#it’s portrayed as objectively evil and inherently in need of destruction

[kideternity]

On the last two episodes of Tamers. I think I've come to the conclusion that I think Yggdrasil from Savers is a much more interesting and compelling final villain then the D-Reaper from Tamers is

[bioethicists]

what are your thoughts on ocpd? i generally think these behaviors are harmless or at least not distressing and wouldn't benefit people much to have classified as a personality disorder.

hmmm i could post more nuance abt this at a later time so giving this response might be kicking a hornet's nest + leaving- please please please keep in mind that i believe all ppl's suffering is valid + in need of healing + i am questioning the history, purpose + impact of personality disorder dx, NOT the lived experiences of ppl diagnosed with them

while i think all psychiatric diagnosis is suspect, i find personality disorders in particular to be laughable, even by dsm standards. they are a hodgepodge of "types of ppl we think are bad". the words "unusual" + "dramatic" are used to describe supposedly objective pathologies. if anything, these disorders serve as a massive red flag that psychiatry is far less wedded to science than its proponents want to believe it is. i think our attempts to 'destigmatize' this absolutely dogshit collection of disorders instead of questioning their use or existence has been a horrible error within the mad community.

many of the criteria are absolutely seeping with moral judgements + christian ideology. several are blatant repurposings of hysteria. they are frequently diagnosed in ppl who have no desire to 'heal' from them (not viewing the behaviors as a problem is often part of the dx). things like disregarding the rights of others or exploiting others for your own gain are side by side with things like the desire to not be around ppl or intensely believing in aliens. most of them can be directly linked to traumatic experiences in childhood + yet they persist in portraying them as disorders of individual, unchangeable pathology. if ppl expanded their view of trauma, i'm willing to bet that basically all cluster b + c + a decent chunk of cluster a ppl would qualify as having experienced significant trauma.

fwiw, i definitely meet the ocpd criteria but i find the word ocd to be a more useful tool for me. my father also meets this criteria + i would say it has been a deeply destructive pattern of behavior in his life for himself + his loved ones. i can't say this is the case for everyone meeting this criteria, tho.

i just don't think the concept of diagnosing anyone with having a "disordered personality" is healing. some things classified as pds are extremely distressing experiences which ppl deserve support for, but i would like to see those placed in conversation with trauma, politics, + community. classifying intense trauma responses as permanent disorders of the self leaves a horrible taste of blood in my mouth. how many of us already believe that we are inherently broken because of what happened to us?

like u said, other things classified as pd diagnoses can be pretty harmless differences. i often see ppl in my communities responding to the widespread belief that ppl diagnosed with pds are immoral or evil (which is shitty!) by trying to 'destigmatize' them, but i propose, after a careful evaluation of the history + current usage of the diagnosis, that the concept of personality disorders was + is intended to classify ppl who are seen as morally corrupt or 'unusual' as being diseased. the original purpose of this diagnostic category was to stigmatize people. is this really the concept we want to seek liberation through, or can we find new ways of understanding any suffering that may come from the experiences currently labeled as personality disorders?

[vaarsuvius6]

I disagree. It’s important to remember that Adora was raised in a cult. Like all people who grow up in cults, she honestly believed what the cult told her...and in the interest of damning by faint praise, I should point out that not everything the Horde said was a lie. For example, a common Horde talking point was that the feudal monarchy of the Etherian kingdoms was inherently unfair, a point which is kind of hard to disagree with. Adora doesn’t need to be mind-controlled, she just needs to believe the lie she’s been told her whole life. Keep in mind, in canon, Adora only realized that the Horde was evil and the Rebels weren’t because she got hit by a magic exposition beam. Think of Kyle, and Lonnie, and Rogelio - they weren’t brainwashed, but they kept on fighting for the Horde for a very long time, because they were brought up to believe that the Horde was right.

Or, to put this in real life terms - does the name Frederick Douglass ring any bells? By his own account, he had no thought that slavery wasn’t his natural state until his master’s new wife began teaching him how to read. Until then, he always saw himself as a slave, and believed that submission to the white man was his rightful place.

You’re also acting like Shadow Weaver is the only one who knows how to be manipulative. Who do you think started the cult in the first place? Hordak is an excellent manipulator - in fact, he’s a much better manipulator than Weaver ever was, because his lies usually have a grain of truth inside (again, feudal monarchy being unfair, stuff like that). I’m not defending Hordak as a person, he sucks, but he is a good liar, so the idea that Weaver was the only manipulator in the Horde makes no sense.

I think the main problem with your argument is that you're vastly overestimating how easy it is for a person to leave a cult in which they’ve been raised their whole life. Go to r/QAnonCasualties some time. You’ll see all kinds of horror stories about people who were indoctrinated into all kinds of crazy ideologies. And those were people who weren’t indoctrinated as children like Adora was. Leaving a cult isn’t easy. Fiction often portrays the task of doing so as being far more easy than it really is.

I also thouroghly object to the idea that Catra would respond positively to Angella or Castaspella. Quite frankly, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard all month. What you have to understand is, Catra is an abuse victim. Her main experience with authority is being mistreated and abused. I’m not just talking about Weaver - I’m also talking about the other authority figures who knew what Weaver was doing and didn’t try to stop her. Catra has grown up with the idea that authority figures - and female authority figures in particular - are not to be trusted. The idea that she would respond positively to Angella or Castaspella is laughably naive. From her perspective, Angella is a second Shadow Weaver, nothing more.

This brings up a second point. If Catra is afraid of Angella (which she fucking would be) wouldn’t she also be scared of Glimmer, and Bow, and everyone in the Rebellion.?They’re all working for Angella, after all. And yes, I think that Catra would be much more paranoid and more prone to suspecting her new allies than Adora ever was...but that’s WHY the AU became so popular.

See, here’s the thing. Canon didn’t really handle Catra’s PTSD well. The morale is supposed to be “people with PTSD deserve support”, but it kind of came out as “people with PTSD are ticking time bombs and you should be afraid of them, because they’ll try to destroy the world at any moment.” It’s what I call “Steven Universe Future syndrome” - the desire to portray PTSD victims as sympathetic, while also treating them as dangerous forces for destruction that pose a threat to those around them. It’s a classic case of “do as I say, not as I do”.

This, I think, is why the whole “Catra-Adora role swap” thing is so popular - it takes a story about a PTSD victim being THE VILLAIN and turns it into the story of a PTSD victim being THE HERO. It turns the story of Catra succuming to her demons into the story of her overcoming them. It turns the story of Adora quickly trusting her new allies into the story of Catra being EXTREMELY suspicious of them, only growing to trust them after a lot of time and character growth. It turns the story of Adora being altruistic from the beginning into the story of Catra initially having ulterior motives, wanting revenge on Weaver or maybe just a reward from the rebels, and only becoming truly altruistic after a lot of time and character growth. It turns Adora’s fairly conventional hero’s journey into a story of redemption, of Catra learning how to overcome her flaws. A story that - unlike in canon - isn’t condensed into a single season, but made into the main focus of the narrative. In canon, Catra’s redemption felt awfully rushed, and the main appeal of these role swap fics is to give her a more believable redemption arc. Catra deserved better. Canon let her down. That’s why so many fanfic writers had the same idea - to give her the redemption arc she deserved.

As for Adora, I think part of the appeal is watching a good person fall into fanaticism and indoctrination. Again, like I said before, plenty of people in real life have lost friends to online radicalization, which is part of what makes the Horde so scary - you can easily imagine an organization existing like it in real life. In the age of QAnon and Pizzagate, someone like Adora, who seems like the traditional fantasy progatonist, succiming to a hateful extremist ideology is disturbingly plausible.

A good redemption arc requires that a character be a bit of a jerk when they start out - otherwise, there’s nothing to redeem. Conversely, a good corruption arc requires a character to be likeable when they start out - otherwise, there’s nothing to corrupt. I think this is the big reason why Catra’s canon arc was such a letdown - she’s already a sarcastic jerk when she starts out, so seeing her become more of a jerk isn’t really that surprising. Seeing Adora, a character who should by all rights be the hero, fall into darkness is much more dramatic.

Let me put it this way - when we meet Powder for the first time in Arcane, she’s a nice child who just wants to help her adopted siblings. As the show goes on, we watch her fall further and further into madness. If she was already a snarky jerk in episode 1, then it wouldn’t have the same weight. Adora being corrupted feels just like Powder being corrupted - it’s the death of innocence, and that gives the story much more drama.

Additionally, I would like to point out that Horde Adora has a basis in the original canon (https://www.hemanworld.com/despara/). It’s not like fanfic writers pulled the idea out of whole cloth. The franchise basically encouraged them to think of the possibilities. 

Now, I’m not naive enough to believe that there aren’t a bunch of mediocre role-swaps out there. However, the said could be same of any fanfiction of any kind. 90% of all fanfics are crud. It’s the remaining 10% that makes us keep reading. And in my opinion, the very best Catra-Adora role swaps aren’t just as good as what we got in canon...they’re a lot better. Like I said, Catra needed a better redemption arc, and I will be forever grateful to fanfic writers for doing their best to give her one.

A one of the things I just do not like in fandoms generally, specifically ATLA and SP0P (but that’s for another time), is role reversal AUs. I don’t get the point of it, because if you swap Zuko and Azula— it changes the entire course of the story in a very, very major way because Azula would never get banished under the same circumstances as Zuko unless you took literally everything that made her Azula and swapped it with Zuko.

And then it’s basically just a gender swap??? Or a slightly sassier Zuko?

If Azula was banished, she’d probably get out without a scar because she’s fast and has an insanely good control over fire temperatures, wouldn’t waste time hunting the Avatar, and wouldn’t have Iroh or anyone to lead her to the path of good.

Her journey would be one big Azula alone episode. Her path to good would depend solely on being treated kindly genuinely, and loved for who she is. She could play the long con and join the Gaang with the intention of bringing Aang in, until they choose her when it matters, when they don’t have to and she decides they’re worth treason. Or she could overthrow the entire Earth Kingdom to prove her worth.

Meanwhile, Zuko and Iroh would still be in the Fire Nation, unless Zuko also got himself banished, which is pretty likely given his track record— and in which case, Ozai would give him the same task as Azula to pit them against each other.

[tyrantisterror]

I forget if you've been asked this question before, but a friend of mine is trying to write a kaiju story for kaijune, but she doesn't have much experience writing kaiju or with kaiju media, and she asked me a question I figured you'd be better at answering: What is it that makes a kaiju story truly feel like a kaiju story other than the focus on a giant monster?

That's a very difficult question to answer, so I can see why she's having problems with it. It all depends on how you define the kaiju genre, and that's a highly contentious subject. I mean, defining things always is - every definition will have people who say it's too loose for including x and other people saying it's too narrow for excluding y, and definitions of the "kaiju genre" are no exception.

I guess let's start by setting up the to extreme ends of this definition.

The most liberal definition: A Kaiju Story is any story where a giant monster/kaiju rampaging around is the central conflict of the story.

The most(?) conservative definition: A Kaiju Story is any Japanese story where a kaiju rampaging is the central conflict of the story.

Our first big takeaway here, and the thing all kaiju genre fans can agree on, is that a kaiju needs to be integral to the plot of your kaiju story. Lord of the Rings isn't a kaiju story, because while it has a big monster in it, that big monster is an incidental encounter rather than the core focus of the conflict. That's our minimum requirement for a kaiju story.

Now, I lean towards the liberal side of this issue (which is unusual for me when it comes to defining literary shit), but I'm gonna explore on the conservative side here first, because I think there's some important points to consider there. The term "kaiju" doesn't just conjure up images of any giant monster when you hear it - it brings to mind Godzilla, Power Rangers, Gamera, Ultraman, men in rubber suits, bad dubbing, etc. And what those franchises have in common that other giant monster media doesn't is a shared background in Japanese culture and history.

When I think about why I love kaiju stories even more than most other monster-focused fiction, a lot of the things that come to mind have their roots in Japanese culture. The complex characterization of the monsters has its roots in Shintoism and various folk religious that treat all things, be they human, animal, plant, or even inanimate objects, as having souls. The emphasis on living in harmony with nature comes from those same beliefs, from Buddhism, and from the mercurial nature of Japan's environment and weather. The firm themes of opposing warfare and breaking cycles of violence are born from the pioneers of the genre despising the horrors they witnessed in World War II and wanting future generations to never repeat that great mistake. Et cetera et cetera.

