#it sounds like a psychological analysis of the book characters not the actual tragedy that should be unfolding

[agentrouka-blog]

Hotd 2x02... Great scene. Who are these people, though.

I would have enjoyed the scene between Rhaenyra and Daemon a lot more if I hadn't watched her demand that her brother should be sharply questioned in Season one. It's superbly acted, it is unusually direct in spelling out the abusive dynamic between them, her moral outrage seems so sincere. I wish I could say it was earned by the writers.

But gods, she has shown zero compassion for anyone but herself before, has spent her adulthood lying for her personal benefit (usurping the Velaryons and blithely accepting murder in defense of her lies) and suddenly she is utterly aghast that anyone could believe she could harm a child? What happened to the squealing boar?

Why are they asking me to pretend that Daemon is the sole source of her problems?

[starkey]

[Spoilers for The Haunting of Bly Manor!]

I know everyone is super loving Bly Manor cause ~80′s gays~!!! but some stuff about it sat really bad for me so I’m gonna try to verbalise it. Obviously if you loved it and aren't vibing with a critical analysis I'm not offended if you don't read lol. Also I’m not trying to say that there’s anything wrong with liking it! I just...didn’t, and I want to think about why, for a sec. (Sorry this got a bit long)

I think part of my problem is that I count Hill House as one of my favourite shows ever and I had ridiculously high hopes for Bly Manor, which probably couldn't ever have been fully realised. And there was actually a lot about it that I liked, especially at the begining. I thought the kids were great, and I loved the core group of Mrs Grose, Owen, Dani and Jamie. I liked the fact that the Henry Wingrave element was expanded upon, and I liked the complexity of Rebecca and Peter, and the room it gave them to be fully realised human beings. I quite enjoyed that they kept to the Hill House ghost mythology - that ghosts are lost in time but fixed in place, and that they jump from memory to memory, and haunt the people that they care about without knowing. But there were lots of things I wasn't so keen on...

Until the last episode my issues were mainly that it felt a bit...lazy? I can't stress it enough but the british accents were really really bad. Old!Jamie’s accent was deeply unbelievable and jarring, as was Henry Wingrave's, and although Peter’s accent was passable (I assume because the actor is English and not American like the others) it still didn’t match his mothers, or his ‘background’ - i.e. it sounded like a private school Edinburgh accent, not a Glasgow kid dragged up through poverty in the scheme - and yes there is a significant difference in those accents. I appreciate there’s a degree of privilege at play here - I’m used to the BBC producing high quality television where these details aren’t messed about with, and the production of Bly Manor was thoroughly American, but to put it in perspective, it would be like... if a character had a deep south dirt-poor Louisiana upbringing and spoke like somebody from a private school in Virginia. Other details also felt off - Rebecca’s costumes all seemed weirdly 2020-adjacent, none of the fashion or ancillary details seemed to match the UK in the 80s (which has a distinct feel), and the house that Peter returned to on his ‘memory bumps’ looked much more like an LA condo than a Scottish council house. Really, they should have just set it in America, because it felt more American than British, and they clearly didn't have any British people involved in the production.

I really didn't enjoy the narrative framing device of 'someone telling a story to a group of people at a party'. It makes sense in the Turn of the Screw, because the narrator is reading from a document written at the time of the events, so the narration becomes a first person one where the degree of detail is logically accounted for. In this take, the story alternated from being one which made sense - us just watching the characters move around normally - to one in which 'Jamie' (who’d apparently had a complete personality transplant that had turned her from a feisty northern lesbian into a coy, mysterious victorian englishwoman with a severe accent problem) adopted a falsely old-fashioned manner and told the wedding guests a ten hour long story about a haunted house.  And somehow neither Flora nor Miles recognised any part of this story in the least, in spite of what must have been overwhelming similarities? It was very jarring.  

I also kept waiting for a twist on a level with Hill House, but never got one. The big twist about Mrs Grose was, I thought, obvious from almost the first episode. I mean the woman didn’t eat or drink anything and spent most of her time confused about where she was, I thought it was fairly clear that she was a ghost. And yeah, I suppose because I’ve read the book I was never in any doubt that Peter was already dead. The ghosts in the background were much less spooky than in Hill House. They stood around in broad daylight while the characters talked and joked and it kind of felt like the ghosts had wandered in by accident and felt too awkward to leave. I really liked how spooky Hill House was - even apart from the jump scares I thought the psychological elements and the open discussion of death and grief was really affecting. I didn’t feel that at all in Bly Manor, and by the time we found out the details of Mrs Grose’s death, I’d already come to terms with it.  But all of this would have been fine, if it hadn’t been for the last episode.

I really really didn’t enjoy the bury your gays ending. And I’m not even usually against this in principle! I think in a dark/horror context, where there’s implied to be an ever-present threat of character death, it’s unreasonable to expect that no characters will die or experience tragedy - and in cases where there’s abundant LGBT rep some of those characters will by necessity not be cis/straight. So I don’t have a problem with gay characters meeting tragic or dark ends, as a general rule, particularly when it serves a narrative purpose and isn’t gratuitous. My problem here was in the manner and necessity of that death.

There were ways in which Dani could have died in this story that I would have felt were narratively meaningful and cathartic, but the manner in which she did die failed to hit those beats for me. This is a story in which two women in the 80's fall in love and are doomed by the world around them (we're already in Meryl Streep 'groundbreaking' territory here, in terms of metaphor). They know death is coming for them, that it will likely destroy them both, that they won't have an opportunity to grow old together, that eventually one day it will catch them and everything will be over - they're on borrowed time, and they spend a lot of that time looking over their shoulders waiting for shit to break bad. In the end, they're destroyed by a force in Dani's body/mind that she can't fight, that she can't win against, and the spectre of which haunts her through the years. Like... the obvious parallel here is mental health, and suicide - they even go out of their way to feature that classic heartsink moment with the overflowing bath. And to me, any story that has a message of 'no matter how strong you are, no matter how much love you have and give, or how beautiful the life you've built is, eventually the dark forces in your mind will Get You and it'll probably be before you make it to middle age' is... really shitty. The other echo that struck me was the HIV/AIDS crisis - obviously wlw were relatively spared from this, in comparison to mlm, but it still carries a cultural legacy of pain and trauma, and I really didn't need this show to grind down on that for me.

And the thing is... in the original story, the governess doesn't even die! Miles does, so maybe there's an argument here that Dani sacrificed herself in exchange for Miles's life in this retelling, but I'm still struck by this element of, like... they added this in! They chose to do this! Only one character dies in the course of this show (with Mrs Grose dying before the show starts) and it's the gay woman?? Why?? What did it show?? Why was it necessary?

Not to mention, the 'epilogue' scene paints Jamie as being very lonely and isolated. I'm not sure why the children didn't recognise ANY elements of this story from their past - even assuming they forgot the ghostly elements of their childhood, they should be able to see the similarities in the characters, but the scene also seems to imply that Jamie really isn't very close to Miles and Flora, and that she doesn't even really get to have a relationship with them as adults, in spite of losing everything to protect them, and not having any family of her own.

Almost everybody else gets a happy ending, but Jamie ends the night of the epilogue standing alone at a table, with the love of her life dead in a cursed lake, doomed to spend eternity watching over a crumbling house, and idk to me? that kind of sucked.

[serialreblogger]

You want to talk more about the bigotry in Harry Potter? Go ahead! I've actually heard stuff like that before, but have yet to do much research on it personally and it's been a while since I read it, so I'm interested.

WELL

Before we begin I should start with a disclaimer: this analysis will be dedicated to examining as many bigoted aspects of Harry Potter’s writing as I can think of, so--while I personally am more or less comfortable balancing critical evaluation with enjoyment of a piece, and strongly advocate developing your own abilities to do the same--I know not everyone is comfortable reading/enjoying a story once they realize its flaws, and again, while I think it’s very important to acknowledge the flaws in culturally impactful stories like Harry Potter, I also know for some people the series is really really important for personal reasons and whatnot. 

