#it is the context that makes them gendered and you have to deconstruct and understand that context in order to get closer to neutral

[takemebacktowheniwassane]

i've been seeing a lot of falsettos posts recently deconstructing the fandoms beliefs and firstly

holy fuck thank you, i try to steer clear of fandom (and fandom-izing thereof) drama but this is getting a lot more visible recently so here's some little tidbits for you

whizzer brown is not an unflawed character!

okay so i haven't seen enough dissecting this but!!! in the chess game!

the whole point of marvin using that game to determine the ending of their relationship is because he suspects whizzer is constantly deceiving him and wants to prove it.

whizzer LITERALLY proves him right!

he asks marvin to help him along (yes i know he says he doesn't want help, hear me out, it's a little more complex than that) and takes advantage of the fact that marvin is- like- infatuated with him.

he draws him into a sense of false security then starts throwing accusations at him ("since you need a man!" "what?" "who's 'brainy'," "or witty, move.") until hes able to win, which he does with ease because he's been using marvin having this idea that he isn't smart against him.

of course, marvin's side of this isn't the best either but honestly, for once the fandom should focus on a different character when they think 'insane asshole'. typically we should also probably change our perspectives a little to be more unbiased cuz fr guys, this is getting really.. annoying.

i understand he's the most visibly flawed but that doesn't excuse constantly picking the worst parts of this musical (without other context, btw) to use against him.

and this post certainly isn't here to excuse anyone either i've just got a lot of opinions that i wanted to share while falsettos is.. trending? right?

2. marvin's (headcanoned but still somewhat researched) autism

this one isn't brought up as much but when i do see it around, it's kind of a skewed viewpoint.

while rewatching bits of the proshot i realized a lot of different neurodivergent traits that he shows-

he's helpless during I Never Wanted to Love You and is childish and regressive when he's upset (not every autistic person is like this either, i know this is a bit of a touchy subject so i just wanted to add that).

usually when people depict it i see it either toned down or joked about which is fine when all in good fun, and when its done respectfully.

not here to attack anyone, just here to point it out and say that yes :) he most likely is neurodivergent, but despite that his actions aren't condoned. he's still kinda a dick who needs to get his shit together

3. ..the lesbians also have shit going on?

just putting this out there- I DON'T SEE ENOUGH FOR THE LESBIANS! OR TRINA!

the girls in this musical are like thoroughly neglected and i think that's kind of shitty just assuming the fact that william finn put them in to demonstrate how gender roles put people in degrading positions (and he even makes it more prevalent by showing marvin as something like a misogynistic character who forces whizzer into more feminine roles to show the audience what woman have to/had to go through in society).

anyways, the lesbians aren't just there guys. they have a plotline too. in Something Bad is Happening, you derive a lot from charlotte singing about the outbreak of HIV/AIDS and realize how she operates on a daily basis (she's passionate about her work and takes every bad day as a hit to her life and career, explaining in a way that as a black, jewish, lesbian, FEMALE doctor in this time, everything that goes wrong is immediately brought down on her so much more than it would as any straight white male pharmacist-).

cordelia on the other hand has to handle the fact that her girlfriend is so adamant about her work ethic that she can't actually be super present in their relationship at times like that.

but either way she still sticks by her and is constantly trying to be supportive and endearing despite feeling like she's not amounting to her gf who's basically a hero in her eyes.

i kinda just wanted to bring that up because they mean a lot to me and they don't get enough love from the fanbase, thank you for listening to my TED talk <3

[yeonsols-garden]

Kang Haesol and the Stoic Male Lead Trope (In the context of Roles Reversal)

All right, I have been seeing constant discussion about Haesol and it really lets me understand that most of y'all don't understand Kang Haesol as a character (Or you just don't have common sense) and that genuinely boggles my mind while letting me know that many people do not read Shoujo and do not understand Shoujo tropes because if you did you would understand her a lot better.

So I'm going to be breaking down the one Shoujo trope you have to know to understand Kang Haesol as a character.

Stoic male lead.

Yeonwoo's Innocence is not only a roles reversal but it is also a Shoujo deconstruction. If you read a lot of Shoujo and romance in general you can pick up on this pretty quickly. Therefore pretty quickly you should understand what type of character Haesol is.

Kang Haesol is the stoic male lead. Given this is RR she is the female lead but this does not change on account of her gender.

This male lead archetype are the ones who do not speak their emotions. They show them instead through action. THAT! is the character archetype that Haesol is based around.

Another thing about these Stoic characters is that they are obsessive. That is a constant trait that all of these stoic characters have in common and it makes a lot of sense given that because they constantly repress their emotions. When something happens and they lose their grip they are going to blow up and show themselves in ways that are not all that pleasant. (All that emotional repression does something to you and it's only a matter of time until it blows up)

The thing about Yeonwoo's innocence is that typically when this trope is put in a Roles Reversal setting the female lead is not exactly like the stoic male lead that is her counterpart. In an RR setting the female lead who is a reflection of this archetype is typically watered down and made a more feminine version of this archetype that loses all its flavor. as the story goes on but Yeonwoo's innocence does not do this.

Kang Haesol is a genuinely stoic character. She is not going to get all blushy and emote because she is STOIC! The Definition of stoic is someone who shows little to no emotion. Kang Haesol is the personification of this trope in female form and You all need to understand that. If you're expecting her to become some cold beauty who ends up a housewife or whatever TF don't. That is NOT her character and it never will be.

With Stoic characters, you have to actually pay attention to them to understand them. You have to WANT to understand them to be able to peel back the different sides of their personalities and Haesol is perfect for this. If you just look at her surface level you see nothing but a stoic person.

But if you actually LOOK at her and how she interacts with the world around her you understand her a lot better.

That is the appeal of The Stoic archetype. That mystery of who they are is what draws Shoujo readers to them and what makes them such interesting characters.

Kang Haesol is the female version of this archetype so don't treat her any differently. You don't tell male stoic characters to smile more or show more emotion so don't do the same to her.

Kang Haesol throughout the story stays consistent and her personality is still at its core that typical stoic male lead archetype. She's the perfect stoic character.

That is until she meets Yeonwoo.

Love at first sight is also a stoic male lead thing and it is done perfectly in this manhwa. (ah we love it when the calm one loses their marbles)

A character who has their emotions mostly in control but one person (that love interest) throws a retch into their usually calm waters.

Here's the thing though. Haesol is different.

Haesol has no grasp on her emotions. She can not perceive her emotions because of her trauma and how being a child model affected her (those who say we know nothing about her need to read the manhwa again because her backstory is literally thrown in your face in multiple moments of this manhwa) she can not understand her emotions because it is the coping mechanism she developed while she was being abused. If she showed emotion she was punished for doing so. So of course she locked them away. Then being with her mother only made things worse because she never truly cared enough to actually help Haesol and instead hurt her even more.

Which only made her retreat further.

Then she meets Yeonwoo.

Then she felt emotion.

Unbridled, overwhelming, EMOTION! for this "girl" and the confusion of it makes it worse. The confusion of why she's unable to get this "girl" out of her head and why everywhere she turns she sees this beautiful person wherever she turns confused and deludes but excites her.

Then she finds out that "she" is in fact a "he" and that she has a chance (Not like she wouldn't have a chance with a girl like have we seen her?)

Of course, she's obsessed!

Of course, she wanted to get closer to him. Of course, she will use whatever excuse she can to get near him.

Of course, she wants him desperately! He's the first person to elicit such strong emotion from her and it's positive! Not only is it overwhelmingly positive but it's all consuming and she's terrified because she's never felt this before.

Of course, she hides it away and shows nothing when showing emotion has only ever led to disaster.

Now that that is out of the way, the reason why I wanted to explain this is because people don't seem to understand her character, especially in relation to Yeonwoo.

Understand that this is a Shoujo deconstruction and a roles reversal manhwa. (it's a good one as well. the most well-written one I've ever read)

This is a two-in-one so unless you have experience with Shoujo/ romance and works that deconstruct popular tropes you most likely won't understand many of the things that are being done in this month.

Haesol very clearly is obsessed with Yeonwoo.

It is painfully obvious and you don't even need to reread it to understand that. (though his manhwa has insane reread value) The moment you get to the scene where she turns around after Yeonwoo asks to go to the amusement park with her you should already have alarms blaring (if you read Shoujo) because you understand that's not what a stoic character would typically do.

In Shoujo, the first meeting with the stoic male lead most of the time is very one and-done. The stoic male lead most of the time does not turn back and ask the female lead anything much less talk to her.

It is mostly their second interaction that does that.

However in Haesol and Yeonwoo's interaction not only does she give him her umbrella but she also engages in a brief conversation asking if he's ok. Sure it's small and bearly a minute but it still matters. If you understand the context surrounding that scene you're going to understand that her giving him her umbrella means that she calculated that he has to give it back to her.

Furthering their conversation... and making sure she gets to talk to him again.

There are so many little details that have been put into this manhwa that need to be talked about more because this is just one of them.

Haesol is a character whom I've said multiple times you need to look at her actions and not her words if you want to understand her as a character.

Also given that she is a Stoic character her obsession is going to be deep, it is going to be unhealthy, and it is not going to be in any way light.

Given the fact that Yeonwoo in fact enables these tendencies of hers you all need to understand that is going to likely get worse. Not in a bad way Shoujo has a tendency to make obsession like this completely viable (as we should let the girls have their fun. I personally love it and fall for it hook line and sinker) but given that this is Esol we are talking about she will probably twist this trope on its head in some way shape or form.

In all honesty, I'm just sick and tired of people constantly making horrible takes about Haesol as a character when it is clear they do not understand who she is. It is very clear that you do not read Shoujo or consume romance in general because most of these takes would not be happening if people actually understood the context of the genre.

[thephantomcasebook]

An actress I really respect once said that when you are given a characters to play you shouldn't judge the character, because then you would be making them a disservice. If you have to play a prostitute then you can't judge the fact that they are able to have sex with a person they are disgusted by for 10$,but understand what led them there and who they are in the context of the story.

I feel like a couple of the HOTD actors didn't do that, judging the character without understanding who they were. And then if you add the 'woke' politics of the writers, then it makes sense how some characters were written and played.

I remember that quote, but I can't, for the life of me, remember who said it.

But I 1000% agree with you.

Just like there's been a degradation of writing over the last decade, because, all writers are taught to do now is deconstruct and tear down, not how to create. Acting is also starting to degrade in the decades due to this insipid mind virus that's affecting everything.

Back in the old days, an actor took on a role and became that role, finding a way in and exposing the humanity so that the flaws can be more pronounced and hit harder when we see both sides of this person that we can relate too, no matter the gender or color of their skin. The actor or actress didn't have to agree with them, but they strove to understand them so they could do the utmost job in brining them to life for the love of the craft and artform.

Now - and I've seen it more and more in actors and especially actresses born in the 1990's - they want to change the character fundamentally to suit their own personality or so they could be more like them. Now, rather than they embody the shoes of someone else, that character must be some extension of them. It's deeply narcissistic and reductive. More and more the character has to be tailor fit and reflect the actor or actresses experiences or beliefs.

I always bring up Lena Headey with Cersei. Don't get it twisted, I may think that Lena Headey is so incredibly stupid that they had to burn down the school to get her out of the third grade, but I also was a big fan of hers for a good chunk of my life and followed her career closely for years. And I guarantee you that Headey had nothing in common with Cersei - other than believing that she is a smart person - but she made it clear in every interview and press tour that she adored Cersei cause she understood her on a fundamental level. And as an actress she loved the scenes where she and Tyrion were being terrible toward one another because she and Dinklage had so much fun getting into these characters and playing these scenes.

The same thing goes for Michelle Dockery and Laura Carmichael in "Downton Abbey". Just like Olivia Cooke and Emma D'Arcy, Dockery and Carmichael are best friends in real life, they're as close as real life sisters. But both their characters in the show and movies, Lady Mary and Lady Edith, aren't just sisters, but rivals and enemies. And the two of them - just like Headey and Dinklage - loved playing those hateful and vicious scenes against one another, cause, once they inhabit these characters, slip in, they have a blast embodying this person they love to be and bringing out their humanity in these sparing and pissing contests between two rich aristocrat sisters.

However, when you look at Cooke and D'arcy, they want the characters of Alicent and Rhaenyra to reflect them, their relationship, their friendship, and not them becoming Alicent and Rhaenyra, taking on the two characters attributes and beliefs. Both actresses are so intolerant, so up their own ass, that rather than accept that these two women hate one another, that they come from two different worlds once they grow up into adults, they allow their bullshit bimbo feminist cultist beliefs get in the way of their own craft.