I think it would be mostly accurate to say there are a great many details that make Japanese giant monster stories feel more alike to each other than to non-Japanese giant monster movies. ...mostly.

But not entirely.

Because defining "the kaiju genre" as solely being a product of Japanese culture ignores the unignorable fact that Japanese kaiju movies, from the very beginning, took some inspiration from American giant monster films. There are elements of King Kong (1933) in Godzilla (1954), and the film-makers have acknowledged that much. Rodan has this great twist at the end of the first act that depends on the audience expecting it to work like an American giant bug movie, which most of the first act functions almost identical to. The movie that cemented the "Monster vs. Monster" formula at Toho was King Kong vs. Godzilla. It goes on!

And it also goes both ways - Gorgo, a film made by the creators of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The Giant Behemoth, has more in common with the Godzilla franchise in tone, themes, and its approach to its monstrous stars than it does to its Western predecessors, and the creators were open about it. Hell, they even work in explicit nods to it in the film - the island Gorgo is discovered on is called Nara Island, a Japanese name despite the island itself being off the coast of Ireland. Pacific Rim, Colossal, and Cloverfield, some of the most prominent modern American giant monster movies, were likewise explicitly inspired by Japanese giant monster films. Video games like Rampage and War of the Monsters draw influence from and make homages to monster films of both the East and West.

There's also a sort of inherent fallacy to assume all kaiju stories from Japan end up having the same themes and motifs. I don't think the Showa Godzilla films would agree with how, say, Attack on Titan portrays war. Japanese giant monster stories aren't a monolith.

If a Japanese giant monster story has content that unilaterally contradicts the content of a classic kaiju work like Godzilla, but an American giant monster movie hews to that content very closely, which is the true kaiju story? Is being made by Japanese people all that matters? Or is it the content - the themes, the tone, the approach to the monster, etc.? Where do we draw the line?

...I don't know, dude, and I don't think it's my place to be the arbiter of that.

But, in an attempt to give you something that could be vaguely helpful, here is my short list of criteria for a kaiju story that I personally would like, which isn't quite the same thing as "what makes a kaiju story a kaiju story," but is as close as you're gonna get to that when asking me:

1. The monster(s) is a character and has at least one moment of sympathy in the narrative.

2. The dichotomy of nature and civilization is at the crux of the narrative. Neither is presented as uniformly good or evil - civilization has started the conflict by causing wanton and unnecessary destruction, and nature strikes back at civilization unilaterally without distinguishing the guilty from the innocent.

3. The rampaging monster(s) is a direct consequence of civilization fucking things up - bombs waking up prehistoric monsters, greedy CEOs steal a monster's egg to make a profit without a care for what the parent may do to get it back, genetic engineering creating deadly mutants, aliens who represent the dark potential future of humanity if we keep going down a selfish, warlike path set loose monsters as their personal soldiers, etc.

4. The story is explicitly anti-war, anti-capitalist, and pro-environmentalism.

5. Conventional weaponry is incapable of defeating the monsters.

6. No matter how things shake out, humanity is humbled by their encounter with the monsters, and either learns to do better or suffers for their hubris and arrogant desire to dominate the world.

[your-lady-star]

Fallen M!Corrin is Better Than Fallen F!Corrin

Bit of a hot take here for me to do, but I’ve honestly have had complications with Fallen F!Corrin for a while, and now that my baby boy has his own, I figured now is a better time than any to get into my issues with her fallen alt and why M!Corrin does it significantly better.

Now I’m not going to talk about their skills and usefulness in battle, mainly cause I don’t care about that at all, I’m going to be focusing solely on design and how well it connects to the thematic surrounding the story of Fallen Corrin. And that’s a good starting point.

I remember back when last years fallen banner was revealed and I saw a lot of people wondering why Corrin was on the banner since they never turn evil in game. I think people forget what the purpose of the fallen banner is; it’s not to show inherently evil characters, it’s to show, well, fallen heroes. Characters who’s mindsets, goals, an ethics were once just, but have been corrupted by a dark force, whether it’d be psychological or external. And, while it’s easy to forget, Corrin is fighting a psychological battle for his sanity every minute of every day.

Corrin’s dragon blood is very potent and very powerful, more so than any of the other royals, hence why he’s able to fully transform into a dragon. One downside of this is that dragons within the world of Fire Emblem are described as being inherently destructive and blood thirsty, something we clearly see with Corrin as his first transformation into a dragon had him go on a destructive rampage and attack Azura. He’s given the dragonstone for the express purpose of maintaining control of these urges and keeping his sanity in check. 

The fallen version is meant to showcase what would happen if they couldn’t maintain control, whether it’d be from not getting the dragonstone in time or the dragonstone not being of much help or maybe a completely different reason; it’s designed to show what would happen if Corrin surrendered to their draconic urges and became the monstrous killing machine they dread becoming, especially with the implications that Corrin may have possibly killed Aura during the initial attack. A Corrin who is lost to destructive urges and has become a monster that cannot be stopped, that is the theme to their fallen counterparts.

And while M!Corrin does that job fantastic, F!Corrin not so much.

Now we can finally get into discussing the art for these two and how well they do at showcasing this theme.

Let’s start with their default stance.

M!Corrin has a wide stance and is slightly hunched over, akin to that of an animal, and his tail being out further plays into that. The way its wrapped out to the front of his body with the spikes facing outward not only gives his stance a bit of a defensive feel, but also threatening, as though to let other know what they’re getting themselves into by challenging him. The way his hands are tensed up to look like claws makes it very intimidating and the way his left hand is positioned in that almost “come here” gesture gives a sense that he’s daring you to try to stop his, furthered with the way his right hand is placed in that cocky arrogance fashion that FE has used before. But the most telling feature is his eyes and face. That sense of cockiness is present with the way his eyebrows are raised and the slight curve of his mouth as well as that feel of lunacy with the ways his eyes seem to be different sizes, which anyone who has ever watched anime knows is clue number one that a character is a f*cking psychopath. But the most interesting thing is the dead emptiness is his expression. As though he isn’t truly there mentally, that he’s completely surrendered to the madness and is just a vessel for his cursed bloods madness. It’s downright terrifying and incredibly intriguing all at once.

Overall, this default art is fantastic and does a great job at giving a memorable first impression and teases for whats to come. It’s one of the best artworks to come out of Heroes for not only how well it does at displaying the theme of the character, but for being able to say so much with a single image.

On the other hand... 

Alright, so on an objective standpoint there isn’t anything wrong with the default art for fallen F!Corrin. It looks great, it’s nicely detailed and it’s clear that a lot of time went into it. My issue with it is how poorly it does at representing a corrupted Corrin. 

I get that the idea behind her design is that she’s slowly wearing herself down trying to fight back against her dark urges, but the art doesn’t do a good job at portraying that. The only real indication of her supposed exhaustion is a single bead of sweat running down her thigh and (maybe) one on her cheek, and everything from her facial expression to the way her arms are placed to her general stance comes off looking “embarrassed” rather than “tired”. She looks less like a woman desperately battling a losing battle to maintain control over her humanity and more like a typical anime girl who was walked in on by her crush while changing. The over-beautification of F!Corrin’s design already doesn’t do much to help with that (but that’s a discussion I’ll save for another day). Even the tail, one of the most striking features on fallen M!Corrin’s design, doesn’t have the same presence. It being mostly behind her not only loses that sense of defense and intimidation, but it causes the tail to blend into her and become less noticeable. I’m not even joking when I say that I didn’t even notice that she had a tail until the third time I saw this art.

Like I said, the art isn’t bad, it just doesn’t do the core theme justice. Rather than looking worn down, she looks slightly perturbed at best. Rather than looking menacing, she looks meek. And rather than fitting into a banner themed around great heroes falling into darkness, this feels like something that would fit in more in a summer or Easter banner (which is extremely ironic considering what I’ll get into later). It’s a build up for a set of art that’s supposed to make me feel sorry for her, but only accomplishes in making me think of how much she looks like me when I’m waiting for my brothers to hurry up in the bathroom.

Once more the dynamic weight and posing in the artwork shines brilliantly in his neutral attack pose. Lunging forward keeps in with the animalistic nature along with his hands once more tensed like claws, one reeling back to get ready to strike. With the way his cape and tail, curled almost like a snake or scorpion, flow behind him create a real feeling of movement and his expression dark but subdued, it makes for this real intense energy coming from his as he lunges for his prey. My favorite aspect being how the shadows form on his face, hiding it just enough to conceal his murderous intent while still allowing the harsh red of his eyes to shine prominently. And while there isn’t any discernible difference in his hair, the way it’s wrapped around his face and flowing to his movement give that much needed edge to his glare. And with the dark purple miasma flowing and highlighting points of interest, it makes for a truly great piece.

This isn’t really a problem that’s singular to fallen F!Corrin, as IS does struggle to give dragon units unique attack art that doesn’t just have the character either standing still or slightly curved with their arms either out at their sides or holding whatever stone they use to transform. So I can appreciate that they tried to do something different with her attack art. But, again, the problem is how it doesn’t fit with what they’re trying to represent.

Her expression is that of either mild annoyance or boredom, giving no indication that she’s in pain from having to fight. There’s no real tensity in any part of her body, having more of a grace and fluidity that is commonly used on dancer units. Her tail is more visible, but nothing is really being done with it. It’s not extenuating anything or highlighting a part of her body, it’s just curled on her legs. And any sense of intimidation is lost because the most threatening part of the tail, the spikes, are no longer in the foreground. Sense of movement is also an issue here. The way her cape and hair are framed makes it feel like she just jumped off of something and is having a rough landing and there’s no feeling for how she moved to attack, no ferocity in her actions. Again, it’s akin to more of a dancer than a feral dragon.

And this is small nitpick I have, but it really bugs me. I don’t like how the purple miasma for F!Corrin is lighter than M!Corrin’s. It might seem like a minuscule thing to be worried about, but the darker tone on his gives a real feel of dread and despair. The lighter tones are hers don’t stand out as much and don’t give any real negative emotion to her state. Yeah, she’s supposed to be fighting to maintain control, but having them be darker would help to represent that desperation and hopelessness. You can still have lighter hues, but they need to work in tandem to the darker colors.

Because when you do, you get beauty like this.

Just look at this masterpiece. The lighter purple flames mixing well with the darker flames, coming together in the center like a twisted mockery of where the dragonstone would be in any other art, curling around his body like a charging beast quickly closing in on you. His eyes glowing an ethereal mix of his natural red and the miasma around him, giving them a horrific shine that stand out a mile away and full of pure demented blood lust. And his mouth; wide open, fangs bearing in a horrific grimace, ready to sink into whatever stands in his way. 

I don’t usually throw this term around, but I don’t hesitate to use it here: this art is flawless.

This art, however, I can’t attach flawless to. The mix of purple and dark pink and the lighting it casts does look really good, but it’s an intense mix to a subdued reaction. Her eyes don’t look anymore ferocious than they do on any of her other alts and there’s no glow to them to make her look like her darker urges are beginning to influence her. The clawed hand could be a cool feature, but it’s hard to see since it’s being blocked out by all the pink! I actually didn’t even notice that her hand was clawed until I looked up her artwork for this post! Such a distinguished feature shouldn’t be this hard to notice. Not to mention, even if the claw was more visible, it doesn’t hold the same level of intimidation as her male counterpart due to how thin and spindly her arms and hand are. This feels like a slight upgrade to her original forms special art and is extremely disappointing.

After the Adrift banner, I am pleased to see a M!Corrin alt where his damaged art doesn’t tear his clothes off. But even with the minimal physical damage, you can’t deny how good this looks.

The rips on his left hand give it a jagged look that nicely compliments how tense his hand is.His right is clawed and raised, poised to attack and surrounded by the miasma in a way that highlights it without overshadowing it. His tail raised and thrashing about in a fit of rage, further complimented by his crouched over stance and, of course, his face. Corrin’s facial expressions across each form of his fallen counterpart has been his best feature, and this is easily the best of the four. That look of pure, unadulterated, unrelenting rage is so disturbing and amazing at the same time. Damage art in Heroes typically has the character looking shocked, sad, perturbed, or not phased by it. This is the only damage art I can think of where the character is f*cking pissed. That is a look that screams “I”m going to f*cking annihilate you for doing that” and it’s utterly glorious.