So! If you’re one of those people, and you have trouble balancing critical engagement with enjoyment, please feel free to skip this analysis (at least for the time being). Self-care is important, and it’s okay to find your own balance between educating yourself and protecting yourself.

On another note, this is gonna be limited strictly to morally squicky things to do with Rowling’s writing and the narrative itself. Bad stuff characters do won’t be talked about unless it’s affirmed by the narrative (held up as morally justified), and plot holes, unrealistic social structures, etc. will not be addressed (it is, after all, a kid’s series, especially in the first few books. Quidditch doesn’t have to make sense). This is strictly about how Rowling’s personal biases and bigotry impacted the story and writing of Harry Potter.

Sketch Thing #1: Quirrell! I don’t see a lot of people talking about Quirrell and racism, but I feel like it’s a definite thing? Quirinus Quirrell is a white man who wears a turban, gifted to him by an “African prince” (what country? where? I couldn’t find a plausible specific when I was researching it for a fic. If there’s a country which has current/recent royalty that might benevolently interact with someone, and also a current/recent culture where turbans of the appropriate style are common, I couldn’t find it). Of course, it wasn’t actually given to him by an African prince in canon, but it’s still an unfortunate explanation.

More importantly, ALL the latent Islamophobia/xenophobia in the significance of the turban. Like, look at it.

“Man wears turban, smells like weird spices, turns out to be concealing an evil second face under the turban” really sounds like something A Bit Not Good, you know? If you wanted to stoke the flames of fear about foreignness, it would be hard to do it better than to tell children about a strange man who’s hiding something horrible underneath a turban.

Also, Quirrell’s stutter being faked to make you think he was trustworthy is a very ableist trope, and an unfortunately common one. “Disability isn’t actually real, just a trick to make you accommodate and trust them” is not a great message, and it’s delivered way too often by mass media. (Check out season 1 of the Flash for another popular example.)

Sketch Thing #2: The goblins. Much more commonly talked about, in my experience, which is good! The more awareness we have about the messages we’re getting from our popular media, the better, in my view. 

For those who haven’t encountered this bit of analysis before: the goblins in Harry Potter reek of antisemitic stereotypes. Large ears, small eyes, crooked noses, green/gray skin, lust for money, control of the banks, and a resentful desire to overthrow the Good British Government? Very reminiscent of wwii propaganda posters, and in general the hateful rhetoric directed towards Jewish people by other European groups from time immemorial. 

I’m also extremely uncomfortable with how goblin culture is handled by Rowling in general. Like, the goblins were a people that were capable of using magic, but prohibited by the British government from owning wands. That was never addressed. They also had a different culture around ownership, which is why Griphook claimed that the sword of Gryffindor belonged rightfully to the goblins--a gift isn’t passed down to descendants upon death, but instead reverts to the maker. This cultural miscommunication is glossed over, despite the fact that it sounds like Griphook’s voicing a very real, legitimate grievance.

To be honest, apart from the antisemitism, the way Goblin culture is treated by the narrative in Harry Potter is very uncomfortably reminiscent to me of how First Nations were treated by English settlers in North America, before the genocide really got started. The Goblins even have a history of “rebellions,” which both raises the question of why another species is ruling them to begin with, and more significantly, is eerily reminiscent of the Red River Rebellion in Canada (which, for the record, wasn’t actually a rebellion--it was Metis people fighting against the Canadian government when it tried to claim the land that legally, rightfully belonged to the Metis. But that’s another story)

In sum: I Don’t Like the implications of how Rowling treats the goblins.

Sketch Thing #3: Muggles. Ok because we’re all “muggles” (presumably) and because I’m white, talking about this might rapidly degenerate into thinly-veiled “reverse racism” discourse, so please y’all correct me if I stray into that kind of colossal stupidity. However, I am not comfortable with the way non-magical humans are treated by Rowling’s narrative.

The whole premise of Harry Potter is that Evil Wizards Want To Hurt The Muggles, right? Except that it’s not. Voldemort’s goal is to subjugate the inferior humans, rule over non-magical people as the rightful overlords, but that’s hardly mentioned by the narrative. Instead, it focuses on the (also egregious and uncomfortably metaphorical) “blood purism” of wizarding culture, and how wizards would be persecuted for their heritage.

But muggles, actual muggles, are arguably the ones who stand to lose the most to Voldemort, and they’re never notified of their danger. We, the muggles reading it, don’t even really register that we’re the collateral damage in this narrative. Because throughout the series, muggles are set up as laughingstocks. Even the kindest, most muggle-friendly wizards are more obsessed with non-magical people as a curiosity than actually able to relate to them as people. 

I dunno, friends, I’m just uncomfortable with the level of dehumanization that’s assigned to non-magical humans. (Like, there’s not even a non-offensive term for them in canon. There’s “muggle,” which is humorously indulgent at best and actively insulting at worst, and there’s “squib,” which is literally the word for a firework that fails to spark.) It’s not like “muggles” are actually a real people group that can be oppressed, and like I said this kind of analysis sounds a bit like the whining of “reverse racism” advocates where the powerful majority complains about being insulted, but... it kind of also reeks of ableism. People that are not able to do a certain cool, useful thing (use magic) are inherently inferior, funny at best and disposable at worst. They suffer and die every day from things that can easily be cured with magic, but magic-users don’t bother to help them, and even when they’re actively attacked the tragedy of hundreds dying is barely mourned by the narrative. 

It gives me bad vibes. I don’t Love It. It sounds uncomfortably like Rowling’s saying “people that are unable to access this common skill are inherently inferior,” and that really does sound like ableism to me. 

Either way, there’s something icky about consigning an entire group of people to the role of “funny clumsy stupid,” regardless of any real-world connections there may or may not be to that people group. Don’t teach children that a single genetic characteristic can impact someone’s personhood, or make them inherently less worthy of being taken seriously. Just, like... don’t do that.

Sketch Thing #4: The house elves. Everyone knows about the house elves, I think. The implications of “they’re slaves but they like it” and the only person who sees it as an issue having her campaign turned into a joke by the narrative (“S.P.E.W.”? Really? It might as well stand for “Stupidly Pleading for Expendable Workers”) are pretty clear.

Sketch Thing #5: Azkaban. Are we gonna talk about how wizarding prison involves literal psychological torture, to the point where prisoners (who are at least sometimes there wrongly, hence the plot of book 3) almost universally go “insane”? This is sort of touched on by the narrative--“dementors are bad and we shouldn’t be using them” was a strongly delivered message, but it was less “because torturing people, even bad people, is not a great policy” and more “because dementors are by their natures monstrous and impossible to fully control.” 

“This humanoid species is monstrous and impossible to control” is, once again, a very concerning message to deliver, and it doesn’t actually address the real issue of “prison torture is bad, actually.” Please, let’s not normalize the idea that prison is inherently horrific. Of course, prison as it exists in North America and Britain is, indeed, inherently horrific and often involves torture (solitary confinement, anyone?), but like--that’s a bad thing, y’all, it’s deeply dysfunctional and fundamentally unjust. Don’t normalize it.

Sketch Thing #6: Werewolves. Because Rowling explicitly stated that lycanthropy in her series is a metaphor for “blood-borne diseases like HIV/AIDS”. The linked article says it better than I could:

Rowling lumps HIV and AIDS in with other blood-borne illnesses, which ignores their uniquely devastating history. And Lupin’s story is by no stretch a thorough or helpful examination of the illness. Nor is its translation as an allegory easily understood, beyond the serious stigma that Rowling mentioned.

That Lupin is a danger to others could not more clearly support an attitude of justifiable fear toward him, one that is an abject disservice to those actually struggling with a disease that does not make them feral with rage.

This definitely ties into homophobia, given how deeply the queer community has been affected by HIV/AIDS. Saying a character with a condition that makes him an active threat to those around him is “a metaphor for AIDS” is deeply, deeply distressing, both for its implications about queer people and their safety for the general population, and for the way it specifically perpetuates the false belief that having HIV/AIDS makes a person dangerous.