Rather than Cooke portraying Alicent as a traditionalist and pious woman that values family and church. She decided that Alicent was a secret closeted lesbian who hates herself and secretly pines for Rhaenyra and her freedoms. And all because Cooke has such a distaste, such a prejudice, against real life women who think in such a way, that she couldn't bear to not only portray them in media, but lower herself to try and understand their world view at all.

And that's why Cooke will always be a good actress but never a great actress like Dockery, Headey, Jessica Brown Findlay, and Laura Carmichael. Cause she'll never fully embody or get lost in a character enough to make them a real or tangible person because her empathy is blocked by rampant narcissisms masked as a crusading activist of the most luxury of West End, London, politics.

[saint-starflicker]

A brief history of my fandoms:

Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (The X-Files) — Doesn't count because I was on Team Platonic, but the gender subversions that I didn't know were subversions, that I thought those are the genders, still did invite a lot of "a person is a person no matter what gender and however else they are different or if they're having a bad day and it makes them mean then it's still important to understand them so you can work together...because there's a serial killer out there who eats human livers, and that is more important to team up against".

Buffy Summers and Redacted For Shipping Flamewar Prevention (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) — I think that I liked what they symbolized to each other in the relationship more than I liked getting to know them. I did read blog essays about how details of this relationship showed a pattern of power imbalance and toxicity/abuse that should not be aspired to in real life, but back then there wasn't this sort of "go into the comments section or inbox of somebody else's blog and tell them that some Big Name Fan said stop shipping"...Instead, I read the essay, I agreed with myself to beware of those patterns in real life, and I kept on shipping because I was not in the first place shipping aspirationally. I was into what they thought they meant to each other, and I already knew that would be unsustainable in real life.

Naoto Shirogane / Kanji Tatsumi (Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4) — I respect that some people headcanon Naoto as ace aro, or cis while Kanji is completely gay, or that Naoto is plainly not that into Kanji, or even that Naoto is an annoying pompous jerk. I hope there is equal respect on the banks of my little lake island where I love their sort of Chivalric Romance dynamic and I love them both as characters. Shout-out to my partner who puts them in a polyamorous triad with Rise Kujikawa. Go, team kohai, go. I played this on the Playstation 2 console, so I have not been in with the re-release updates.

Killian Jones (Once Upon A Time) — I identified a lot with Emma's emotional issues (not so much the life situation), and I thought Killian's sexual libertine aspect was downplayed and then punished enough canonly that I never took his character as a personal threat so frankly I was a fan of his character too...but canonizing Captain Swan was a mistake. He should have become the town bike, and stayed the town bike, giving crabs to all the 90s Disney princes too. He could still produce a lesbian daughter if the show needed him to have that specific redemption arc that badly. Give us a promiscuous bi Captain Hook, cowards! Make that the face that canonizes a thousand ships!

Laura Hollis / Carmilla Karnstein (KindaTV's Carmilla) — I like Carmilla slightly more to moderately more as a character, but I understand why Laura is the protagonist and doing a fine job of it. The both of them in my opinion make the best portrayal and then deconstruction and then satisfying reconstruction of the monster/everyman type of ship.

Peter Simmonds / Jason McConnell (Bare: A Pop Opera) — I adored and admired Peter, still do even though I can admit to his literally fatal flaws, the show did a good job getting me invested in their relationship in such a short time (Jason had me at "duck"), but I did not understand Jason. Depending on how he's played, I would often go, "I don't want Peter my fictional son to be dating a boy like that" because Jason is several personal issues stacked in a trenchcoat. But then that's actually what made Jason McConnell my favorite character to analyze because in the context of his personal history and life situation...everything he feels and does makes sense if you think about it. But you have to think about it. Nobody being the way he is, with his mind, his emotions, his history, and his situation would have done better—because he could not, he could not, he could not, and I think a crucial part of the work is being open to the concept that neither could you the audience member if you were him. If Jason is the monster, the problem person, then the world he was trapped in turned him into that and that's what needs to change. If people say "he has no excuse" now then my most charitable interpretation is that it's because the world has changed since then. Three cheers for the world, I guess.

reblog for a larger sample size plz ✌️

[sanstropfremir]

So I have opinions on the other stages but like most of us I can’t stop thinking about the SF9 stage. Hanya said it really well in her response but I think we have to break up the members into the ones who tried to emulate Taemin’s androgyny and those who just flat out didn’t try. So in order I’d put it Taeyang, Jaeyoon, Zuho. Those three stood out to me the most as really pushing into more feminine ways of carrying themselves and dancing especially Jaeyoon-like where did that man come from it was very unexpected. Then Chani and Inseong were both more neutral. I can’t put Chani in the first category mostly because of the contrast between his dancing and style with the female dancers that made it obvious that he was still trying to be more masculine despite having certain moves that definitely lend to a feline style like all the hip movements(whether consciously or unconsciously). And last Hwiyoung, Youngbin, and Dawon. I think this is the distinction that some people were making with “sexy” and “Taemin sexy”. Like everyone just associates him with sexiness but opening your shirt to show off your abs doesn’t fit with Taemin’s usual sensuality. Taemin seems to be more focused on movement (throwback to your post on his dancing style) so in order to emulate him there a certain attitude and way in which you carry yourself through movement is necessary. Also youngbin’s rap part did not fit with the concept either-it was too energetic and chill (too much swagger?). Like the way he moved compared to say Zuho was more in line with his usual stuff rather than fitting the way he moved to the stage and song. It’s also interesting to see that the outfits seem to also keep in line with this. Zuho and Taeyang have their midsections showing in a way that’s more common in women’s fashion then in men’s, Chani and Inseong are almost completely covered (so neither in one direction or the other) and Hwiyoung has his arms bared to show off his manly, manly biceps. And of course there’s Dawon. It’s fascinating to compare the members with the more revealing outfits. Like they all have their midsections uncovered but to be more feminine it’s only just a crop top and to be more masculine you open the shirt up completely. It makes sense. Also I’ve been obsessed with Jaeyoon and I can’t exactly pinpoint why he stood out so much especially when Taeyang is RIGHT THERE (though I don’t really think Taeyang got a solo scene but rather was center on the group dances which kind of dilutes his parts). Like his outfit is pretty plain but I love the cutout and the fact that he has long sleeves but they aren’t mesh. It’s simple but effective. I kept thinking this was the Hetero man’s Move especially during Youngbin and Dawson’s parts.

ok this took a really long time because honestly i changed what i was writing about like four times in the middle of the process and i changed my mind like four times because this is a very complicated topic and i could not settle on what the best way to come at it was. tbh i dont think i did the best job even though this is over a thousand words but i have no clue how to make this any more coherent without re-reading all of my flatmate and i's gender theory books and that's just way too much. but here we go.

EDIT: here is hanya’s post about the stage for reference!

where i'm at right now is that i think we are overlaying taemin’s current gender antics with what the actual move was. move has transformed along with taemin, and as such we look back at it with the understanding of what it becomes, but if we take a moment to forget that context, well... let me show you. here’s the 171019 comeback stage. and the 171027. and the 171029. now, here’s the 190223 stage from sketchbook. and from almost a year later, at the 2019 mbc music festival. and now here’s it from a month ago on the tiktok stage. it’s changed a significant amount not only in how he performs it, but in how the costumes and his body affect what it looks like. the cutoff muscle shirt of october 2017 absolutely has a different connotation than the lace back and velvet princess glove and the diamonds of december 2019.

i still do believe that sf9’s cover is missing a huge dimension because it comes from a fundamental non-understanding of what people who present even the slightest bit outside of the gender binary go through, i don’t think they were wrong in interpreting it as ‘man doing non-aggressive but seductive dance moves’ because on the surface, that’s what it is. taemin has actually spent a significant portion of his solo career doing what you described as traditionally 'masculine' dressing; he did famously rip his shirt off for the first non-music show performance of danger, after all. what we associate as 'taemin sensuality' is relatively new for him, it's more prominently a post-want mannerism because pre-move (and for a lot of move itself) he was very focussed on being perceived as masculine.

if we look at sf9's costumes individually, the breakdown looks like this:

chani - skinny trouser, chiffon shirt, and a cropped wrap suit jacket with a tie back

dawon - straight leg trouser, open silk shirt

jaeyoon - asymmetric open shoulder mock turtleneck, wide leg trouser

taeyang - wide leg trouser, faux leather open shoulder crop top

inseong - silk/silk blend shirt, cropped asymmetric suit jacket with a crossover back, tailored trouser

hwiyoung - sleeveless mock neck faux leather vest, straight leg cargo pant

youngbin - mock neck asymmetric crop top with a mesh underlayer, wide leg trouser

zuho - skinny trouser, mock neck crop top, cropped suit jacket with a pointed front

taemin has worn most of these looks. cropped wrap jacket? ngda beyond live velvet suit. open silk shirt? the move album cover. asymmetric shoulder cutout? several want performances. the only exception is that he doesn’t often wear non-skinny trousers, but even then he did for his beauty and the beast moment with the jinro frog. and sleeveless was the whole costume concept for move in the first place. even youngbin’s look is very similar to this outfit from the offsick concert series. but silhouette is only one factor of a complete costume design - you have to take into account the performer’s body, and how that silhouette is perceived on that body. it’s interesting that you specify that hwiyoung’s biceps are ‘manly’ and grouped him in with the more ‘masculine’ of the sf9 members; as i showed at the beginning of this, taemin was at his most physically muscular for move promotions. hwiyoung has just as pretty a face as taemin, but we perceive him differently in this outfit because his body is categorized as more masculine because his muscles are bigger. and this is fundamentally a gender essentialist argument because bigger muscles are not actually ‘more masculine,’ muscles don’t have gender they’re just how humans move around. it’s just our societally impressed gender binary that makes us think that.

another costume point i want to make is how you describe chani and inseong as being completely covered so ‘neither one direction or the other,’ which i would like to break down a bit. for starters, jaeyoon is also essentially fully covered, but you perceived him as being one of the more androgynous ones over chani or inseong. why? because his silhouette was more form-fitted? because there was an uncommon area of skin showing? chani has a tightly fit silhouette as well, and you can see a fair amount of his skin because his shirt is chiffon. why is a suit neutral but something cut to follow the contour of a body not? the fact of the matter is, the suit is the most symbolically gendered garment in the world; it is loaded with western colonial and patriarchal implications. we just view it as 'neutral' because we’ve been normalized to see it as neutral. now neither of the suits chani or inseong are wearing are traditionally cut, and chani’s especially is quite subversive in its construction, but taemin is no stranger to using the implications of a suit for move, here’s the stage from 171105. grey double breasted pinstripe suits were the most popular style for businessmen in the postwar west, and still maintain a prominent indicator of class and power to this day.

you are correct in pointing out that the movements and mannerisms of the members don’t all match the same level, but i want to specifically talk about the intro moment with chani, because you mention him as trying to be more masculine, which i very much disagree with. chani actually does the best at retaining the body neutrality of the original choreo because the original choreo as a stand alone isn’t that seductive or ‘feminine.’ yea he doesn’t have the attitude down pat but the guy’s 20 and is clearly not as comfortable with being this kind of sexy. the reason why you’re perceiving him to be more ‘masculine’ in his movements is because the backup dancers are frankly, being pretty aggressively sexual in a feminine coded way around him. of course he’s gonna look out of place! part of what gives move its uniqueness is that the backup dancers are doing the exact same choreo as taemin, at the exact same intensity. not an altered version where they slut drop behind him.

like i said at the very beginning, i think taemin’s been tipped into the ‘feminine’ category under false assumptions, so it’s doing a bit of skewing of the responses to this stage. if i were to make a very reductivist diagram, i think a lot of responses have been (taemin) <- neutral -> masculine, with the implication that taemin is the feminine analogue, but in reality what taemin is and is aiming for is feminine -> (taemin) <- masculine. because we have been socialized to see things in such an aggressive binary, it can be very difficult to pick out what a true neutral is.

