think that as a child, Tenko is caged and tries to break free of his cage, of his ‘itch’ but he cannot because he does not realise what it is, and there is no freedom for him to actually understand. The first time he uses his Quirk, he feels finally satisfied for the first time. He tasted freedom for the first time, and now he wants to do it again and again. Growing up, however his ideals become blurry and he does not understand what he actually wants. He does know that the hands on his body represent what he has lost and what is actually still there with him, giving him strength and will, but at the same time he does not know what is beyond there. Which is why, after he goes through the transformation by Garaki, his hair becomes white: he gets rid of the insecurities, of the shackles that have stopped him from actually achieving his goal, or rather to pursue it freely. His ultimate goal, after all, is to get rid of his ‘itch’, which, in its own way, it’s his language to say that Shimura Tenko wants freedom.

As a note, Blue is also the colour of the Throat chakra. It is located in the throat, but it is linked to the throat, neck, hands, and arms. This Chakra is linked to speech. 

Final remark on blue: this colour is one of the most important lucky colors in Japan ( together with yellow, white, purple, green and, red) - and all the colour associated with Tomura, except for black, is indeed considered lucky.

White 

White, is an inherently positive colour, is usually associated with purity, innocence, light, goodness, beginnings, possibility and perfection. However it is also described an dperceived as cold, impersonal and bland. Shigaraki after his ‘transformation’ is the perfect soldier: he is very powerful, to a fault, and represents a new chapter in not only his own life but as well in the one which has been conducted by AfO, as he sees him as his vessel. The fact is that the beginning of a new Shigaraki which is flawless, in appearance, is a very well constructed lie. While he should represent perfection, first of all his transformation has not been entirely completed and furthermore, while it does represent a clean slate in his check, is also the possibility, reality coming through for AfO to take advantage of the body new, which Tomura must preserve. As the new Shigaraki however, has his ideals very present and wants to fight for them, to protect his feelings and his ideas, it is anyway a struggle for both him and AfO to juggle through everything going on Tenko’s mind, and emerge victorious. This is also the most interesting aspect of this colour: the goodness and inherent purity which comes from this colour implies a purification process in Shigaraki’s character, who instead gets fixed even more on him not wanting to forgive society and insisting on going on his rampage, because at the same time he cannot let go of these feelings, because now they are the only thing which make him go forward.

White is usually used in contrast to black, and represents the dichotomy of good and bad.

The psychological meaning of white is wholeness and completion. This also refers to the meaning and falls into the category of ‘perfection’: it is a new beginning, but at the same time it represents the closure of a cycle and the beginning of a new one: a perfect one, which represents closure (‘The Circle’). Tomura is supposed to be the new complete weapon at AfO’s will, but as I states before this is a fought point (between the two of them).

White, in cultures that believe in reincarnation is held in high regard. Indeed, they sustain how white is a sign of rebirth. 

Technically, Shigaraki has been reborn. What I mean is that he has transformed himself into not a new person, but in a better version of himself, he upgraded - and now of course going back is not an option. He has been held in a womb, breeding his new potential and now he became an individual whose strength far surpasses normal, his quirk control is absolutely insane and as well his memories, ideas and feelings are heightened. The theme of rebirth, which I think fits both Shigaraki and Dabi, is used a few times in BNHA, but as for Shigaraki it is very literal and very clear (after all he has been asleep for a time, just to wake up and fight an entire war against the Heroes). It is clear however, how his personality has been rebirth too: while he was not insecure, but more hesitant, now he is sure of his objective and he thrives on achieving it. What distinguishes therefore the old Shigaraki from this new one is the knowledge of being powerful and therefore being able to accomplish what we wants.

Finally, white inherently denotes death and mourning too in the Japanese culture, as well as black. Here, we are mourning the old Shigaraki, and the loss of the traits that instead made him a little bit more human, and a little less like God himself.

II.) From Red Eyes to Red Shoes (in association with both Izuku and Katsuki) 

I already talked about the colour red in regard to Izuku here, but if we take the same meaning and apply it to Tomura instead, we get a different picture. It is no mystery how Izuku and Tenko are foils for each other, and that they resemble each other in different ways (starting from them sporting red shoes, to their characters, being ‘accepted’ and trained by a mentor, and so on).

Red is the colour of extremes. It appears clear how Izuku and Tenko represent the opposite extremes: where Izuku is enamoured of heroes and idolised them to an unhealthy point, even though he comes from a background where he has been discriminated by that same society because he was different, Tenko is disillusioned with the society they live in. He wants to destroy to the ground, because he cannot find it in himself to forgive anyone who could and did not extend him a hand when he needed it. At the same time, both Izuku and Tenko believe that to a certain extent what they had done has been ‘deserved’, and are not entirely focused on their own well being. 

Red is also an attention-bringer. As I already noticed for Izuku, it is very curious how both wear red shoes, as a way to try and separate themselves from the rest, trying to escape the opinions of other which have labelled them in a way, and of course at the same time trying to take control and wanting to be the best in their own ways (hero or villain, that is).  

Red is also the colour of blood, of rage, anger as well as desire, leadership and strength. I want to make a point which I do not know whether is important or not, however, a fact that struck me hard is how Shigaraki’s irises are very very small, and it somehow seems that he tries to compensate the little quantity of red of Shigaraki with wearing red shoes. This might be an indicator how Shigaraki strives to achieve these qualities, but at the same time he needs to put a lot of effort in it, and furthermore it somehow feels different from when we compare it to Izuku: even if both are charismatic leaders, Shigaraki is very dispassionate about it, while Izuku frequently denies how his influence might be fundamental when it comes to other people (Katsuki, All Might, 1A). However, Shigaraki does reflect in his personality, the venous desire to be angry, aggressive and destructive as it what his power entails, and after all what has been taught to him. I noticed as well a post (which unfortunately I cannot find) where it says that Shigaraki has a very high tolerance pain (again, the parallels with Izuku are insane), which also reconnects somehow to the colour red as we saw how Shigaraki himself even if tired (LoV vs Machia/LF) or absolutely bloody and at the brink of death is instead held up by his will to destroy (Shigaraki vs Heroes).

It relates to danger, power, determination and action. Well, Shigaraki and danger go to hand in hand as well as determination and action. After all, Shigaraki’s Modus Operandi is Trial and Error, which means he is not afraid to be wrong and to try things out, even if he is stubborn and ways things to go his way, every time (when that rarely happens in general). 

Red is indeed determined, powerful, impulsive and aggressive. It is also tied to self-preservation. Although true for the most part, the self-preservation is still a massive blank point. 

He is bloody, and even AfO is telling him to rest and preserve his energies (even if here, my counter argument would be that it would be easier for him to overtake Shigaraki’s body if he is weaker, so I do not know how reliable this is).