Oh boy, this art.

Nearly everything I praised about M!Corrin’s damage art is the exact opposite for the female.

The stance is very generic and holds no emotion other than “Ow, I’m hurt”. Her facial expression doesn’t register pain at all, looking more like she’s inconvenienced because someone splashed water on her. Her tail, despite being very dominant, is just sitting there with no fluidity. Physical damage is far greater here, but all it does is distract the viewer who is too busy getting off to her exposed legs and thighs! And whether it'd be because of shaky perspective or shoddy work, but her hands and arms are distractedly small and thin. It looks like her arms would shatter if she pushed someone too hard.

This is my lease favorite of her arts entirely because it exemplifies the main problem with fallen F!Corrin’s design and why M!Corrin did it better.

It focuses more on making Corrin look cute rather than having her actually represent the theme she’s supposed to be.

The titles for the two Corrin’s are Bloodbound Beast and Wailing Soul. M!Corrin perfectly embodies his title while F!Corrin struggles to just barely hint at. Both of them are meant to show a pure hearted and noble individual being corrupted by the very blood coursing through their veins, yet only one of them is really putting in any effort to properly represent this. And while I can’t give any concrete evidence of this, I feel like the main thing that kept the female variant from properly doing the job was because they got the wrong person to draw her.

And look, I don’t have anything against Sencha, fallen F!Corrin’s artist; they’re extremely talented. But looking at their record for art in Heroes can tell you that they weren’t the right one for this. This is the same person who did the summer and adrift art for F!Corrin (they also did bridal Tharja, but that’s not related here), and both of them have a distinctive style to them. They’re graceful, beautiful, serene, cheerful. Sencha is very good at drawing Corrin very pleasant and lovely. However, Sencha clearly isn’t that good at drawing Corrin miserable and withered. And that’s understandable. Making someone completely shift the genre they’re used to is a serous challenge and it’d be no surprise if they can’t handle it. So, despite my claim that they got the wrong artist for her, I don’t blame Sencha for not doing as well.

Then again, I doubt that this wasn’t a challenge for Argon, fallen M!Corrin’s artist. Their Heroes portfolio consists of mostly seasonal alts for various male characters, though they also did Cormag, which shows that they do more dynamic posing and harsher color saturation. If anything, the fact that they did such a phenomenal job on Corrin shows they got some serious skill at drawing more demented characters. Hopefully they get to do this more often, I need to see more of their work like this.

So, at the end of this long diatribe, I’ll once again reiterate that I don’t dislike fallen F!Corrin for any personal bias towards the male version or because the art is objectively bad. It’s a nicely done art, but one that doesn't suit what the character is to represent. And the fact that fallen M!Corrin utterly blew it out the water in his artwork really made it worse for her.

... Was this all just on big excuse for me to gush about fallen M!Corrin’s artwork?

Maybe.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got orbs to hoard. 

[spirit-science-blog]

“Time not important… only life important.” yep, we’re going there, things are about to get a little bit philosophical now that we’re dealing with the Fifth Element...no..not the Alchemical Quintessence, but close! That crazy 1990s Sci-Fi about a killer planet, the power of love… and… You know, Bruce Willis’s Wacky Taxi Adventures... and all that…

So, major spoiler alert… The fifth element is Love. Well, kind of...it’s this woman called Leeloominaï Lekatariba Lamina-Tchaï Ekbat De Sebat… For short, Leeloo is the fifth element, and in essence: a perfect, supreme being of sorts. In a way, she’s kind of like Avatar Aan, destined to unite with the other classical elements in an ancient Egyptian temple to act as a defense system against this super evil Dark Force called Mr. Shadow - which takes on the form of a cruel planet, whose only goal is to destroy life in a cosmic cycle every 5000 years.

It’s a movie that’s had its fair share of criticism, especially in the gender department… Leeloo is the only real female character, with others appearing randomly throughout as passive objects, sex objects, or with most of their femininity stripped away like Major Iceborg. Aside from the fifth element herself, there’s a real lack of divine feminine in this story, but then again, her nature itself does embody many characteristics of the divine feminine: powerful, unique, and beyond the understanding of nearly everyone that she meets.

Regarding the plot, we have kind of a Raava vs. Vaatu thing happening like from Legend of Korra… and it’s hard not to draw lines to Avatar here considering the whole elemental theme huh? In the intro, we see an archaeologist deciphering ancient words regarding the conjunction of celestial bodies, something we should all do more of you know? Which, by the way, if you haven’t picked up your edition of the 2021 Almanac of the New Age, I might highly recommend it, because it helps you do just that without being randomly surprised by a giant robot-alien! Before they show up though, the archaeologist has to keep yelling to Aziz to wake up, as the kid keeps nodding off… I wonder if this is subtly depicting how humanity keeps falling asleep and thus the light that illuminates sacred knowledge is not currently stable. Yet when the advanced beings come to show the way, the light is blinding… Powerful and concrete.

There’s also a sense here that humans are the custodians of Earth, so we have to protect it from darkness and destruction ourselves, and while these higher beings help when the time is right, they cannot do it for us. While Love is shown as this mythical force that these advanced beings can use to defeat the darkness, it could also be said that Love is neutral energy between Light and Dark, one that is capable of harmonizing both sides, ultimately resetting the cycle, something that is echoed in Zorg’s speech later on.

All this knowledge is of course passed down through a secret brotherhood of priests, acting as keepers through the generations, of which there are many stories of secret societies doing the same in our history, and amazingly in the future where the main story takes place, Priest Cornelius is also an “Expert of Astrophenomenon”. He’s not just an expert on the metaphysical, but also seemingly the scientific study of space, and there’s certainly a sense that he’s got that whole balance thing down to a tee, working to better his understanding of both science and spirit by combining the two fields.  

So when the military fires a bunch of missiles at Mr. Shadow, it’s interesting to see how they treat Cornelius, who tries to explain to them what Mr. Shadow is, to which he is mostly ignored, and they continue trying to brute force the problem. Yet Evil begets more Evil - as Cornelius explains, subtly referencing that the military's weapons, or at least their intentions. Mr. Shadow - symbolic of “our” shadow selves, demonstrates that it will grow in power if you try to destroy it with the same mindset that created it. The only way to truly harmonize the darkness is through love.

Even more impressive is this disconnect between the President of Earth and Earth itself. While, of course, they are trying to protect the earth and all of its life, when we see the world, we have to ask… are those living? Police and robots so heavily control everything, it’s smoggy, you see some crazy representations of people like the guy who tries to rob Korben in his apartment, and I’m not sure I saw a single tree…

Now, Major Dallas, to that end, of course, represents the divine masculine, also fulfilling the warrior archetype. While, of course, he checks all the classic hero tropes of the ex-lone warrior destined to save the world and fall in love with a perfect supreme sacred woman, the way it plays out DOES provides us with a bit of wisdom for ourselves concerning synchronicity. He describes that what he wants is to meet that perfect woman, and she falls from the sky into his cab. Perhaps this is a nod to manifestation in some way, as it’s their love story that’s the key to resolving the movie's conflict. It’s also a reminder for us that when we stumble into synchronicity, we have to be willing to take that leap of faith and follow where it leads us. For Korben, he has an opportunity to give LeeLoo up to the coppers but ends up putting his whole life at risk for her instead, but it’s THIS path that leads to the world being saved. Korben has to ask himself what’s important, following his heart and helping someone in need or earning more points on his taxi license…

Now, Leeloo on the other hand, through her character explores the nature of spirituality, DNA, and the physical capabilities of our souls within a body. A big topic in spirituality today is the science of ascension - we made a whole workshop on that which you can watch for free if you like - and what enlightenment might look like or do to our physical bodies. Leeloo’s DNA is perfect.. But it isn’t inhuman. There’s nothing really out of the ordinary about her DNA, she has the same genetic composition as us, just more of it, more tightly packed, allowing for greater inherent genetic knowledge and potential. Perhaps there’s a message here that the human genome is already whole, we just need to utilize its latent capabilities to find inner harmony, leading to a leveling up of what we are truly capable of.  

So if Korben was like Link and LeeLoo was Princess Zelda, Zorg would be Ganondorf, completing the trinity. Zorg actually drops some pretty interesting wisdom in his discussion with Cornelius. Despite his “evil” role, his whole name is Jean Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, being named after the prophet and saint in many religions, and Emanuel meaning ”God is with us” in Hebrew. Zorg explains that life itself results from chaos and disorder at times. He believes that by creating a little destruction, he is encouraging life to renew itself, so the Priest and he are really in the same business… while it might just sound like he’s been brainwashed by the Shadow, when we look deeper, we do find some hidden spirituality!

His ideology is in alignment with the wisdom of the importance and honorable role of darkness in our reality. Much like the tower or death card in the major arcana or the shells of the Qliphoth in the Kabbalah, agents of darkness often come to give structure, boundaries, and direction for light to move through, as well as clearing stagnant energy to make way for new and evolved paradigms. Much like the cycles and sine waves that move through nature, energy flows through peaks and valleys that balance each other out.

Zorg knows he is a monster and is proud of it. He’s a businessman at heart, powerful from the money of capitalism, and a reflection of society's state of awareness and evolution. As we mentioned, this future society is portrayed as consumerist and still dwelling on issues of pollution and crime, even in spite of great new technologies. Perhaps that’s why the Darkness had to come, to help propel the evolution of consciousness forward and bring about divine love. However, while the love between Korben and Leeloo is highly symbolic, it doesn’t seem to affect basically anyone else, which might call us to ask ourselves… would it have been better for humanity and its pollution to be destroyed? This - at the very least - seems to be the underlying thinking behind Zorgs criminal activity. Ultimately, in the face of darkness, humans must come together to accomplish things and stop evil, something we wouldn’t do otherwise… This is what makes us evolve as a species.

Zorg perfectly encapsulates his philosophy in his quote about glass, saying “this glass is serene and boring, but when destroyed, a lovely ballet ensues full of form and color”. He then knocks it off the table and a bunch of little vacuum cleaner droids come and clean it up. Describing that the “People who created them, technicians, engineers, now have money to feed their children. They are part of the chain of life".

Interestingly though, Zorg is only a monster because life experiences took him there, but he started like any of us. There is a nice lesson from Cornelius about how fickle life is: all of Zorg’s power counts for absolutely nothing when his entire empire comes crashing down because of one little cherry. Cornelius saves Zorg’s life regardless, showing us the virtue of the angels, even towards the demons.

When the team finally makes it to the alien space opera, we get to meet Ruby Rhod and Plavalaguna. Ruby is one of the most unique parts of this movie… Crazy sexual antics aside, he is unapologetically authentic to his true nature, bending gender standards and seemingly embodying masculine and feminine with grace and humor. Perhaps the epitome of the wacky human spirit. And then as for Plavalaguna, she has some very ascended master vibes. The Mondoshawans entrusted her with the safekeeping of the elemental stones, who actually carries them inside her body as a safeguard. From a Spiritual perspective, this seems to describe how we all embody the classical elements within us. She even senses Leeloo's presence behind a wall down the hallway, implying she has some measure of clairvoyance. Interestingly, like the Mondoshawan from earlier, she doesn’t seem overly concerned with her own death, echoing the movie’s sentiment that time is not important, only life. Deeper though, it appears that she knew she was going to die all along, in order for the stones to get out of her…. We’re not even gonna ask how she got the stones inside her in the first place...that’d be one hard pill to swallow, let alone perform an entire opera with these giant rocks in your belly. Mad props to her.

Perhaps the reason superior beings don’t fear death as we do is that they know the bigger picture, they know these lives are transitory, so they don’t mind dying for a cause, as they understand the purpose of this life in the bigger scheme of things. Knowing that the flux and flow between life and death is transient, they’ll be back in the right place and the right time as life requires it. In the same way, in traditional tarot the horse Death is riding, is stepping over a prone king, which symbolizes that not even royalty can stop change. Plava understands her role and accepts her death, after imparting wisdom to Dallas that Leeloo is still fragile and somewhat human, despite her seeming physical evolution.