Sketch Thing #7: Blood Ties. This isn’t, like, inherently sketch, but (especially for those of us with complicated relationships to our birth families) it can rub a lot of people the wrong way. Rowling talks a big talk about the folly of “blood purism,” but she also upholds the idea that blood and blood relations are magically significant. 

Personally, I’m very uncomfortable with the fact that Harry was left with an abusive family for his entire childhood, and it was justified because they were his “blood relatives.” I’ve had this argument with ultra-conservative family friends who genuinely believe it’s a parent’s right to abuse their child, and while I don’t think that’s what Rowling is saying, I do feel uncomfortable with the degree of importance she places on blood family. I’m uncomfortable with the narrative’s confirmation that it is acceptable (even necessary) to compromise on boundaries and allow the continuation of abuse because “it’s better for a child to be raised by their Real Family” than it is to risk them to the care of an unrelated parent.

Genetic relations aren’t half as important as Rowling tells us. For people with a bad birth family, this can be a damaging message to internalize, so I’ll reiterate: it’s a pretty thought, the love in blood, but it’s ultimately false. The family you build is more real, more powerful and more valid than any family you were assigned to by an accident of genes.

I can think of one or two more things, but they’re all a lot more debatable than what I have here--as it is, you might not agree with everything I’ve said. That’s cool! I’m certainly not trying to start a fight. We all have the right to read and interpret things for ourselves, and to disagree with each other. And again, I’m not trying to ruin Harry Potter. It’s honestly, as a series, not worse in terms of latent bigotry than most other books of its time, and better than many. It’s just more popular, with a much bigger impact and many more people analyzing it. I do think it’s important to critically evaluate the media that shapes one’s culture, and to acknowledge its shortcomings (and the ways it can be genuinely harmful to people, especially when it’s as culturally powerful as Harry Potter). But that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t enjoy it for what it was meant to be: a fun, creative, engaging story, with amazing characters, complex plots, heroism and inspiration for more than one generation of people. 

Enjoy Harry Potter. It is, in my opinion, a good series, worth reading and re-reading for enjoyment, even for nourishment. It’s also flawed. These things can both be true.

[evanfleischer]

Truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense. —  W.H. Auden, “New Year Letter”

Walter Benjamin spoke of an “angel of history” in his unpublished-at-the-time essay, “On The Concept Of History,” writing that  — 

His [that is, the angel’s face] face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin’s definition of ‘the angel of history’ enables us to look a little bit more closely at the function of the symbol and the idea of ‘an angel of history’ in The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. It’s also in discussing both Walter Benjamin’s angel and The Rings of Saturn that we can discuss Wings of Desire and take note of how the three engage with the other.

There are literal connections and all but literal connections that can be drawn between the three texts: in the library scene in Wings of Desire, per the screenplay, one reader studies Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” which is referenced by Walter Benjamin in relation to “the angel of history” (and which prompts the above-quoted paragraph), which itself serves as a point of intellectual reference in The Rings of Saturn.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystalizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history  —  blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled (orig.: aufheben) … The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

The Rings Of Saturn is manifestly aware of an oppressed past and the notion of “blast[ing] a specific era out of the homogenous course of history.” The text is aware of how frequently it looks upon a “wreckage,” so aware that the voice of the text frequently slides upward into a register filled with hauntings — but not just Gothic-styled hauntings pegged to a specific object, i.e., a single ghost haunting a single house because of a single terrible act committed one generational leap back into the past.

Sebald pursues a different path: when the reader ascends to a certain level in the text when one might feel a more ‘direct’ encounter with a ‘ghost,’ i.e., that space between a pile of herring and the bodies of those murdered in the Holocaust as defined by the implicit metaphor, we also share an intellectual space with thinking over of what generational trauma means while also operating in the middle of an encounter with ‘place.’ (The narrator can be expected to only accomplish so much, being human, after all.) The book has names for the things that have produced that “wreckage” — imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and fascism; and the book traces their evolution well — but merely indicting a large ‘-ism’ isn’t where the mission of The Rings Of Saturn begins or ends. Sebald the narrator seeks out a saint in Nuremberg. An angel seeks to become human in Berlin. Each are on an analogous path and make use of similar tools. In a small essay called “Why Do You Make Films?” written in 1987, Wim Wenders remarked that “The camera is a weapon against the tragedy of things, against their disappearing.” Sebald himself was quoted in an interview flagged by the podcast Backlisted as saying that “The photograph is meant to get lost somewhere in an attic — a nomadic thing that has a small chance only to survive,” making their survival — and the act of ensuring their survival — all the more striking.  And, more often than not, both Sebald and the angel seek to commune with nominally empty spaces.

To explain what occupies this emptiness requires us to talk for a moment about what we mean when we use words like trauma, collective trauma, and generational trauma.

With all three, there’s a rough feeling that lingers with us where we can say that we know it when we see it, feel it, or hear about it. We know it when we keep friends safe in the middle of the night, telling them over the phone to breathe in and breathe out. We know it when we hear a blues song scratchily emanating from the side of an open and otherwise quiet car mechanic’s garage late at night. We know it when we read a book like The Body Keeps The Score and we know it when we watch a television show like Watchmen.

Now, there’s a DSM-5 definition we can break out — which talks about “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” — but that doesn’t incorporate a thousand other things that are part of the landscape of trauma. There is also a certain level of complexity in tracing generational trauma from one generation to the next at the level of biology. As of 2018 — insofar as this writer can make out — no studies exist that follow the trauma a mother might have before she conceives a child, how that trauma changes the genetic make-up of an oocyte (a cell in the ovary that changes to form an ovum), and how that link between the trauma established before conception and the trauma felt by the child is established after the child has been born.

That difficulty doesn’t mean the investigation into generational trauma is illegitimate. In 1966, Vivian M. Rakoff, a Canadian psychologist, described the children of parents who survived the Holocaust as suffering more acute psychological symptoms than their parents. In the 1990’s, as Rachel Yahuda and Amy Lehrner note in World Psychiatry, as technology developed, time passed, and more investigations were made — 

… offspring of Holocaust survivors were more likely to show HPA axis alterations associated with PTSD, such as lower cortisol levels and enhanced GR responsiveness … Subsequent investigations documented that maternal and paternal PTSD were associated with different biological outcomes. A post‐hoc analysis of cortisol circadian rhythm data indicated that lower cortisol levels in adult Holocaust offspring were associated with maternal, but not paternal, PTSD.

The HPA axis refers to the connection between the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and adrenal glands. GR responsiveness refers to glucocorticoid receptors, which are found throughout the body and play a role in regulating the genes that control development, metabolism, and immune response.

Looking at these results suggests that it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to offer up the reductive assertion that lower cortisol levels and enhanced GR responsiveness means that someone is both hyper-sensitive and might not feel the stress that the body should otherwise feel if it were in a ‘flight or ‘fight,’ trauma-inducing situation. In other words: the children exhibit the symptoms of the traumatized.

There is much more detail at hand here — studies involving GR gene methylation that parallel but don’t explicitly show genetic transmission of trauma, mothers with PTSD who experienced September 11th rating their children as having higher anxiety in the morning than mothers without PTSD, animals exposed to “chronic stress in utero [that led to] increased male, but not female, HPA stress reactivity,” and ‘secondary traumatization’ — but we should zoom the camera lens out to flag the fact that trauma simply makes itself manifest in the day-to-day lives of individuals in a variety of ways. In Bassel Van Der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps The Score, the doctor describes patients who “felt emotionally distant from everybody, as though [their] heart were frozen and [the individual in question was] living behind a glass wall,” as well as other patients who were “suffering from memories,” and notes that “I [the author] could not be [the doctor of a traumatized group] unless they made me one of them.”