The color red in Japanese culture denotes strength, passion, self sacrifice and blood. It Also stands for good luck and happiness. Which is still very amusing to me, as Shigaraki feels like the farthest character away from achieving happiness, and his passions and strives are all useless unless he gets rid of his master puppeteer. However, Shigaraki embodies the self-sacrificing spirit. Even if it might sound strange, and he is not very willing to be himself in the front lines (at least not always), he does approach ReDestro himself and takes him on, while leaving the League to deal with the rest.

III.) Yellow

Surprise, surprise! Yellow, in the Japanese culture stands for Courage, while usually the Western culture associates it with Cowardice. It is a funny thing that it also stands for betrayal, sickness, egoism and madness on the negative side, however it is rather a holy colour, usually associated with deities on the other side.

Since I am not going to include yellow in the association paragraph, it is not a case that black reacts badly to yellow, and forms a very unpleasant colour, which means that the circumstances which follow either do not mix well together. However, it is also true how the most resonant contrast between yellow and another colour is given by black. 

Plus yellow is the colour of the Solar Plexus Chakra and it is the symbol of vitality and will. All these elements, however present in a very limited amount in regard to Tenko, are telling of the aspect of authority (reconfirmed and amplified by black) and somehow, the lack of bright colours of Tenko makes the little yellow details resonating of a sad picture, as it embodies more the negative sides (egoism, sickness - and in part sickness). 

Colours in Association.

Black used in contrast–particularly with white or yellow–does create energy (especially the contrast on shapes and just power that the image of waken up Shigaraki creates in the last arc is enough to send this message). It is as well true that black when used in opposition with white, symbolises the eternal struggle between day and night, good and evil, and right and wrong - a thing that for Shigaraki is somehow a metaphor and a literal representation of himself as a character. A perfect example would be the struggle he has with AfO for his body, where he struggles between his internal feelings and dreams and instead the evil will imposed by him by AfO, as well as in terms of consciousness where him being present and conscious is the day, while being subdued to AfO’s will in the Night.

Black usually represent the end, but the end always implies a new beginning. So when the light appears, and black transcends to white, it instead the colour of new beginnings. I already talked about how rebirth theme and the new beginning on new ideals and dreams is represented for Tenko by the colour white, however it is interesting also to note how his change in personality brings him from his childhood dream to being thankful to AfO who raised to him, but wanting to be even greater than AfO himself,- metaphor for Tomura’s life as being free from shackles of reality.

Bluish-Grey is also defined as ‘livid’, an adjective used to describe anger or decoloration of the skin (caused by bruising). This colour gives a sense of detachment - which also goes to review the colour grey and blue, in them being interpreted together as an entity, and how Tomura feels a detachment from his own memories, and past life, as well as his future (When Did We Ever Need A Future?) and instead seek meaning in everything that surrounds him. 

Red and white are prominent traditional colours in Japan. Both colours are used in decorations at events which represent happiness and joy.

On a non serious note, Shigaraki’s date of birth is 4th of April, and casually the colours associated with April are Burgundy (deep red) and White (according to the Japanese etiquette). 

And finally last remark for this post: it is very funny how Shigaraki’s palette is somehow almost the same as Bakugou’s (with the exception of green - which I would like to interpret as if Bakugou did not have Midoriya as his side, he could have ended in a far worse position, with no hope and no one to compare to).

Thank you for reading.

[beechicory]

Don't attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Or, I suppose, don't attribute to multimillion-dollar conspiracy that which is adequately explained by a stressed-out dude feeling incredibly pressured to create an 'exciting race' and having seconds to make a decision.

(That does not, however, negate the fact that issues like racism, the desire to put 'entertainment' first, and a willingness to be pressured by fans, etc, have had an impact on decisions and rules throughout the season).

Look, in my day job I literally am an expert in conspiracy theories (it's a very shitty and stressful day job). And how conspiracy theories fuck people up.

Don't attribute to massive sport-wide conspiracy theory (e.g. race-fixing, paying millions under the table for Merc to drop the case, etc.) things that are so much more adequately explained by pressure, unclear rules, and poor in-the-moment decisions.

The sport still needs fixed: those external factors shouldn't have sway (and in the case of racism they, uh, shouldn't fucking exist), the rules should be far clearer and more consistent, and poor decisions can't be so easy to make.

But please, please this cry of conspiracy, now even blaming Merc for supposedly being in on a conspiracy...please consider the speed and trajectory stuff like this can take. Consider who you could inadvertently harm along the way (like Lewis, for God's sake).

And consider the reality that most crappy things in life are banal, not conspiratorial. Injustice happens so very frequently (including now), and it's very rarely due to a big evil plot - it's usually due to life being chaotic and full of crap, crap that we need to work to fix.

There aren't always simple bad guys. We want simple bad guys, because something isn't fair, and we want to change it. We want simple bad guys, because we can fight them.

And we WANT to fight them! We want to do something! We want to put right a wrong, defend what we care about, ride valiantly in and force them to do What's Right!

It's hard for us, as fans, to fight concepts like the unacknowledged racism of F1 and the FIA and its fans, poor bureaucratic systems, the pressures of sport vs entertainment, inadequate consistency in governing, and over-centralization of decision-making power.

It's a lot easier, and feels more 'right', to say a person, or a vague group of persons, did this on purpose, and there's only one way to make it right. And by God, if anyone disagrees, well then they must be part of the conspiracy, too!

...

Sometimes shitty things occur, for shitty reasons, and we can't un-do it; sometimes the best thing we can do is work to prevent that shitty thing from happening again. And we do that by looking for the causes, and finding solutions.

No, it isn't fair. But it isn't an evil conspiracy, either. Hell, it might still be evil, but it's that infamous 'banal evil' - the omnipresent, harder-to-fight issues of racism, capitalism, etc.

Fighting those things? It's harder. But it's how we actually make the world better, it's how we actually hold people accountable, it's how we actually do some good.

Please, please consider before you cry conspiracy.

[anarchonist]

"For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III 'to prove a villain.' Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is still far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man—that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem."

- Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Understanding how the capitalist economist mind works is deeply unsettling from a humane standpoint. Knowing that there walk people in our midst who look at the beautiful things we have created, indeed, even other people, even nature itself, and think "this is all completely worthless until some form of monetary transaction has been made."

Yet that is exactly what capitalist market economics teaches. That nothing has an inherent value: that the value of a thing, a person, anything, is created the exact moment when someone pays for it. Only then can we determine its value. All the effort you've put into your labour, all the help you've given others, all the love you've poured into something you've created, all that is inherently worthless unless someone trades you some digits on a screen that you can then use to trade what you need to survive.

And it's so random, since one day the exact thing you did before may suddenly be worth less, just because of "the market". The labour you did, the service you provided, it was the exact same amount and quality. But, again, because someone, somewhere, decided what you did isn't as valuable as before, you now have less to survive on.