[gunkreads]

Ok small analysis/rant about the changes to Aes Sedai culture in the show and a little extra rant at the end:

One scene sticks out to me like a sore, swollen thumb. Liandrin trying to wiggle her way into Nynaeve’s head in the hallway felt like such a painful, jarring change from the books and... even after deconstructing why I believe the changes happened, I don’t like it. My personal opinion aside, it’s very clear that Liandrin, along with literally every other Aes Sedai, is being given miles more room to be expressive than the books suggest. In the books, for example, Alanna is noted as a weirdly expressive and open Aes Sedai; in the show she’s played fairly similarly to how I imagined, but is still one of the less expressive sisters we see. Aes Sedai are frequently defined by the phrases “serene expression” or “schooled her face to stillness”. These women don’t let a damn thing show on their faces unless they want to. In the show, this has been changed to slightly more familiar manipulation tactics of ingratiation and congeniality, specifically in Liandrin’s case. This, obviously, lets the actors go absolutely nuts and, devoid of the context of the books, it totally works. Every woman playing an Aes Sedai absoLUTELY comes across as at least a bit creepily manipulative.

But it’s fundamentally different from the books. I understand that a visual medium with live actors can’t really afford to have a bunch of people walk around completely expressionless, but that’s what makes Aes Sedai so scary. They literally DO NOT look fully human. Their faces throw you off, their voices and expressionless demeanor put up the hairs on the back of your neck--to the layman, they’re practically eldritch in some ways. The way they’re described, you could almost say they’re halfway down the slope of uncanny valley. It seems the show, so far, is leaning in to the idea that Moiraine has mastered this stoicism to a much greater extent than most Aes Sedai (which is fine--she’s kind of a folk legend to them in the books as well). I assume Siuan will have a similar mastery of it. However, she’s still selective with it, and that pulls the whole damn thing apart. Think about it logistically: acting serene all the time as a way of being unreadable only works if you’re serene all the time. Moiraine is far too expressive in the show for this to work; the second she puts on the serene face, it’s painfully clear she’s hiding something. If you want to hide something, you can’t just go around telegraphing that you’re hiding something.

Again, considering the show as a standalone, most of this is pretty chill. I personally liked this establishment of Aes Sedai as, above all, imperious. They’re cold, they’re calculating, they’re frequently cruel, occasionally kind, and commanding to an extent you rarely see in ANY media. I’ve said before that every shitty thing the Aes Sedai do translates to real life perfectly if you imagine the women doing it as a bunch of men in suits around a conference table. Personally, that take on a matriarchal organization was super cool! It’s one of Jordan’s few gender-relations decisions that feels weirdly progressive; he’s effectively saying that gender doesn’t decide what kind of leader you’ll be, only the manner and degree of power you have. A woman given a colossal degree of influence over world affairs is fundamentally no different from a man in the same situation, in his world. There are good and bad women leading the world to the same degree that there are good and bad men. I love that shit! I love this idea that putting a fictional woman in a position that’s male-dominated in real life doesn’t immediately make her better or worse than the fictional man that would’ve been there! I’m sure this is a concept from like three waves of feminism ago, but that’s not my purview; I just think it’s a more interesting world than one where women and men lead in a fundamentally different way.

More to the point, the fact that Liandrin’s manipulation tactics are very specifically aligned with traits that, in real life, are often considered feminine bothers me. She lays it on thick in honeyed words, ingratiating smiles, and naive body language. It very clearly doesn’t work on Nynaeve, and that makes it look sillier. I loved the way that, in the books, Aes Sedai “manipulation” frequently involved just giving a command and walking away with such confidence that people did it, not for any reason more than sheer fear of the consequences of failure. Their whole MO is to browbeat people. No carrot, all stick. The only variations you see is how much stick is applied and how well they hit pressure points with it. Moiraine is a great manipulator because she’s smart about when to ease off the stick, going from full-bodied smacks to light pokes. Elaida isn’t good at it because she puts her hips into every single swing she takes with that stick. Aes Sedai almost never learn that there can be a give-and-take to their commands because they’ve been trained that no one has the right to ask anything of them. Sure, they’re servants of the people, but the prevailing culture in the Tower is that people will take what they are given by the Aes Sedai and offer fealty or loyalty or trust in return.

Just to keep the monkeys off my back, I’ll reiterate that I’m still enjoying the show. Even if I’m not some hardcore fan who speedread every book the day it was released and reread the series every year, I still love this series and the show is making critical changes to things I enjoyed in the books. translation: let me have this one. I’m going forward in the show treating it drastically differently than I initially hoped I could. So much has been changed, so much not to my liking, that I’m ready to give up trying to keep track of it all. I almost want to quit posting analyses of the differences between the show and books because there’s just so much going on in the adaptation that I’m just... not vibing with. I think the show is good, I think it’s well made, I think it’s doing at least a passable job of capturing the spirit of the series, but it truly doesn’t feel like the same story. It’s going to have to re-sell me on everything I love in Wheel of Time. So far it’s doing a bang-up job, but the sheer effort of forgetting what I know of the story is making the show so much harder to enjoy than I’d like. It’s hitting me hard in a lot of ways, but it’s not even throwing many of the punches that made me love Eye of the World so much the first time. The world feels smaller, the arcs are shorter, the mysteries shallower and more contained. The show isn’t qualitatively worse for any of that; it’s just different in a way I’m having a hard time getting over all the changes.

inb4 “rip to you but i love everything about the show” proud of u bb <3 couldn’t be me

[dog-teeth]

hi... idk if this is stupid but any tips on telling apart gender envy and attraction? i've been questioning for years and it's really throwing me off. i don't wanna transition only to realize i wanted to be with the person instead of being them :((

this ended up being long asf cuz i love to ramble so im gonna put it under the cut

i’ve struggled a lot with that too, i started being attracted to men after transitioning more, instead of just having gender envy towards them, thanks to physical/medical/more intense social transition which made me able to interact with men while not being perceived as a woman. it was all very confusing.

generally, i don’t think pure attraction would make you?? want to transition??? like if you were just attracted to them then you would be attracted to them as your current gender, not want to change your gender to be more like them? i guess maybe that could happen but honestly i don’t rly think cis people usually work like that.

i also think you need to deconstruct your idea of what ‘transition’ means - it’s not like one singular process over a set amount of time that you go through and then suddenly at the end you realize you made a mistake and don’t identify that way. transitioning is an active choice you make every moment of every day, and the vast majority of it is internal + social, not physical, so if you end up changing your mind, you can do it just fine. i strongly doubt you would go through an entire social and medical transition without realizing that you actually just wanted to be with someone. along the way you will be able to understand which parts of gender and transition make you happy, and what feels wrong. you’ll be able to feel out how things like altering your gender presentation with clothes, pronouns, names, etc, feels to you. if it makes you feel more like yourself, you’re probably not just doing it because you’re attracted to someone.

you can (and should) also take your transition as slow as you want, deciding to transition is a big deal but also it doesn’t have any inherent repercussions, from that decision you can choose to do whatever you want with your gender. take it one little step at a time, it’s not a big huge thing that happens all at once, it’s a slow and tedious and active process that will give you plenty of time to figure yourself out along the way.

as always, my blanket advice is that thinking really hard about your gender identity and what you want and how you feel often does not help, what does help is actually experimenting with your identity/presentation/etc, in whatever way you think would be most helpful and doable, even if it’s just by yourself or with a close friend or online etc. it doesn’t have to be drastic or public.

if you’ve been questioning for years, that’s a pretty solid indicator that some part of your identity, gender, sexuality, or presentation, is not currently what will make you happiest & your most genuine self. which part, i can’t tell you, but you can figure out with experimentation.

it also can be both gender envy and attraction. i feel that way about guys sometimes. it doesn’t make either aspect less valid or important, it just means there are traits of that gender/person that i find attractive both in a partner and that i want for myself. now that i’m more comfortable in my body & presentation (shoutout to hrt), the relationship i have with gender-envy-attraction is a little different, it would take a whole essay to explain but basically i just have a type LOL.

i can’t tell if you mean that there’s one specific person who you feel gender envy / attraction towards, or if this is a more general thing for you. if you mean one person, then consider looking for other sources of gender inspiration, like other people you’d want to be like, and see how it feels, and just think about your life and experiences separate from this person.

either way, think about who you would want to be if there were no expectations or context. just if it was you alone being able to choose what gender you were born as, or how you would want to look/be if you could instantly magically make it happen. if it’s something different than how you are now, then that’s significant! for example, i know that if i was the only person on earth and no one would ever see me, i would still want to have a flat chest. and i wouldn’t be able to choose which gender i id want to be born as because i wouldn’t want to be born as either one. dealing inn hypotheticals like this can be frustrating and unhelpful, but it can also help you get to the root of your feelings by removing the practical context of your life.

as always my perspective is that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from experimenting with your gender, and you should go for it, and if you end up realizing that it’s not for you, that’s totally fine and you can go back to being cis! no harm done! but if there’s even a chance that changing something about your gender would make you happier, you should try it out.

[hel2anthusannuus]

Okay, you mean really well but i wanted to touch on a few things:

“oh you’re nonbinary. [..] that reframes the post.”

First, you don’t have to be nonbinary to make critical examinations of gender. And in fact, you lose a lot of perspective and conversation by saying that only a certain group are allowed to criticize and analyze facets of gender and gender terminology. I am purposefully not letting you know my gender. I could be anything. Yes, gender provides context, but if you are unable or unwilling to listen to people points because they are not the gender you THINK should be talking about a subject, you need to stay out of debates.

This is not a matter of being, say, open minded, this is about the inability to critically examine a post with or without context. That is a valuable tool. I understand that context is used as a framing tool but you need to be able to look at and deconstruct what someone is saying without it. I understand, too, that this post is virtually devoid of context [of gender] but even REMOVED from context of who is authoring this sentiment he’s making a perfectly legitimate observation and examination with ostensibly no red flags, so i’d reexamine your biases.

appealing to lawmakers with reductive language is bad. Full stop. It is not inclusive. It is not appropriately descriptive. It leaves out, say, the intersex, or anybody who does not fall squarely into the binary of afab or amab. It only serves to harm our community. That is not why we use those terms. We are a society based on clout and convenience, and ignorant lawmakers who haven’t seen a gay person since stonewall have adopted them under the assumption that is all that there is. We know better. They purposefully don’t.

Why would you assume op is afab, by the way, right after talking about the “afab = women” rhetoric? It sounds as if you may assume that nonbinary people, especially those critical of gender terminology and the reductive nature of those terms, are secretly women lite. That sounds like a bias you may have. And should do something about.

I have a solution to twitter’s character limit, by the way: use more tweets. One should not trade specificity for view-ability. Doing so is *bad*.

I really appreciate that you took the time to reconsider what op was saying and think about it but just wanted to touch on those few things. 👍

everyone who says afabs and amabs ? stop that . “Assigned female at births,” “assigned male at births,” do you understand why it sounds off? just say whatever specific thing you mean instead of dancing around it and couching it in faux progressive language

[pixelsandpins]

My Gender is Crab: How Fantasy and Sci-fi Helped Shaped My Non-Binary Identity

On Twitter and in casual conversation I have described my gender as the following: crab-person, one of the creatures from “Behemoth’s World” by 70’s sci-fi painter Richard Clifton-Day, a bird demon with a funny hat, the Pokemon Gengar, and “a lady, I guess, but…you know…not on purpose.” The non-binary experience is, by its nature, weird as hell in the context of a system that, at its best, describes itself as a spectrum between set points, and, at its worst, demands you fall into a discreet category of only two options. Are you neither? Are you both? Are you sat somewhere squat in the middle? And the answer is just sort of…yes? My relationship with my own non-binaryness is informed by a patchwork of neurodivergencies. At its core, though, it stems from a pervasive intellectual disconnect from existence as a human as we, collectively, understand it. Sci-fi and fantasy is both an instigating factor, and, as a writer, an exploration of that thought process.

The first time I feel like I saw a real deconstruction of the gender I was assumed at birth was in a book by Harry Harrison. In West of Eden there’s this species of hyper-intelligent matriarchal dinosaur people called the Yilané . Among the Yilané , the females run everything and the males are these little blobfish lookin’ dudes who get relegated to the breeding pen. And at twelve years old? My mind? Totally and completely blown. And this wasn’t because it was women in charge. Not really. I’d been raised on that unique brand of 90s/early aughts girl power already. Buffy, Xena, various Disney channel everygirl heroines, Powerpuff Girls, Daria, whatever the fuck Cleopatra 2525 was trying to do. I had been told that girls could do anything boys could do without sacrificing their femininity blah blah blah.

But the Yilané ?