This characterization brings us back to the idea of the lead characters in The Rings Of Saturn and Wings Of Desire encountering nominally empty spaces. At Somerleyton Hall in The Rings Of Saturn, the narrator thinks of how “fine a place the house seemed to me now that it was imperceptibly nearing the brink of dissolution and silent oblivion,” a house where “there are … moments, as one passes through the rooms open to the public … when one is not quite sure whether one is in a country house in Suffolk or some kind of no-man’s-land, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean or in the heart of the dark continent.”

The house is only ‘nominally’ empty because of the action implied by the phrases of “the Arctic Ocean” and “in the heart of the dark continent.” Open up the door of the latter phrase and voices will come rushing through. The alexithymia of trauma located in more than one place — in both the house and the ‘dark continent’ — will find a voice — of exploitation, cruelty, and worse. (Later on, the narrator goes so far as to suggest that the colonial violence of the Belgians in the past makes it manifest in physical deformations in the near-present.)

Consider two scenes in Wings Of Desire. The first is the montage that shows us a glimpse of what happened to Berlin in the war: the camera passes by a destitute man, a domestic argument, and a child screaming for his mother in the street before we transition to the sounds of a bomb siren, see for ourselves the bombs flash bulb across the sky of the city, the shadow of planes and white-yellow search lights, and buildings on fire. Or, as the English writer Thomas Browne puts it in one section of The Rings Of Saturn —

The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so … one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn — an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.

The second scene is Peter Falk standing outside a small snack bar in the middle of a muddied expanse. He talks to Bruno Ganz, the angel, and — even though the angel says nothing — they share a moment.

I can’t see you, but I know you’re here. I feel it. You’ve been hanging around since I got here. I wish I could see your face. Just look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here. Just to touch something. See, that’s cold. That feels good. Or, here … To smoke. Have coffee. And, if you do it together, it’s fantastic. Or … to draw. You know, you take a pencil, and you make a dark line … then you make a light line. And, together, it’s a good line. Or when your hands are cold — you rub ’em together. You see, that’s good. That feels good. There’s so many good things. But you’re not here. I’m here. I wish you were here. I wish you could talk to me, because I’m a friend. Compañero.

It is agonizingly tempting to liken Falk’s voice here to Sebald’s voice in a one-to-one ratio, even in spite of the fairly central role ‘wreckage’ and melancholy play in The Rings Of Saturn, especially if one were to factor in the consistently sumptuous turns of Sebald’s language, i.e., how the scratchy sounds of a transistor radio playing on a beach are “as if the pebbles being dragged back by the waves were talking to each other”; how — instead of a child — one couple in The Hague has an “apricot-colored poodle”; and how — “every now and then” at the Schiphol airport — “the announcers’ voices, disembodied and intoning their messages like angels, would call someone’s name.” But just before that scene in the film, Falk is seen wandering through a muddied expanse of earth. “Walking and seeing,” he says in voice over. He turns and looks off in the distance to his right (and the lingering background of the shot.) “That must be the station — not the one where the trains stop, but the station where the station stops.”

“The station where the station stops” is a roundabout way of talking about “the zero hour,” the end of history, or the “inclusion of all exclusions,” which is how the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann once described the apocalypse. Falk goes from contemplating the “inclusion of all exclusions” — an enormous collective trauma collectively felt — to talking about simple things with a spirit he can’t see, a spirit who doesn’t feel like it’s part of humanity and wants to be a part of humanity. And Falk wants that spirit there.

Sebald’s narrator has a role in reaching out to the spirits. The angel has a role in reaching out to humanity. Each are working to build a narrative bridge over which those impacted by collective trauma and generational trauma can pass into the story of the present. The aforementioned individuals who felt “emotionally distant from everybody, as though [their] heart[s] were frozen and [they] were living behind a glass wall” might now have a better idea of the path they need to take to unfreeze the heart and come from behind said glass wall. (Or, as it was put in HBO’s Watchmen: “Wounds need air.”) Neither narrator in either text can accomplish the project of building this bridge without the other, as is evidenced by the fact that The Rings Of Saturn all but ends amongst a reconstructed Temple of Jerusalem — an appeal to the judgement of eternity — and Wings Of Desire ends with the angel becoming human and falling in love.

There are a few complications that linger along our path: on one level, Sebald’s narrator doesn’t really ‘do’ much of anything. He walks around, has some associative thoughts, and eventually ends up in the hospital. The same judgement could be passed on the angel: he drifts, becomes human, and — for his troubles — ends up with a colorful coat.

But that reading ignores the role of what it means to be a witness.

“A witness is needed in order for the particular narrative to rise from the inundation of universal sound,” Xavier Vila and Alice Kuzniar wrote of ‘the library scene’ in Wings of Desire in the 1992 Spring issue of Film Criticism, and witnesses abound in both Wings of Desire and The Rings of Saturn. Roger Casement is witnessed on television. The gaze of the painter is witnessed in The Anatomy Lesson. The pathway of a Nazi who becomes the head of the United Nations is witnessed from one era to the next. The descendants of the colonialists — as well as what they took — are witnessed. In looking at a bridge crossing the river Blyth, the narrator also performs an act of witness concerning the growth of capitalism and empire in China.

It is this repeated act of witness that lends a shape of characterization to the seemingly unobserved, un-filled-in narrator. In observing this, we observe a man who is quiet, decent, and thoughtful. We observe a man who knows what it means to genuinely ‘live in the moment.’ We observe his silence in the same fashion that the narrator and housekeeper observe the silence of Major George Wyndham Le-Strange after the latter was one of the ones who liberated Belsen.

By contrast, the angels in Wings Of Desire observe things in an earthward direction, i.e., someone reading in a library — or someone dying as the result of a motorcycle accident  and seeing their life flash before their eyes — 

Albert Camus. The morning light. The child’s eyes. The swim in the waterfall. The spots of the first drops of rain. The sun. The bread and wine. Hopping. Easter. The veins of leaves. The blowing grass. The color of stones. The pebbles on the stream’s bed. The white tablecloth outdoors. The dream of the house in the house. The dear one asleep in the next room. The peaceful Sundays. The horizon. The light from the room in the garden. The night flight. Riding a bicycle with no hands. The beautiful stranger. My father. My mother. My wife. My child.

In each case, we see a deepening of the role of the angel of history as described by Benjamin in his essay. It isn’t just that the angel witnesses the wreckage; it’s that the angel has emotions about the wreckage it wants to share with us. It isn’t just that the storm propels the angel into the future; it’s that the angel has an opinion as to how that wreckage should have conducted itself. The angel of history isn’t about the truth or falsity of history; it’s about who is acknowledged and what it means to share care and concern for those initially lost to history.

The other complication to the arc of this argument is that solely ascribing an interest in the traumatized ‘lessens’ the work of either text — that it strips them of the necessary ineffable mysteriousness that makes art ‘art.’

If that were to hold true — if we were to push our concern with trauma to the side — it still wouldn’t get rid of the fact that there is an emotion we can ascribe to the wreckage of history as described in The Rings Of Saturn. You can’t look at the very end of the book — wherein Sebald notes the death of his father-in-law — and not feel an emotion — that, over the course of history, when a ‘lady of the upper classes’ suffered a grief — which the reader could reasonably read as barely concealed code for ‘a very important woman’ — this is how history would respond (ergo, how we could respond), with …

… heavy robes of black silk taffeta or black crêpe de chine … black Mantua silk of which the Norwich silk weavers … had created … to rape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field …

 — but the text doesn’t just stop with the emotion. It begins to move and slides upward to note that these arrangements were done so that  — 

… the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost forever.  

In other words: amidst the wreckage of empire and silk, as you cross from a story about Queen Victoria to fictitious words falsely attributed to Thomas Browne, we realize that a bridge has been built for a dear one close to the narrator’s heart. In fact, all of this is done in the name of building a bridge: the angel bearing witness to the words of a dying motorcyclist in Wings of Desire; Peter Falk (as an ex-angel) bearing witness to an empty space on his way to get a cup of coffee; Sebald’s narrator bearing witness to an empty house or to fishermen on the beach who looked

… as if the last stragglers of some nomadic people had settled there, at the outermost limit of the earth, in expectation of the miracle longed for since time immemorial, the miracle which would justify all their erstwhile privations and wanderings.