This is before we consider the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. The lives we lead. The world that is getting destroyed. Billionaires look for ways to monetize all of it. To a capitalist, if he cannot extract monetary value out of something, it is not worth the time of day. According to capitalist economics, all of this makes perfect sense. Because under capitalism, everything is inherently worthless. There is only the market, the transaction, the space of ideas, only utter alienation.

Capitalism is chaotic, violent, and ugly. If more people actually understood what capitalism teaches us about ourselves and the world around us, no one but the most heinous mind could ever support it.

[sebastianshaw]

@sammysdewysensitiveeyes - And finally, Shinobi for World of Darkness, three different versions/games! Under cut because like always, it’s long!

For a vampire, he’d be a Toreador. They’re the type who will turn someone just because they’re pretty, then get tired of them within the week, and that’s how their ranks get flooded with dilettantes who don’t posses any artistic talent, like Shinobi. Toreador are famous for being the most emotional and passionate and in touch with humanity, but in truth, many are emotionally hollow, chasing fleeting highs of false feelings that are shallow and brief despite their deceptive intensity. This leads them to become callow and callous, trying forever to breath life into themselves through new experiences that become banal all too soon, leaving a trail of broken mortal hearts and lives behind them, to say nothing of fledglings that, like, Shinobi, are pulled into this world they’re not ready for and typically destroyed by soon enough. While many people deride them as romance novel vampires, I think they’re actually a very clever subversion of that, and in their own way as horrifying as more famously frightening ones. Shinobi, bitter and wounded over being rejected and abandoned by his sire, has become exactly that kind of Toreador himself. He also strives to be as seductive and glamorous as other members of the clan, and he has the image down, but it falls apart quickly when others question or reject him. He’s also a very young and weak vampire, so he has no political strings to pull, and since he has no art, is looked down by his clanmates as a poseur. All this just makes him more pathologically driven to prove himself and gather allies who will love and respect him, even as he fails at it every night. Also, the Tories are often called divas and “Degenerates” is literally a nickname for the whole clan, it’s perf. I also think he’d make a good Ghoul. When someone---be it a human, animal, even a fellow vampire---drinks the blood of a vampire three times, they become Blood Bound to them. In the case of animals and humans, this makes them the vampire’s ghoul, and the vampire their domitor or regnant. The blood bond is one of the most powerful tools of vampirekind, as the victim is completely enthralled to them, forced to obey. The ghoul is obsessed with them, usually in love, and will do anything asked of them. Continual drinks reinforce it, and the ghouls WANT this, for vitae---vampire blood--is addictive. And the longer they serve a vampire, the more they’ll need it not just out of addiction, but to survive. Ghouling a human (or animal) will freeze them at their current age, just like a vampire, and even grant them some vampiric powers...but when the blood stops coming, all those years catch up with them...all at once. It’s not pretty. Some ghouls who manage to escape their masters---usually by the latter’s death--become vampire hunters in order to get their vitae fix, drinking from different ones in order to avoid the “three strikes and you’re out” Blood Bond. As for what vampires get from this, ghouls have any number of uses, from daytime bodyguards to managers of mortal affairs, messengers, servants, it goes on. The sad, cursed existence of a Ghoul is in many ways worse than that of a vampire, and with none of the benefits. I could see him either as a group ghoul, perhaps, serving a coterie (small group) of powerful female vampires...but I feel like that’s more his fantasy than anything. The reality is probably that he went looking for his birth father, tracked him down successfully, and got a lot more than he bargained for...but hasn’t aged a day since either. Much like Ghouls serve vampires, Kinfolk serve werebeasts, and out of a very different sense of being bound by blood. Kinfolk are the human and animal relations of a werewolf or other werecreature, and breeding with them yields a higher chance of a Garou offspring (since, remember, the offspring of two Garou is a sterile, deformed metis) A Garou birth will still be rare, and most or all of their children will just be Kinfolk, but maybe the next gen will have a Garou, or the next. Because of this, the Garou (or Bastet, or whatever they may be) maintain close ties with their Kinfolk, watching them like shepherds over their flocks. There’s a dark side though. Their primary role ultimately is breeding stock, and many tribes treat them exactly like that. They’re automatically seen as part of the Garou tribe to which they’re related (or worse, its property) and are thus beholden to its regulations, owing them their loyalty, but get none of the respect and glory that the Garou do in return. They’re "valuable second class citizens" at best. Besides breeding, other roles they take includes childcare (since the werewolves are off battling the Wyrm), financing, politicking, and bureaucratic maneuvering on behalf of the Garou, directly or in their interests, are all examples, but there are dozens more things an individual Kinfolk might to do serve their family. Sebastian would definitely be a Shadow Lord werewolf as described in Fabian’s section, and Shinobi his unfortunate Kinfolk pup. A disappointment twice over, firstly for not being Garou, secondly for not even being the USEFUL kind of Kinfolk. All the tribes have an individual approach to their kin beyond the general basics I just described, and Shadow Lords tend towards the abusive. To quote the canon,  “[Shadow Lord] Kinfolk don't receive much coddling, however. Weaklings and victims don't deserve to breed.” So not only is Shinobi not supposed to be sticking his dick in anything that can get pregnant, he’s supposed to purely serve his father’s interests while also growing up a society where he will NEVER be good enough. Which...look it’s horrible, but you can’t deny it FITS! (Also: While Sebastian def would be a Shadow Lord himself as a werewolf, he also could easily just be a human "target" of one as a mate. To quote canon: "Female Shadow Lords are sometimes drawn away from the flock toward men with power. A ruthless businessman, a brilliant crime lord or even a military dictator may find himself overpowered by a stalking suitor.") Since Shinobi is half-Japanese, he could be a kuei-jin if he was born/raised/died in Japan or a place with a strong Japanese (or other Asian) culture. Now, the kuei-jin are very problematic, White Wolf (the game company that does all this) mashed together a bunch of different Asian cultures together (even “kuei-jin” is a combination of Japanese and Chinese) and appropriated a bunch of terms they used incorrectly (ex: dharma) but I really like them and I’d like it if one day they could go back and fix them like they have with other creations they made that were really problematic at their conception (most all of this shit was made up by white nerds in the 90s) So, kuei-jin are vampires of a sort, but an entirely different sort than the Kindred are, despite some calling them ‘the Kindred of the East’. Firstly, their range has more to do with culture than geography. They populate Asia, but have begun emerging in the West in places like Chinatowns where Asian cultures are prevalent. Which brings us to the second difference---they are not Embraced like Western vampires, they rise from the grave on their own. Something drove them so hard that their souls clawed their way out of Yomi World and back into their bodies...well, usually their bodies, there have been cases where they came back in a DIFFERENT body. The goal of the kuei-jin is to remember what this something was, for they believe it is their purpose, and they must then accomplish it. In order to discover their purpose and fulfill it, they will choose different paths that they think will be best for this. These paths, called Dharmas, are liked clans, but, as I said, can be chosen, and even changed. Shinobi’s Dharma would be the The Dance of the Thrashing Dragon, also known as the Laughing Rainbows. Yes, they all have names like that. Again, white nerds in the 90s. The Thrashing Dragons are the Yang-Aspected paths, they  seek to defy their undead state through frenzied revelry and acts meant to celebrate life (in all its beauty and bloodcurdling savagery both).  These Kuei-jin are as alive as the undead can be, believing  creation is a rainbow – illusory, but too colourful to ignore-- and their ideal is to experience each of those colours as vividly as possible. As a result, Laughing Rainbows shun society's restrictions, are often messy and vulgar, indulging themselves with wild feasts and drunken orgies - celebrations that usually feature living "entertainment," too. In their calmer moments, a Thrashing Dragon can be gentle and compassionate, nurturing life even though they consume it---the kuei-jin are still a type of vampires, and they feed on chi. They can get it from flesh and blood, but, as they get older and more powerful, can suck the pure chi out of the air from a person. But the Thrashing Dragons like to eat their prey raw, and often alive. They’re violent and combative, in addition to  shameless, impulsive, lusty, and having a tendency towards nudity. What’s interesting is that in life, many Thrashing Dragons denied the flesh, and believe they came back due to their repression during life. Some ferociously carnal people do return to finish what they started in life, but most Laughing Rainbows learned to laugh only after they died. So perhaps Shinobi had a sad life that ended prematurely (COUGH DAD COUGH) and now that he’s come back, he’s “living” large at last. Or perhaps he’s one of the ones that was ALWAYS a hedonistic idiot and he was actually brought back as a lesson to live a better life, but he hasn’t learned it yet. Kuei-jin have two souls, the Hun and P’o, and they struggle against the latter. The Hun is  higher, rational half of the soul, akin to  morality, conscience, honor and devotion to duty. The P’o is the evil bestial half of the soul, akin to “the Beast” that Western vampires struggle against. Each person’s P’o takes one of several archetypes, based on which is most likely to tempt a kuei-jin off their path, and Shinobi’s would be The Monkey. The Monkey is  a creature of the moment, its each new pleasure or distraction being the most important thing in the world. The Monkey is capable of concocting elaborate plans to achieve small or momentary goals, but it’s in no way concerned with any overarching mission that the Kuei-jin might have. Indeed, the Monkey seeks, at every turn, to waylay Shinobi from his appointed goal, to divert all of the his attention and energy to lesser, transitory things. So basically it tempts him to be HIMSELF. (As a note, I think the Adversary would translate REALLY well as a P’o for a kuei-jin Haven; India is part of Asia too!) Finally...I might be typecasting him too much by race, but there’s also the kitsune. The kitsune, as one would expect, are the werefoxes of East Asia, mostly found in Japan and China. They are the youngest of the Changing Breeds, and the story goes that when a fox named Bai Mianxi was brought before Gaia (who created all the werecreatures) by Luna (the moon) for playing tricks that created havoc in the world, Gaia’s punishment was that Bai Mianxi be given a duty. Bai Mianxi tried to trick her way out of it, claiming that  Gaia's other children were all adequate enough in their duties and she was not needed. Gaia's wrath at Bai Mianxi's impudence shook her residence, but after soothing words from Luna, Gaia promised the fox that in return for their service, the fox-people would one day become the BEST at something, better than all the other werecreatures were at it, whatever it is. Like all other were-types, the kitsune are born in animal or human form, and the offspring of two Kitsune will be born in hybrid form and be stuck that way until their First Change. Unlike the Western metis of the Garou and many other fera though, these “shinju” as they are called, are NOT sterile or deformed, nor are they looked down upon by other kitsune. But all kitsune, no matter what form they were born in, carry a curse, and that is that when a kitstune is born, at least one of its parents will die. Usually, it is the non-kitsune parent, and there is also a one-in-ten chance that the Kitsune parent may die, either instead of, or along with, their mate. So my thinking is kitsune Shinobi was born in human form in Japan to a kitsune mother, but has a human white dad in America (Sebastian obvy) who despite the great distance still passed away mysteriously at the moment Shinobi drew his first breath. And so Shinobi grew up raised by his mother and her Kinfolk, and he never saw his father and he grew up feeling loved and wanted, and now he is a happy healthy adult werefox who will indeed be the best at something one day! You can see why I wanted this for him ^^