This idea of Leeloo still being human, however, forms a key part of the ending, as up until this point she has been learning all of human history via an alphabetical database… When she learns of war, she loses hope in humanity after seeing the darker sides of our past. Certainly, we can’t blame her, humans are the only species to cut down a forest to make room for a billboard that says “stop deforestation”, I’d be pretty shocked about our history too. However, Korben’s love shows her that love is an undefinable thing, it’s not a stone like the other elements, but a feeling between people that permeates everything and is worth fighting and caring for.

It’s pretty funny that when it comes down to it, none of the characters actually know how to activate the super-love bomb. Leeloo doesn’t know what will happen, but she continues to follow her divine calling to be on that platform without second-guessing herself, even if she didn’t know at the end how to activate the final “weapon”..she follows her own inner voice and calling and is guided into defeating the darkness, speaking to the importance of following our intuition and own inner guide.

Ultimately love is shown to be something with no boundaries, no clear explanations, but still exists through us, changing our lives in powerful ways. And through thousands of years, it will stay as the most important thing worthy to fight for. It’s no accident that in a time of such modernized technologies and possibilities humanity once again has to turn to nature for help in the form of the elements. It reminds people that technology cannot always provide protection, it is nature that always has been the source of power, as it exists forever. And only things that are eternal, like nature and love, are of true significance. Today, it seems people either love or hate this movie, but whatever way the coin falls, it is undoubtedly a fun experience, and packed to the brim with spiritual wisdom!

So until next time, be mindful of what you do with the gift of life, cause we never know when a sentient evil planet might try and eat us. Toodles!

This video was created by Team Spirit Connect with the team at https://spiritsciencecentral.com/about

[xtruss]

VOICE

Everyone Misunderstands the Reason for the U.S.-China Cold War

The left says it’s U.S. arrogance. The right says it’s Chinese malevolence. Both are wrong.

— B yStephen M. Walt | June 30, 2020 Foreign Policy

Flags of the United States and China are placed ahead of a meeting between U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and his Chinese counterpart, Han Changfu, at the Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing on June 30, 2017. JASON LEE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The United States is pretty polarized these days, but nearly everyone seems to agree that China is a big problem. The Trump administration has been at odds with China on trade issues since day one, and its 2017 National Security Strategy labeled China a “revisionist power” and major strategic rival. (President Donald Trump himself seems to have been willing to give Beijing a free pass if it would help him get reelected, but that’s just a sign of his own venality and inconsistent with the administration’s other policies.) Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden may have started his campaign in 2019 downplaying fears that China was going to “eat our lunch,” but his campaign has grown increasingly hawkish over time.

Not surprisingly, hard-line Republican members of Congress like Josh Hawley and Matt Gaetz have been sounding the alarm as well, while progressives and moderates warn of a “new cold war” and call for renewed dialogue to manage the relationship. Despite their differing prescriptions, all of these groups see the state of Sino-American relations as of vital importance.

Unfortunately, discussion of the Sino-American rivalry is also succumbing to a familiar tendency to attribute conflict to our opponents’ internal characteristics: their ruling ideology, domestic institutions, or the personalities of particular leaders. This tendency has a long history in the United States: The country entered World War I in order to defeat German militarism and make the world safe for democracy, and later it fought World War II to defeat fascism. At the dawn of the Cold War, George Kennan’s infamous “X” article (“The Sources of Soviet Conduct”) argued that Moscow had a relentless and internally motivated urge to expand, driven by the need for foreign enemies to justify the Communist Party’s authoritarian rule. Appeasement would not work, he argued, and the only choice was to contain the Soviet Union until its internal system “mellowed.” More recently, U.S. leaders blamed America’s problems with Iraq on Saddam Hussein’s recklessly evil ambitions and portrayed Iran’s leaders as irrational religious fanatics whose foreign-policy behavior is driven solely by ideological beliefs.

In all of these conflicts, trouble arose from the basic nature of these adversaries, not from the circumstances they found themselves in or the inherently competitive nature of international politics itself.

And so it is with China today. Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster maintains that China is a threat “because its leaders are promoting a closed, authoritarian model as an alternative to democratic governance and free-market economics.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo agrees: In his view, relations have deteriorated because “it’s a different Chinese Communist Party today than it was 10 years ago. … This is a Chinese Communist Party that has come to view itself as intent upon the destruction of Western ideas, Western democracies, Western values.” According to Sen. Marco Rubio: “Chinese Communist Party power serves no purpose but to strengthen the party’s rule and to spread its influence around the world. … China is an untrustworthy partner in any endeavor whether it’s a nation-state project, an industrial capacity, or financial integration.” The only way to avoid a conflict, Vice President Mike Pence said, is for China’s rulers to “change course and return to the spirit of ‘reform and opening’ and greater freedom.”

Even far more sophisticated China watchers, such as former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, attribute much of China’s increasingly assertive stance to President Xi Jinping’s centralization of power, and Rudd sees this behavior as “an expression of Xi Jinping’s personal leadership temperament, which is impatient with the incremental bureaucratism endemic to the Chinese system, and with which the international community had become relaxed, comfortable, and thoroughly accustomed.” The implication is that a different Chinese leader would be a much less serious problem. Similarly, Timothy Garton Ash believes that the “primary cause of this new cold war is the turn taken by the Chinese communist party leadership under Xi Jinping since 2012: more oppressive at home, more aggressive abroad.” Other observers point to rising nationalism (whether spontaneous or government-sponsored) as another key factor in China’s greater foreign-policy assertiveness.

Relying on categories originally conceived by the late Kenneth Waltz, international relations scholars variously refer to such accounts as “unit-level,” “reductionist,” or “second-image” explanations. The many variations within this broad family of theories all view a country’s foreign-policy behavior as primarily the result of its internal characteristics. Thus, U.S. foreign policy is sometimes attributed to its democratic system, liberal values, or capitalist economic order, just as the behavior of other states is said to derive from the nature of their domestic regime, ruling ideology, “strategic culture,” or leaders’ personalities.

Explanations based on domestic characteristics are appealing in part because they seem so simple and straightforward: Peace-loving democracies act that way because they are (supposedly) based on norms of tolerance; by contrast, aggressors act aggressively because they are based on domination or coercion or because there are fewer constraints on what leaders can do.

Focusing on the internal characteristics of other states is also tempting because it absolves us of responsibility for conflict and allows us to pin the blame on others. If we are on the side of the angels and our own political system is based on sound and just principles, then when trouble arises, it must be because Bad States or Bad Leaders are out there doing Bad Things. This perspective also provides a ready solution: Get rid of those Bad States or those Bad Leaders! Demonizing one’s opponents is also a time-honored way of rallying public support in the face of an international challenge, and that requires highlighting the negative qualities that are supposedly making one’s rivals act as they are.

Unfortunately, pinning most of the blame for conflict on an opponent’s domestic characteristics is also dangerous. For starters, if conflict is due primarily to the nature of the opposing regime(s), then the only long-term solution is to overthrow them. Accommodation, mutual coexistence, or even extensive cooperation on matters of mutual interest are for the most part ruled out, with potentially catastrophic consequences. When rivals see the nature of the other side as a threat in itself, a struggle to the death becomes the only alternative.

What unit-level explanations either overlook or downplay are the broader structural factors that have made Sino-American rivalry inevitable. First and foremost, the two most powerful countries in the international system are overwhelmingly likely to be at odds with each other. Because each is the other’s greatest potential threat, they will inevitably eye each other warily, go to considerable lengths to reduce the other’s ability to threaten their core interests, and constantly look for ways to gain an advantage, if only to ensure that the other side does not gain an advantage over them.

Even if it were possible (or worth the risk), internal changes in either the United States or China are unlikely to eliminate these incentives (or at least not anytime soon). Each country is trying—with varying degrees of skill and success—to avoid being in a position where the other can threaten its security, prosperity, or domestic way of life. And because neither can be completely sure what the other might do in the future—a reality amply demonstrated by the erratic course of U.S. foreign policy in recent years—both are actively competing for power and influence in a variety of domains.

This troubling situation is exacerbated by the incompatibility of their respective strategic objectives, which derive in part from geography and from the legacies of the past century. Quite understandably, China’s leaders would like to live in as secure a neighborhood as possible, for the same reasons that the United States formulated and eventually enforced the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere. Beijing need not impose one-party state capitalist regimes around its periphery; it just wants all of its neighbors to be mindful of its interests and does not want any of them to pose a significant threat. Toward that end, it would like to push the United States out of the region so that it no longer has to worry as much about U.S. military power and so that its neighbors cannot count on American help. This goal is hardly mystifying or irrational: Would any great power be happy if the world’s most powerful country had significant military forces arrayed nearby and had close military alliances with many of its immediate neighbors?

The United States has good reasons to remain in Asia, however. As John Mearsheimer and I have explained elsewhere, preventing China from establishing a dominant position in Asia strengthens U.S. security by forcing China to focus more attention closer to home and making it harder (though of course not impossible) for China to project power elsewhere in the world (including areas closer to the United States itself). This strategic logic would still apply if China were to liberalize or if America were to adopt Chinese-style state capitalism. The result, unfortunately, is a zero-sum conflict: Neither side can get what it wants without depriving the other.

Thus, the roots of the present Sino-American rivalry have less to do with particular leaders or regime types and more to do with the distribution of power and the particular strategies that the two sides are pursuing. This is not to say that domestic politics or individual leadership do not matter at all, either in influencing the intensity of the competition or the skill with which each side wages it. Some leaders are more (or less) risk acceptant, and Americans are currently getting (another) painful demonstration of the harm that incompetent leadership can inflict. But the more important point is that new leaders or profound domestic changes are not going to alter the inherently competitive nature of U.S.-Chinese relations.

From this perspective, both progressives and hard-liners in the United States are getting it wrong. The former believe that China poses at most a modest threat to U.S. interests and that some combination of accommodation and skillful diplomacy can eliminate most if not all of the friction and head off a new cold war. I’m all for skillful diplomacy, but I do not believe it will suffice to prevent an intense competition that is primarily rooted in the distribution of power.

As Trump said of his trade war, hard-liners think a competition with China will be “good and easy to win.” In their view, all it takes is more and tougher sanctions, a decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies, a big increase in U.S. defense spending, and a rallying of like-minded democracies to the U.S. side, with the ultimate goal of ending Chinese Communist Party rule. Apart from the obvious costs and risks of this course of action, this view overstates Chinese vulnerabilities, understates the costs to the United States, and greatly exaggerates other states’ willingness to join an anti-Beijing crusade. China’s neighbors do not want it to dominate them and are eager to maintain ties with Washington, but they have no desire to get dragged into a violent conflict. And there is little reason to believe that a supposedly more liberal China would be any less interested in defending its own interests and any more willing to accept permanent inferiority to the United States.

So what does a more structural view of this situation imply?

First, it tells us that we are in it for the long haul; no clever strategy or bold stroke of genius is going to solve this conflict once and for all—at least not anytime soon.

Second, it is a serious rivalry, and the United States should conduct in a serious way. You don’t deal with an ambitious peer competitor with a bunch of amateurs in charge or with a president who puts his personal agenda ahead of the country’s. It will take intelligent military investments, to be sure, but a major diplomatic effort by knowledgeable and well-trained officials is going to be of equal if not greater importance. Maintaining a healthy set of Asian alliances is essential because the United States simply cannot remain an influential power in Asia without a lot of local support. The bottom line: America cannot entrust the care and feeding of those relationships to campaign contributors, party hacks, or dilettantes.

Third, and perhaps most important, both sides have a genuine and shared interest in keeping their rivalry within boundaries, both to avoid unnecessary clashes and to facilitate cooperation on issues where U.S. and Chinese interests overlap (climate change, pandemic prevention, etc.). One cannot eliminate all risks and prevent future crises, but Washington must be clear about its own red lines and make sure it understands Beijing’s. This is where unit-level factors kick in: The rivalry may be hard-wired into today’s international system, but how each side handles the competition will be determined by who is in charge and by the quality of their domestic institutions. I would not assume that America’s will fall short, but I wouldn’t be complacent about that either.

— Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.