The late David Foster Wallace once characterized true heroism as “minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer.” The actions undertaken in Wings Of Desire and The Rings Of Saturn highlight just how much weight the words ‘probity’ and ‘care’ carry over the course of a story, as well as what it takes for someone to actually earn that epithet of praise.

[langwrites]

Lang Plays Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I’m playing them in this order: Blue Lions, Black Eagles, Church of Seiros, and then Golden Deer. (I organized them by how likely it is to have a true final boss who is actually as relevant to the lore as the opening cutscene. And also because I thoroughly spoiled myself about that.)

So, after sinking what the game tells me was eighty hours into a single playthrough, here’s my thoughts on the first thing I tackled.

Spoilers below the cut.

Very Early Game (Blue Lions):

It’s the Fire Emblem Dad! (I played Path of Radiance. I’ve seen this dude before.)

Hi Claude. Sorry, I’m gonna steal every single one of your peers I can catch. Same to you, Edelgard.

Dimitri is so awkward it’s almost palpable.

Aww, Ashe and Annette are adorable. Mercedes has that dead anime mom hairstyle that sets my teeth on edge, but she’s super nice. It’ll take me longer to warm up to the boys, I think.

Felix is the token “I MUST BECOME STRONGER” myrmidon character. Gotta have at least one per game, apparently.

Sylvain = Sain. Token womanizer cavalier. His support list is pretty odd, though.

Dedue = the guy who done punch things. And he *has* to punch things, because he’s slow as hell and his speed growth isn’t great.

What the fuck is that strength growth, Dimitri. What the fuck is that Charm growth.

I was so close to making him my team’s designated Dancer unit, you guys.

Beleth is gonna be their teacher and somehow I don’t imagine this going super well.

Pre-Timeskip School Life:

Once again, I regret not being able to support with characters who’ve firmly attached themselves to the other two houses. (Which is only like three people in my “gotta catch ‘em all” playthrough, but whatever.)

But I can support all the recruitables, which is...something that took me a long while to do.

The first person I stole for the Blue Lions was Caspar. The first person who straight-up joined was Flayn. Yay, auxiliary punchers and auxiliary-auxiliary healers!

Ashe, your adoptive father really didn’t need to die. You were right. It was all bad all the way down.

Flayn gets kidnapped and I fuck around for a month raising everyone else’s supports and realizing Seteth’s too distraught to train my Lance level. Dangit.

I missed the opportunity to support with Leonie entirely because her personality put me off for the first few in-game months, and it turns out you can only start her support chain while Jeralt is alive.

Dammit. Now I’ve gotta train with lances.

What’s-his-fuck over at the village sure did do a thing, didn’t he. And if he hadn’t dropped his disguise just then he could have gotten away with it.

Their scheme would’ve failed faster if anybody around this fucking monastery could apply logic to shapeshifter shenanigans.

Seriously, no one should have trusted Monica.

You vanish over the course of a year, and come back with your personality totally inverted.

Tomas/Solon had just demonstrated what it looks like when these dickbags drop cover, and then everyone subsequently failed to make the correct deduction. If they hadn’t, Jeralt would’ve lived.

Dad-stabbing: A theme of Fire Emblem games. Seriously. Check out the huge list of dead dads (which goes all the way back to the first game in the series.)

Also dead moms, but for some reason moms are less prominent in the series as a whole.

For the purposes of this analysis, we are also including every single boss who had kids. Which isn’t most of them, but god damn there are still a lot of dead dads.

Dorotheaaaaaa be my frieeeeeeend

Yoinked Linhardt after finally showering him in enough gifts to get his sleepy ass to sign transfer papers.

Swiped Marianne, Bernadetta, Petra, Ignatz, Alois (kinda), Shamir (sorta), Manuela (iffy), Hanneman (yoink), Catherine (see previous), Hilda (how), Lorenz (woop woop), and Leonie (sigh).

The Death Knight remains, for the moment, unpillaged for his Dark Seal drops. This time it was an accident: I killed everyone else in the room except for him and a priest/mage, but then that last dude squared up with Felix and died.

All the points I poured into their associated skills and their supports, however, left one big gap:

DAMMIT FERDINAND, I’M TRYING TO SAVE YOUR LIFE. WHY DO YOU CARE SO MUCH ABOUT HEAVY ARMOR. RAPHAEL JOINED UP DESPITE THAT.

(I got a B-rank support with him and he popped into my office to say he was transferring, nbd. Ferdinand’s B-rank is locked until after the timeskip.)

tl;dr: The only recruitable character I missed was Ferdinand.

Seteth and Gilbert don’t do shit until post-timeskip and Rhea isn’t playable, so w/e.

As soon as I say that, Seteth and Flayn have a paralogue. It’s a beach level. I hate beach levels and desert levels. Seteth gets to be MVP because he’s the only jerk who can fly.

They have a little speech after the paralogue level that reveals that they’re actually father and daughter, not siblings. And the whole story of this little subplot basically confirms that they’re dragons.

Neither of them transform over the course of the game, and that’s okay.

Ruh-roh, Raggy. Let’s see who’s really under the Flame Emperor’s mask--

“AND I WOULD HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT TOO, IF NOT FOR--oh wait teleportation exists. BYE!”

Dimitri proceeds to thoroughly lose any chill he ever pretended to have, and I’m 99% sure the villain in question isn’t actually old enough to have caused the Tragedy of Duscur. Unless the biographies in the notes were lying.

Now, the backup dancers over there sure as shit are, but logical reasoning has its time and place.

Whatever. Time for stabbing.

WE ALREADY KNOW THESE PEOPLE ARE CAPABLE OF MAKING THEMSELVES LOOK LIKE ANYONE, MASKS TOTALLY UNNECESSARY. THE VICTIM ONLY HAS TO DISAPPEAR FOR A WHILE.

WHY AREN’T WE CHECKING THAT AS A BASIC PRECAUTION.

THERE HAVE BEEN THREE OF THESE CREEPS ALREADY.

Their name is too long and I should call them Morlocks.

But seriously, check for infiltrators.

What passes for strategy around here: Take Paladin Dimitri, plunk his overleveled ass down on a corner where all the enemies’ targeting reticles converge, and wait five minutes for all the counterkill animations to play out.

If I wanna try the same with Sylvain, he needs to be backed up by at least Annette and probably Felix. Maybe even Mercedes if she’s not already busy slinging Physics around.

Dimitri’s fine with just sitting around with a forged Steel Lance and poking holes in everything.

Beleth can do the same, but is much more reliant on dodging and not just facetanking axes.

The little “no damage!” sound effect is still very satisfying. Yes, game, my Defense/Resistance has escaped the bounds of your damage curve.

Dorothea became my Dancer unit, because despite Dimitri having twenty-eight Charm to her nineteen, he begged me not to and also is better sitting on a corner and killing everything.

Huh, the monastery is sure being invad--you know, Edelgard, if it wasn’t already really obvious that your faction is basically the “villain route” in Samurai Warriors parlance, using giant mop-headed demonic beasts as shock troops would probably give it away to observers. If they weren’t already running away in abject terror.

The principle from How to Train Your Dragon still applies: A downed dragon is a dead dragon. If Rhea didn’t want to basically get mobbed, she should’ve stayed in the air and acted as flying artillery for the Knights of Seiros with her mouth laser. She could’ve sat on top of a wall and fired with relative impunity.

Sure, some demonic beasts can fly, but there weren’t any in that cutscene and the flying ones have, mechanically, one less health meter than the landbound ones.

Also, they’re pushovers.

And there’s the washed-out creep brigade! They look like the Grimleal, but with more feathers and less of a tan.