[plays-the-thing]

Netflix’s Witcher: What Makes a Good Adaptation? – A companion piece

If you’ve somehow found this without seeing the video first, here’s a link:

In this video I analyze the screen adaptations of Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, and the Witcher series. I use the comparisons of the three to discuss what makes adaptations in general work and to explain why I feel the Witcher is heading down the road to mediocrity.

However, this is a hugely complicated subject, and the works themselves are also complex, especially Martin’s work. I make plenty of claims in the video that a reasonable person could disagree with without any explanation for why I think they are true. Unfortunately, if I were to go down every rabbit hole that I touch on the video would be hours long, so I have to gloss over some potentially confusing or controversial statements.

Enter this post. Here I will be attempting to pre-empt any questions that I think people may have, and go through my thought process on certain claims. I don’t recommend that you read the whole thing. Each explanation will be followed by a timestamp and relevant quote from the video that I am expanding upon so that you can quickly search the page and find what you are looking for.

 I’m sure there will be things I don’t think to cover, or things that are poorly reasoned both here and in the video, so feel free to ask additional questions. Just please check to make sure you aren’t asking something that I already covered here.

 I will also be attempting to give as much credit as possible to all the wonderful writers and creators who have influenced my thinking with regards to these works. I’ll be linking as much as possible to my sources, as well as to additional content that expands on ideas I mention. Also I’ve included some personal tidbits and commentary, just for fun.

 Under a cut for length.

INTRODUCTION:

Huge props to the people who put together the behind-the-scenes footage of LOTR. I’ve watched all the bonus footage numerous times in my life. If you have any interest in the nitty-gritty of how movies get made, I can’t recommend it enough. It really shows all the work and complexity that goes into making movies. That they even get made at all is honestly incredible, especially massive undertakings like LOTR.

[3:30] And if you've ever wondered what the hell happened to The Hobbit, to me it seemed like they were indulging all of these worst impulses instead of catching themselves and editing them out like they did in LOTR.

As soon as I saw that they were making three Hobbit movies my hopes plummeted. It just reeked of executive meddling, and of trying to make the story into something it just isn’t. Lo and behold, that’s what we got: sticking in loads of unnecessary and thematically incoherent material to stretch out the runtime and make it more “epic.” I couldn’t bring myself to watch past the first one, but Lindsay Ellis has an excellent video series exploring in detail what went wrong with the trilogy.

PART ONE: LORD OF THE RINGS

[8:40] If you followed the events and the chronology of the book they would just hang out with Faramir for a little bit and then the movie would end

Technically it’s more complicated than this because that’s already following the revised movie timeline. In reality, Frodo would have just left the Black Gate. They *are* moving the events around to some extent, usually by a few of days here and there, but they can’t move stuff together that takes place weeks apart or the whole timeline would crumble.