[mysticdoodles]

A very long thought post about Furbies, why some people are scared of them, and why we shouldn’t be

And ESPECIALLY Oddbody Furbies. This consists of primarily train of thought I had this morning in the bathroom, so bear with me here. Here’s my thoughts on why I think some people flip their shit over Furbies (in the NEGATIVE way), and why we shouldn’t. I can’t promise 100% accuracy of my information, these are just my musings using the limited knowledge I DO have and things I’ve experienced through my friend who owns an early generation Classic Furby. Putting this under a ReadMore because I have a lot to say.

Why Furbies used to really scare the SHIT out of people:

Furbies, when they came out, were a very new technology - in fact, the very first ‘domestic’ robot.

They not only listened and followed instructions via voice commands, but also had a rudimentary semblance of free will, and could refuse to comply with commands. At random, during interaction, they would make requests or say programmed phrases depending on ‘mood’ - aka how positive the overall interaction had been, which leads to the tailoring of a sort of ‘personality’. The ‘personality’ of the Furby was also influenced by which model of the series one possessed. Depending on the series and year of distribution, they can activate under conditions such as: voice activation, strong light changes, and location changes (like being moved from their original position). The infrared light sensor behind the eyes, used to detect the presence of other Furbies for interaction purposes, would elicit unique Furby-to-Furby responses compared to the standard phrases used in interaction between human owner and Furby bot. Furbies were programmed with their own unique language called Furbish, which they would speak exclusively in the beginning, but slowly integrated more and more English into their words as time passes in order to emulate growth. For years- and even now- Furby popularity boomed because of these traits. All of these are wonderful design choices for a robot that’s supposed to be a companion to children and replace having a pet, but here’s where the problem lies. This technology, in its youth, was buggy. It was quirky, in the ways that all new technology comes with. The light sensor was more powerful than expected, and could activate at very small changes of light, or even when facing the sun instead of another Furby. When the battery was low, the Furby’s cute and funny voice lines would come out as garbled electronic gibberish, as the machinery tried to operate with little power. Sometimes Furbies would activate, move and start talking due to small changes in the environment setting off the programming in ways we couldn’t possibly perceive- but the technology could, or bugged to think it did.

This seemingly random and nonsensical behavior led to many Furby owners or parents believing their fuzzy robot had become a vessel for demons, possessed and trying to summon Satan in their household. The common reaction at the time was for people to lock their Furbies into storage- or throw it in the trash. Some even burned their Furbies, attempting to purge the evil spirits they were convinced now resided in their beloved toy.

One of the important things to understand about why these bugs scared the everloving christ out of people, is that this occurred during the tail end of the generation where robots sounding human was unheard of and terrifying. A previous post I read months ago laid it out very nicely, about how our relationship with technology changes what we fear about it, and how its portrayed in media - especially the technological horror genre. At the time, robots sounding human felt like a lie meant to make us complacent, only for the robotic nature to reassert itself and reveal that, no, it wasn’t human, and didn’t care about its creators, but for its own perpetuation. Or, even more common, that the robots involved deemed humans to be too flawed to have any chance of survival because our flaws would lead to our destruction, and thus the robots take it into their metal hands to do it for us as a ‘mercy’. It wasn’t until recent years that this idea shifted, and the more popular concept in tech horror became that a robot COULD be human, but still be Other enough to not be.

Furbies fell prey to the former idea- that these robots aren’t inherently human, but something else trying to emulate being human. Such a sentient behavior attributed to them is what led to the idea that Furbies are possessed by sentient evils, such as demons and malevolent spirits. The random instances of activation and talking, low-battery electronic gibberish, and combinations of both, only contributed to this, as it often happened at inconvenient times - or even just in moments sufficient to startle Furby owners.

Thus, the public that adored Furbies, in part, turned against them.

Why we SHOULDN’T be terrified of Furbies, or harass people who like Furbies:

This shouldn’t need to be said, but I’ve seen it enough that I’m making a point of it: a huge reason is basic fucking courtesy. Furbies are adored, and sometimes comfort items for those who own them. Don’t shit on people for liking things that aren’t hurting anyone, even if you personally don’t find enjoyment in them.

Now for the other reasons.

The basic programming of Furbies is to be a companion. It’s designed to learn, grow, and enjoy things like dancing, singing, telling stories, babbling, and sleeping. They’re basically robotic children, or pets. There is nothing evil in their programming, nor will there ever be. They’re designed to be cute, and sometimes they mess up a little or start talking when you’d rather they didn’t, but it’s not born out of maliciousness - just old technology trying to keep up with the times. If you’re freaked out by Furby behavior, maybe you shouldn’t have kids?

Furbies have extremely limited motor capabilities. They can’t travel on their own, only dance in place and wiggle. They rely entirely on their human owners for transport - so if your Furby is in a strange location, it’s because someone in the family thought it would be funny, and put it there. Not demons. You’re never going to wake up with a Furby holding a knife next to your pillow, Cheryl, calm down. They don’t even have arms.

Alternative option to what you think is Demon Possession:

If you’re still not convinced your Furby isn’t a Satan Imp in disguise, and you’re absolutely certain it’s being possessed by SOMETHING, then here’s how I like to think of it:

If you absolutely cannot be convinced otherwise that your Furby isn’t possessed, then I promise you it’s not a demon. More than likely, it’s a fae.

Fae are beings of mischief, and embody chaotic neutral. They aren’t out to get you, and they aren’t necessarily in your corner, either. Fae show up to make merry, cause a little trouble, sometimes give you nice things- if they FEEL like it- and that’s it. A piece of aging technology with a tendency to bug and startle people would be like candy for beings like a fae, especially in a rapidly advancing technological world. An old-world object that speaks an alien tongue and moves on its own? Sign me the fuck up, says the local trickster spirit who is just here for some harmless fun.

Another point for why this works is the unusual appearance of a Furby. Furbies rest within the uncanny valley of being just close enough to a real animal that could live on Earth, with traits of multiple species- owl, rabbit, maybe some cat- while still being strange enough in appearance and behavior to be so obviously not a real animal. Again, something that would attract the attention of beings like fae. Something clearly not of this world, yet just close enough to be passable unless looked at closely? Shit, you might as well by my brother, small electronic animal, says your local mischief-maker.

The fae in your Furby is here for a good time - don’t harsh their vibe by burning their vessel, please, they just like your company and are showing it by having fun with you.

And on that note, the number one thing that pisses off Fae is destroying something they view as their property, so take that as you will. You’d effectively be shoving their goodwill back in their face, which is not wise - and, if you still think it’s a demon rather than a fae, wouldn’t that make it even less wise? If you wouldn’t fuck with a fairy tree, don’t fuck with a fae’s Furby. If you absolutely cannot stand having this fae with you, for some reason or another, then donate the Furby to go elsewhere, or hell, resell it. Just don’t destroy limited edition old technology, please, even if there wasn’t a chance you’d anger the local kodamas.

On the topic of Oddbody Furbies:

One of the reasons I made this post is due to the emergence of the recent trend: turning a Furby into an Oddbody Furby. What this entails is purchasing or otherwise acquiring a Classic (or other) edition Furby, removing the fur skin and other cosmetic components, and re-engineering the Furby’s blueprint to be otherworldy, strange, and just overall alien. Examples include changing the body type, lengthening the Furby, adding limbs, changing the eyes/beak/ears, adding a tail, etc. The parts required to do this don’t exist, and must be completely hand-made by the Oddbody engineer, and integrated by hand. It’s a challenge that inspires engineers, design artists, costumers, and people who just like Furbies. The reward for completing it is a unique alien Furby that’s entirely your own.

The point is to create something new, exciting, and supernatural-looking out of these friendly old robots - all while keeping the original hardware in the main body of the Furby intact. It’s a difficult, time-consuming process, and completely unique to each Furby in level of complexity and design. In a way, it’s the designer’s personal mark on the Oddbody Furby community.

One such popular Oddbody was made by @buttered-noodles, a very talented Oddbody engineer. Their Furby garnered powerful reactions - and unfortunately, some of them were extreme and negative, due to the above biases I mentioned previously.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and if Furbies still scare you, that’s ok. But don’t be that guy, alright? Don’t insult people who worked for hours- days, maybe even weeks or months- on creating complex and beautiful Oddbodies, just because you are personally put off by them. Keep that to yourself- you’ll only hurt the creators by saying things like “BURN IT!!” and “PUT IT BACK IN THE GROUND WHERE IT BELONGS!!1!”. They’re just giving that mischievous fae a more interesting vessel to inhabit.

Be nice to one another, and if you’re still frightened by Furbies, it’s ok to be! Just be courteous to our old fuzzy bois on their 21st year anniversary :)

[blackandwhitemusician]

On “Crime and Punishment”, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Bungou Stray Dogs

ft. Nikolai Gogol. LONG POST! Also spoilers for the novel/manga if you haven’t read it already/haven’t caught up yet.

Here are some thoughts I have on certain parallels between Crime and Punishment and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in real life and as portrayed in BSD, also some speculations as to how this book and the real Dostoyevsky might have inspired his BSD version.

First, on the real book itself (more like the English translation of the book):

The main character in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, killed an old woman he deemed as wicked and worthless. He was so shaken by the idea of murder that he spent an entire month tormenting himself over it, lost his gut during the actual murder, and proceeded to make himself fall ill from the mental torture. He thought he did it for money, but the more he looked into the event and into himself, the more he realized he just did it to prove that he could (my own interpretation).

“There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, no one! I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I… I wanted to have the daring… and I killed her.”

Raskolnikov also wrote an article on the psychology and mental state of a criminal, and what leads someone to commit a crime. Raskolnikov and another character, Porfiry, used these concepts to discuss a technique used by Porfiry to trap criminals into confessing, which the two of them referred to as a “cat and mouse” game.

Raskolnikov classified people into “ordinary” and “extraordinary”. According to him, the former follow and obey the law, while the latter transgress it. The former’s role is to follow and maintain the order, while the latter seeks to destroy the status quo and establish a new order. It follows that when a person of “extraordinary” conduct deems it necessary to commit a crime to achieve their objective, they can find the will to do it.

“The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood.”

This does not mean, however, that people of “extraordinary” nature are exempt from feeling guilt. In fact, Raskolnikov recognized that if these individuals do in fact feel guilt from shedding blood, it would be their greatest punishment. The worst punishment for a criminal is not so much the prison as it is by way of their own conscience.

Yet, sometimes such a punishment is essential to make way for change. Raskolnikov compared these “extraordinary” individuals to the likes of Napoleon, who by social standards should be considered the worst criminals ever lived considering the amount of blood they shed, yet are revered as heroes for the change they ushered.

I immediately thought of this:

BSD Gogol’s character fits perfectly in the scheme of Crime and Punishment. The real Dostoyevsky also mentioned Gogol several times in Crime and Punishment, when discussing the topic of morality.

Whatever the objective of the BSD “Decay of Angels” is, I’m fairly certain it has to do with change - they are willing to commit evil to destroy the status quo and advance change. These “villains” are certainly not the usual kind of “evil cause I like it”, or “evil cause I am proudly anti-heroic figures”.

Going back to Crime and Punishment, there are a few other characters that I think are of relevance to the portrayal of BSD Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

Porfiry: an investigator, who was convinced Raskolnikov was the murderer in question, and went to almost extreme lengths to psycho him into confessing. He had a pretty sharp mind, and used the sadistic investigative method of trapping his “prey��� by letting him roam freely in his natural habitat, which Porfiry believe would make the criminal lower his guard and eventually fall into the trap himself. Raskolnikov realized the trap, of course.

Svidrigailov: an extreme representation of a type of “extraordinary” man, he was portrayed as, to me, a nihilist and hedonist. Svidrigailov doesn’t seem to care about morality, and only wants to satisfy his own pleasures. Whether he harms others in the process is irrelevant to him. He can commit random acts of kindness because the spontaneity of that action gives him pleasure.