...And there goes Beleth, off to have a five-year nap.

Welp.

Post Timeskip:

Oh good, it’s been five years. Beleth, I hate to break it to you, but you’re probably at least slightly dragon at this point. Check your ears if you have a chance.

Tiki canonically napped for like 99% of her three thousand years in Awakening, ironically enough, so it’s not like dragon-people are exactly early risers.

Poor rando gets asked “what year is it” like that question is ever used outside of fiction. Beleth doesn’t read time travel books, I take it.

“oh you probably shouldn’t go to the monastery, it’s like super haunted and shit”

“sorry what was that i couldn’t hear you over the sound of me climbing up to the monastery”

Eyyyy, it’s a lance-wielding pirate.

...Hi, Dimitri. Where’d your macaroni hair go.

You know, it’s not surprising that Dimitri would think Beleth was a hallucination. He spent a lot of time yelling at his inner demons even pre-timeskip, after taking a couple of severe psychological shocks.

But he absolutely should have walked into her and been surprised when he knocked them both on their asses.

He’s been spending the last five years stabbing people, hasn’t he.

Yep.

He looks like he fell out of Game of Thrones.

Blue Lions! Rah rah something team chant. Rah rah Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen~

None of you people trained any of your skills. In five years. Dimitri you were a paladin. Did you eat your horse.

You are all getting sent to boot camp.

Hi, Gilbert. Why are you playable now all of a sudden. Why is your speed a fucking two.

THIS IS WHY MIKLAN HANDED YOU YOUR ASS.

Once again, the “plunk Dimitri’s overleveled ass down on a corner and watch people die” plan is still a valid strategy. I still don’t know where he gets all this strength (and charm). Like, goddamn.

Annette got cornered for like five turns because I was too cowardly to put her in range of a Brawler.

Then she killed him with a critical Fire.

So, I guess Felix’s remarks about Dimitri’s issues make some sense now, but he should still stop making them. I know he’s a tsundere par excellence, but still.

STop TalKing AboUT KilLing PeoPle

Warning: Sympathetic Boss Approaching.

Look, most “sympathetic” bosses in Fire Emblem kinda fall flat. The better ones are placed in the way of the player characters while they’re in the middle of a low point in the emotional arc and get utterly wrecked in a flurry of misdirected fury. Sometimes the characters even feel bad about it afterward. The worst ones are the ones who are just utterly devoted to someone who’s earned everyone’s ire by being a utter fucking asshole.

Good: Mustafa from Awakening and Shiharam from Path of Radiance. Good people forced into bad situations. Or just cornered. Henry talked up the former long after he got a Chrom to the face, and the latter was probably the best-written of the “aw, I wish I didn’t have to kill him” bosses I’ve run across.

Bad: Levail from Radiant Dawn. There is no getting around the fact that General Zelgius was a bad dude. Levail holding him up as a paragon of knightliness and swearing to serve him out of sheer admiration did not make him even marginally better.

We sure did kill Caspar’s uncle, didn’t we. I’m sure that won’t come back to bite us square in the ass. Not after he had that “this guy is a person who cares about stuff” cutscene to remind us of his pixel humanity.

I’m sure it’s fine.

Bwoop, bwoop, everyone say hello to Ferdinand and Lorenz! And say goodbye to Ferdinand, because he didn’t allow himself to be recruited pre-timeskip, isn’t recruitable post-timeskip, and then I had Felix kill him with Thoron.

Lorenz can rejoin us, though. He doesn’t count as an enemy commander once he’s been smacked down to 0 hp.

HI, DEDUE. WHY ARE YOU ONLY LEVEL TWENTY. GET IN THE BACKLINES AND DON’T TALK TO ME UNTIL YOU CAN ACTUALLY DAMAGE ANYTHING.

(Seriously, tho, I was waiting for Dedue to come back for two reasons. One: I did that paralogue of his way back in Part One and he did not get to die after all that. Two: Part of Dimitri’s epic slide into “spear-wielding mountain man who runs around killing people with his bare hands” had to do with Dedue “dying” during the timeskip. That jackass cracked a smile for the first time in ingame years thanks to the world’s punchiest bodyguard coming back alive.)

(Fortress Knight is still the worst class.)

I totally didn’t pay any attention to what, if anything, actually separated Master classes from Advanced classes other than my inability to get my hands on Master Seals. So Ashe is a Bow Knight now, while Felix made it to Mortal Savant (wtf is that name and why is the class model basically a samurai) and I spent a very long time level-grinding Sylvain’s Reason skill to make him a Dark Knight. I aimed for Gremory with all my spellcaster girls, but I admit to not really paying attention to specifics.

(I ended up with five Gremories: Annette, Flayn, Mercedes, Lysithea, and Dorothea. Bernadetta became a Bow Knight and Marianne promoted eventually to a Holy Knight. Dorothea also ended up taking Mortal Savant, which she didn’t ever use.)

(Seteth became a Wyvern Lord and Dedue eventually made it to Warrior.)

(Byleth qualified for Mortal Savant and used it precisely no times.)

(It became pretty clear that I just threw Master Seals at people whenever the possibility of promoting them came up.)

(Certification is a weird system.)

I stopped paying a ton of attention to supports around the time I realized that Ferdinand wasn’t going to be recruited no matter what I did in the final month before Shit Went Down.

Then I started paying attention again like two chapters from endgame, because I remembered some A-ranked supports meant that the characters could get paired endings.

I also stopped ignoring Cyril and started using him as an adjutant, though his stats never quite caught up to Seteth (also known as the only instructor unit I ever consistently used).

Cornelia is absolutely a Morlock plant. That is a face she just made, even in flashback.

I wish we could've seen Dimitri’s now-dead uncle, if only because I’m curious. Also, what did Edelgard’s mom/Dimitri’s stepmom look like?

Why is there always a fire level. I saw it earlier thanks to doing Ingrid and Dorothea’s paralogue, but it’s a Fire Emblem stock level type and I hate it.

Okay, yeah, this area totally got nuked. Magitech nukes, but still. It’s still on fire centuries later? Why??

Felix’s dad is a Holy Knight. Why do I have to keep his ass alive on a field when half the enemies are barely Advanced classes, never mind Master classes.

Oh right, because I want the exp for myself.

Rodrigue is possibly the single person here who can make Dimitri’s murder-bender change direction even slightly. He also gets along with his actual son so much worse than that. He’s like Annette’s dad, but with actual verbal confrontations.

There’s Caspar’s not-exactly-forgotten aunt, here to “secretly” avenge her dead brother. Dude, could you say something about that?

Three levels later: I thought we were done with the dad-stabbing. 

Felix has officially lost Too Many People in pursuit of keeping Dimitri alive. As has everyone else, frankly.

In other routes, Dimitri absolutely runs his campaign off a cliff.

Here, he turns his life around. More or less. Gotta make the choice to get better.

Time to take back the Kingdom’s capital, like we’ve not been doing for four chapters now. Finally.

Cornelia is absolutely a Morlock plant. This is like the fourth character who supposedly did a complete characterization 180 after a period of being actually useful to other people. Goodbye, civil engineer we never knew.

I think the only infiltrator who did things properly was Solon, but he still dropped his disguise for no good reason early in the game. That operatic level of drama is not a trait that helps him survive a month later. Just goes to show that the Morlocks don’t have more than one type of good judgment at a time, I guess.

I know I’m supposed to avoid the giant doom robots, but...

No, it turns out I can just have Dimitri and Beleth stand in the middle of the killzone and destroy them for fun and profit.

Ding dong the witch is dead.

Welp, time to go save the Alliance, which is getting schooled by the Empire.

HI CLAUDE.

I MISSED YOU AND YOUR FAITH IN HUMANITY. And specifically in Dimitri, for some reason? I think he kinda stabbed your soldiers a lot the last time you two met, but feel free to keep being the Best Character.

Your bodyguards are top-notch, man. One of them got hit with anything over the course of the entire battle.