They weren’t any of that bubblegum, spandex, high-kick pop feminism that my female cohorts vibed with so easily. They were morally complicated and intelligent and calculating and vicious. More importantly, they were the first version of “woman” I truly groked. Their whole existence wasn’t centered around either adhering to or being in defiance of some arbitrary standard of femininity. They lived unburdened by the expectations that my own horrific corporeal form had been saddled with. They were monstrous. So while I admired the Janeways and Hermiones and Dana Scullys and Zoë Washburns with which I had been presented as formidable models of womanhood, I didn’t want to be them. I wanted claws and teeth and the ability to smell blood on the wind.

“So you’re just a scaly/furry?”

Shush.

Shit, maybe?

It’s not quite like that.

I don’t/didn’t really want to be an animal necessarily (though, like, if someone offered to turn me into a dragon…who the fuck is turning that down). But when no version of womanhood, be it traditional or progressive, feels right and you can’t pinpoint why, just being a horned demon from one of the middle circles of hell seems like a way easier plan in the long term.

Over the years, without intellectually understanding that I was doing it in my writing, I started crafting sections of world and lore where the rules for sex and gender and the expression of both were different at a fundamental, biological level. Female elves became boxy and tall, almost indistinguishable from their male counterparts in androgynous elven clothing. Ariesians could only be told apart by the color of their horns. The dimorphism of drakkakens shifted from their initial designs in my early sketch books to favor, larger, imposing females. Goblins, that I finally got around to including in The Terrible Persistence of Memory, were designed as hermaphrodites. I’ve been working up the details for a band of tri-sexed species, tacking down their reproductive process, and a member of this clade appeared as the lead in The Center of the Universe.

Naxos was the first time, though, when proverbial pen was put to paper that the personal feelings about my own identity latched to a specific character. Ysa is a bull-creature. She’s been made into something weird and strange through a combination of her own will and magic that she doesn’t quite understand. And she’s me. And Ari, her romantic partner, doesn’t see Ysa in terms of any social construct. Ari doesn’t see a man or a woman or a monster. She sees Ysa. To make this as a story between women. To make and market it as a yuri game. For me, it was a radical reinterpretation of the role of “woman” I felt like I was regularly being forced into. That I couldn’t escape.

Since I put out that game in 2018, what began as a re-invention turned into what I realized had always been a rejection, one I hadn’t really figured out the parameters of, yet. One that had words I had only really just learned as an adult. That despite how much I wanted womanhood to incorporate that which I was, it just kind of….didn’t. But that it was, indeed, something I could escape. And the instant I gave myself a place, however fictional, to actually do so, I started to see myself hiding underneath.

[writing-with-olive]

im writing a book where you can either be a prince princess or witch. princes as male princesses as female and witch is someone who has potential to become evil/some1 who isn’t a damsel. mc is a cis girl + lesbian who wants be a "prince" to save ppl. the whole thing is to be a commentary on gender roles and deconstruction of fairytales i wanna include trans and nb ppl but how can i do that without it being offensive esp in a world like this

Hey anon!

So first thing, I'm going to write what I think you've worldbuilt here to make sure that I'm accurate in my understanding/if I'm not, then to see my suggestions with that context.

Prince: male, not a damsel (based on your character wanting to be a prince)

Princess: female, a damsel

Witch: genderless, has the potential to be evil, not a damsel like a princess

Okay so. Including characters respectfully. My personal opinion is that a trans-inclusive/trans-supportive world is ideal because the ratio of fictional transphobic worlds to trans-inclusive worlds is WAY too high. Also, we live in a largely transphobic world (just take a look at what the United States is doing - it's horrific) and a chance to actually have some escapism, instead of just being reminded that we're not included the same way everyone else is, is kinda nice. 

With this in mind, how you structure your worldbuilding is going to look a few different ways. (Note that these are not the limit, but just some ways I might think about worldbuilding to help give you a starting place)

Option 1: There's a certain period of time before people are seperated out into being princes, princesses, or witches. During their youth, gender is pretty fluid and open. It's only after a certain milestone that characters have to decide what they want to call themselves and then they are slotted into the appropriate social role. This would mean that it is completely natural to have trans princes/princesses/witches. This does open up the plot hole of "well then why didn't MC just say she was male so she could become a prince?" Though I imagine this can be circumvented with an explanation such as "she didn't realize"

Option 2: Just.... don't explain it. There are trans princesses and trans princes and that's just how it is. This has the benifit of not being too complicated and focusing the story on the gender roles themselves rather than the mechanics of how they work. This also opens up a ton of plotholes so.... have fun with that :D

Option 3: Given that there's witches in this, I'm assuming that there's magic, so maybe there's a way that people could tell what gender characters are based on that, as opposed to what they look like physically. This changes out some of the identity that comes with discovering that you don't quite fit into the established gender roles, but it also reinforces that people's gender isn't just what kinda package they were born with, which is a win. 

The one thing to keep in mind is that under no circumstances should you make all the trans characters (or if there's only one trans character) witches. If you have witch trans characters, fine. But you gotta have trans princes/princesses too. 

This leads us to nonbinary people. Basically the concept is that if someone's nonbinary, it means they don't fit into society's gender roles. In this case, the gender roles are pretty strict -- you're either a prince, princess, or a witch. Like with binary trans characters, we have a few options here as well (feel free to mix and match options that I give for nb/trans characters how you want it's your book).

Option 1: If it's set up like a monarchy system almost, you can have nonbinary characters being neither princes or princesses (the witch comment from above applies here as well), but rather other high-ranking positions like advisors or religious leaders or emissaries. Basically, you're not forcing them into lower ranks because they don't fit with the binary system that's been set up

Option 2: There are nonbinary princes/princesses. Basically, they've been slotted into being a prince or princess just like everyone else, but within their role as prince or princess, they're still nonbinary, meaning they might use more gender neutral language to talk about themselves, and they fit into the role as required but in every other respect, they don't. 

So I guess to sum up, my thoughts are to make your world trans-inclusive/trans-supportive as this is both nice to read as someone who is trans, and also adds to the overall commentary on gender roles, and within this, you have options to play with to make your worldbuilding support this.

Happy writing!

[zedecksiew]

“Exotic Warrior”

(Am writing this because it’s been bubbling over in my mind. This post is an exorcism of bad vibes over bad ideas that have held me hostage, the past few days.)

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There is now criticism on Twitter arguing that the “Exotic Warrior”, one of Troika!’s d66 Backgrounds, is racist because it is coded as Orientalist / Asian.

I would like to respectfully disagree.

(There are other arguments in the initial complaint. I am commenting the “Exotic Warrior” specifically. Because by being actually East Asian -- part of the diaspora, living in Southeast Asia -- I feel I have some standing to comment.)

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When I encountered “Exotic Warrior” in the book it stood out as a neat background and helped sell me on Troika!.

As I read it, the Background is a deft piece of work: it references the “adventurer from a foreign land” thing, but occludes said trope’s usual Orientalism -- an attempt at deconstruction.

A foreigner, in Troika!, can be anybody. This isn’t just a platitude; it’s supported by the book’s implied science-fantasy setting -- is essentially Spelljammer, but on more acid.

It is similar to Electric Bastionland / Planescape / etc in that it features a melting-pot, nobody’s-local “city at the centre of creation”-type deal. (I have Thoughts about RPG setttings that focus on metropoles, but that’s a separate post.)

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Here’s the “Exotic Warrior” ’s text, in full:

24 EXOTIC WARRIOR No one has heard of your homeland. Your habits are peculiar, your clothes are outrageous, and in a land jaded to the outlandish and new you still somehow manage to stand out.

POSSESSIONS - A WEIRD & WONDERFUL WEAPON. - STRANGE CLOTHES. - EXCITING ACCENT. - A TEA SET or 3 POCKET GODS or ASTROLOGICAL EQUIPMENT.

ADVANCED SKILLS 6 Language - Exotic Language 3 Fighting in your Weird Weapon 2 Language - Local Language 2 Spell - Random 1 Astrology 1 Etiquette 

Honestly? None of the above reads as particularly problematic. It’s a legit, characterful beginning point for a player-character.

Sure, my Western-media-battered brain jumps to Samurai Warrior -- 

But immediately also to Sufi Missionary or Varangian Guard. And indeed comes to rest at Indeterminately White Gentleperson Naturalist -- the kind of exotic visitor Southeast Asia got, a lot, those scouts of European imperialism.

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These readings are possible because of the illustration the entry is paired with. Here they are together:

Setting aside the surrealist stylisations:

The shape of the costume, the belt, the “skirt” -- these look like Europeanisms, to me. And the figure’s laughing abandon opposes the standard Orientalist tropes of wise inscrutability or red-faced savagery.

The choice to run “Exotic Warrior” with a decidedly non-Orientalist-coded illustration isn’t an unintentional piece of art direction.

(PS: any critique of an illustrated text that only focuses on the words is incomplete. Image is half the text of an illustrated text.)

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The nondescript-ness of the entry plus its accompanying image is an open door. Opening this door isn’t without risk: whatever assumptions you make about your particular “Exotic Warrior” are drawn from your own biases.

+

Regarding “Etiquette” and “Astrology” and “Tea Set”?

With my biases: I don’t read these things as uniquely East-Asian. (When I first encountered “tea set” in Troika! I genuinely thought: “English tea service”, instead of: “temae”.)

The one that I did read as real-world Eastern was “Pocket Gods” -- but many human cultures had this, pocket gods are a part of Troika!’s wider fantasy setting, and “Exotic Warrior” isn’t the only Background to start with them.

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A note on “exotification”:

The criticism of “Exotic Warrior” fundamentally seems to be: “Playing a character from the Other / that is Other-ed = BAD”.

I fundamentally disagree with this notion.

I have no lived experience of a society where being other-ed (in terms of culture, race, class, gender expression, etc) isn't an ever-present thread in the fabric of one's life -- and therefore a crucial and profound source of conflict and insight into the human condition.

(The ethnic fault-lines in Malaysian society have become so unbridgeable today primarily because it was official policy to sweep all that other-ing under the rug of “Malaysia Truly Asia”, as opposed to working through our ugly whispered prejudices towards understanding.)

We are not all the same. Cultural, geographic, and material differences exist. The mismatch in knowledge and understanding this creates? It matters.

In fact: To insist on universal cultural-knowledge parity; To push for “nobody’s born here, everybody belongs” melting-pots as the default framing; To nudge questions of difference and arrival into ghettos (to paraphrase one of the tweets I saw: “you can only explore issues surrounding the Other in a game specifically designed to do so”);

All that comes off to me as a very neo-liberal position, designed to safeguard and disguise the privileges of “mainstream” metropolitan melting-pots.

I read it as:

“Post-modern cosmopolitan societies want to be inclusive but don’t want to pay the admission price of history and discomfort, so they generally opt for erasure instead.”  

+++

Throughout this post I have been careful to speak from my particular context. Because context matters.

More context:

I like Troika!. Like, a lot. I think its creator, UK-based Daniel Sell, strives and succeeds at making thoughtful work. I consider him a friend, whom I’ve had personal (albeit Internet-bound) interactions now and again.

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I have BJ Recio to thank for the following insight. Talking to him about “Exotic Warrior”, BJ brought up a crucial point that I’ll paraphrase here:

Roleplaying the outsider can be bad, especially when it is used as an excuse by the West to do fucked-up shit. But it is not default bad. Assuming it is default bad centres the discussion on “Will White people fuck this up? (Yes.)”

Essentially, the argument against “Playing a character from the Other / that is Other-ed = BAD" assumes two things:

(a) Western participants as default; (b) harm (because of ignorance or bad faith) as default.

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If your context -- your Background, hah! -- prompts you to experience Troika! with those assumptions; and therefore read “Exotic Warrior” as necessarily Orientalist, and racially-charged?

Your context is your context; I’m not going to invalidate it.

If you are located in a society where the binary of White / non-White overpowers everything, I certainly understand the whys and hows of your position.

Your context matters.

+

So does mine.

+++

I think I’m reacting badly to this because I personally feel turned away by this RPG Discourse Around Representation (tm), supposedly done in the name of my East-Asian ass.

I resent the idea that “Playing a character from the Other / that is Other-ed = BAD”. It threatens to render verboten the entirety of my RPG work.

I am a SEA creator trying to explore and be true to my context. If there is one constant throughout SEAsian experience, it is difference.