[9:55] You can call it the theme, the soul, the spirit, the point, or whatever else you want, but the great works of fiction have something at their core that pulls everything together and elevates it into art. It’s a difficult thing to describe, but I think this scene perfectly tapped into the soul of Tolkien’s work.

Huge shout out to Bob Case and his video “Blame of Thrones” for first introducing me to this concept and the language of the “spirit” of a work to describe this phenomenon. In many ways the first two parts of this video are merely building on the LOTR-GOT comparison that he makes in that video, digging a little deeper and looking at more specific and concrete (and spoileriffic) examples of what he’s talking about so that we can apply these ideas to the Witcher…and beyond. Like all his work, it’s excellent. His YouTube is pretty much inactive these days, but he also occasionally writes content for Shamus Young’s blog if you want more of his work.

PART TWO: GAME OF THRONES

Alright, here it is: the section that really caused me to want to make this companion piece. Earlier I mentioned that I have sympathy for the GoT showrunners, and I really do. Martin’s work is incredibly complex, and so this section dominates the blogpost because there is so much to explain and no way that I could explain it all in the video without incredible bloat.

First I should mention that I, and all the writers I am going to credit here, share a very specific interpretation of Martin’s work. This isn’t the only interpretation. I doubt it’s the interpretation of the majority of readers. Obviously, I fully believe it is the correct interpretation, but the showrunners clearly had a wildly different one.

People who have this interpretation express it in different ways. Joannalannister collects hers in her tag #the-meaning-of-asoiaf. PoorQuentyn expresses it here, and in his analysis of Davos, Quentyn, and Tyrion. Other writers express it in their own ways.

With my lit degree hanging over my head, I can’t help but see it as a problem of competing artistic movements. To me, HBO’s Game of Thrones is part of the art movement of the past few decades, namely postmodernism. Art movements are complex, but basically postmodernism is the cynical reaction to the sincerity of modernism which came before it. Cynicism is, I think, the defining trait of Game of Thrones.

But it is NOT the defining trait of the books. In my view, Martin’s ASOIAF is part of the art movement that we are moving towards, which is starting to become known as metamodernism. Metamodernism is a reaction to the nihilistic pessimism and cynicism of postmodernism, and replaces it not with the unbridled sincerity of modernism, but rather oscillation between the two modes. It can be both ironic and sincere, deconstructionist and constructionist, apathetic and affectual. Once you have peeled back all the layers however, it is ultimately hopeful and optimistic. It embraces a sense of radical optimism. In metamodernist works optimism is often radical because the world the characters live in can be so dark. But that darkness serves only to highlight those characters that can hold fast to virtue amidst such darkness.

So, be warned. If you believe that Martin’s work is all about controlling the Iron Throne, and believe that cynicism is for the wise and honor is for fools, we just aren’t going to see eye to eye.

[12:45] Ned is a competent northern politician who has some trouble adapting to southern culture. Through a combination of bad luck, some understandable mistakes, and a misconception about his position, he fails in his goals.

The show didn’t invent the idea of Stupid Honorable Ned. Plenty of people believed this, even before the show. Obviously I believe they are wrong. If you would like to read more about it I would suggest Steven Attewell’s analysis of Ned’s chapters that he does on his blog, particularly Eddard XI and Eddard XIII. Steven does a much better job of analyzing Ned as a political actor than I ever could.

[13:00] Most of these changes are subtle…the best example is the council debate about whether or not to assassinate Daenerys.

Many of the ideas in this section are pulled from two essays by turtle-paced: Poor Doomed Ned and The Argument to Assassinate Daenerys. Turtle goes deep into the details of the differences between the Ned Stark of the books and the show, and I skimmed some of their comparisons for my argument. Steven Attewell’s analysis of this chapter is also worth reading.

[14:09] It’s a good argument, and I think in the books we are expected to mostly agree with Ned, both morally and politically.

When I say “expected” I mean from the authors point of view, which of course relies on me being correct about my interpretation of Martin’s work. Obviously I think I’m right, but if you don’t agree with my interpretation you may not agree with this statement.

[14:16] Notice also that the supporters of the assassination: Littlefinger, Varys, Renly, and Pycelle are all villains (all except Pycelle are trying to destabilize the kingdom), and the people who oppose it, Ned and Barristan, are heroes.

Each of them represents a different sort of evil. Littlefinger is a scheming sociopathic villain. Varys is a well-intentioned extremist whose willingness to commit utterly heinous acts in the pursuit of his goals makes him a villain. This is because, as Huxley puts it, “The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.”  Renly is narcissistic ambitious evil, willing to throw a realm into war to satisfy his own ego, and is totally uncaring about the lives of other people. It isn’t precisely correct to say that Pycelle is a villain because he represents the banality of evil. He thinks he’s just doing his job, but he’s morally bankrupt and politically corrupt.

[16:40] It would take too long to list all the ways that Tywin is awful, and everyone knows it.

To clarify, I mean that everyone in-universe knows it. For some god-forsaken reason, some readers seem to think that Tywin was just being effective after he unleashed the Mountain on the Riverlands and violated every military and political norm in Westeros.

If you are going to say that he is “Machiavellian” I would encourage you to actually read The Prince, where Machiavelli says “Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred” and goes into the reasons why.

[17:17] Tywin on the other hand accomplished a lot of short-term gains by being as treacherous and dishonorable as possible. But this has a cost: by proving themselves fair-weather allies they surround themselves with the same. Nobody trusts them, and so their allies scheme and betray them.

Oberyn and Doran are both scheming in their own way to revenge themselves on the Lannisters for the deaths of Elia and her children. The Tyrells poison Joffrey and scheme to spirit Sansa away to Highgarden.

[17:36] Ned failed due to a couple of minor mistakes, some bad luck, and treachery.

I mention a few times that Ned, and more broadly the Starks, get “unlucky.” Again, Steven Attewell does an excellent job of documenting this with his keen eye for how GRRM cheats political realities, but I’ll note a few of the many ways George has to bend over backward to screw the Starks.

In AGoT Catelyn leaves King’s Landing roughly around the same time that Tyrion leaves the wall, and both are on horseback. In order for them to meet at the Inn at the Crossroads Tyrion has to travel roughly 2,000 miles in the same time that Catelyn travels 400 miles. This is basically impossible, but necessary for the plot so that Catelyn can lose Tyrion at the Eyrie. If she had caught him somewhere further north she could have simply chucked him into her own dungeons and managed his trial herself.

Cersei has been trying to kill Robert for goodness knows how long with just as unreliable methods as “get him drunk on a hunt.” In order for Ned to get screwed she has to succeed in killing Robert at precisely that moment. If it had failed like every one of her other attempts she is most likely dead, because Ned would tell Robert the truth about her children as soon as he got back.