Your general Judith, however, necessitates Flayn using ALL of her Rescue spells just to keep her alive.

I still had to send Ashe to keep a Falcon Knight off you, but no big.

And also had to send Hilda and Petra to kill the Asshole Reinforcements to nick their stuff.

Dimitri sat there and dodge-tanked all of Arundel’s attempts to kill him until the team killed everybody else. Then Dimitri poked him and he died. Dimitri OHKOs everything except monsters now, and that’s only because they have multiple health meters.

And then Claude fucks off to become king somewhere else. Okay then. It was a nice speech, though.

Killing the Death Knight for fun and profit and now Mercedes is crying. Shit.

Doesn’t this place get vaporized in every other route?

Did killing so many Morlocks by accident lock us out of seeing an intercontinental ballistic missile?

(And it is by accident, because this route is like the only one where the Morlocks are incidentals instead of the main problem, partly due to Dimitri’s tunnel vision and partly just because they don’t drop their disguises upon death.)

Well, I guess it’s time to confront Edelgard.

It’s completely valid of her to look at the guy who was threatening to rip her head off with his bare hands and hang it from the gates of the Empire’s capital a little while ago, and then go “Yeah, diplomacy’s shot.” That Dimitri stopped being quite so all-consumingly homicidal a bit ago is not actually reason to try throwing herself on anyone’s mercy. I feel kinda bad for her, since she’s been pushed into this corner and her ace-in-the-hole allies are basically decapitated, and I stole all her potential friends back during the school phase of the game.

Also, sunk cost fallacy.

Still walloped the entire roster of the second-to-last level, down to killing Hubert with Lysithea. Hilda and Cyril killed all the bird demons.

On the final level, which starts immediately after the previous one, three characters got totally destroyed by the sheer number of mages floating around: Dimitri (whose Avoid finally failed him four times in a row), Hilda (same), and Dedue (thirded). Seteth miraculously survived taking 68 points of damage from a single attack, and then later went on to take Edelgard’s last health bar off with a crit.

Weirdly, Beleth’s Avoid was just fine. Finally let her use the Sublime Sword of the Creator and she killed most of the Gremories that took out Dimitri and Hilda.

And everybody we could save per plot constraints got to live! (Except Ferdinand.)

I’m willing to save him on subsequent routes because killing him made Dorothea sad.

Next time: Lang plays the route that screws over most of these people in service of killing the God-Pope.

[smartphone-science]

The final Counterintuitive episode of the three-part miniseries about human nature is online! After tackling preferences & personality, we now weigh in on the debate about nature vs. nurture to find out how we become who we are. If you like this episode, be sure to check out other episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, YouTube, or SoundCloud (or basically every place where you can get podcasts). Below, you’ll find the transcript of this episode with some references / further reading hyperlinks. The music for this episode comes from FreeSound. At this point it is basically “music by Setuniman“, because that’s really great music! Specifically these pieces:

https://freesound.org/people/Erokia/sounds/477924/ https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/475959/ https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/470116/ https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/379927/ https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/222741/ https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/264937/ https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/180249/ https://freesound.org/people/sofialomba/sounds/467936/ https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/466655/

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Transcript

In the fourth century before Christ, Aristotle, pupil of Plato and often referred to as the father of Western philosophy, was the defining figure in the Greece of antiquity. Unbeknownst to many, Aristotle also dabbled in Greek tragedy, the main form of theatre back in the day. In his book Poetics, he noted that the typical Greek tragedy consists of five parts, two parts introducing the audience to the story and three acts for telling the actual story. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Sounds trivial but even today most screenplays, and stories in general, follow this course. Because it works.

By now the three-act structure has been solidified and extended, with the presence of a situation-changing incident in Act I – think a first encounter between future spouses or an unexpected inheritance – and the introduction of tension and excitement in Act II, trouble in paradise for instance. Act III then contains the climax, the ultimate settling of the question of the play: Will they or won’t they? Will the main character find happiness in the end? If you don’t want to call them Act I, II, III, they also have other names: Setup, Confrontation, and Resolution. This is Act III, this is Resolution, this is the climax.

Introduction

You’re listening to episode seven of Counterintuitive, the podcast about things which are not what they seem to be. My name is Daniel Bojar and we are right now in the final episode of this miniseries about human nature. In the span of these three episodes, I wanted to investigate human nature, find out how the current research consensus aligns with intuitive beliefs about human nature, and, finally, make a case for a new conceptual view of our nature. Because, and we will get to that in the next episode, concepts and mechanism are always more abstract, always more counterintuitive than we intuitively believe. Because it would be the most extreme expression of anthropocentric hubris to think that intuitive or simple explanations could even remotely capture reality.

In the first episode of this miniseries we probed our preferences, with the conclusion that preferences can only considered to be stable if you accept the extreme context dependence of preferences. Then, in the second episode, personality was the main topic, specifically its stability across contexts. And of course a similar picture to preferences emerged: incredibly high variance, incredibly high context importance. These revelations have thrown up a couple of important questions: Are we one or are we many? Who are we truly? We’ve answered these questions at least partially in the last two episodes. Today, we add to these answers and we also add a new question into the mix: How do we become who we are? Yes, you’ve got it: we’re talking about nature vs. nurture here. Welcome to Act III, welcome to the climax.

Main

It all started with a 2015 article in the journal Nature Genetics. In fact, a meta-analysis by lead author Tinca Polderman, corresponding authors Peter Visscher and Danielle Posthuma, and collaborators, based in the Netherlands and Australia. Polderman and her colleagues took on the gargantuan task of sifting through thousands of scientific publications, in order to find the type of studies they were interested in analyzing. Twin studies which investigated complex human traits. Traits like personality aspects, cognitive functioning, weight maintenance, etc. etc. They ended up with more than 2500 publications, basically all twin studies published in that topic between 1958 and 2012, more than 50 years of twin study research! Just to give you a sense of scale: that corresponded to close to 18 000 investigated human traits and 14.5 million twin pairs from 39 different countries. The results of this meta-analysis might offend you or just lead to flat-out denial. But before doubting the results of this meta-analysis, which we’ll go into in a minute, please ask yourself if your psychological pet theory has 14.5 million study participants in its corner and how much data you think is enough to settle a question.

Why then are twin studies so all-important for investigating complex human traits? Twin studies usually compare genetically identical twins who either grew up in different households or in the same household. That’s really great because it basically eliminates genetics as a confounding factor. You can then even compare these twins with fraternal twins, whose DNA is not the same, similar to normal siblings, to find out what effect genetics plays. Since identical twins have the exact same genes, any difference between them growing up apart or together must come from their environment. Twin studies are the gold standard in the nature vs. nurture debate. From these studies come all the results you probably heard of already, like for instance that traits are on average about 50 percent heritable. This is oftentimes transformed into the one-size-fits-all “it’s about fifty-fifty nature and nurture”. And I won’t argue too much with that number. What I will argue with, however, is what we mean by ‘nurture’.

Unsurprisingly, Polderman and her colleagues found that not a single trait of their close to 18 000 investigated traits had no genetic influence. Fair enough, we are at ease with the notion that genetics has some influence, even though it’s currently popular to downplay its importance. What about nurture though? Technically, nurture should be synonymous with ‘environment’. Yet, at least in the way we typically use it, we mean child rearing when we say nurture. Psychologists use a handy notation to distinguish these different types of nurture: They speak of ‘shared environment’ for the effects your parents or siblings have on you. Shared, because a set of twins growing up in the same household necessarily shares this environment. On the other hand, the term ‘non-shared environment’ is used to describe the effects of the rest of your environment (peers, school, etc.). Because even for identical twins, their friends are not necessarily shared. How about you venture a guess which one of the two is more important? Shared environment, with parents and siblings, or non-shared environment, with peers, the media, and school? Here’s a hint: This show isn’t called Counterintuitive for no reason.