Our peoples have ever encountered and glamourised and hated each other, all of us simultaneously Us and the Other:

Japanese and Malay enclaves in Ayutthaya; Mongol invaders in Java, who never left; Luzones mercenaries, employed by both the Sultan of Melaka and his Portuguese enemies; The reputation of the Ilanun / Bajak Laut; White conquistadors (aforementioned above); The entire history of diaspora Chinese identities (my identity!) in SEA, generally;

Foreigners from foreign lands -- feared, not fully understood, not fully understanding, simultaneously conquering and settling and finding modes of belonging, becoming a part of the land.

Always arriving.

+

That the background music of my geography, discordant though it may be, is somehow so harmful it may only be meaningfully depicted in the hermetic context of a “game specifically designed to explore that”?

This feels bad, and extremely unwelcoming. It feels like a shut gate instead of an open door.

I refuse to be turned away.

+++

(Hopefully I can finally stop thinking about this shit.)

[random-thought-depository]

In another post I wrote:

“Like … right now I’m planning out a story I intend to write in January; it’s supposed to be a kind of deconstruction of the Fremen mirage, and very much one of the thoughts going into it is “yo, a Proud Warrior Race would be a horrible society to live in or have as neighbors, we shouldn’t romanticize them!” and yet … I feel that the “bad guy” culture in it is much better, from a literary viewpoint, for me having given some thought to the material base of their society and how that would shape their culture. I could have just written them as flat edgelordy-grimdark barbarians, but thinking about their culture in materialist terms gave me a more complex and nuanced picture that I think will make for a more interesting and nuanced story and a fictional society that feels more interesting and human and alive.”

So, I want to infodump a little about this fictional culture I’ve thought up! I decided to split my infodumping into three posts, of which this is the second. In my previous post, I talked about the material conditions and subsistence strategy that shape this culture. If you haven’t read it already, I suggest you click that link and read my last post before you read this one, as it’s important context for what I’ve written here. In this and my next post I’ll talk about these people as a culture instead of just as an economy. I was originally going to make this whole thing two posts, but there’s so much stuff that could go in the culture part I decided I better split that up. In this post I’ll make a broad outline of the less “where does the food come from and where does the sewage go?” aspects of these people’s social structure, try to give you a general picture of how their society works. In my next post I’ll try to give you a more intimate “human” picture of what these people’s lives are like and what sort of people they are; talk more about relationships and attitudes and so on.

History and context:

The ancestors of these people were abducted from Bronze Age Earth by imperialistic aliens and used as basically slaves and slave-soldiers by these aliens. Some time in the last millennium BCE these imperialist aliens and their enemies blew each other up in the interstellar empire equivalent of a nuclear apocalypse. In the aftermath of this war the alien civilizations never really recovered, but the descendants of the human slaves built their own interstellar civilization, and the space nomad raiders I’ve been talking about are one branch of that civilization (the surviving aliens now mostly live on a small number of their planets that avoided destruction during the big ancient war, while nowadays most inhabited worlds in local space are populated more-or-less entirely by humans). There’s complexity here I’m not going to get into now, but as I said in my previous post, a significant point is these space nomad raiders I’m talking about mostly interact with other humans; the foreigners they interact with are mostly other humans, and the victims of their raiding are mostly other humans.  The location of Earth was lost in the chaos of the big ancient war, and Earth continued its independent cultural development (i.e. real history) and was isolated from the rest of the setting and the rest of humanity for about 3500 years or so, with re-contact between Earth humanity and the rest of humanity happening maybe around 30 years before the story I’m planning to write (which takes place some time in the twenty-second or twenty-third century CE).

The story I’m planning takes place against a background of a utopian-ish future Earth society that was in the process of colonizing the solar system fighting an “alien invasion” of these space nomad raiders.

Gender weirdness:

These people went straight from Bronze Age to space age, they completely missed the Enlightenment etc., and their former alien masters had little interest in giving them a more “progressive” culture (and were kind of too starfish alien to even really think in those terms; e.g. they were genderless hermaphrodites, so why wouldn’t they more-or-less just shrug and accept a Bronze Age human’s ideas about human gender?). So, to us these people’s culture would look like a strange mix of the very primitive and the space age, with the two combining in strange ways.

These people have strong gender roles and no concept of gender equality in the sense we think of it. Their society still runs on a “men are warriors, women are non-combatants who at best get patronizing protection and at worst are part of the spoils the men fight over” paradigm. Most younger men are more-or-less full-time warriors; their lives are more-or-less completely dedicating to raiding, defending the community from raids, and preparing for doing these things. If they survive long enough to become too old to fight they usually “retire” and then spend their time doing maintenance work on the weapons and passing on their knowledge to the younger generations of warriors and warriors-in-training. Women do most of the non-combatant work.

This might sound like a recipe for a rather brutal patriarchy, and in a way that conclusion isn’t wrong, but... This means women are doing most of the work of keeping the space habitat running. And remember, much of the labor of keeping a space community alive is specialized skilled labor; the sort of work where trying to extract labor through simple brutality wouldn’t work well. Women are most of the machinists and the repair technicians and the nuclear reactor operators and the doctors and so on. As I said in my last post, you really don’t want to anger the person who fixes the machine that makes the air you breathe, one of the people who tend the nuclear reactor that provides energy to your community, or the person who might do surgery on you. So this is a society with lots of female power (which coexists with horrifying institutionalized abuse of other women).

Now, in my last post I stressed how a society like this will be labor-limited and want to make efficient use of labor, so you may be thinking that having half the population be full-time warriors sounds extremely inefficient. And it would be! But that’s not what these people do. For one thing, that’s a simplification of their system; there are gender-variant male eunuchs and enslaved men who do “women’s work,” and as I said retired warriors do maintenance work on the weapons and raiding ships. But what really helps in making their system viably efficient is their population isn’t 50% male. This is where it gets weird.

Remember when I said earlier that a small almost-self-sufficient space community would have tightly controlled reproduction? Among these people, there’s a powerful order of priestesses that does that. They regulate reproduction to prevent over-reproduction or under-reproduction and to minimize the effects of inbreeding ... but they’ve also spent the last couple of thousand years doing eugenics and genetic tinkering on these people. Partially they’re into creepy fascist trying to breed superior warriors stuff, but also at some point they fiddled with the human meiosis process to give these people a naturally unbalanced sex ratio. I’m thinking they got it to the point where something like 60% of the children born among these people are female. The sex ratio among adults is even more skewed because of higher male early mortality rates, a tendency to ritually kill male captives while keeping female captives, etc.. This gives maybe 20% of the adult population being active warriors (remember, the retired warriors are mostly functionally maintenance workers until they get too old and feeble to do that too), which is probably still inefficiently big but manageable.

So these people have some of the social structures and cultural attitudes of a patriarchal society, but they’re a society where men are a minority and masculinity is defined by doing something socially prestigious but economically marginal (and, incidentally to this point but important to understanding their culture, they’re a society where warrior vs. almost everything else is heavily gendered).

Tribal warrior barbarian hordes IN SPACE:

Another aspect of these people being a weird mix of the extremely primitive and the space age is that they have advanced technology but they are basically a patriarchal clan rule society.

The basic social unit of this society is the patrilineal kin-group, i.e. the patriarchal clan. Inheritance is patrilineal and marriage is virilocal; when a woman marries she moves into her husband’s family’s dwelling, she becomes part of her husband’s clan, and her children “belong” to her husband’s clan. Because social kinship is basically unilineal, these clans become quite big; a normal size is thousands of people (and that’s if you don’t count non-kin dependents). A typical habitat community contains maybe five or six of these big clans. Usually the most powerful clan (usually the biggest) is the “royal family” and exercises hegemony over the habitat, while the other clans are allied to it in an arrangement similar to feudal vassalage. Attached to these clans through various vassalage-like and slavery-like arrangements are a large number of non-kin dependents, who usually make up the majority of the community’s population (more on them later). These clans are very much families in the Mafia sense of the word. So, I said earlier that the mobile space habitat community is the basic political unit of this culture, but most of those communities are more like five or six allied big Mafia gangs/families in a trench-coat.

The social glue of this society is blood ties, marriage, vassalage, slavery, and other forms of what can broadly be called fictive kinship style relationships. The line between marriage, vassalage, slavery, and other forms of fictive kinship is often blurry - indeed, these are basically Earth Western concepts that I’m imposing on this society to communicate what it’s like; these people would not carve their own social reality at the places I’m carving it by using these terms. As I said, this is a clan rule society; your social position is basically entirely a question of who your relatives and in-laws are or who you are affiliated with or owned by; the concept of an individual having legal rights (or even really legal personhood) separate from their clan affiliations basically doesn’t exist.

Status and rank within a clan is mostly hereditary, though it’s mediated by gender and age, and there’s also a significant “meritocratic” charismatic component (e.g. a younger son of a previous patriarch who’s a distinguished warrior and popular with the cousins may be chosen for leadership over a less distinguished and less popular older son who all else being equal would have been ahead in the succession order). The clan overall functions as a disciplined hierarchical organization with a delegation of authority and duties that’s orderly enough to be more-or-less functional (patriarch bosses around his brothers and sons, who boss around his cousins, who boss around their cousins, etc.), but there’s a significant amount of jockeying and potential for overlapping conflicting authority within that. Note: I’m making this sound like a basically male hierarchy, but remember that this is a society with lots of female power, the wives of high-status men tend to be high-status themselves and often have significant power bases of their own, so high-status women are very much big players in this.

These communities are economically egalitarian but socially inegalitarian. Your clan leader isn’t much richer than you; he probably has some servants and a somewhat bigger apartment and somewhat nicer clothes and furniture and somewhat better food and so on, but that’s about it - but he can control your life in more-or-less the same way your parents controlled your life when you were 14, you must show him deference, and if he wants almost any sort of favor you’d better give it to him. Power in this society isn’t about having stuff, it’s about being respected and obeyed.

The clan is responsible for the conduct of its members and your conduct reflects on your clan, so this is an “honor culture” where reputation is very important; you can expect to get killed by your own relatives if you harm or embarrass your own clan badly enough, and on the flip-side if you do something heroic your whole clan gets a boost to its reputation and “soft power” by association with you. Between this and what I said in the rest of this section, this is a society where most people (of any gender) have little personal freedom.

One thing these people mercifully mostly don’t have is the spiraling inter-clan blood-feuds that often happen in clan rule societies on Earth. You really, really, really don’t want gloves-off open gang warfare in a space habitat. So, these people have developed powerful social mechanisms for resolving disputes before they get to the blood feud stage. Unfortunately, these dispute resolution mechanisms themselves include lethal violence, i.e. there’s a tradition of often lethal dueling. These basically controlled murders are a significant cause of male early mortality among these people, so in that sense this is a very violent society even internally, before you get to all the violence they inflict on outsiders. However, this violence is very gender-asymmetric; among these people the taboos against killing women are stronger than the taboos against killing men, and there are especially very strong taboos against killing female skilled specialists (doctors, engineers, etc.). Ironically, as a consequence of the way male eunuchs and enslaved men are considered not really men, they are more-or-less grouped with the women for purposes of these taboos, so they are often actually safer from intra-community violence than higher-status men are.

This basically fits with men in these communities doing something that is prestigious but economically marginal; they get some prestige and power and privilege, but they are treated as disposable, and you can interpret the dueling as them having internalized this collective judgment on them. Mind you, it’s mostly not the same people getting both ends of this deal; it’s mostly the high-status men who get the “prestige and power and privilege” end of the deal, and the low-ranking warriors tend to get more of the “treated as disposable” end of the deal. Though in fairness this society is one with an idea that a leader is supposed to actually lead in battle, so high-status men often do take the same sort of risks as their subordinates (on the other hand, the strong hereditary element of power in this society means it trends toward gerontocracy, so the guys at the very top are often “retired” from direct participation in fighting).

In my previous post I said that humans usually prefer sharing or trading to violent theft because violent theft means risk of injury or death. That’s kind of true of these people, but with these people there’s an internal social pressure that acts in the opposite direction. In this society, heroic deeds in battle reflect positively on your clan and increase its prestige and “soft power,” and also because of the charismatic “meritocratic” component of their hierarchy impressing people by performing heroic deeds in battle is one of the few avenues of social mobility available to men in this society (note: “heroic deeds” in this context often means things like pulling off some particularly audacious heist; things that directly benefit the community if they succeed, so in a sense this is a smart incentive system). So this society will have a lot of ambitious young men who at least kind of want battles to happen so they have opportunities to prove themselves, and clan leaders will similarly often want battles to happen so they have opportunities to increase the prestige and influence of their clan.  Also, individuals and clans who contribute to a successful raid often get to keep some of the loot or have the right to control how some or all of it is distributed, and that makes raiding tempting to people who aren’t satisfied with what they have in the status quo even if the community as a whole has enough resources. So this is a society that’s likely to be more violent than is “rational,” if you define “rational” as “acts like a hive mind instead of like an actual human community made up of people who have their own goals.” Their whole social structure basically reflects that sort of dynamic; their warrior class is probably inefficiently big, but masculinity and participation in the raiding have become so entwined that they can’t shrink it without facing ferocious resistance from people who have their whole identity invested in being warriors; you can’t take somebody who’s been literally raised from birth to do one thing and has their whole sense of self-worth bound up in it and just casually reassign them to a different job (I’m thinking the man = warrior thing started when these people were slave-soldiers + logistical support “camp followers,” and survived a transition from “we’re an army with some ‘live off the land’ short-term self-sufficiency capacity” to “we’re space nomads who use violence as part of our survival strategy”).