In order for Theon to take Winterfell, veteran military man and castellan Ser Rodrik Cassell has to stupidly empty the Winterfell garrison while he knows that Ironborn raiders are running loose in the North, not even leaving behind a mere twenty-five to fifty men that would have completely thrashed Theon’s assault. If Theon can’t take Winterfell, the Red Wedding doesn’t happen (as Martin has told us that the real inciting incident of the Red Wedding was the fall of Winterfell).

[17:41] However, killing him was a terrible idea, and backfired on the Lannisters instantly.

Continuing this theme, the Lannisters were in an absolutely horrible position at the beginning of the War of the Five Kings. They pretty much just have their bannerman in the Westerlands. Stannis seems to have the support of most of the Crownlands, and he and Renly are splitting the lords of the Reach and the Stormlands (with Renly having the larger chunk). The Starks have all the support of the North and the Riverlands combined. The Lannisters are surrounded by enemies who outnumber them on all sides. Killing Ned immediately jumpstarts a war that will almost certainly crush the Lannisters. That it didn’t took some very thin plotting and improbable developments at times, but overall George made it work. For more analysis of this, again check out Steven Attewell Blog: Race for the Iron Throne.

[17:48] Tywin was killed by both a guest whom he considered his ally, and his son.

I firmly believe Oberyn poisoned Tywin. Here’s a good rundown of the evidence. Beyond simple means, motive, and opportunity it also provides neat answers to lingering odd questions like why Tywin rotted so oddly and aggressively, why Tyrion knew he would find him in the privy, why Oberyn was willing to chuck his life away for a confession before seeming to have secured revenge against Tywin.

It’s also thematically juicy. I love the idea that Tywin, who so egregiously violated Westerosi norms culminating in the total breach of the social contract at the Red Wedding, was a victim of contrapasso. He can’t be protected by social norms, so he gets poisoned by his guest and ally. Did Tyrion know he was dying? Had he put it all together? Was that bolt really an act of mercy? Perhaps it was one final service to the Lannisters, to keep the dream of their alliance with the Martells alive. Who knows, but boy is it interesting to consider.

[18:13] his alliances fall to pieces, and his children are abandoned by even their own family.

I’m referring here to the infighting between the Tyrells and Lannisters (and Martells, though they never had any intent of staying true to the alliance) after Tywin’s death (though there was some before as well, just intensified after Cersei takes over from Tywin). Kevan forces Cersei to take the walk of shame, and Jaime and the rest of the Lannisters abandon her to that fate.

[19:41] Just like Lord of the Rings, and the Witcher, ASOIAF is clearly dedicated to anti-violence. Not pacifism: all three works have heroes dealing out retributive violence in order to try and restore justice.

I understand it might be odd to suggest that three works which feature so much violence can be dedicated to anti-violence, but depicting something is not the same as endorsing it. I would argue in the case of Martin’s work in particular that his depiction of violence, so un-romantically brutal and direct, is intentionally revolting, and therefore is designed to be anti-violence. Martin purposefully makes you want revenge on certain characters, gives it to you, and then forces you to stare at the inhumanity of this thing you thought you wanted. Yeah I wanted Theon to pay, but not like that. Yeah, I wanted Cersei to pay, but not like that. Yeah, I want the Freys to pay, but I don’t think I’m going to like what Stoneheart is going to do to them.

There is a certain amount of this in the Witcher as well. I can specifically think of one scene in The Blood of Elves, but I promised no Witcher spoilers.

The violence in LOTR is much more romanticized, but as Faramir says: “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.” The hero is still Frodo, who doesn’t fight anyone or anything in the whole story. Frodo is a pacifist, but his pacifism is enabled by others who are willing to fight.

[20:07] In a Dance with Dragons Daenerys allows the old slave-holding class to maintain too much power and so they immediately attempt to continue the old violence of slavery. Daenerys did not commit enough violence against the slave-owners, so they were allowed to continue existing, and as long as they existed they were always going to abuse and oppress the ex-slaves.

A couple years after the release of ADWD, an obnoxiously wrong and poisonous idea began to creep into the ASOIAF fandom: Daenerys’ violence against the slaveowners in Slaver’s Bay is dangerous and immoral, and peace is the better option. This idea was most persuasively argued in the Meereenese Blot’s series of essays.

I’ll quote some of the conclusion here:

“They are supposed to feel this generic distrust for everyone, and to fail to grasp that their peaces were actually quite successful. Dany is supposed to conclude — wrongly — that her behavior through most of the book was silly and foolish. And if you came away with those impressions too, it’s perfectly understandable…The whole plotline is designed to maneuver Dany into a mental place where she’ll decide to sideline her concerns for innocent life, and take what she wants with fire and blood.”

This idea, much like the idea that Daenerys is some sort of unhinged fascist just waiting for the right trigger, makes me unbelievably angry. This idea that I am supposed to value the life of the slaveowner and the slave equally, and that maintaining a “peaceful” slave-owning society is an acceptable alternative to violent revolution is so fundamentally revolting to me, that it turns my stomach even to write that sentence.

Some fans went even as far as to suggest that Daenerys’ occupation of Meereen was a parallel to the US occupation of Iraq, and that she was engaged in erasing an authentic slave-owning culture that she despised. If you read the above series of essays, you can see that they are, at the least, enabling that kind of thinking.

To be clear, I do not consider any slave society to be worth a damn thing. Anything that continues it is evil and all that attempts to destroy it is good. That being said, once again Steven Attewell does a better job than I ever could of rebutting the ideas of the Meereneese Blot, and explaining how the correct parallel of Daenerys’ actions in Meereen is the American mistake of abandoning radical reconstruction. He describes her actions in Meereen as abandoning a revolution half complete. I highly recommend reading it, especially if you are American. 

Martin is not a pacifist. He has said he would have fought in WWII. He demonstrated against Vietnam. As far as I know, the first time George ever used the words “Fire and Blood” was in a book released in 1982 called Fevre Dream:

“I never held much with slavery […]. You can’t just go… usin’ another kind of people, like they wasn’t people at all. Know what I mean? Got to end, sooner or later. Better if it ends peaceful, but it’s got to end even if it has to be with fire and blood, you see? Maybe that’s what them abolitionists been sayin’ all along. You try to be reasonable, that’s only right, but if it don’t work, you got to be ready. Some things is just wrong. They got to be ended.”

Daenerys is a slave-freeing, slave-owner-killing Hero with a capital H. She has made mistakes. I weep for the lives of the slaves that she has thrown away by abandoning her revolution, by failing to give the people of Astapor the strength to defend themselves, by maintaining a false peace that allows the Meereneese KKK to kill ex-slaves in the night.  I shed no tears for the slaveowners that she has killed. When you treat other human beings as property you forfeit your right to Prosperity, Freedom, and Life. Preferably in that order—I would prefer that a slave society could peacefully transition, that those who attempted to continue it could be locked up, and that bloodshed could be avoided. But sometimes violence is necessary.