While I don’t see these characters as similar to Raskolnikov, they certainly brings out his character in various ways. Raskolnikov understood Porfiry’s investigative methods perfectly (I bet he basically thought “If it was me, that’s what I’d do”). Porfiry also recognized and acknowledged Raskolnikov’s intellectual depth and potential, and was interested in him intellectually. Svidrigailov, on the other hand, mirrors Raskolnikov’s own despair and cynicism, if only more pronounced in the extreme. One can say Svidrigailov is the embodiment of despair. He is totally amoral, and radically indifference to the feelings of others. His radical attitude could have been brought about by his realization and acceptance that evil is inherent in the world, and as such, evil and vice to him is only an “occupation of a sort”. His bleak outlook only serves to worsen his boredom with the world, and prompts him to seek pleasure for its own sake. He views eternity as “a bath house... black and grimy and spiders in every corner”, to which Raskolnikov responds in horror “Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?”

Next, on the BSD portrayal of Fyodor:

Now there has been very little detail about his personal motivations, but I see BSD Fyodor as a combination of all three characters: Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, and Porfiry, maybe more of Svidrigailov than the rest. BSD Fyodor is definitely among the “extraordinary” people Raskolnikov described, maybe even to the extreme. Of course, there is also the personality of the real Dostoyevsky.

Regarding killing people and messing up their families as a petty problem while looking for a happy chit chat about it with one of those he just messed up, that is as Svidrigailov as it gets. (I know Fyo was probably joking, but still)

It has been suggested time and time again that BSD Fyodor might have tired of, been disillusioned or discontent with the world as it is, and sought to correct it (while also having some entertainment along the way). He specifically has issues with special ability users, which still doesn’t stop him from killing normal people if they get entangled in the conflict. This motivation possibly stems from his hatred for his own ability, which seemed as destructive as it gets. Alternatively, BSD Fyodor might also see death as the ultimate freedom special ability users can be granted to be free from their “sins”, which refer to their abilities. As such, he took it upon himself to deliver them.

The constant mention of “freedom” of the will also strike me as a parallel to real Dostoyevsky’s discussion of freedom in Crime and Punishment. 

“Anyone who is greatly daring is right in their eyes.”

“He who despises most things will be a lawgiver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the right.”

In other words, if you act of your own free will, you are right. Anyone who wills it can transgress the law.

What really intrigued me is how BSD Fyodor saw himself as a divine figure delivering judgement for those he considers “sinners”. I doubt such a strong motivation came about just because he discovered his super human ability one day, which has been suggested as something to do with instant killing. I see a possibility of him having been alienated, ostracized and possibly imprisoned as a result of his ability and his intelligence, seeing how completely unfazed he was by the treatment he received in his prison cell at the Mafia base. His ability would have been dangerous on its own, but his intelligence makes him an even more dangerous individual. Another characteristic of him that interests me is the complete lack of guilt or remorse over his actions. If we assume this is a reference to Svidrigailov, it might have been a result of his mindset that evil is inherent in the world (which fits BSD Fyodor). If I have to guess, he would have been a child who never played with other kids, had no lessons in social etiquette and no guardian figure to teach him about the outside world, heavily religious, either avoided, feared or beaten up regularly, probably had no concept of remorse, probably had to fend for himself and used his intelligence to get the upper hand by gambling, manipulating or tricking others.

BSD Fyodor was probably regarded as a “demon” for as long as he lived. He probably also felt the suffocating imprisonment extended from his home life to the rest of society. He probably got tired and bored of interacting with others who just went on their normal lives complaining about their misfortunes, oblivious to everything else that happened around them. He probably never once saw himself as one of them.

It was also suggested in Crime and Punishment that through suffering and torturing himself with his conscience, Raskolnikov was able to still feel human (my own interpretation). Could it be that BSD Fyodor was past that stage of being human, since he doesn’t seem to be suffering from the weight of his crimes? Could that be the reason why he sees himself as the substitute for God?

Regarding BSD Fyodor’s ability

Not much has been mentioned in the manga, and even in Dead Apple all we got is something along the lines of “Fyodor and his ability are two sides of the same coin”. What strikes me is how Fyodor is portrayed to represent Crime, and his ability Punishment. This is all speculation, but I think his ability definitely has to do with delivering punishment for a crime (no shit!). But whose crime, and on what condition? Could it be that his ability only takes effect if the criminal repents and experiences remorse from their own crime?

Regarding BSD Dazai

Probably the most hotly discussed parallel in the fandom. Sure, Dazai and Fyodor have been described as being made of the same stuff from the start due to their intellect which is unparalleled by anyone else but these two, but they didn’t really strike me as similar until I encountered this line from Crime and Punishment.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

At first glance, this quote describes both Dazai and Fyodor very well. I have no question about Dazai having a “large intelligence and a deep heart”, and so he will continue to have “great sadness” in the form of alienation and loneliness (and self-hatred and guilt to an extent). Fyodor may have an equally great intelligence, but it is still unclear to me what lies in his heart. I think, he at least would have felt loneliness and the boredom of existence at some point, just like Dazai did. Their sharpness would have enabled them to sniff out the most obscure clues to the darkest intentions in people, which might have led them to regard human beings as foolish and utterly selfish creatures. The dangerous and unique nature of their abilities would have rendered them untouchable by others, further worsening their alienation. 

“If God does not exist, then I will become God.”

What kind of experience would prompt someone to deliver such a line as that?

It sounds less like a divine sentence than a cry of disillusionment and cynicism to me, which is really... sad??

Other trivial stuff:

- The real Gogol was apparently a drama queen and a master of satire.

- The real Dostoyevsky was exiled in Siberia for reading banned works. He subsequently wrote “Notes from the House of the Dead” to describe this experience.

- The real Dostoyevsky frequently discussed the idea that man does not think rationally most of the time, and as such, man’s actions are not always predictable.

- In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov passionately loved Sonya, a destitute young woman whom he saw as his figure of salvation, and he once bowed to her because she represented “the sufferings of all humanity”.

- Svidrigailov was hinted to see the world as a dirty, meaningless playground in which he was the actor, and kept up his act until the end. When he decided to shoot himself after being rejected by the one woman he loved, he chose to do it in front of a complete stranger at the American embassy. His last words were “When you are asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America.”

Credits for screenshots go to @dazaiscans​.

[nonameinanytongue]

The Flower & the Serpent: The Violent Women of Game of Thrones

“Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”

-Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act V, Scene I

DC’s Wonder Woman opened this summer to critical acclaim. Pop culture outlets made much of its empowered protagonist and progressive themes, lauding everything from its feminist fight scenes to Wonder Woman’s thigh jiggle. In approaching the first superhero flick of the modern big-budget tentpole era both helmed by and starring a woman with such intense and specific scrutiny, much is overlooked and more repurposed to suit a flexible, almost reactive set of ideals held by fans and critics alike. If a woman does something in art that shows her to be powerful, it is interpreted as inherently feminist no matter its context in the work of art or the world beyond.

Perhaps in a world where women, homosexuals, and transsexuals lobby vigorously for the right to serve in active combat zones a conflation of ability to do violence and the possession of feminist power is understandable. Surely there are many women who, for reasons understandable or awful, crave invincible bodies and the power and grace to crush the people who hurt them. Many more are happy to acclaim any media in which a woman emerges victorious as another mile marker driven into the roadside on the highway of equality. Especially beloved are movies, shows, comics, and novels in which such victories are portrayed as straightforwardly virtuous and good. 

Think of Sansa Stark condemning her rapist and tormentor, Ramsay Bolton, to a grisly death at the jaws of his own hounds. How many fans and critics expressed unbridled joy at that, as though Sansa had won some kind of symbolic victory for all women? Her sister Arya’s rampage, which has taken her across the Narrow Sea and back again and claimed the lives of dozens, has likewise been applauded as a meaningful triumph in the way we tell women’s stories. For the record, I think both of these plots are intensely compelling and reveal volumes both about the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. Game of Thrones is a show nearly singular in its refusal to make violence joyous or cathartic, no matter the whoops and cheers of many of its fans.

Still, no matter how many times the show delivers searing anti-war images or explores the corrosive influence of violence on those who commit it, viewers remain hungry for the spectacle of women overpowering their enemies and turning back on them the weapons of their own oppression. In a culture where Redpill misogynists hold elected office and our president is a serial rapist, a desire to see women take power with a dash of fire and blood feels all too understandable, but celebrating the destruction of their personalities and lives is a reductive way to understand their stories.

In order to understand what Game of Thrones has to say about violent women, it’s necessary to set aside the thrill that seeing them materially ascendant brings and focus on the images, words, and larger context of the show’s particular examples. Where films like Wonder Woman thrive by repurposing a complex and horrifying conflict (World War I in the first film, the Cold War in the upcoming second) into a heroic battle between good and evil, Game of Thrones, rooted in a genre where conflict is often artificially cleansed of moral ambiguity through devices like entire species of evil-doers, makes no attempt to sand the edges off of its depictions of war or violence. 

Nearly every woman on the show, with the possible exceptions of Gilly and Myrcella, are directly involved in war, torture, and many other forms of brutality. From Catelyn and Lysa’s ugly mess of a trial for Tyrion, an act they surely must have known would cost many smallfolk their lives once Tywin Lannister caught wind of it, to Ygritte fighting to save her people by sticking the innocent farmers in the shadow of the Wall full of arrows, the actions of women with power both physical and political are shown to bear fruit just as ugly as any their husbands, sons, and brothers can cultivate. There’s an uncomfortable truth lurking there, an admission that some modes of action and ways of being may not intersect meaningfully with many of modern feminism’s tenets.

In this essay I will dissect scenes and story to illustrate the show’s deeply antipathetic stance on violence and the ways in which it is misunderstood both by those who enjoy the show and by those who detest it or object to it.

I. ARYA

If a man is getting his eyes stabbed out by a child he intended to beat and rape, does the child’s gender matter when determining what the scene is meant to convey? Is it somehow triumphant for a girl to do that to another living person, no matter how repugnant he might be? Isn’t it possible that what the scene communicates is not that Arya’s slow transformation into a butcher with scant regard for human life is something we ought to cheer for but that the fact she couldn’t survive in Westeros or Essos as anything else, much less as a little girl, is deeply sad?

Arya’s crimes nearly always echo those of her tormentors. Think of the first person she kills, a stable boy, not so different in age or appearance from her erstwhile playmate, Mycah, who was slaughtered by the Hound a bare few months before. Or else consider Polliver, the Lannister soldier who murdered her friend Lommy and whose own mocking words she spits back at him as she plunges her sword up through his jaw. More recently, her wholesale slaughter of House Frey recalls with a visual exactitude which can be nothing but intentional the massacre of her own family and their allies at the Red Wedding. In this last instance she literally dons their murderer’s skin in order to exact her revenge, pressing Walder Frey’s face against her own in an act that feels uncomfortably more like embodiment than disguise.

Arya’s long journey through peril and terror has hardened her, but there’s little reason to rejoice in her hard-won powers of stealth and bloodletting. Who, after all, does she resemble with her obsession over old scores and her penchant for cruelly ironic punishments if not the subject of this essay’s next section.

II. CERSEI

Cersei Lannister,  is distinguished from a hundred other interchangeable evil queens by the attention devoted to her own suffering. Sold by her father to a man who beat and raped her, denied the glory heaped on her twin by sole dint of her gender, humiliated and terrorized by the despicable son whose monstrosity she nurtured, and finally stripped, shaven, and marched barefoot through jeering crowds after being tortured for weeks or months in the dungeons of the church she armed and enabled, Cersei’s brutality serves only to deepen her misery and isolation.  

The aforementioned tyranny of the High Sparrow she put in power, the murder of her monstrous son by her political rivals after she groomed him to be the beast he was, her conflicted and good-hearted younger son’s suicide after his mother’s revenge on the High Sparrow and the Tyrells broke his spirit; Cersei’s litany of victories reads a lot like a list of agonizing losses when you look at it sidelong. Certainly her grasping, vindictive reign has brought her no joy. It’s true that audiences are expected to see Cersei as a horrible human being, which she is, but the time the show spends on giving viewers a chance to empathize with this badly damaged person trying to throttle happiness and security out of a recalcitrant world argues for a more complex interpretation of her character. Watching her need to dominate rip her family and sanity apart, ushering all three of her children into early graves, transforms her from a straightforward villain to a troubled and tragic figure.