“Women’s spaces” and non-kin clan dependents:

Societies with very strong gender roles often have lots of homosociality, and these people very much fit that pattern. Because women do most of the productive work among these people, most of the habitat community’s work-spaces are female majority spaces that the male warriors don’t directly interact with much (there are male eunuchs and enslaved men working in there with the women, but in these people’s gender system those hardly count as men, and anyway the women outnumber them quite solidly). So, basically, this society has a more-or-less separate majority female social world that has its own social networks, its own strong affiliation/friendship groups (mostly work gangs), and its own centers of power.

Being a clan-based patriarchal society, these people also have a marriage system that’s kind of a bad deal for women (patrilineal and virilocal marriage strengthens male-centered social networks while disrupting female-centered social networks, and makes wives vulnerable to abuse). This is a society where patriarchal family institutions coexist with a semi-separate female-majority social world and lots of female power, so a lot of women respond to the former by never marrying. If this was a more conventional patriarchal society this might mean lots of childless spinsters, but this is a society where maintaining high genetic diversity is a community survival imperative and where a female majority population and high female homosociality makes it easy to create all-female cooperative child-care arrangements, so the result is lots of unmarried mothers.

Note: “unmarried” may be a simplification here, I’m thinking there might be a sort of “marriage lite” where the woman gets some of the benefits of marriage (e.g. her husband has “honor code” obligations to protect her and her children from harm and take revenge on anyone who harms or kills her or one of her children) but she and her husband keep separate residences and her husband and his kin have no authority over her. But if this status exists it’s basically a formal recognition of a boyfriend/girlfriend type relationship and the woman can “divorce” the man whenever she wants. Possibly the line between boyfriend/girlfriend and husband/wife in this culture is fluid (IIRC in a lot of past societies all a heterosexual couple had to do to be considered married was live together and call each other husband and wife, and I could see the sort of “marriage-lite” I’m talking about here being similarly fluid, though since the couple not living together is part of the point of it the details of how it works would have to be different).

Children of unmarried (or “married lite”) mothers are for purposes of clan affiliation considered to have no father. This means they’re by default more-or-less outside the clan system, especially if the mother doesn’t have a patrilineal descent connection to one of the local clans (e.g. if she’s an abductee who was taken in a raid). Because being an unmarried (or “married lite”) mother is a better deal for the majority of women, offspring of unmarried (or “married lite”) mothers are usually a majority of the habitat community’s population. So in a typical community of these people, the local big clans dominate the community politically but are actually a minority of the community’s population.

I’m thinking the way this is usually handled is legally fatherless people legally directly “belong” to the “king” (the leader of the community’s most powerful clan). But in practice legally fatherless children are usually raised by majority-female cooperative child-care groups in majority female social spaces that have a lot of independence, and if they’re female they’ll usually spend their entire lives in those spaces and follow the same reproductive strategy their mothers did. So the effect is to strengthen the semi-separate social world character of these female majority work-spaces.

That’s how it works with legally fatherless girls and women, with legally fatherless boys and men things are more complicated. If you’re a legally fatherless boy among these people you spend the first 11-12 years of your life with your mother, and then you’re given various aptitude and fitness tests, and if you fail you’re left with your mother to be raised to be a worker, and if you pass you’re taken away from your mother and given to a group of legally fatherless warriors and retired warriors to be raised by them and if all goes well ultimately become one of them. It’s a bit like what the Spartans did, though thankfully the training is actually significantly less nasty than what they did in the agoge; I’ll talk about it more in my next post.

I’ll generally talk more about the details of what life in this society is like in my next post!

[hamliet]

Girls Don’t Want Boys, Girls Want Monsters: Netflix’s The Witcher Review

Finally, the show we deserve. 

Men get all their superhero power fantasies of kicking villain ass. Finally there’s  a story that has that and includes women’s emotional power fantasies about falling in love with monsters who change. It doesn’t treat either as ridiculous or limited by gender, either, since Geralt falls for a monster too and women get to kick ass as well. 

Essentially, it’s a story about defeating monsters: often through integration with the shadow, sometimes involving love and connection, sometimes violence, but the violence is never glorified. It’s good. 

NB: I’m in the middle of reading the books (in the middle of Blood of Elves so far). I haven’t played the game since video games aren’t really a medium I enjoy. So I’ll make some comparisons since the show covered the two books I’ve read thus far, but please don’t put spoilers for the books below!

Let’s talk my favorite aspect of every story: characters. 

Renfri. 

Her story was somewhat sanitized from the books (it’s a lot more brutal what happened to Renfri) but well adapted. Both versions--the book and show--depict sincere empathy for our deconstructed Snow White. I loved her dialogue with Geralt, in which Geralt praises her for escaping the huntsman her stepmother hired to kill her, and she laughs and says that she didn’t. He let her go, but not before raping and robbing her. The story never directly answers if the prophecy was true or not; Geralt doesn’t believe it, but a lot of things Geralt doubts turn out to be true. Renfri was supposedly attacking animals as a child; however, the person reporting that is highly unlikely to be unbiased (Stregobor) so is this even true? Did Renfri become a killer because she was horribly abused and left with no other option? (That’s the option that I think seems most likely.) 

We can’t know. The Witcher isn’t interested in giving its audience palatable answers. It’s interested in provoking questions. The show gives more answers than do the books, again likely due to the medium, but it still lets these questions linger. 

Renfri’s story is not the first one in the books, but it is the first one the show adapts, and that’s a good decision imo. Her story embodies The Witcher’s themes and questions:

By acting the monster, we make monsters out of others. 

To defeat monsters, you must be a monster. 

What, then, can heal, especially in a world so broken?

Ciri.

Our deconstructed Rapunzel (yes, there are a lot of fairy tale references). As far as her story goes in its adaptation, the addition of Dara was well done. Sadly, no, Dara is not in the books, but his addition gave Ciri an arc beyond merely running in this story. 

That said, Ciri in the books is much younger than she is in the show. Which is okay, because Ciri is somewhat emblematic of the future: there’s a lot unknown about her powers, she needs to be protected from everyone trying to grab her and use her powers for themselves. She is Geralt’s destiny, and she is the future of the world of The Witcher. 

NB: I can’t discuss Ciri without shouting out to the casting director for casting Pavetta: how did they find an actress who looks so much like Ciri’s actress? It’s almost eerie. 

The episode where Geralt finds out about the Law of Surprise and his reaction to Pavetta’s pregnancy is perhaps the only story that I felt was better in the show than in the books (again, this isn’t inherently a quality thing but a medium preference). It added some much-needed hilarity (Geralt’s perfectly-timed “destiny can go f--” *Pavetta vomits* and all he can say is, “fuck”) and gave Geralt an arc. 

Geralt.

Mm. 

I liked how they handled his character and his struggles with what it means to be a Witcher and/or human. His struggles to understand himself are relatable, and fairly well set-up for future exploration. He’s a foil of Ciri, Yennefer, Jaskier, and Cahir so far, and I’m particularly intrigued by the monster theme and the foiling that is already set up thus with all of the above except Jaskier (who is no monster). Geralt was skeptical about saving the striga for her father, but managed to succeed, and I wonder if he will somehow be able to save himself from his own inner fears/monster by being a father. (Basically, I am curious as to how being Ciri’s de factor dad is going to challenge him.)

Jaskier.

Or, Dandelion, as he’s known in the books. The bard adds some much needed levity to the tale, and as @aspoonofsugar​ says, he’s pretty much Donkey from Shrek. But he is used fairly well within the story: he shows Geralt even before Ciri and Yennefer enter his life that he has a purpose beyond being a killing machine. In that sense he’s the foil of Renfri (Renfri accomplishes the same, but through violence) in that Geralt saves him and he clearly thinks highly of the Witcher. Jaskier is in some ways humanity in all its paradoxes and foibles, annoying and stupid, kind and clever, funny and truthful, deceptive and respectful. 

Cahir.

I’m a sucker for ravens as part of an aesthetic, as well as pretty, tormented bad boys. Yes, I know he’s a character I’m sure will arouse much handwringing and puritanical policing a la his other archetype brothers (Loki, Kylo Ren, Snape, etc). I don’t care. I do think the show made him much darker when compared to the books, but I still expect his arc to go in the same direction as the books. He’s a complicated, conflicted, complex character, and I’m not sorry for feeling empathy for him. 

But I am curious about his foiling with Geralt. Both are characters seeking Ciri to fulfill... something, and monstrous in a way (Cahir more for what he does, but there’s a humanity to him as well).

Yennefer.

Finally, my favorite, my baby murder daughter. 

Yennefer’s character was fascinating. I appreciated that she’s allowed to want deeply, her own wants, instead of attaching her wants to be whatever the male character desires. She wants to have children. She wants love. She wants to be beautiful. Her desires are traditionally feminine, and the show doesn’t put this down. And she also kicks ass and takes names, she fails, she’s allowed to be angry, to be mean often, to want to learn and to want to be the best. 

The show doesn’t punish Yennefer for her ambition. Neither do the books. She experiences consequences, both positive and negative, for her every choice. The show reveals her backstory right away, whereas the books don’t, but again that’s a medium thing. I think both do excellently in setting up Yennefer for our empathy. It doesn’t apologize for her or her wants or actions; it lets her arc and the story itself do the talking. 

Yennefer’s not here to be your cautionary tale or your role model. She’s just there to be her and to live. 

That is, to an extent, perhaps the best kind of role model. 

That doesn’t mean the show did everything in Yennefer’s story justice. I wasn’t thrilled with the adaptation of her first meeting with Geralt--the orgy in the background isn’t in the books and is a very bizarre decision given context. While, I loved Tissaia’s character and her foiling with Yennefer: they are too alike to ever get along, I really didn’t understand the point of Tissaia turning the other girls into slugs in episode 2. It was unsettling and not in the books. It was a heavy-handed metaphor not explained until episode 7 (about treating people as expendable slugs) that didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about how the world and Dark!Hogwarts worked. If anything it made the school seem foolishly cackling-mustache evil instead of the true current of darkness within it: manipulation and utilitarianism. As part of effort to control things, that control itself can lead to chaos. 

I think the rest of the series set this precise dilemma of a precarious balance between self-control and manipulation/utilitarianism quite well, though (it goes hand-in-hand with the theme of a “lesser evil” to quote Renfri’s story). I’m excited to see this explored more. 

Other comments:

When comparing the show to the books as I’ve read so far, I think the show made some smart changes for adapting to a visual medium. For example, Foltest and Adda’s story was adapted as a mystery: what is the monster? Who is the father? Who is the curser? Can the monster be saved? Whereas the book doesn’t do that: you know immediately that the monster is a striga, Foltest is the father, and he wants the striga saved. The answer to who cursed Adda is never clear in the written story either, whereas the show declares it was Ostrit (the book leaves it very much up in the air as to whether it was Ostrit or Adda’s mother). However, the way this particular episode weaves Adda’s story of rebirth with Yennefer’s rebirth was beautifully done. (Foltest is a good dad. We need more good dads in stories; of course, if we had more good dads, we’d have far less stories.) (I’m jesting.) 

The dialogue is at times... well it’s not like it’s The Rise of Skywalker levels of “who wrote this???” but it’s not always stellar. Actually, I’d say the quality tends to swing wildly about between clever (episode 4) and just confusing (episode 5). But in general, I think the dialogue issue is representative of the show’s largest issue: it struggles to know when to trust its audience. When should it give details? When should it trust them? When is it spoonfeeding, and when is it just confusing? It tries to walk a fine line and stumbles a bit. It succeeds, however, with the characters as I mentioned earlier with Yennefer, Geralt, and Ciri. 