Daenerys will make more mistakes, I am sure. I believe that she will swing too far in the other direction, temporarily. But that’s a topic for another time.

[20:57] She comforts the hound even as he threatens her and helps him on his path from violence to peace.

Sandor did not die, despite what the Elder Brother told Brienne. He uses his words very carefully, to suggest that the Hound is dead, but that Sandor Clegane the man is simply “at rest.” He has become a brother of the isle.

“On the upper slopes they saw three boys driving sheep, and higher still they passed a lichyard where a brother bigger than Brienne was struggling to dig a grave. From the way he moved, it was plain to see that he was lame.” - Brienne VI, AFFC

[21:40] If they don’t understand why Tywin is a villain then of course they won’t understand why the Others are the main villains of the series, and will probably replace them with some blonde queen. And if you don’t understand that the cold of the human heart is the real enemy than of course you’ll think you can stop winter by just stabbing it. Like Tywin would.

In the books the Others are the villains. They are what the whole story is building towards, much like in LOTR the story builds towards Frodo casting the ring into the Fire. Martin has said that he thinks that the finishing chapters of LOTR, like the Scouring of the Shire, were important, so we may see something like that, but the clear emphasis will be on the existential evil, and cleaning up Cersei or Aegon “Targaryen’s” mess will be a clear step down in importance. It’s something that the heroes have grown beyond, but still need to handle, just like Saruman in the Shire.

[22:04] There’s nothing wrong with liking Game of Thrones, or disliking Lord of the Rings, or anything else.

I really do mean this. I am going to be critical of things you like, and am going to praise things you love. People are different, that’s to be expected. I am not here to pretend that people should only like the things I like. I’m interested in what makes these stories work. I said much the same thing in my last video about some of the new Star Wars properties. People tend to get really attached to the media they like (I’m no exception) and that can color our perception of criticism. Do try to keep in mind that if you like something I criticize it isn’t an attack on you. You have a sacred and personal relationship to the things you enjoy that no one can take from you. I like all kinds of stuff that other people might consider bad, and that’s okay. Actually it’s great, because it gives us something to talk about.

I may genuinely hate Game of Thrones because it butchers something I came to love, but that doesn’t mean I have anything against the people who do like it for their own reasons. We’re all just out here enjoying what we like.

PART THREE: THE WITCHER

There is less in this section for two reasons. First, I promised not to spoil anything past the material covered in the show and I’ll stick to that here. Second—full disclosure here—I haven’t read all of the books because after Blood of Elves I got pretty bored and from what I had heard they did not improve in quality, and if anything got worse. Having already felt that going from the anthologies to Blood I was happy to end my reading there.

If something I say is contradicted by a later book that I didn’t read feel free to let me know.

[23:31] First I should mention that Sapkowski’s works are not on the same level as Tolkien’s and Martin’s, who are the best and second-best fantasy authors of all time. I have enjoyed the Witcher books that I have read, but they are not anywhere near as complex or beautifully written.

This is just my opinion, see above paragraph. I really do think that it’s a pretty common opinion though. I’ve read it before, and you often see people recommend the first two Witcher anthologies in a “if you like it maybe see if you like the rest of them?” sort of way. Book sales numbers also support this, though by all accounts they are exploding in the wake of the show.

But, one potential issue is that I’m reading a translation so I have no idea how good Sapkowski’s prose actually is. You get a lot of sentences in the US edition like: “it must be both bothersome and irritating.” Translation is art, not science, and passages like these make me worry that the translator is just translating each phrase without worrying about all the subtlety that makes language beautiful. These are minor examples of course, but they worry me about what else might be changed. So take my criticism of his writing with a giant, translated, grain of salt, in that I don’t read Polish.

[23:58] Despite this, Geralt the Witcher has been worming his way into popular culture for years, interestingly on the back of a series of video games

Google trends clearly show that the video games are what primarily generated interest in the character before the show. There were no English editions until around the time the games started coming out, and the US editions all feature concept art from the games on the covers. The release of the subsequently translated books after the games received very little attention in comparison to the games.

[24:15] In my opinion, that decline of focus on Geralt was the greatest weakness in the books, and the focus on Geralt is the greatest strength of the games. Because Geralt is at the core of what made Sapkowski’s story and world engaging in the first place. He is a fascinating character in a way that Ciri, who is a fairly standard fantasy “chosen child,” could never be.

This is just my opinion, and I explain why I think Geralt is so great in the subsequent paragraphs. Reasonable people can disagree on this, but I’ve come across more than a couple fantasy characters who could be generically described as “royal orphans with special powers.” It’s not exactly novel. Geralt is pretty novel, at least in terms of what I have read.

[24:49] He suffers many of the same psychological problems that characters like Tyrion and Brienne suffer from in Martin’s work

The technical name for these kinds of issues is “internalized bigotry.” This happens when you get treated consistently horribly by the society you live in due to some fundamental fact about yourself that you didn’t choose, and eventually you begin to believe and “internalize” their opinion of you. For example, people expect Tyrion to be unlovable, conniving, lecherous, and debauched. Eventually he simply leans into these characteristics, because in a way it’s almost easier to be what people expect you to be.

[25:48] To top it off, he hides all this inside a cynical and nihilistic exterior, he pretends he doesn’t care when in fact, he cares more than anyone.

The shot that accompanies this, of Geralt looking intently at what’s happening in the room while others tend to be watching with a sort of mild curiosity like you might at an unexpected circus performance, did an awesome job of conveying this idea.

[26:36] This was kind of a cool idea, but predictably their scenes ended up being generally less interesting and engaging then Geralt’s. Yennefer’s were sometimes fantastic but Ciri’s rarely were.

This was the opinion of fans that I most commonly observed. I don’t have any empirical evidence of this. If you have any that either supports or contradicts this please let me know, I would be fascinated to see it. I could see someone really loving Yennefer’s scenes, and I personally enjoyed a lot of them, but I don’t understand how someone could walk away from the first season with Ciri as their favorite character of the three. I’ll come back to this in a later section.

[27:40] In many ways the first two books, and the games, have more in common with Sherlock Holmes than they do most other fantasy stories.

Really a more accurate comparison would be Philip Marlowe since Geralt is definitely more of an American Pulp detective than a British one. I do love the similarity between Geralt’s Witcher Senses in The Witcher 3 and Sherlock’s detective vision in Crimes and Punishment. I can’t make the same comparison to a Philip Marlowe game, because no one’s made one yet.

Actually that’s not strictly true. There was one game that came out in 1996.

[28:12] But Netflix’s Witcher has barely a whiff of detective fiction anywhere. I think this has caused a lot of fans to feel alienated by the show, even if they can’t explain exactly why.