You might even be fine with non-shared environment playing a somewhat larger role than shared environment but that’s not what Polderman and her collaborators found. After combing through all the studies their conclusion was this: For about 70 percent of their traits, that corresponds to over 12 000 complex human traits, no influence of shared environment was found. None. Put another way, for the majority of your traits, including personality and values, neither your parents nor your siblings matter. At all. Or maybe that’s not strictly true. Their genes matter, just not whatever they do during child-rearing. All the ‘nurture’ effects in these 70 percent comes from non-shared environment, for instance from your peers. Of course there are the other 30 percent of traits, in which shared environment plays at least some role, such as how spiritual you are, but if you take any random trait it’s much more likely that how your parents raised you didn’t affect you in that trait.

Now that’s a lot to unpack and I’m sure it meets a lot of mental resistance in most people. Because the alternative, that how you were raised is important for your personality and values, is just so intuitive and so unshakeable. So let’s first give you all the stabilizing information I can give you. Parents certainly can impart knowledge or skills to their children through education. They can also certainly give their child a happy childhood which is worthwhile regardless of whether this leads to any positive change in their personality or values. They just don’t have any substantial influence on their personality or values.

One of the immediate objections most likely is going to be the plethora of research indicating otherwise. Countless publications demonstrating the effects education by one’s parents can have on later life. For instance, parents who abuse their children increase the chances of their children to be abusive parents and partners themselves later on. But notice the trap here. ‘Increasing the chances’ would mean that the parental behavior causes the later increase in the behavior of their children. Yet what most people, and unfortunately most psychological articles, forget is that parents share about 50 percent of their DNA with their children. So, a priori, it is expected that children are, to some extent, like their parents because they are directly related and share a substantial portion of their genetic information. This is precisely where twin studies come into play again. Because, in studies, genetically identical twins are in most traits similar to the same degree, regardless of whether they grew up together or in different households. If parental education would make a substantial difference, you would expect twins who grow up in the same household with the same parents to be more similar than twins growing up separately. Yet even though these twins share genetics and shared environment, they’re not more similar than twins merely sharing genetics. Even more shocking, adopted children are not more similar to their new siblings after growing up with them than two random kids from the street!

This result, based on millions and millions of twins and thousands of academic publications, is our climax. Parental education (and interaction with your siblings) does not form your personality, values, and most other traits in a substantial manner. Now onto the resolution. For this, we’ll answer two questions: how is this possible & why does it happen like that? First, how.

Here, we can draw on the last two episodes, on the extreme context-dependence of preferences and personality. I hope by now we have successfully eroded any belief in a stable or intrinsically true personality and preferences. Effectively, in every new context we learn anew how to act, how to react, and how to be. And there are so many different contexts. You can observe that when you speak to your parents as an adult. If you’re anything like the typical person, you act characteristically different than when speaking to a friend or to your boss. In a way, you become more childlike again: don’t act out, don’t use swear words, respect the parental authority (at least to some degree). Or, more precisely, you act more childlike again. It’s just another context, with a corresponding personality. And as it’s not the exact same context as when you were a child, you don’t act exactly as you did when you were a child. Since your parental context only describes one context among many which you will encounter during your life, you wouldn’t expect that the behavior learned at home would be characteristic overall. One way you can see this is that a stronger parental influence on personality can be seen while the child is living at home (even though it basically vanishes once the child moves out). Because at that point, the context at home is one of the most dominant contexts in the life of a child and better represents their overall life than in adulthood. Even here though, you can ascertain that the behavior at home is just a reaction to context and not some intrinsic personality. Studies show, for instance, that there is very little correlation between rule-breaking behavior at school and at home. Two very different contexts, two very different personalities.

Another, often neglected, factor is the indirect influence of genetics. I’m talking about the power of genetics to sway your choice of environment. Let’s say you’re smart. Being smart is at least 50 percent genetically determined. But being smart also leads you to associate with other smart people, to perhaps choose a more intellectually stimulating type of work, and to engage in lifelong learning. These are all environmental factors but they’re made more likely by your genetic basis of intelligence. You can demonstrate that with data, as the fraction of your IQ that can be explained by your genetics steadily increases throughout your life, concordant with the idea that your DNA has a seeping influence on your environment. The fifty-fifty split between nature and nurture with regard to IQ is only true in adolescence. In old age, however, genetics explains about 80 percent of your IQ score.

One part of this environment which you, to some extent, choose are your peers. And as a substantial part of your nonshared environment, they of course have an influence on many of your traits. Studies show, for instance, that attitudes about school (whether you care about school or if you’re too cool for school) and other attitudes change after you change your group of friends. Of course your attitude changes in a way that it afterwards resembles the attitude of your new friends. You fit into your new peer group because exclusion from a group carries an evolutionary penalty with it.

Now, you might ask, why is it that this value and trait adaptation stemming from fear of exclusion takes place in peer groups but not in your family? That brings us to the second question: Why does shared environment (aka parents and siblings) have no substantial influence on your character? Because of course exclusion from your family group should be even more deadly evolutionarily speaking. But there are two broad counterarguments to this. First, prehistoric humans did not engage in the careful childrearing we can observe today. As can be seen in hunter-gatherer societies today, children did not receive special attention and were left to the care of elder siblings or other children. They were taught to not speak to adults if not spoken to, and were not imbued with a carefully selected assortment of values by their parents as is the case today. So, evolutionarily speaking, it would be suicide if a child relies on receiving all or even most of its traits, values, and personality from their parents. Rather, the focus should be on other children, preferably elder children, because that’s where they will spend most of their time. Today, younger children are however no longer entrusted to their older siblings for nurture. Rather, sibling rivalries are flourishing and can even be exacerbated by their parents.

The second counterargument applies both to the prehistoric as well as our current age. It refers to the fact that peer environments are much more characteristic for the average life situation you face in adulthood. While living at home, a child is in a clear power imbalance and has to obey the commands of their parents. Yet, later, when you’re with friends or with your partner, little to no power imbalance can be observed. Therefore, building peer group-compatible values and traits is more important overall than building the same for a power imbalance scenario as in your childhood. Your trait acquisition therefore accurately reflects your needs in life and your overall characteristic environment. Here’s another scientific nugget which nicely illustrates this point: Children with less contact to peers were shown to have lower pro-social behavior but the number of siblings (or absence of siblings) did not influence the number of friends a child had. The conclusion seems clear. Children learn their social skills from their peer-friends, not from their parents, nor from their siblings. Because the social skills you learn from your parents are only useful in power imbalance contexts, not in peer contexts which dominate your life once you exit your parental home.

Even conservative estimates locate the timespan containing the most dramatic changes to our personality as extending to our thirties. For most people, this gives you a full decade of development outside the influence zone of your parents. So even just considering this should lead us to question the dominance of parental influence. And change doesn’t stop at age thirty, as we have seen in the preceding episodes. Instead, it’s happening all the time. Not only are we multifaceted with regard to all kinds of contexts, we’re also continuously evolving with time. The moral of the story? Maybe don’t blame parents for how their children turned out, the next time around. But also, don’t praise them too much if their children turned out well. Because, frankly, their influence on all of that is really limited. Because each of us is many and our intricate yet flexible nature cannot be conclusively explained by a single source of influence. Because sometimes even the most intuitive sources of influence don’t matter all that much.

Outro

And now we are at the end of this miniseries about human nature! If you want to find out more about this fascinating topic, consider reading The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris, an excellent and in-depth book which yielded much of the inspiration for this series. In two weeks, we will reconvene to dedicate ourselves to the question of why it’s beneficial to think about counterintuitives in the first place. As always, references and further reading for this episode can be found in the linked show notes. If you like this or other episodes, please consider sharing them with your friends and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast from. Every second Thursday a new episode will be uploaded. My name is Daniel Bojar and you’ve listened to Counterintuitive, the critical thinking podcast about things which are not what they seem to be. You can follow me on Twitter at @daniel_bojar or on my website dbojar.com, where you will find other counterintuitive articles. Until next time!

via Science Blogs