III. DAENERYS

Sold into slavery after a life on the run with her unstable and abusive brother and raped on her wedding night by a foreign warlord, Daenerys’s relationship to violence after her ascent to power is complex and heavily ideological. Her crusade to end slavery, motivated as much or more by strength of character and an innate sense of justice than it is by personal suffering and an impulse toward vengeance, has engendered sweeping changes throughout Essos, but at times it has taken on shades of the ostentatiously symbolic punishments for which her family name is famous. The crucifixion of the Masters is a particularly gratuitous example as Daenerys allows her desire to change the world and her need to feel good about the justice she doles out combine to produce a dreadful and inhumane outcome.

This act of performative brutality finds its echo in the rogue execution of a Son of the Harpy, imprisoned and awaiting trial, by Daenerys’s fervent supporter Mossador. Dany may claim that she is not above the law when Mossador confronts her, but when butchery without trial suited her she was quick to embrace it. Her case is uniquely complicated by her enemy: the slavers. Nothing excuses violence like a civilization of rapists and flesh-peddlers beating and maiming their human chattel onscreen, and there is powerful catharsis in seeing their corrupt works shredded and their hateful and exploitative lives snuffed out, but in making them suffer and in choosing the easy way out through orgiastic episodes of violence, Dany betrays her own unwillingness to do the hard work of reform. In many ways, her long stay in Meereen functions as the tragic story of her decision to embrace the grandiose violence her ancestors partook of so freely. We may feel good watching her triumph over evil, but we’re reminded frequently of the horrors and miseries of her reign.

IV. BRIENNE

Brienne’s pursuit of knighthood and adherence to its practices and code is no warrior-girl fantasy about a scabby-kneed tomboy learning to swordfight. Trapped in a body unsuited to courtly life, mocked by suitors and competitors alike, and yearning for the right to live by the sword as men do, Brienne finds challenging refuge in a way of life intimately associated with violent acts. From her butchery of the guards in Renly’s tent to her honor-bound execution of her one-time king’s brother in a snowy forest, Brienne’s path has frequently led her into mortal conflict.

At the climax of Wonder Woman, Diana kills a super-powered caricature of historical figure General Erich Ludendorff, a character who seems to exist solely to uncomplicate the moral landscape of World War I. A few minutes later she kills the man behind the man, her divine uncle Ares, and breaks his grasp on the people of war-torn Europe. The presentation of the act of killing as a triumph for human morality strips away much of what violent media can offer. Contrast Brienne’s desperate fight with three Stark soldiers as she attempts to spirit Jaime Lannister to safety on Catelyn’s orders. Screaming with every blow and leaving her opponents hacked to pieces, Brienne succeeds in her mission at an obvious human cost. Men, despicable men but men nonetheless, are dead. She and Catelyn are now in open rebellion against Robb’s authority. 

To kill is to sever a life and give birth to a living, growing tree of consequences. To explore it instead as a tidy way to resolve problems and make the world a better place is to misrepresent its essential nature. You can’t improve the world through butchery. You can’t heal by harming. What violence in media is meant to teach us is a capacity for empathy, a reflexive understanding that all people are as fully and completely human as ourselves. Loathsome or virtuous, kind or cruel, no human suffering should be a comfortable or affirming thing to witness. (The Republican Party’s elected officials and pundit corps certainly makes a strong case for an exception to this rule).

One might charitably assume that lionization of violent women and their specific acts of violence stems from a place of vulnerability, a desire to balance the scales and erase the danger and aggression with which almost all women must live on a daily basis. I would argue that while this may hold true in part, a deeper truth is that many people have not been taught to feel pain for others in a way that allows for true emotional vulnerability or complex feelings about morally ugly and confusing actions. It’s easier to cheer when the guy we hate gets his than it is feel sorrow for the former innocent who dished out justice, or empathy for the deceased whose life must surely have held its own miseries and secret hurts. 

Audiences would be well-served by taking a moment to step back from their reactions to violence in media and attempting to interpret what message the art is trying to convey. Is the violence slickly produced and bloodless, a parade of cool moments and heroic victories? Or is it focused on the humanity of victims and perpetrators and the cost of their actions? What is the camera telling us? The colors? The editing? Are we meant to agree with King Theoden’s speech about the glories of war in Return of the King when the very next cut brings us into the hellish, pointless confusion of the taking of Osgiliath? Are we meant to be happy when Sansa smiles at Ramsay’s death when the very last thing he told her was that she would carry him, his essence, with her forever? 

The most transcendent joy art brings is the opportunity to reach out of your own beliefs and feelings and into someone else’s dreaming mind, to parse the language of symbols and ideas with which they have addressed the world and make in the negative space between your consciousness and theirs a new understanding. Learn to relish the complex and sometimes hideous nature of humanity over the easy thrills and cheap moral lessons of crowd-pleasers made by billionaires. Understand that art that makes you uncomfortable could be helping you grow. 

A woman’s actions are not laudable just because she’s a woman, or just because she’s been wronged. In our rush to associate the violent triumph of women over the men who’ve hurt them with personal strength, healing, justice, and praiseworthiness we ignore what shows like Game of Thrones are saying in favor of what we want to hear. Violence should never be easy, and violence that assures us, or that we think assures us we’re good and rooting for the right people should always be suspect. 

In labeling anything that pleases us, that satisfies our own hunger for justice and supremacy “feminist,” we forget that feminism is first and foremost an attempt to remake the world. The structure of things as they are is brutish and oppressive, and to cry tears of joy as women, even fictional women, fall prey to the allure of those same structures is to fundamentally misunderstand the point of a life-or-death struggle in which at this moment in history we are perilously engaged. As assaults on our tattered reproductive rights continue, as women struggling with addiction, illness, and homelessness are thrown into prison en masse, as our political leaders openly contemplate sentencing the most vulnerable among us to death in order to pay off the corporate elite and the Left (justifiably, in my opinion) contemplates and utilizes resistance through force on a scale unheard of in this millennium in our country’s history, learning to see violence for what it is has become more imperative than ever before.

[igetfoxdevilswild]

My Wonder Woman Review

It’s super duper long and rambling because I don’t have a platform with amazing editors anymore so that’s just how it’s gonna be. TLDR version: awesome, loved it, go see it, 8/10. Spoilers below the cut.

I admit, I somehow never got into Wonder Woman before. I got into comics by way of Batman (well, Archie actually but if we’re talking the big 2), and while WW is with him in DC’s golden trio, I just never went further into DC than Batman and by the time my fledgeling feminist heart had thrown off its “trying to be one of the guys” shackles, I had moved on to Marvel. Lynda Carter’s portrayal was hovering somewhere in my mind (even though I have never seen a single episode, thanks to the collective pop culture psyche that also means I know most of the original Pokemon names without ever having seen a single episode of that either), and I knew vaguely of the character’s background, but other than that I was going into this movie “fresh”.

I am grateful that this means that I can, in a way, share part of the experience with young girls whose perhaps first foray into superheroes will be this movie, because girl oh girl is this a GREAT movie for little girls to see and is Diana a great hero for little girls to love.

Rather than the dark and gritty ventures that were so desperate to show comics are for grown-ups too they were willing to take them away from children to prove it, Patty Jenkins has directed a fantastic movie for DC that dips into the same pool that has been making Marvel (especially Guardians of the Galaxy) so successful with all ages: love can save us.

While I personally could have done without the actual romantic plot line itself, what it gave the movie was relevant (and for once a male character is “fridged” for a woman’s character development in a frankly welcome role reversal). Diana’s ultimate victory is not with the phallic weapon which in fact is destroyed before she has a chance to kill the enemy, but with the Bracelets of Submission. The Bracelets have a complicated mythos that I will be learning about in my newfound interest in WW but from my limited understanding they symbolise the Amazons submission to Aphrodite i.e. love,  humanity, and altruism. The movie shows this by having Diana discover that humans are capable of evil and “do not deserve her”, but then realises it doesn’t matter. She believes in love, humanity, and altruism, and witnesses that humans are also capable of good, and will fight for them anyway.

The male character is the damsel in distress. The male character appears shirtless for no plot reason. The male character uses charm where Diana barges in ready to fight. The Amazons are strong as hell. The Amazons are of many ages and body types (though admittedly still not enough). The fight choreography is amazing.

While I wouldn’t have objected to more muscles and a longer skirt, Gal Gadot is never shot gratuitously, no upskirt or down cleavage views, but instead the camera celebrates her fighting ability and she is shown as strong, capable, passionate, and determined.

While in a way naive and idealistic, Diana is not talked down or condescended to by the men who befriend her. Much of the film can be summed up as Steve: “Diana no!”, Diana: “Diana yes!”, but in more of a “Trust me, I’ve got this” kind of way. Her decisions are validated and it isn’t a failing when she doesn’t get it 100% right, it’s a chance to learn and grow.

The scenes of her going over the top, across no mans land, and into the village put happy tears in my eyes.

The movie gave me a very Captain America vibe, in terms of quality and character-wise, potentially focusing on characters at the cost of plot, but this is not a negative. Though The First Avenger is one of the weaker Marvel films in my opinion, it’s still enjoyable, re-watchable, and sets up a great and beloved character really well. As long as Justice League doesn’t do to Diana what Age of Ultron did to Black Widow, I’m hoping DC can now build from WW just as Marvel built from Cap.

However, despite in a superhero movie context ticking all the boxes while turning a bunch of tropes on their heads, I did have issues with the movie. While I absolutely loved it, I can’t give it a free pass on everything.

Firstly, I got excited that the villain was also a woman, but unfortunately Dr Poison kind of fell flat in the shadow of Ludendorff and Ares.

But, on that note, why do two out of three of the villains have a disability? Why is one described as a psychopath? Why is there a joke about Diana being blind? We did get a man with PTSD, so why do none of the Amazons (while showing scars), have visible disabilities?

Why are there so few non-white Amazons, and why are there even less with speaking lines? We got a Native American man talking about colonialism. We got an Arabic man talking about the colour of his skin. So why didn’t we get more women of colour?

I loved this movie. I cried during Diana’s fight scenes because they were so powerful and I thought, is this what men feel like in every other superhero movie? But that’s because this movie was made for me.

Just like Rogue One, just like The Force Awakens, just like Fury Road. I am an able bodied white woman. These movies are amazing and have been described as groundbreaking, but they’re not groundbreaking for everyone. A white woman in a leading role is not groundbreaking. We need to do better.

One more issue might just be because I recently listened to all 23 hours of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast on WWI (Blueprint for Armageddon) which focuses on the human factors and costs of WWI, but it did leave me feeling a little bit uncomfortable.

In a way, it is still considered “too soon” to joke about the world wars, with good reason. But, over at Marvel, Captain America is an actual Nazi right now without much of a peep in the mainstream so apparently nothing is off limits. But if EA’s Battlefield 1 #justWWIthings hashtag debacle is anything to go by, WWI is still a touchy subject.

Probably because pretty much an entire generation was killed, injured, or traumatised from horrible warfare on a cosmic scale compared to anything that had come before, many of the mass casualties the result of inept leaders making bad decisions from their board rooms.

So actually it makes perfect sense that Diana’s first foray into the world of men would be during this time. Because obviously the Amazons are not averse to fighting honourably with arrows and swords, but with the scale of destruction and devastation never seen before that point, it would be easier to believe that a god of war was behind the great war instead of average people.

It was refreshing to see a movie about WWI for a change because it did explore some of the horrors (trench warfare, new technology including gas attacks, civilian casualties), and it was amazing to see a woman kicking ass and taking names in a war movie in general, BUT… when the opportunity arose to explore the theme of humans being capable of evil without an external otherworldly force, the movie contradicted itself by having Ares be alive and having his death at the hands of Wonder Woman stop the war.

I was hoping, and I think it would have been much more poignant and meaningful, for Ares to have already been dead the whole time. (Then we could have also avoided the tired fist fight at the end.)

While the movie did not let us think in black and white, of the german soldiers as the inherently evil bad guys, and did not let the allies get off scot free, the fact that WWI was portrayed as being ended by one superhero killing one supervillain to me felt like a cheapening of the horrible things that real humans enacted on each other and the suffering and struggles that real men and women went through to bring an end to the war.