My advice for the show going forward (not that they should definitely listen to me) is to forget Game of Thrones. It’s pretty obvious that this show is a passion project made by people who love The Witcher. I really hope they lean into that aspect instead of into the GoT-replacement aspect (because there are definitely aspects of that, particularly in the mood/aesthetic, tone, and gratuitous nudity--which is not exploitative or disturbing, but it also wasn’t necessary, isn’t in the books, and so felt like pandering). 

However, the sheer love for the material still really shines  through. They made me care for the characters, they interested me in the world, and they have me hooked for season 2. The showrunners’ excitement for the story and adoration of its characters is contagious, and I hope the show lets this excitement spread. 

[kae-karo]

hi! me again! i understand that bi/pan people with a preference would never be considered lesbians but i had it presented to me as being like bisexual homoromantic which would be as valid as being ace and homoromantic right? and i don't understand how A's id could affect or imply anything about B's id? like the acknowledgment of demigirls doesn't affects girls being fully girls? as far as pronouns isn't the whole point that they ARE gendered, otherwise we would all just be they/them? (1/2)

non queer people very much understand pronouns to indicate gender. so why is language malleable when it comes to redefining gender and pronouns but not when it comes to using orientation labels differently? also i read that carrd and want to clarify i would never make the argument that trans people aren't "really" the gender they id as. also, i'm sorry for asking so much but i'm just trying to understand.

--

hi dear! for context (x) and please don’t apologize for asking questions! there are so many people who would rather shut down and not try to understand, i will always greatly appreciate people who are actively trying to learn

also sorry this got wAY too long lmao i have a lot of thoughts, apparently...

as for the way the term bi/pan lesbian was presented to you, that’s totally understandable! and again, per my lil caveat, the idea of expressing a difference in romantic and sexual attraction with a single term (like being bi/pansexual but lesbian in terms of romantic attraction) is totally chill but i think the part that starts to come into question is the large movement of people who were using bi/pan lesbian in the way i described in my other post (ie as a way to express that they are “lesbian but with some attraction to men, still”)

in terms of how person A identifies and how that affects person B, the point is less about an individual interaction - no, how a stranger chooses to identify themself does not directly affect my identity. to your notion of demigirls and the fact that they don’t negate the identity of women, that’s totally true! it’s not so much that a person’s identity negates another’s, more that the words a person uses to identify themself can affect others, because we tie certain terms with certain experiences. by a group of people commandeering terminology that already has an experience tied to it, the people who already use that terminology (because they have that experience) can start to feel as though their experience and identity are being called into question

okay, so if bi/pan lesbians become a standard terminology to describe ppl who would id as lesbians if not for some attraction to men, that could start to bring into question whether all or any lesbians could be attracted to men (as the person in the tweet mentioned). now (certain) men may start to believe that any person who ids as a lesbian might still be attracted to men, so these certain men may think that they have a chance with that lesbian even though the man ids as a man! this could lead to harassment, or the lesbian in question may already be prone to some internalized homophobia. now they’re starting to wonder if their attraction should include men because they id as a lesbian (and apparently, lesbian could include attraction to men), or if they’ve just been ‘confused’, as people may have told them before, and they start to doubt their own identity and whether ‘lesbian’ is the right reflection of their experiences (which it is, except that the term has been hijacked and presented as including experiences that actually belong in the bi/pan community)

and, once again, the way the terminology is structured (a ‘bi/pan lesbian’) seems to imply that the person in question doesn’t want to be attracted to men. if they did, why not use an umbrella term like bi or pan as their identity? the only distinguishing feature here is that one is inclusive while the other says ‘i’m attracted to women primarily and would like to identify as a lesbian, except for that pesky bit of me that’s attracted to men too...’ again, this is a harmful ideology to let grow, not only for those already identifying as bi/pan but for baby queers who may not fully understand their own identities yet! or for people outside the community who are trying to understand to the best of their abilities as allies!

to that end, it also propagates that harmful rhetoric of ‘oof, doesn’t it suck to be attracted to men lmao’ like MAN that’s really hurtful to guys??? and that rhetoric already exists. notions like this (where a wonderful umbrella term is turned into something that seeks to minimize attraction to men/male-aligned genders) can be so harmful not only to cis men and transmasc/trans men who are a part of the community but men outside the community as well

okay with regards to pronouns: i think this is where we start to get into the deconstruction of gender as a social construct. i feel like the most apt analogy here is the one i provided in the other post: names. names have, throughout history, been gendered (for the most part). sally was a girl, timmy was a boy. but we’ve started to deconstruct that as we’ve started to recognize that there are more than 2 genders (as a societal whole, i’m aware that this hasn’t been news in a while for people in the queer community). you have names like alex, sam, riley, names that you can’t look at and go ‘ah, they are [certain] gender!’ which is awesome for everyone! esp for people who are sensitive about their gender identity and for whom it is bothersome, upsetting, or even triggering to be misgendered!

pronouns are grammatically just a substitute for a noun, they take the place of the noun for the sake of ease of speech/writing. so the first question here is why, if we’ve extrapolated and separated the idea of someone’s name from their gender and acknowledged that the thing that we refer to them by is just...a noise they like, then why is it necessary for pronouns (another thing that is just a noise the person likes) to be inherently tied to a gender? a gender is a representation of an experience, but people who use the same pronouns may have nothing in common in terms of their gender experience!

now, you could argue that people who use they/them pronouns may be able to rally around a shared experience/frustration with getting others to use and accept those pronouns, but they likely aren’t all going to share a gender - maybe some are fem-aligned, or masc-aligned, or genderfluid or agender or any other gender on the massive spectrum of possible gender identities. but the way that they ask others to refer to themselves purely as an individual does not help give any insight into their experiences or community! 

you stated that ‘as far as pronouns isn't the whole point that they ARE gendered?’, so my question here is what purpose do pronouns actually serve? they allow you to refer to a person without using their name, right? so if we’re talking outside the world of grammar, i would argue that a person’s pronouns are an extension of their name: the purpose of a name and/or pronouns is to ensure that they make the user of said name/pronouns comfortable in their identity when being referred to. they are whatever gender they are (if any at all) - they may choose a name and pronouns to help them feel more comfortable in who they are. in fact, they may choose a name and pronouns that they didn’t use from birth simply because they do not feel comfortable with them for non-gender-related reasons, too!

and i can hear you thinking ‘okay, so why can’t we do that with labels like sexuality and just let people use whatever feels okay?’ and this is sort of the way i think about it: there are certain words we have defined with clarity in order to help us as a community understand ourselves and each other. we all agree that cis = you are the gender you were assigned at birth, trans = you are not the gender you were assigned at birth. lesbian means attraction to women/fem-aligned genders, ace means feeling no sexual attraction, bi and pan are siblings of each other that define attraction to all genders (which may or may not include preferences). male and female as genders have clear enough meanings that we use them in our other definitions, and nonbinary is a lovely catch-all umbrella that can encompass anything outside ‘male’ and ‘female’, even though there are also more specific identities that fall under that umbrella

(quick aside - fwiw i don’t think gender definitions are necessarily malleable in the same way pronoun ‘definitions’ are, i think there are gender experiences that we have not yet given formal terms to and that people may switch around between existing gender identifying terms as they look for ones that get close to their own and i think there’s still a question of what it even means to be a certain gender without reference to other genders, but as it stands, people who identify with certain gender terms do so because of a set of shared experiences that fall underneath that gender term)

what we have not done is defined an individual’s right to their experiences. if someone feels attraction to all genders with a preference for men, there’s a word to express that! if a person feels like they might shift between a variety of genders on a regular basis, there’s a word for that! if a person does not feel romantic attraction, there’s a word for that! and the reason we use these words with pre-defined definitions is so that we can identify people who share our experiences - if someone identifies as a lesbian, they can seek out other lesbians and know that they are among a group that understands what they have been through or are going through. if someone experiences attraction to all genders with a female/fem-aligned preference, they are likely not going to find a community that understands their experiences if they look for people who identify as lesbian

but if a person decides that hey, i feel most myself when people call me ‘emma’ even though that wasn’t my assigned birth name, that is when we step back and say ‘yes, that’s awesome! you do you!’ because there is no pre-defined definition of that name - yes, there’s a societal gender often associated with it, but it doesn’t provide anyone any benefit to assign a definition of an experience to that name. nobody is out there going ‘where are all the ‘emmas’, the ‘emmas’ understand my experience and i want to find them so that i can feel as though i’m part of the ‘emma’ community’

now, idk about you, but if i hear that someone uses she/her pronouns, that means....almost nothing to me, except that i know that they prefer those pronouns! in the same way that someone saying ‘oh, my name is emma’ means nothing to me except that their name is emma! whereas if someone says to me, ‘i’m asexual’, i know from their choice of identifier that they fall under the ace umbrella and awesome, this person might understand how i feel about certain subjects! (obviously ace is a huge spectrum in itself, but you get the idea)

in summary:

an orientation or a gender relates to an individual’s experiences, and the general definitions we have assigned to certain orientations and genders should remain somewhat clearly-defined in order to provide a sense of community for those that fall under the orientation/gender in question. that is not to say that new orientations/gender terms can’t arise to describe new experiences that do not already have a definition. the irritation with the ‘bi/pan lesbian’ discourse is that the experience described (attraction to all genders with fem-aligned preference) already has a defined term (bi or pan) that is contradictory to the term ‘lesbian’

the reason pronouns don’t need to fall under a clear definition is that they are not a signal to indicate a uniting experience - their purpose and function is equivalent to that of a name: it’s a way to refer to a person that makes that person feel comfortable, and it’s perfectly fine not to have a rigid definition for pronouns in the same way that you wouldn’t assign a name to have a rigid experience or definition associated with it

i know it’s a long read, but i hope that helps clarify my thoughts on the matter!

[veganthranduil]

A Semi-Coherent Essay on Nationalism, Masculinity, and The Terror

Or: This is what happens when somebody mentions my sleeper agent activation phrase (it’s ‘masculinity’). It’s all the fault of this interview that @paramaline so helpfully provided yesterday.

How do you tell a story about gender with a shipful of men? Can you do that successfully? I think the answer is maybe. You can certainly tell a very engaging story about masculinity.

My rambling is mostly based on Joane Nagel’s ‘Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations’ and my background reading of one semester of feminist international relations theory, which I spent asking ‘what about men?’ but in the sexy way. I don’t have a gender studies degree. I am just a political scientist with too much time on my hands. I’m sorry to everyone who actually understands what gender is. I can’t even pronounce Foucault.

Nagel makes the argument for a feminist analysis of state power that focusses on men based on an understanding of states/citizenship/power as masculine institutions. In that vein, The Terror is right up there with the scholars in using men to talk about nationalism. Sometimes you just need to look at men to figure out what’s up with them.

The Terror makes a number of interesting points about masculinity and nationalism. Before I can get into that, I should say a word on the two concepts.

Masculinity/Nationalism

The great question of ‘what is masculinity?’ is best answered by saying ‘there’s no such thing as masculinity separate from place, time, and context’, meaning there’s no such thing as a universal masculinity. But Nagel maintains we can, for any time and place, identify a hegemonic masculinity which sets the standard for male behavior, is widespread, and is seen as natural. Tl;dr: masculinity is elusive and context-dependent, nevertheless we can probably tease out a hegemonic masculinity for the specific context we’re talking about.

It's interesting because The Terror doesn’t spell things out for you, and the dominant masculinity of the day is one of these things. I have no idea what Victorian gender roles were like. But the characters – both in their actions and in their words – often show quite clearly the standard they hold themselves to. More on this in a minute.

What, then, is nationalism? What is a nation? A nation is not a state (Exhibit A is like most of the UK). A nation can be a state. A nation certainly doesn’t exist independently of some kind of nationalist project. Nationalism makes nations, not the other way around. We invent our nations. Nagel says nationalism is, among other things, a belief in the ‘collective commonality’. There’s also often an ethnic dimension to that (Exhibit B is Francis Crozier himself, my essay on stateless nationalism, and the fact that he’s allowed to participate in the nation building process while being excluded from the nation), which already illustrates that nationalism and nation-building are dependent on The Other. Identity is constructed in reference to what one is not.

Nationality. The most obvious one being the Inuit, and the rejection of their personhood/desires/goals by the British sailors, but also Crozier’s rejection as someone who is very much not included in English nation building, despite working for English nation building. That stings, dude.

Rank is another obvious one. It’s probably the most important ordering principle for daily interactions.  