It’s not reasonable to expect people to know why they like or don’t like something. It’s a feeling, and unless they have experience with writing, narratology, literature, film studies, or just read a lot of tvtropes.org, they are not likely to be able to put their finger on what it is. This causes people to disproportionally blame the things that are most obviously wrong. The premiere example of this is Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace. Jar Jar was obviously bad, but he doesn’t even come close to the top ten biggest problems with the movie. It was much worse that there was no main character or understandable plot and drama. Check out Red Letter Media’s legendary review for more on that.

I think a similar thing happened with Ciri, in that her story was sort of obviously underwhelming and so received a lot of flak, but there are deeper problems with the show.

[32:04] The third change is more subtle, but I’m worried that this Geralt genuinely believes in neutrality.

Just like Ned, the showrunners would not be the first to espouse this view. This quote in particular about “evil is evil” is obnoxiously peddled about as a justification for fence-sitting despite the fact that Geralt’s actual behavior doesn’t support it at all.

I don’t know for sure if the showrunners genuinely think Geralt tries to be neutral. There’s some evidence for yes in the first episode, the Borch episode, the Striga episode, and a couple of others. There’s strong evidence for no in the Duny/Pavetta episode. We’ll just have to see.

To be clear, when I mean “neutral” I mean in the face of immediate violence or injustice. Geralt often doesn’t care who is king, as he explains to Ostrit. But he won’t let a Striga continue to kill people just for coin.

[37:20]  When the writers took away Ned’s best arguments for his actions, when they took his story of existential triumph, of not compromising his morals, and turned it into a simple tragedy, they showed they clearly did not understand his heroism.

See PoorQuentyn’s explanation of existential heroism, and how it applies to ASOIAF.

[37:58] In the books, Ciri and Yennefer are included in the story through their connection to Geralt, because he is our hero and the foundation of our connection to the world. In the show they are included before ever having met Geralt, and they take up time that could have been spent focusing on those devilish detective details that make Geralt’s stories and character work.

Originally this video had a lot of discussion about how well these two other characters worked, but it ended up being kind of useless because it comes down to personal opinion, and the writers failure to properly use Geralt massively overshadows whether or not someone liked or didn’t like either of the other two leads. Again, I get why someone could like Yennefer’s scenes. I get why someone could maybe even like her scenes more than Geralt’s. Anya Chalotra did great. I thought the writing was a little weak at times, but on balance pretty decent. Geralt gets the benefit of all his stories being straight adaptations, and she didn’t, so it was a pretty decent job.

On the other hand, I thought Ciri’s storyline was a giant waste of space. When I think of all the best moments in the show, Ciri doesn’t show up in any of them. She spends the entire season running away from and interacting with fairly minor and forgettable characters that did not need to be introduced in this season. Calanthe, Eist, and Mousesack were great characters and the actors gave great performances, but that did not make up for the fact that her storyline went nowhere and did nothing to justify its inclusion. If someone loved Ciri’s storyline I would genuinely be interested to know why.

[39:10] I do have some sympathy for the writers of the Witcher.

Many times in this video I mention sympathy for various writers. Moviemaking is a massively complex undertaking. If you know anything about the difficulty of getting these things together you’ll know that it’s an absolute miracle any movie gets made and takes herculean effort from everyone involved. Television series are arguably even worse because they are longer, more complex, and often have a lower budget despite that. The people involved are honestly doing their best, and I recognize that, even if I criticize the product.

[39:47] They are in this unfortunate position where they can’t really pull the majority of their writing straight from the books because the material isn’t really strong enough by itself.

The books are very dialogue heavy. As I allude to, the one scene that was very close to the book is that scene with Filavandrel and it’s just obnoxious because the two characters just dialogue at each other. It goes on even longer in the book. How well that works in a book is up for debate but it wasn’t going to work on the screen, and it didn’t.

These problems are not insurmountable though. You can put other footage over these monologues. You could have included some footage of Elves fighting in their war. You could have footage of the “cursed” daughters of Lilit being locked in towers or autopsied while Stregobor explains it. I get this is more budget, but that budget went other places.

On the other hand some great scenes that I think would have translated excellently shot-for-shot from the book with little additional budget, like Renfri and Geralt in the Alderman’s attic, are entirely cut. Ah well.

[40:25] Well, I have my theories, but it in the end it doesn’t really matter.

I have a sneaking suspicion that somebody thought it needed to be more “epic” than the first two books are, so we got all this princess and political stuff in early. If there’s any merit to the idea that this series “copied” GoT, it’s somewhere in here, just like how the Hobbit got poisoned with all of the “epicness” of LOTR.

[44:54] Lastly, I’m gonna do my best to put out more regular content going forward. I’m aiming for at least one video a month.

I place no limitation on topics. It’ll probably be mostly media analysis, but if I’m honest I’m just going to write about whatever interests me. That’s the best way to keep myself interested.

That being said, if you have something you think I should analyze let me know. If I’m interested, I might do it.

[neriad13]

My Favorite Tropes

I tend to be more likely to switch up tropes from work to work, without much attachment to one or another. If it works in that particular story, okay, but I’m probably not marrying it for the next. But then there are the tiny handful of tropes to which I’m married, which are:

Earn Your Happy Ending - my favorite, ever, for about as long as I can remember. I think the only stories I’ve ever written that didn’t include it were straight up tragedies or horror that was always meant to end badly. And I’ve written way less of those than I have the former. I’m not opposed to stories with bad ends and love quite a few of them, but I usually get more catharsis out of characters making it through the horror movie and being somehow changed by what has happened, rather than all of them falling to whatever is monstrous in the end.

A while back I read a post in which someone criticized the trope as implying that good things inherently need to be earned, rather than freely given and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. After a long time considering it, I came to the conclusion that I don’t love the trope because I believe that happiness needs to be hard-earned to be worthwhile...I love it because so often, that’s how it just so happens to shake out in reality. Doing it that way feels truer to life for me. In a world in which generations of people have fought, tooth and nail, for every single civil right that is currently existent, happiness is not a passive pursuit.

Evil is Banal - the type of evil an average person is likely to encounter is not a flashy mastermind with a subtle plan laid out years in advance. Evil is careless. Evil is ignorant. Evil conceals its aims with incompetence, both real and feigned. Evil is not always purposefully malicious. Evil is going with the flow without thinking too hard about the implications of doing so. Evil is crushing the life out of a person under a mounting pile of microaggressions that the crusher probably gave not a single passing thought to. Evil asks “is this about me?” and nothing else. 

I adore Disney villains. I go on binges of listening to their songs every so often and their parts in the movies are a cherished childhood memory. On the rare occasion that I write a flashy villain with a master plan, it’s a ton of fun. But for the vast majority of time, I don’t. They’re not a type of character that lines up with reality for me. They’re much less interesting than the evil I’ve met and seen put into practice in my lifetime. I think it’s important to write about the mundane evils of the world, so that those who read about them are better able to pull back the veil on them in their own lives.