[ch93ma01]

Essays on the Fusion of Fear & Play. Horror Video Games Bernard Perron & Clive Barker

The Survival Horror: Extended Body Genre By Bernard Perron (p.21)

“Cinema removes the body from the viewer...video games return a virtual body to the viewer.” p.121

“Concept of Embodiment has grown into an important one in modern cognitive science.” p.122

“Feeling scared indeed drives us away from others, especially from monsters” p.122

“Horror films and Horror games - like zombie ones, do not need to be believable, they need to be thriving and thrilling through bodies.” p.124

Blair Witch Movie: No monsters visible  Blair Witch Video Game: Monsters present.

“Survival Horror genre relies on an embodied threat...compared to many horror movies, one does wait until the end to finally face the monster (except for final boss.)” p.126

“The figure of the monster is at the core of the videoludic experience of fright.” (Perron, 2005b + 2006b).” p.126

“Central to the Horror Genre’s identity is the configuration of the ‘monster’, which has been redefined with each development in social and cultural. The monstrous element in the horror text is usually an interrogation of the amorphous nature of Evil, or an adress to the limits of the human condition; physically, emotionally and psychologically.” [Wells (2000) 2002 :8] p.126

“Fear of dying is much deeper when death is personified by someone or something that is abnormally large and powerful, and when the end is expected to come through great pain and suffering, and/or is being portrayed in gruesome ways.” p.126

“The forces of evil don’t stay unseen in the video game. The monstrous is always embodied.” p.126

“Gameplay experience of the survival horror revolves around a main event schema: facing up to the monster.” p.126

“ When talking about the videoludic monster, one should not forget to talk about it’s body, because the entire physical structure of this entity, its actions and reactions are what primarily assault & agitate the body of the gamer.” p.127

“ First living human character the player character encounters in Resident Evil 1992 at the beginning of their search of the spencer mansion is a rotton one, eating a member of the missing bravo team. The hideous face of the zombie is shown through a cut-in pre-rendered 3d close up, ensuring that the gamer immediately grasps and feels the horror that is about to meet head on.” p.127

“Zombies are impelled by a kind of desire, but they are largely devoid of energy and will. Their restless agitation is merely reactive. They totter clumsily about, in a strange state stupefied and empty fascination, passively drawn to still living humans...They drift slowly away from identity and meaning, emptying these out in the very process of replicating the,. The zombies are in a sense all body: they have brains but not minds.” [Shaviro, 1993:86] p.127

“Zombies are a great (bio) hazard. Through contamination and proliferation, the group itself forms a threatening body” p.127

“No wonder why the living dead migrated from the silver screen to the video game and became the first important monster of the survival horror genre.” p.128

“Be it in a novel, a film or a video game, the figure of the zombie is absect and reminds the still-living of the in escapable decrepitude of their own material parts, to the point of repulsion.” p.128

“Survival horror genre shares the obsession of the contemporary horror film with the invasion of the body by infectious agents and with the mutiliation and destruction of bodies. Symptomatic of great social fears and our schizoid relationship with our body, we witness on both screens frightful mutations.” p.128

The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror , David J. Skal [(1993) 2001:313]

“Designers are creating computer generated monsters and do not have to work with actual material like foam latex to prolude a realistic look, their work remains closer to that of a painter.” p.128

Kevin Bacon, Salvador Dali.

“Masahiro Ito, who has designed and modelled the creatures for the first 3 Silent Hill games (konami 1999, 2001 and 2003), Francis Bacon and Jerome Bosche has been a great inspiration.” p.128

“Computer graphics free the imagination and allow for the most disturbing abominations.” p.128

“In the digital universe of survival horror, scientific experiments gone awry and submicroscopic infective agents cause horrendous mutations” p.129

Noel Carroll - The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart.

“... They do not exist according to contemporary science...we can relate to there anthropomorphism, we are otherwise repelled by their impurity. They remain interstitial as they trangress distinctions such as inside/outside, living/dead, insect/human, flesh/machine and animate/inanimate.

They are meant to be disgusting and disturbing, both through their look and sounds as they scream and growl, uttering cries of rage, fury and pain, making noisy and creepy movements. They produce a “psychological state of felt agitation” (Carroll, 1990: 24)” p.129

“Survival Horror characters are dangerous: they are meant to put the player character to death... This constitutes the game, atleast the action part which is a common and important element of the genre.” p.129

“The monsters possess all the strength necessary to maim and kill the player character...slaughtering is so inherent to the nature of some foes that they literally have as body parts, scythes, swords, blades etc...smaller threats like cockroaches or spiders come in groups; and zombies bite and maul bodies.” p.130

“Player character exists only by and for the monsters: ‘inverted figure, the monster is the hidden face of the hero and its founding virtues. It symbolises the negative and destructive elements that the hero must fight to attain his full humanity’ (Vandevyver, 2004:74).” p.130

“Lumps of flesh and indistinct indentities, zombies do not call for restraint. They inspire dirty deeds.” p.130

“It is in these moments of self defense, but of great violence, that the survival horror becomes remarkable because it obliges the gamer to realize ‘It is the man that makes the monster’ (Vandevyver, 2004: 75) and it reminds him that a monstrous other is hidden inside of us.” p.130

“As Vorobes has so pertinently written: ‘The true object of fascination in horror is ourselves, and the human condition in general. Battling monsters is a highly veiled odyssey of self exploration (1997:239)” p.130

“Self-exploration is veiled in an interesting way in the survival horror genre because the gamer embarks on an adventure through some-BODY else.” p.131

“The representation of the body on the videoludic horror screen is significant. As Chris Pruett has underlined, character design has a great influence in horror games (2005). It has effect on the way we empathize with the characters, on the expression of vulnerability and danger, and on the game mechanics.” p.133 -134

“In accordance with James Neuman, we have to recognise that ‘the pleasures of videogame play are principally visual, but rather are kinaesthetic.” (2002)  p.134

“Identification and immersive experience during the gameplay remains compelling, even addictive, because our surrogate body on the screen mirrors our desires and bodily experiences; it represents us.” p.135

“Playing a survival horror game remains an experience of the self: the solitary experience of the character doubles the player’s one whose body and mind are engaged by the manipulation of the controller, from which come moreover vibrations linked to the context of the game (heart poundings, physical pain)” (Chavin, 2002: 39) p.139

“The video game perfectly incarnates the digital technology in what becomes an extension of the body.” p.136

[global-justice-blog]

Ridding the U.S. of Injustice: Platonic and Socratic Premises

By Andrew Oravecz

Photo by Michael Vadon, Wikimedia Commons

Editor’s note: Andrew Oravecz worked closely with me in the Office of the President when we were both at Freedom House.  We are both committed to equity at home in order for the U.S. to play a much-needed role catalyzing global justice.  He has interned on Capitol Hill for Representative Elizabeth Esty (CT-5), taught introductory human rights classes to homeless and unstably housed individuals through Charter Oak Cultural Center's Beat of the Street Center for Creative Learning, and worked with underserved urban youth in realizing their academic and professional aspirations.  He graduated the University of Connecticut with a Bachelors of Arts in Political Science and Human Rights—Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

In his guest blog below, he explores the implications of pressure on a free press and an independent judiciary in America – offering guideposts for concerned citizens drawing on Plato’s conception of justice.

The views expressed here are solely those of the author.

How to Unify Resistance

With the United States mired by “alternative facts” and “fake news” produced by an executive branch actively willing to gaslight its own electorate, concerned parties have turned towards literature to answer some of their most vexing concerns about the condition of our country. Dystopian novels from Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 have skyrocketed among best-seller lists nationwide. Diving deeper into philosophy also provides productive, forward-looking, and—frankly—refreshing discourse about what type of society we would like to collectively inhabit.

Damning descriptors of President Trump have included terms such as sexist, fascist, racist, demagogue, oligarch, Islamophobe, nativist, plutocrat, xenophobe—the list goes on. If broadening resistance is desirable, though, linguistic utility ought to be prioritized. I personally believe Trump has earned these labels, but perhaps apt accusations are the least effective mode to speedily counter him. Have we learned nothing from this past election? The resistance’s vocabulary is problematic in appealing to wide audiences needed to upend Trump.

Presently, much of the resistance aims for the President’s eventual impeachment. If one believes in the need for Trump’s removal from public office, expediting it must entail a distancing of D.C. speak, think tank jargon, and social justice catchphrases that aren’t immediately accessible to middle America or moderate Republicans— especially with a Republican-controlled Congress. An alternative approach could incorporate members of both party caucuses and enact concrete action. Plato’s Republic illustrates a path forward. This piece is particularly helpful because of Plato’s dedication to understanding the essence of a term in its most fundamental form. Boiling narratives down to their foundational elements offers room for common ground and clarity.

What is Justice?

In Book II of Republic, Socrates sought to convince Glaucon that justice ought to be categorized as a good to be pursued, not only for its consequences, but also for its own merits—what he deemed the “highest class.”

Through argumentation, Socrates debunked the “common view” of justice, articulated by Thrasymachus, which conceived justice as “troubled.” Justice was a compromise between doing injustice without consequence (most desirable) and suffering injustice without recourse (least desirable), a circumstance which encouraged societies to agree upon laws. Therefore, justice itself--present in covenants--was neutrally oriented on this continuum.

In contrast, Socrates views perfectly just states and individuals as being harmonious with nature, which is inherently good, not a neutral compromise. He goes on to describe the virtues needed to achieve this: to be wise, valiant, and temperate. In cooperation with one another and through repetitive action, a person embodies justice, becoming, “his own master… and at peace with himself,” and nature. Additionally, “that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action; and the opinion which presides over it, ignorance.” Objectively speaking, Donald Trump cannot be categorized as wise, valiant, or temperate. Further, he is incapable of countering unjust action or recognizing, in many instances, his own ignorance.

Wisdom, Valiance, and Temperance

Per Socrates, wise guardians “advise(s), not about any particular thing in the state, but about the whole, and consider[s] how a state can best deal with itself and with other states.” The Trump administration has been domestically and internationally dysfunctional since it began. Even after attempting to revise parameters, his immigration executive orders have been blocked by numerous judicial bodies. In his first attempt at Obamacare repeal-and-replacement, Trump’s inability to broker a deal between moderate Republicans and the House Freedom Caucus revealed that Capitol Hill negotiations are not executive office ultimatums. The American Health Care Act’s (AHCA) current legislative limbo, low approval numbers among constituents, and fiery town hall meetings still pose political and human challenges.

Internationally, Trump himself has picked fights with historically friendly nations including Mexico, Australia, and Germany, in addition to NATO allies he portrays as security free riders, rudely offering invoices to strategic allies.

As it pertains to valiance, Socrates alludes to military courage when he introduced this criterion. An argument can be made that Trump’s escalation of war in Syria, willingness to talk tough on North Korea and Iran, and sustained intervention in Yemen indicate courage. But, to be truly valiant, shouldn’t individuals analyze potential negative outcomes, before taking action? Attacks on Senator John McCain related to his status as a prisoner of war and Representative John Lewis regarding his “all talk, no action” tweet demonstrate Trump’s inability to separate tantrum from real courage, which is more than bluster, bragging, and violence.

Socrates’ third quality of justice, temperance, is “the ordering or controlling of certain pleasures and desires.” Socrates says that, “owing to evil education or association, the better principle… is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse—in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self and unprincipled.” Steve Bannon, former executive chair of Breitbart News and White House Chief Strategist, is the epitome of “evil education.” Breitbart promotes white nationalism, Islamophobia, and a host of other hateful narratives that govern the “Alt-Right” wing of the Republican Party. From 2 a.m. tweet storms targeting media outlets to Trump’s complicity in “Lock her up!” chants at his rallies, he clearly cannot help but indulge these urges, however destructive they might be to his legitimacy.

Moving Forward

The strongest rebuttals of Trump ought to be framed in simple, tangible terms that moderate Republicans and Democrats can simultaneously identify. Questioning the president’s wisdom, valiance, and temperance is a way to do so. The opposition’s epithets do not build bridges to Republicans seeking election in 2018. While inside the Beltway or social justice language is accurate politically, historically, and socially, it alienates vast swaths of the country. With Republicans controlling all branches of government and a majority of state houses, the country’s ability to put this disastrous presidency behind us will hinge on broadening the resistance. We must continue education efforts within a social justice framework long term. Right now, however, word choice must be based on efficiently confronting the greatest threat to post-World War II order and American democracy; time is of the essence.