Class, which interacts with rank and nationality (I sort of took one seminar on Theories of Intersectionality).

Knowledge/skill. Blanky and Crozier are Arctic veterans with intimate experience of the dangers they’re likely to encounter. They also speak Inuktitut (as does MacDonald). This puts them at an advantage vis-à-vis other characters in certain situations, where they can acquire knowledge other characters cannot (sorry, Irving). To a certain extent, knowledge and understanding works to deconstruct some of these boundaries as well (see: Goodsir, or Hickey).

Now let me go back to how nationalism and masculinity just vibe well with one another because they extoll the same values (honour, bravery, patriotism, stoicism, persistence, …). These are a lot more important to some characters than others, and a lot more important at the beginning of the story than at the end (absolutely “bugger the archbishop of Canterbury”). But they’re referenced A LOT. Can I have a montage of characters positioning themselves in relation to the hegemonic masculinity of their time?

To give just two examples:

David Young: “I didn’t want to disappoint Sir John.”

Jimmy Fitzjimmy: “I was up and smiling for the official portrait.”

(I’m going to have to do a re-watch just to collect quotes for this.)

Deconstructing Hegemonic Masculinity (by dying, but in a sexy way)

But The Terror doesn’t just present us with men who position themselves in relation to hegemonic masculinity and hegemonic nationalism – its characterizing feature is that all of the characters are transformed through their experiences, and I want to focus on one transformation especially: sickness and death.

At the beginning of the story, when David Young is dying, he says, “I didn’t want to disappoint Sir John”. We get it, dude, masculinity rests on honour and stoicism. “Don’t tell him I was afraid”. Goodsir can’t even comfort him in his final moments. The stoicism and putting on a brave face swings 100% in the opposite direction.

Contrast that with later in the story, with Blanky’s amputation or Crozier’s withdrawal or even Fitzjames’s death. At the end of vanity, we give up on trying to conform to hegemonic masculinity. Fitzjames, I think, is the one who best illustrates the struggle and the violence of attempting to conform to an image of hegemonic masculinity that is tied up with the nationalist project – he cannot change the circumstances of his birth, but he can obscure them by conforming to the standard of the dominant masculinity, even when it’s killing him. But his death is nothing like the violent death of David Young – it’s peaceful. He can be comforted in his final moments, after giving up all the ideas he has about the sources of his dignity: it doesn’t come from conforming to an impossible standard of masculinity, but from moments of vulnerability and genuine human connection.

Similarly, Crozier in his withdrawal is literally making himself vulnerable and helpless. These are totally at odds with what is expected of him as both expedition commander and as a man, and yet it’s what helps him lead the people he’s in charge of. To gain the rewards of being expedition commander, you must first subject yourself to the mortifying ordeal of vulnerability, or however that phrase goes. His strength comes from this weakness, not in spite of it.

Where are the women? (This being a joke about a different Cynthia Enloe quote)

There’s another interesting element to the nationalist project, and that’s the exclusion of women from political spaces. Bullet points, because it works better this way:

Nationalism rests on the exclusion of women from the public sphere (like politics).

The Discovery Service excludes women based on this same understanding of their role in society. You know how this one works, and I’m not going to go in depth about it.

Gendered places. Ships are ‘female’. No one has been able to explain this to me, just as no one has been able to explain to me why Catholics think fish is not meat. Ships are gendered places because they are female, but also because they are vessels of male nationalist undertakings (discovery), and because women are not allowed on them.

Nations are also considered ‘female’. If I had a euro for every time some conservative politician referred to a country or nation by she/her pronouns I could die a rich man. Nations are often represented by female ‘icons’. More on this in about two bullet points…

Women are something to fight for & something to come back to. “Miss Cracroft… who rejected you?” says Fitzjames, showing the appropriate horror at constructing women as ‘beautiful souls’ (Elshtain, 1992) that men fight for/go to the Arctic for. I know, James. I know.

But then again, James literally dresses up as Britannia (remember what I said about nations being represented by female ‘icons’) so like. Maybe he didn’t get the memo after all. When Cynthia Enloe said women are reduced to the status of icons in nationalism, Fitzjames said ‘ok, got it, I’ll put on a dress for the nationalist cause’. God I love him.

Masculinized Memory, Masculinized Humiliation, and Masculinized Hope

Relatedly, if I don’t talk about Cynthia Enloe, assume that I’m dead. She said that nationalism springs from ‘masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation, and masculinized hope’ (Enloe, 2014). I think The Terror ticks all of these boxes at some point. I’ve already talked about Fitzjames and his take on hegemonic masculinity as a tool for survival, but let me just say – “I was thinking of Caesar, crossing the Rubicon” is very ‘masculinized memory’ to me. Then there’s all of the characters who see the expedition as a chance to make up for past failings to conform to the standard of manhood of the day (I’m sorry, Franklin, I did not google Van Diemen’s Land because I don’t care that much, but the narrative really wants me to know that you need to prove yourself again. And when your wife attempts to rescue you, her last resort is admitting to your failings at hegemonic masculinity. Masculinized humiliation indeed.).

I think ‘masculinized hope’ is a tricky one. There’s Fitzjames and his insistence that they may yet find the Passage (and prove themselves), and they do (or Blanky does) but it’s not in a way that will benefit them, their reputation, or anyone in England. And still Fitzjames thinks (at that point) survival is not motivator enough – their motivator must be the nationalist undertaking they set out for. There’s Franklin’s: “I believe God and winter will see us in safe waters by the end of this year” (or however that quote goes), which leaves the realm of hope and begins to enter the realm of delusion. There is the sheer amount of stuff that the men take with them from the ships in order to maintain this society they come from and the ordering principles that go with it.

This is not to say that the only valid answer to subverting ‘masculinized hope’ is sole focus on survival. That’s Hickey’s take on it, and I don’t think that turned out well for him. But Hickey is in the business of deconstructing every single boundary he comes across like the trickster God he is, so maybe we’ll leave him alone.

So how do you tell a story about masculinity? Well, apparently you put a bunch of men on a ship the service of the ultimate masculine nationalist undertaking and then have it go to shit. There are a couple of themes in there that could be explored in depth by someone with an actual gender studies degree, and not someone who put on the hat of one and then yelled about it for half an hour.

[kokkuri3]

Hello! Which books/arcticles/etc can you recommend If I am interested in writing character`s analyses as good as you?

This was SUCH a flattering ask to receive and I'm glad you respect me enough to ask it!! I thought about this question for a while and my answer is this:

There are a few books and articles I can recommend. The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Writer's Journey are both important works among literary analysis circles and their deconstructions of fundamental character archetypes are, in my opinion, very helpful to know. Articles on character analysis specifically are in my experience a little hard to come by, and most focus more on the writing of the essay more than the analysis itself. WriteAnyPapers has a not bad article on it.

The books and articles I linked all explain fundamental character archetypes, and how they fit into a larger work. Having an understanding of these groundworks is important to being able to interpret characters and literature as a whole, at least in my opinion. What you're actually looking for, however, probably isn't what's in those books. What you want to know is probably more along the lines of "how do you come to interpret characters like this." In which case, I think it's better if I just give some advice myself.

1. Consider the greater whole.

This is the most important advice I have. When I say "consider the greater whole," I mean that one must always put any event, line, or character into the context of the story or character as a whole. Everything a character does, says, or narrates is part of their larger characterization. To take it a step further, characters exist as part of a greater narrative, and are part of a larger context. It's important to understand these as a network of interacting elements, and not as singular, independent episodes.

How does this character behave differently from other characters? In what way do they behave the same? Who is important to them, and to who are they important to? Why do they matter to the story as a whole? For this last question, consider not only plot, but themes and symbolism.

Essentially: everything is connected, so you have to consider what one thing has to do with another. (Note: sometimes, this also means taking the cultural context of a character or work into consideration. I don't think that's always necessary for character analysis, though.)

2. Consider more than just what's text.

By which I mean: take into account not only stated or directly shown characterization, but more subtle instances, as well. Not every event in a character's life will be shown, nor will their every thought. Learn to interpret subtext, identify symbolism, and recognize double meaning.

Subtext is a very important part of a narrative, despite being often overlooked or regarded as non-canon. For some purposes, I understand why subtext is held as lesser than canon (for example, I wouldn't call a character who is never explicitly stated or shown to experience same gender attraction 'canonically gay'), but for character analysis, your purpose is already to come to a conclusion that's not immediately obvious. By throwing away subtext, one erases a genuine part of a character's writing, making what they reach a bad faith interpretation (meaning, one made with an agenda).

Symbolism is often used to communicate characterization in a subtextual manner. This symbolism can be associated with particular events, or attached to a character design. If you see a specific symbol recurring throughout a work, try to see if there is any connection between its appearances. Some symbols aren't recurring within a specific work, but are associated with certain qualities across multiple works. I don't do symbol analysis as often as I do character analysis, but here's an analysis that's more the former (on scissors, specifically) and here's one that's more the latter (on white dresses as a symbol of purity.) By learning to recognize and interpret symbolism, one is able to see more aspects of a character than they would have otherwise.

Essentially: Not everything about a character will be explicitly stated, so it's alright to interpret a character based on guesses or assumptions, so long as these are backed by canon.

3. Do not conflate a character and their archetype.

One thing that happens often, and which bugs me to hell and back, is when assumptions are made about a character based on an archetype they appear to be, even when these assumptions blatantly conflict with canon. This rule is less "how to write a good character analysis" and more "how to not write a bad one," but I see this done so often I had to include it.

Is this character actually stupid, or did you just assume they were because they have traits associated with stupid characters? Is this character actually competent, or did you just assume they were because they have traits associated with competent characters? Is this character actually flirtatious, or did you just... You get my point.

In many ways this is also about combating stereotypes. You should always check your analysis for traits that are potentially racist/misogynist/homophobic/etc., and make sure canon actually supports these traits.

Character archetypes aren't bad-- they, like all tropes, are tools. Having a framework for a character can be helpful in writing them, and by creating a character that can be easily associated with other, similar ones, one can essentially shorthand to the reader what their position in the narrative will be. But well written characters are always greater than their archetypes. Identify which archetypes you associate with a character, and try to figure out if there are any ways in which they avert, subvert, or otherwise go against traits typical of their archetype.

Essentially: Make sure you're thinking about the character you're analyzing, and not other, similar characters.

4. Don't let personal biases cloud your judgement.

Fictional characters are not your friends. Nor are they your enemies. Developing a personal attachment or relationship to characters is natural, and I certainly do it. When analyzing a character, however, you shouldn't let any emotions you have warp your perception of the text.

Simply because you like a character does not mean you should look over their flaws. Sometimes, analysis can lead you to the conclusion a character you thought was good was actually pretty terrible. That's alright, and you're not betraying anyone by pointing out a character's dubious actions or flaws. Similarly, you can't make up reasons a character you hate is a terrible person. By framing actions not originally written as malicious as though they are a crime, one creates a bad faith interpretation.

And, by extent, just because you find a particular subject difficult does not mean you should ignore it. Bad faith interpretations go both ways, and interpretations made having erased all traces of taboo subject matter are as much made on false pretenses as interpretations made while fetishizing these.

Essentially: Fictional characters aren't real, and thus won't be hurt by your analysis. You shouldn't feel guilty or vengeful in creating a disparaging analysis, nor should you feel supportive or shameful in creating a supportive one. And it's OK to have mixed feelings on a character-- I take it as a sign of good writing.

Otherwise, my advice is a lot more broad. Simply familiarizing yourself with literature and its analysis should help you. Try to learn from other people. In my opinion, being a writer myself and learning to develop my own characters has positively influenced my interpretation. TVTropes as a website... Isn't great, but it is a pretty good way to learn to identify patterns across media to help with analysis and is also pretty fun to scroll through (actually looking at TVTropes character analyses isn't recommended though they tend to be pretty terrible). Wikipedia explains a lot of important analytical terminology (I reference foils a lot, for example). Have discussions with other people familiar with what you're analyzing, and don't be afraid of being wrong. Interpretation of art is subjective, so what's true to you is as true as anything. :)

Good luck !!! If you want any more advice, please let me know-- and keep in mind, a lot is just practice! I've been on Tumblr for 5+ years, and only recently have I begun making any... Decent analysis posts. As you further engross yourself, you'll be more able to identify important aspects of character and other devices such as subtext and symbolism. Even if your interpretation doesn't get much attention, keep going!!

Hope I could help!!